I nearly said, “Of course I’m safe from a war that’s finished,” but something about the dark meadow in the fog made me uneasy. I half expected her to conjure up some family ghosts from the Highland dead, but she just walked around a bit, looked at the cairn of stones commemorating the soldiers, and read the inscriptions on the historical markers.
“It was all so pointless,” she said, as we walked back to the car. “Why couldn’t they see what was going to happen?”
I was thinking out my answer, involving previous confrontations, discrepancies in weaponry, and inept leadership, when she stepped ankle-deep into a puddle and began to cry. I surrendered my handkerchief, which she proceeded to use to wipe the muddy water from her foot, still crying.
“You’re not hurt, for heaven’s sake!” I told her. “You’re carrying on as if it were blood!”
I thought she was all right by the time we reached Queen’s Garden, an old-fashioned bed-and-breakfast place she’d found in some guidebook to Scotland. I couldn’t get her to stay in anything that was less than a century old. I sent her in to book the rooms, while I was seeing to the tire pressures on the Morgan. She was waiting for me downstairs when I came in, looking quite at home in a chintz-covered chair. She looked up at me, smiling. “You can bring the bags in later. I want to go to dinner now.”
She may have been rather quiet through dinner. I don’t know. I was telling her about the Loch Ness Centre, thinking that the monster would be an entertaining distraction from this afternoon’s bleakness, but she didn’t seem interested. She pushed her dish of apple crumble and custard toward my side of the table, and continued to toy with her napkin. I had just tasted the first forkful of apple, when she said, “I’m not sleeping alone.”
I gulped a mouthful of hot dessert, and managed to say, “Well, if you find you can’t sleep, tap on my door, and we can come downstairs and talk until you get sleepy.”
She smiled. “I booked a double room.” She looked like a cat lapping cream, knowing that the disabled bird will not be able to get away.
I didn’t quite see what I could do about it. Telling the proprietor that we weren’t married and that I wanted a room of my own would make me look foolish, but suppose we ran into someone from Edinburgh? It had to be just a matter of time before friends of my parents ran into us somewhere, and then what? She’d been married at least once (she won’t say much about her past), she’d got too much education for her own good, and she equated housework with indentured servitude. This was not the “nice girl” Mum was always on about my bringing home. Well, perhaps she’s just frightened of having nightmares about Culloden, I thought. There wouldn’t be any harm in my sleeping in the other bed, in that case. Except that there wasn’t one.
I went through seven copies of The Scottish Field after dinner, paying scrupulous attention to window treatments and garden layouts. “Imagine the care they take in planning a fox hunt,” I remarked, trying to strike up a conversation with the silent creature watching me from the counterpane. “They have to stop up the earths so that the fox will have no place to retreat to, make sure of the terrain. Such a lot of planning.”
“I know,” she said.
I read the magazines silently after that, hunched in the tiny chair beside the radiator, in a narrowing circle of yellow light from the rose-china table lamp. She looked asleep, curled up in the middle of the bed, her dark hair spilling onto my pillow. I supposed it was going to be my pillow, sooner or later. I undressed as quietly as possible and slid into the bed a good distance away from her. A few moments later I felt her hand like a warm cat’s paw along my back, and her lips brushed my shoulder blade.
I rolled over on my stomach and rested my head on my wrists. “Do you have permission to touch me?” I asked, as gently as one might remove a new kitten from velvet curtains.
“May I have permission to touch you?” She sounded amused.
“No.”
I heard a little intake of breath-she hadn’t expected that-and I was working out what to say about sin, and propriety, and all the rest of it, but she only said, “He whose love is thin and wise may view John Knox in paradise.”
I asked if she’d still read the map for me the next day, and she laughed.
We talked for a long time in the dark after that, about castles and mountains and train wrecks in Tennessee. She lay propped on one elbow, and talked to me as unselfconsciously as ever. After a while, I became so involved in talking that I forgot to be afraid, and I rolled over beside her, lying on my back and talking as if we were tent-mates in Scouts. The spell didn’t break when she kissed me, and I found that I knew what came next without thinking about it.
We stayed seven days past our scheduled time to return to Edinburgh, but then she had to leave for America, and I stayed on. I gave her the eight guidebooks to Scotland and all the maps that I had, but I still don’t know what she was looking for in the phrases and the mountains and the faces of children in the villages.
At Christmas-surely the bleakest time of year in Scotland, foggy and dark and cold-I had a card from her. On the front was a snow scene of two deer standing in the shadows of a pine forest, and inside she wrote of her work, and people we’d known, and about how a possum had taken to stealing cat food from a dish she left on the porch. Nothing more. But I knew even before I opened it that I was going back.
