Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Youth group is a bore. One night their leader, Mrs. Robert Haskell, tells the girls of the MYF never to pet, because boys can become so excited during the act of petting that they can literally die if they don’t have a chance to relieve themselves. Girls have more control, of course, so girls are responsible for seeing that petting does not occur. The girls of the MYF nod seriously. Life-and-death decisions are safe with them. Crystal looks out the window. There’s a silver mine out there someplace, and a hollow tree a man lived in.

  The next afternoon she has a date with a boy named Woodrow Morris, a tall lanky boy, a doctor’s son, from Richlands. He has driven all the way over here to date her after meeting her at the MYF district meeting a month before. Crystal introduces him to Lorene, who is impressed, and then gets into his baby-blue convertible and they drive across Fletcher’s Ridge to the Breaks, a picnic area maybe forty minutes away from Black Rock. It’s early fall, September, and red and gold leaves fall on her hair and all over her new plaid A-line skirt; they rustle in the back seat of Woodrow’s convertible. Woodrow asks Crystal if she has any hobbies. He parks on an overlook. Woodrow’s Adam’s apple sticks out; he wears loafers. “I hope to become a surgeon like my father,” he says. “Let’s go sit over there,” she suggests, pointing, and they get out of the convertible and sit in the fallen leaves at the edge of the cliff for their picnic.

  After they eat their sandwiches and drink their Cokes, Woodrow kisses her, tentatively. Crystal kisses him back, harder. “Oh Crystal,” Woodrow says. She guides his hand to her breast, unbuttoning the monogrammned shirt she bought last summer at Miller and Rhoads in Richmond. “Oh baby, Crystal, you don’t,” he says. “Oh Crystal.” He tries to say a lot more, but Crystal kisses him and puts her hand between his legs and finally she says, “Listen, Woodrow, would you please please please just shut up?” He does. After they’re through, they lie on their backs in the dusty leaves and Woodrow plans out their whole future. He’s going back to Hampden-Sydney in a week; Crystal will come for a weekend. Crystal will come for Winter Weekend. Crystal doesn’t even bother to listen. Woodrow thinks this is a big deal, but it’s not. Because she knows something that Woodrow does not know even if he is so smart: this doesn’t matter. This doesn’t make any difference. Woodrow kisses her neck and her hair. “Oh Crystal,” he says. “Oh Crystal.”

  Other times she lets other boys touch her and she doesn’t care. Sometimes she lets them go all the way, too, and she doesn’t care about that either. She doesn’t care what Mrs. Robert Haskell thinks about it either—or what Mrs. Robert Haskell would think about it, if she knew. Because it’s only when she’s with boys that she feels pretty, or popular, or fun. In the way they talk to her and act around her, Crystal can see what they think of her, and then that’s the way she is.

  During her senior year, Crystal wins two more beauty contests before she gets tired of them altogether. She dates more boys. She reads two books by William Faulkner which she stumbles upon quite by accident in the public library. The grammar in these books is complicated. She loves them. She reads some foreign books, such as Les Misérables and Fathers and Sons. Jean Valjean of Les Misérables is just her style: a lot of anguish and intensity, as she tells Agnes, who is not very interested in either one. Crystal writes a sonnet comparing life to a rose: first the bud, the bloom, then the falling petals in a high, cruel wind. She writes a term paper on “Nature in Mark Twain,” with twenty-six footnotes, but Miss Hart gives her a B on it because she typed the bibliography wrong.

  Agnes is accepted at VPI, where she plans to major in home economics, but VPI is not good enough for Crystal. Oh no. Because Lorene is in charge of that. Lorene has plenty of rivet money laid by, plus insurance money from Grant, and she has her sights set high. Even East Tennessee State University is not good enough. Lorene envisions herself as a visiting mother-in-law, with Crystal married to a brain surgeon. It’s time for some culture, Lorene feels, some society. Crystal should meet a better class of people. Jules writes a letter of advice on the subject, in which he tells Lorene above all to get Crystal out of the South. Lorene sniffs and throws this letter away. She pores over college bulletins, checking the clothes and the prices, ignoring the course offerings, settling at last on a fancy school in Maryland. Crystal doesn’t care about college. She won’t even look at the booklets. She dates boys and daydreams and reads books, and then it’s spring again, then graduation and summer and she and Agnes go off to Girls’ State.

