“You’d think somebody would have cleaned this place up,” snapped Elissa in the doorway. She turned her head slowly to study the room, her eyebrows raised.
Carl brought in the suitcases from the front porch. “The bedroom is in there,” he said, leading the way. “I can heat you some well water on the stove if you’d like to wash. First, though, I’m going to get this fire going in the fireplace.”
Elissa sat down on the couch to watch. Carl knelt on the stone hearth, rearranging some of the smaller sticks. “See if you can find some newspapers,” he told her.
“Newspapers?”
“Yes. Or leaves. Anything I can use to get this fire started.”
Elissa began to wander around, looking behind the couch and poking in drawers in the kitchen part of the room. “How about this old calendar on the wall?” she called.
Carl turned to look at the wall decoration: a 1945 calendar with a drawing of a Hying Fortress against an unfurled flag. “No,” he said. “Not that.”
With a sigh of exasperation, Elissa continued to search. “Well, it certainly wasn’t one of your ancestors who discovered fire, Carl! Why don’t you just strike a match and let the logs burn?”
He put a match to one of the smaller sticks, holding it there until it burned his finger, but although the stick glowed tentatively for a few moments, it faded to darkness again. He reached in his pocket for another box of matches.
“Carl, I found some little pieces of cloth. Will they do?”
Elissa held up four short strips of black crêpe. “Are these from a quilt?” she asked.
“Bring them here.” He took them from her outstretched hand. “I haven’t seen these since Grandma died. They’re crêpe for the beehives.”
“The beehives?”
“Yes. For mourning. You have to tell the bees when there has been a death in the family, or else they’ll leave the hive and start one somewhere else. When Grandma died, Uncle Mose hung these black streamers on each beehive when he told the bees.”
“You’re teasing me!” Elissa protested.
“No. When somebody’s gone, you have to tell the bees they’re not coming back.”
Elissa shook her head. “There are some strange goings-on in your mountains,” she said.
Carl tucked one of the streamers away in the pocket of his jeans. He looked at her for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “I guess I’d better start this fire.”
She answered the tone, rather than the words. “Carl! Are you angry with me?”
“Guess I’ll go out and gather up some leaves for kindling.” He started to get up.
“Carl! Please don’t go yet!” There was a catch in her voice, and she began to pace, not looking at him as she spoke. “I understand about your wanting me to see where you grew up and all, but I’m not used to this! I just didn’t know what to expect! I mean, you said cabin, but this isn’t like the cabins I’ve stayed in on ski trips! Carl, this is our honeymoon! I had to tell people we were going to Aspen, because how could I possibly explain that you wanted to come and stay in-this?”
He held another match to the sticks, concentrating on the feeble light in his hand.
“You dragged me up here and ruined my new boots-and for what? A shack with no water, no lights, and no heat!” She sat down on the arm of the sofa and sobbed. “I married an engineer, not a-a hillbilly!”
Carl watched the spark in the fireplace until it flickered out. “It’s all right, Elissa. We’ll leave in the morning. We’ll go wherever you want.”
She managed a moist smile. “Aspen?” she quavered.
“Sure. Aspen. Fine.”
“Oh, thank you, Carl! Things will be all right when we get back where we belong. You’ll see!”
He brushed off the legs of his pants. “I’ll go out and get those leaves now.”
“Do you want me to come along?”
“No. I won’t be long.”
He stood on the porch and looked at the quarter moon webbed in branches on the ridge until his eyes became accustomed to the dark. When the black shapes in the yard had rearranged themselves into familiar objects-a tree, a wagon wheel-he began to walk toward the back garden at the edge of the woods. Tomorrow he would stop at the farm and tell Whilden they were going. Maybe he’d send him something from California. Elissa would be all right when they got back. He pictured her at their glass-topped table pouring wine into Waterford goblets. She would be blond and tanned from a day of sailing, and she would tease him when he alternated Vivaldi and Ernest Tubb on the stereo. Elissa didn’t belong here, but… He tried to picture Roseanne Shull entertaining his engineer friends in the glass room over the Bay. It was time to go back.