SOUTHERN COMFORT
“LOVE,” VICKI USED to say, “is like flushing yourself down the toilet: a nice cool ride, and a lot of crap at the end.” I was standing in the dorm mail room, rereading Anthony’s letter for the fifth time, but it still said the same thing: “Surely, by now you realize there can never be anything more between us…” I would definitely have to talk to Vicki.
I plunged up the stairs toward 308, still clutching the antiseptic green notepaper, and not even crying. I just felt numb all over. Vaguely I wondered what miracle Vicki Baird would accomplish to get Anthony back for me. She was bound to produce one. After all, she was a senior, pinned to a ∆KE, and she had actually invited Joan Baez to her high school commencement exercises. (Joan didn’t go, of course, but Vicki had received a nice letter from her secretary explaining that Joan was on a peace march with Dr. King, and wished her well. Vicki had the letter framed and hanging above her Donovan poster.)
Vicki’s door was the one with the poster of LBJ and Lady Bird dressed as Bonnie and Clyde. When I got there, a sign tacked to Lyndon’s nose said that Vicki had gone to the post office and would be back before dinner. I slumped down beside the door to wait.
How could Anthony do this to me? I was an English major, for God’s sake! Didn’t I stay in on Friday nights and write to him instead of going out? And no matter how many times people said it was uncool to still be tied to your high school honey, I’d always smile and say that we had been lucky to find each other so young. And now this. It was a judgment, I decided. A curse. I’d laughed when Sophy thought she was pregnant. Back in September, I’d gone to Rosh Hashanah services with her (and became-from force of habit-the first person to genuflect in the UNC Hillel), and she met a med student named Bundschaft. I tried to tell her not to go off and spend the weekend with him, but no! Sophy wanted to experience Life. She came back Sunday night with a green lab coat and a blow-by-blow account of the weekend. Told me I ought to try it with Anthony, and I’d sniffed and said that Southern men didn’t expect that kind of thing from their fiancées. I sniffled a little, remembering it. How did I know what Anthony expected? Some Yankee bitch at Duke might be screwing him on the fifty-yard line for all I knew. And then when Sophy thought she was pregnant-well, she had been rather melodramatic about it. Alternately planning to drop out of school and raise it alone or tell no one and brazen out the year. Finally one evening after dinner, when we were all walking back through the parlor where the guys wait on little loveseats for their dates, Sophy announced her latest plan: “We won’t tell anybody. And then in May when the time comes for the delivery, you can all come in and help me. We’ll boil wa
ter in the hot pots-”
At that point the absurdity of the whole situation overcame me-her period was only nine days late-and I dropped to my knees in the parlor, crying: “Oh laws a mussy, Miz Scarlett! I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!” It was wicked and I deserved to be punished-but it did put a stop to the planning. And then a few days later, Sophy had timidly taken the matter to Vicki, who glanced up from her chemistry book, studied the supplicant for a few seconds and flatly declared: “You aren’t pregnant. Go study.” At breakfast the next morning, Sophy had announced in hushed tones that Vicki had been proved right. The crisis was over.
I began to relax a little. Anthony ought to be easy after that miracle.
“Hey! McCrory! What are you doing sitting out in the hall?”
I looked up to find Sophy’s roommate P. J. Purdue hovering over me, dressed as usual in a black turtleneck and black slacks. She looked like a drill sergeant’s impersonation of Mia Farrow. I didn’t want to tell her about Anthony. P. J. Purdue was not what you’d call a sympathetic listener. In fact she was a Vietcong of the sexual revolution; her exploits had passed into campus mythology. P. J. Purdue had once humiliated a flasher in the campus arboretum. She’d been walking back from class when the guy jumped out of the bushes and exposed himself. He’d picked the wrong victim. Purdue said: “Are you bragging or complaining? Listen, buddy, I’ve seen Vienna sausages that were more impressive than that! Wait! Before you jerk off, I’ll lend you my tweezers!” The guy slunk off into the shrubbery and never worked that park again. I could imagine Purdue’s reaction to my broken heart. Purdue had lost her virginity in high school in the backseat of a ’63 Corvair, and she claims her reaction was: “That’s it? You mean, that was if?” I sometimes wondered if there was a Trappist monastery in Charlotte filling up with victims of Purdue’s sexual contempt.
Before I could think up an excuse for camping outside Vicki’s door, Purdue said: “Anyway, you’re just who I wanted to see. I want your wastebasket.”
“My wastebasket?”
“Yeah. My parents are coming down for the weekend, and ours is filled with cigarette ashes and God-knows-what. So we want to borrow yours.” She walked away. “Bring it down to our room!” she yelled back.