  Girls’ State, an annual occurrence, is held each summer at Radford College, while Boys’ State is held simultaneously on the campus at VPI, up the road in Blacksburg. A fine sum of state money goes to support both these projects. The purpose of Girls’ and Boys’ State is to teach future leaders about representative government. So Girls’ State is just like the government in Richmond. There are elections; lobbies and factions; bills to be considered, rejected, or passed; caucuses to attend.

  Crystal is only a Congressman from the Ninth District, but Agnes has been maneuvering for the first three days and on Thursday she gets herself elected Secretary of the General Assembly. Today, Friday, she will take the minutes and call the roll at the General Assembly meeting, and she has bought a special notebook for this event, plus three new ball point pens in different colors.

  The girls sleep thirty to a bunch in a cluster of giant, barrackslike dormitory halls at Radford. Agnes and Crystal have been placed in the same building, but they are not in the same dormitory hall. Each morning they are awakened by a bugler playing reveille, and they must get right up and wash their faces and dress and show up fifteen minutes later, ready to say the Pledge of Allegiance and salute the flag. In many ways, Girls’ State is like a big camp. Most of the girls are really too old for this sort of thing, and there are not many budding politicos among them. A lot of them are just waiting for Saturday night, when they will have a dance with the boys from Boys’ State.

  That Friday morning, Crystal awakens an hour before anyone else. This in itself is strange, because although she often has trouble falling asleep, she always sleeps dreamlessly and interminably until someone or something wakes her up. She never wakes up by herself. She never wakes up for no reason. But this particular morning, she’s suddenly wide awake and tingling from head to toe. Lying flat in her bed in her top bunk, Crystal runs her fingers over her breasts and down over her pelvic bones sticking up, down over the length of her body. She knows it’s not time for her period. Maybe she’s sick. But she doesn’t feel sick. She’s simply wide awake, and she knows that something’s going to happen.

  Crystal raises herself up on one elbow and pushes the hair out of her eyes and looks around to see what it might be. The vast gray room is shadowed and furred in the funny light of the early dawn. The twenty-nine other girls are all sleeping, heads on their pillows or their pillows pushed to one side, some arms hanging limp off the beds. The air is palpable, light gray. It stirs and sways with their breathing in sleep. Sometimes, somebody murmurs something that Crystal can’t hear distinctly, something absorbed immediately into the thick sleeping air of the room. Crystal leans down to look at the girl on the bottom bunk; Diane Phillips from Danville, Virginia. Diane sleeps with her black hair in green foam rollers. Her sheet has twisted down to expose her to the waist, flat-chested under a cheap pink nightgown. Diane’s head is skewed to one side and her eyes appear partly open, the pale lids fluttering, but she, too, is sound asleep, breathing with her mouth open. Crystal watches Diane for a long time and sees one saliva bubble form, then burst, then reform on her lower lip. Maybe Diane has sinus.

  The window is level with the top bunk, so Crystal turns to stare out, but she can’t see much—the corner of another building, brick too, a part of a courtyard, a tree, a fountain, a wall. Her view is partly obscured by the mist that clings to everything here in the mornings, persistent mist which rises only when the girls have pledged allegiance and the sun is fully up. While Crystal stares out the window, the air around her seems to move, the sounds
of breathing intensify, and there is a swell, a rising movement of the air. At first she feels disconnected, then oddly terrifyingly buoyant, borne up on the gray moving air and floating. It’s being in this top bunk, she thinks. That’s all. I’ve never slept in a top bunk before. She wishes it would stop, expects it to stop—maybe it’s something she ate. Only the rising current never stops, and even though Crystal lies, or falls, back on the bed, she’s in it now and it has taken her up and up and up. She struggles to sit up, but she can’t. Her body doesn’t respond or move although she can raise her head, can thrash it from side to side on the pillow to stare out wildly into the softening, lightening room where no one stirs, no one moves, no one is yet awake. She can’t believe they’re still sleeping when all the air has turned to wind now, loud and roaring, tossing her and sweeping her along. How can they be asleep? Crystal twists her neck again and looks out the window. Something moves in the mist by the single tree. She tosses her head to get the hair out of her eyes and looks again. It moves.