He had reached the end of the garden. Glancing back at the cabin, Carl tried to remember how long he had been walking. Elissa would be impatient. It was time to gather the leaves and go back to her. He looked down at the abandoned beehive at his feet, the last of Uncle Mose’s collection. He had to go back. Pulling the black streamer from his pocket, he laid it gently on the box, and hurried away.
LOVE ON FIRST BOUNCE
I SQUINTED BACK at the glass double door of Taylor High. Despite the glare of the afternoon sun and the glares of departing seniors, who kept jostling me back and forth as they passed, I saw Carol Lee’s grinning face in the doorway. She was twitching with excitement. I could tell by the way she was hugging her notebook as if it were a teddy bear and the way the ponytails over her ears bobbed up and down. She kept looking all around, obviously for me, so I prepared to be bored. By the time she fought her way through the crowd and reached the bottom step, I had an expression of utter disdain.
“Guess what, Elizabeth!” she said in tones of breathless excitement.
“I cannot imagine,” I said wearily. Trying to guess what Carol Lee Jenkins was excited about was always an exercise in futility. It could be anything from a B on a biology lab quiz to Neil Sedaka’s using her name in a song. (I kept telling her that she was not entitled to take “Oh! Carol” personally. Fat lot of good that did; she mooned over it for weeks.)
“There’s the cutest boy whose locker is right across from mine! I just noticed him.”
“Oh? Who is he?” I was only slightly curious.
“I don’t know. I think he’s a senior, though. He has the same lunch period as mine. I bumped into him after second period.”
I started to say “Accidentally?” and then thought better of it. Actually, I didn’t want to know. Encouraging Carol Lee only increases her intensity. Instead I said, “What does he look like?”
“Well, he’s kind of hard to describe, but he’s very cute. He has feathery brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses.”
“Incredible,” I said. She was too wound up to hear my sarcasm, but mentally I applauded my efforts.
“There he is. Coming out over there! Look! No-over there, stupid!”
I sniffed loudly and purposely stared in the opposite direction. “Good grief!” I hissed. “Do you have to point?”
“Look!” she pleaded.
I dutifully turned, expecting to see the president of the school or the star football player. Carol Lee was just idiotic enough to flip over somebody like that, but the object of her affections was not one of the school’s superstars. “You mean the one who’s bouncing?”
“Hey, yeah,” Carol Lee took only a moment to consider my description before she cheerfully agreed. “That’s exactly what it is: he’s bouncing.”
I’d never seen the boy with the weird gait before. I would have remembered that walk. He sort of loped along, bobbing up at every other step, like a rubber duck caught in the current of a bathtub drain. He was nice-looking in an ordinary kind of way: not too tall, not muscle-bound, definitely not a jock. He walked by himself, instead of surrounded by a clump of laughing madras-and-Weejun-clad companions, so he wasn’t one of the popular kids, into school politics and serious partying. All the candid shots in the yearbook seemed to be of the same eight people, laughing and posing pret
tily, with every hair in place, and he wasn’t one of them. He wore a plaid sport shirt and tan chinos, instead of a black turtleneck and black jeans, which meant that he wasn’t one of the “posturing poets for peace” crowd, either. I couldn’t place him in the rigid social hierarchy of Taylor High. He was just a guy who happened to be in school here.
I wondered what had made Carol Lee notice him in the first place. Of course, there is no telling what will attract Carol Lee to a guy; her affections are as random as tornadoes, and of similar duration. She likes to build souls for mysterious strangers; I suppose getting to know someone would spoil the effect. For one entire bewildering week in eighth grade, though, she actually had a crush on my brother Bill. Even she recognized the absurdity in that, and after a couple of chances to observe him closely, while she was visiting me, she gave it up. Bill would not notice someone flirting with him unless she used a flamethrower, and having lived a few doors down from him for most of her life, Carol Lee found it hard to fantasize about Bill as Mr. Wonderful. As I kept reminding her: she knew better.
I looked at her latest victim with clinical interest. Being a freshman, I knew by some sixth sense that the bouncer was definitely a senior, but despite that aura of upperclassman grandeur, he looked like a big kid. Except for the oversized glasses, he had a round cherub face and a pleasant, if absentminded, expression.
Just before he reached the square of sidewalk where we were standing, I dropped my eyes and gazed intently at a wad of chewing gum fossilized in the pavement. As soon as he was out of earshot, Carol Lee breathed rapturously into my ear, “He smiled at me, Elizabeth! He actually smiled at me.”
“What did you expect him to do? You were staring at him like he was Baldur the Beautiful. He probably thought you were a dangerous lunatic, and he was trying to pacify you by not making any sudden moves.”
Carol Lee wasn’t listening. “His eyes are the most beautiful shade of brown,” she sighed.
“Like horse manure,” I said briskly. “Can we go home now?”
It is a half-mile walk from the high school to Sycamore Street, where Carol Lee lives-around the corner and two houses away from me. I yawned all the way home, listening to Carol Lee’s endless babbling about the mysterious senior. There was no point in trying to work up any enthusiasm for her latest obsession, because Carol Lee fell in love about every three weeks, always with some good-looking total stranger, and after she wore herself out scheming over ways to meet the object of her affections, and speculated endlessly on what he was “really” like, she would lose interest and direct her attention to another victim.
Honestly, I thought, she might as well develop a crush on Paul McCartney; he is no less unattainable than any of her other crushes. Carol Lee disdained movie poster romances, though; she dwells in possibility, which in her case is a very long commute from real life. She never actually dated any of her idols; in fact, I think she barely spoke to any of them. The chief victim of her delusions was me: I had to hear about Mr. Wonder-of-the-Week in our nightly phone conversations. The only thing that made it bearable was the short duration of each crush. About the time I got bored with hearing about the Piggly Wiggly bag boy or the minister’s son, her fantasies had a cast change, and the whole process began again. I predicted that this crush would last exactly one week: the time it would take Carol Lee to notice that the bouncing Mr. X wasn’t wearing his class ring.
A week later, though, Carol Lee’s ravings showed no sign of tapering off, and I was beginning to worry.
Friday night the phone rang.
“Elizabeth! I found out what his name is. You know-the boy.”
Of course I knew. She had scarcely talked about anything else in days. “Hello, Carol Lee,” I said. That was encouragement enough.
“His name is Cholly Barnes, and he’s-”
“Charlie?”
“No. Cholly. C-h-o-l-l-y. It’s a family nickname. Short for Collins or something. My informant wasn’t sure. Anyhow, he goes to the Grace Methodist Church, and he drives a green Chevy. He’s a photographer for the yearbook staff, and he plays the guitar. He likes apples-”
“And he’s going with somebody else.”
“What?” gasped Carol Lee. “Oh. You noticed that he’s not wearing his class ring, didn’t you? He lost it on a fishing trip. Actually, he doesn’t date much.”
“According to the FBI wiretap, I suppose?”
She laughed. “I just talked to a couple of girls who know him, that’s all.”
“Like his mother and sisters?”
“He doesn’t have any sisters,” Carol Lee replied promptly. “But Daddy knows his grandfather.”
“Oh, Carol,” I said (and I was not quoting Neil Sedaka), “have you no sense of decency? What will you do next? Start peeking in his windows?”
“Hey, that gives me an idea!”
“Oh, no…”
“Tomorrow is Saturday. We can go for a bike ride.”
“And?” Actually I didn’t want to know.
“We can ride by his house. I found out where he lives, too. Maybe he’ll be outside, mowing the lawn or something.”
“Absolutely not. I refuse. I am not going. You can’t make me.”
I said that the whole mile over to his house. “This is ridiculous!” I said that about fifty times, too. I don’t know why I kept muttering. Carol Lee wasn’t listening, and I didn’t need any convincing.