  Suddenly, with no warning, the wind stops. There’s no sound at all. Crystal hears her own heart beating, and the blood runs like a creek in her veins. She expects to plummet down some awful immediate spiral into the lack of wind and sound. But she doesn’t. She’s suspended, and it grows lighter and lighter in the hall as surfaces everywhere grow distinct once more. Edges appear.

  “Crystal!” It’s a man’s voice, very deep, mournful, and somehow familiar, coming from far away. Coming across unbelievable distance, echoing in empty places, but close, too. Close to her.

  “What?” Now Crystal can speak, and she does, and she can sit up, too. Pulling her knees up to her chest and pulling her sheet up tight around her, she hugs her knees and looks everywhere carefully, bunk by bunk. He could be anywhere in this big room, hiding behind any bed.

  “What?” she says again. She waits.

  “Crystal,” he calls again, drawing her name out long, making it last forever, and it becomes clear that he’s not here inside this room.

  “Wait!” she calls out. “Wait!” She pulls her bathrobe off the rail at the head of her bunk and puts it on, not stopping to button it, and climbs down the iron ladder.

  “Please wait!” Crystal calls again.

  She runs up the rows of bunks the length of the hall, not looking back once to see Diane Williams sit bolt upright in bed, not noticing the girls all around her waking up now, getting up. She runs straight out the front door onto the cement sidewalk, then around the side of the building and along its length, past shrubs and windows, to where the fountain is, and the tree. The mist is not so thick now. The sun is up, and only wisps of gray are left. Her feet are wet from the grass.

  “Where are you?” Crystal stops and holds on to the fountain. “Where are you? Here I am.”

  The bugle sounds reveille very close, so loud and brassy it nearly scares her to death. Crystal runs around the fountain and the tree, along the facing wall. No one is there. A Coke bottle is wedged in a crook of the tree. “Where are you?” she screams although she knows that nobody could hear anything over that bugle.

  When the bugle stops, she hears all the girls, far away and babbling, getting dressed. Crystal sits down in the grass where she is. It’s still wet, feels good. She gets a blade and looks at it, licks it, chews it. She doesn’t think the man will call again. He called, and she couldn’t find him, and now it’s full morning and he won’t call again. She has missed him. Crystal puzzles over who it might have been: it wasn’t ex-actly her father’s voice; it wasn’t anybody here; it wasn’t anybody she knows. Not anybody she really knows, that is, even though in a way she knows it as well as she knows her own. When Crystal was little and Grant told her about China being on the other side of the earth, she used to dig and dig for it at the edge of Lorene’s tomato patch. Then when that didn’t work, she took to imagining another girl or maybe a little boy, a Chinese mirror self in China, sleeping when she was awake and playing when she was asleep. Everything she dreamed was what the other did, and everything she did was dreamed by the Chinese mirror child. Maybe that was who was calling her, grown now. Maybe it was Clarence B. Oliver. More likely it was God. Whoever it was, she has failed to find him. Shit. She sits exhausted in the grass at the side of the dormitory with no will to go in and dress to go to the General Assembly, which seems totally meaningless anyway. More shit.

  The bugle blows again and the girls come out at the front of the building. When they say the Pledge of Allegiance it’s like a litany, just far enough away so Crystal can make out the words, close enough for her to catch the rhythm. Crystal looks up at the bare flagpole across the roof of the dormitory and here comes the flag. It droops and furls and then is caught by a breeze.

  Crystal sighs and gets up. Maybe she can find Agnes. She can always count on Agnes to tell her what to do. Holding her nightgown up, Crystal runs around to the front of the dormitory, where the straight lines of girls are breaking up, forming groups, and starting off to breakfast. Everybody stares at her, but Crystal doesn’t care.

  “Agnes!” she yells. “Hey, Agnes! Wait a minute!”

  Agnes, way up the walk with two other girls from her own hall, stops, pauses, and looks back. Then she says something to the two girls, who look back, too, before they walk on. Agnes moves quickly and officiously back to where Crystal waits in the grass near the flagpole, with one hand shading her eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” Agnes asks immediately. “Are you sick?”

  Crystal looks so pale and funny, and she has grass stains all over her bathrobe. She feels funny, too. She grabs Agnes’s arm, hard. “Listen,” she hisses, but then, looking at Agnes all dressed up in this bright morning light, she doesn’t know what to say. Suddenly, she’s just plain tired. The girls of Girls’ State stream by them on either side, staring curiously at Crystal.

  “What?” asks Agnes. “What?” she asks with less patience, as Crystal continues to hold her arm and say nothing. Agnes begins to realize that Crystal isn’t sick at all, and she suspects that this is another one of Crystal’s stunts. But this morning Agnes has no time to waste. Girls’ State runs on a tight schedule, and since she’s Secretary of the General Assembly she has to be on time. Agnes grips her new notebook and her ballpoint pens firmly.

  “Calm down, I’ll talk to you later,” she says. “Right now I’ve got to go.”

  “Listen,” Crystal says.

  Agnes looks at her good. Color is flooding her face and she seems to be much too excited.

  “I had this vision,” Crystal says.

  “What kind of a vision?” Agnes is looking around. Nearly all the girls have left for breakfast now.

  “Well,” Crystal says, speaking slowly so she can get it right, “I woke up real early this morning and I was just lying there, with everybody else still asleep, and all of a sudden I heard somebody call my name.” Crystal decides not to mention the wind.

  “So what?” Agnes says.

  “It was a man’s voice.” Crystal pushes her fingernails into Agnes’s arm.

  “Well?” asks Agnes, fidgeting.

  “Well, there aren’t any men in Girls’ State.” Crystal pauses to let this sink in. “Then I heard it again. I heard it two times in all.”

  “Who do you think it was?” Agnes is partly scornful, partly impressed.

  “Probably God,” Crystal says solemnly. “It had to be.” Her heart beats just like thunder in her chest and this is how she wants to feel forever and ever, this much alive.

  “I bet you’ve got the flu or something. You better calm down and I’ll see you at lunch,” Agnes says. She pulls away from Crystal’s fingers and runs up the sidewalk after the others. She looks back once at Crystal standing stock still there by the flagpole, staring off at nothing with that excited look all over her. Even the way she’s standing, you can tell that something is up.

  Crystal feels a lot better after she brushes her teeth. While she’s dressing, she remembers something she read once in Lorene’s Nationa
l Observer about visitors from outer space who come down in UFOs and try to contact earthlings. There are thousands of mysterious disappearances in the United States alone. The dining room is closed when Crystal arrives, but she persuades the kitchen help to let her have two doughnuts, and then she puts her name tag on and walks over to the General Assembly, where later that day she will vote against water pollution.

  II

  FIVE YEARS LATER, Agnes is in the kitchen making a Lady Baltimore cake for her poor old daddy’s birthday, and while she mixes and measures she looks over every now and then at the postcard lying on top of the stove. She butters and flours the pans. She pours in the batter, licks the spatula, and throws it into the sink. She puts the pans in the oven: 350 degrees. She wipes her hands down her sides on the apron and looks at the card again. One side has a picture of some big pink birds sticking their heads into the water. The other side says: “Hi! We’re in Key West. Will come through Black Rock on our way back North. See you probably on Thursday. Best, Crystal.”

  Agnes tightens her mouth and puts the postcard into the trash. Today is Thursday, February 16. You could have knocked her over with a feather when she got this postcard in the mail. Good thing she was the one who looked in the mailbox, so Mama and Daddy don’t know a thing about it. And won’t, if she can help it! Not that Daddy knows much of anything these days anyway, they keep him so doped up. “Best, Crystal.” Well, Crystal’s best is not good enough for Agnes anymore. Imagine writing somebody a card that you haven’t seen in three years, expecting them to say oh goody! Agnes fixes herself some instant coffee and sits down heavily in a kitchen chair. She has been up since 6 A.M. Crystal takes too much for granted, always has.