We kept going around and around the block. I began to feel like a vulture. To relieve the monotony and take my mind off how stupid I felt, I started counting the bricks on the left side of his house. The only reason I kept going was loyalty. Carol was my friend, and it was my duty to stand by her in her madness. Sancho Panza on a Schwinn-that’s me, I thought.
He’s never going to come out. I pictured him lurking behind the living room curtains, watching two giggling freshmen in orbit around his block. There’s no way he’s coming out of that house, I thought. He’ll stay barricaded in there until doomsday. He won’t check the mail; he won’t retrieve the newspaper; he won’t go to school on Monday. He’ll never come out. He’ll probably leave instructions that when he dies, they are to cremate him in the toaster oven and flush his remains down the toilet. Meanwhile we’ll just keep circling. And Carol will never leave. We’ll be doomed to an eternal bike path around this block. I could hear Rod Serling solemnly describing our trajectory: “Elizabeth MacPherson and Carol Lee Jenkins, two typical teenage girls with ordinary hopes and dreams, who started out on a Saturday morning bike ride, and ended up perpetually circling, forever straining for a glimpse of Cholly Barnes as they hurtle past the brick ranch house on Maple Street, trapped in an orbital obsession known only in The Twilight Zone.”
Finally I’d had enough. I was tired, sweaty, hungry, and, above all, I felt utterly foolish. “Look, Carol Lee,” I said, edging my bike to within earshot. “I’m going home now. I’ve got motion sickness.”
“Oh, just a few more minutes,” said Carol Lee. “He’s bound to come out sometime.”
“Sorry,” I told her. “I’m all pedaled out.” As we turned the corner onto Fourth Street, I steered my bike away from Carol Lee’s and headed straight for Elm Avenue. I was going home. I glanced back to see her pumping furiously along, determined not to abandon the vigil.
I had been home about two hours-long enough to take a half-hour bubble bath, fix myself a sandwich, and immerse myself in The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker-when the phone rang.
It was Carol Lee, wailing.
I almost dropped the phone. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Oh, Elizabeth! The most awful thing happened.”
She’s been hit by a truck, I thought. She’s in the hospital, and they’ve allowed her one last phone call before they cut off her-oh, wait. I suddenly remembered who I was dealing with. This was Carol Lee Jenkins, the Star-Spangled Queen of Melodrama, to whom every hangnail was a tragedy, and she was no doubt calling on her pink Princess phone from her white lace French Provinci
al bedroom in perfect health.
“What happened?” I sighed.
“He saw me!”
“What?”
“He saw me. Cholly Barnes saw me. He came out to get the newspaper, and he was just straightening up as I came around the block, and he looked right at me.”
Maybe something did happen, I thought. Maybe he smiled and waved for her to stop, and then he went over to the curb to chat with her, and they hit it off beautifully, and now she’s calling to tell me that they’re going to the movies later tonight. Oh, wait, this is Carol Lee’s theoretical love life. Motto: “Not on This Planet.” Okay. Maybe he went out into his yard, picked up the biggest rock he could find, and waited for her next revolution…
“Okay,” I said. “He came out into the yard, picked up the newspaper, and saw you. Then what?”
“That’s it,” said Carol Lee. “Then I came home.”
“So he saw you. Why are you hysterical? Oh, wait. Did he catch you rooting through his garbage cans?”
“No, of course not!”
I didn’t think there was any of course about it, but I was relieved that she had restrained herself. “Okay, he saw you on your bike. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“No!” She was wailing again. “I just wanted to see him. I didn’t want him to see me.”
I told Carol Lee that if that was her idea of a romantic encounter, she would be much better off falling in love with a Paul McCartney poster, but she was not amused. Well, I thought, at least I’ve heard the last of Cholly Barnes.
I hadn’t, though.
Carol Lee continued to stake out a lunch table so that she could keep Cholly under surveillance while we ate, and her obsession with him showed no sign of letting up. She managed to discover his birthday, his dog’s name, his food preferences, and about a zillion other completely useless biographical details, all of which she regaled me with as we watched him eat. If Taylor High had offered a course in Cholly Barnes, we would have passed it with honors.
Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories Page 3