I was too dazed with personal sorrow to argue. I gave up my vigil outside 308, and went to deliver my chaste and virginal wastebasket to their den of iniquity. Sophy was sprawled out on her bed under the poster of the statue of David-with a fig leaf taped in a strategic area. She waved a languid hand at me as I came in.
“Hi, kid! Still subscribing to Modern Bride?”
“Not for long,” I said. “I just got a kiss-off letter from Anthony.” There’s something about Sophy and Purdue that makes people blasé about anything.
Purdue looked up from The Village Voice. “So that’s why you were camped outside Baird’s door! Trauma case. Tough luck about the boyfriend, though!”
“What should I do?” I quavered.
Purdue shook her head. “Nah. All that emotional counseling crap is strictly Baird’s department. Now if you had a sexual problem, I’d be the one to go to!”
Sophy snickered. “Not Baird!”
Purdue shrugged. “Oh, you mean the phone call? That was a stitch. But we were freshmen then.”
“What phone call?”
“Freshman year for us. Vicki Baird was always a missionary, even back then. Everybody’s aunt. But she was pretty naive herself, having just got here from Middle Earth, North Carolina, or someplace. So one day the hall phone rings and she answers it, and this guy says he’s going to jack off.” Purdue made the appropriate hand motion to illustrate the procedure. “Got it? Yeah, your basic obscene phone call. Well, Baird was such a twit with her shrink complex that she thought he was going to commit suicide. So she stays on the phone with him trying to talk him out of it, for chrissakes! ‘Oh, don’t do that. Life is beautiful. I’m sure there are people who care about you.’ Finally, the guy says he feels much better, and she says she’s glad. Guy says: ‘Can I call you back?’ And the idiot says: ‘Oh, yes! Any time you feel like this, you can call and talk to me!’ So Baird hangs up the phone feeling like a minister of grace. That glow lasted until dinner that night. We’re sitting at the table-”
Sophy stopped laughing long enough to interrupt. “Yeah, Baird says to P. J.: ‘Oh, Purdue, some poor guy called our hall this afternoon and he was so depressed he was going to jack off!’ And Purdue freaked. Coffee went everywhere.”
“Did you tell her-”
“Yeah, she took it pretty well. Baird’s okay. She’s a big help to sensitive types.” She looked meaningfully at Sophy.
“I’ve aged a lot since September!” snapped Sophy.
She had, too. Since the Bundschaft incident, Sophy had taken up the pill, and a succession of rugged primates who may have been football players. She called this her zaftig period, which we took to mean something like hunks. No one was ever exactly sure what Sophy was talking about, because she had arrived at our Waspish Southern school from Queens, New York, speaking something which was decidedly not English. “Listen!” she’d say to us in the laundry room. “Don’t let me nosh, anymore, okay? I hate to kvetch about my weight all the time, but I have such tsuris with my metabolism-” And we’d say: “You wanna run that one around the barn one more time, honey chile?” Mutual comprehension arrived in a few weeks’ time. Now I knew what tsuris was. Boy, did I know!
“Listen, thanks for the trash can,” Purdue was saying. “And you know, if you wanna write that shit Anthony a nasty letter, I’ll be glad to help, but-” She shrugged. “Advice to the lovelorn-that’s Baird’s department.”
I nodded solemnly and trudged back to 308. The sign was off Lyndon’s nose, so I knocked.
“Come in!”
Vicki was sitting on her bed, frowning at a chemistry book. She looked up when I came in and her eyes widened. After leaving Purdue’s room-where crying is not permitted-I had let all my misery wash back over me until I had reached a climax of self-pity. I looked wretched enough to command her full attention.
“Mary Frances McCrory! What is the matter?”
I tossed her the letter with a terrible smile that indicated that I was incapable of speech. She began to read Anthony’s inhibited scrawl, her eyes getting wider and wider at every word. “Damn!” she said, jumping up from the bed.
She began rummaging around in the medicine chest, muttering something about Duke students, which Anthony was, and bastards, which Anthony had certainly proven to be. Finally she turned around holding a prescription bottle, from which she extracted two white pills. “Valium,” she said, filling a glass. “Take two. I’ll be right back.” She hurried out of the room in the direction of the phone, while I sat there sniffling with a mental image of Anthony superimposed over scenes of my becoming a nun or perhaps opening a small lending library. I was just administering Chaulmoogra oil to a leper in the African veldt when Vicki reappeared and announced: “You are dating a brother at the Phi Kapp House tonight. He is probably a lizard, and you’re going to enjoy yourself if it kills you.”
This was my wisdom from the oracle of Addison Hall? “Vicki, I can’t!” I wailed. “I just want to slink off into my room and never come out again. If I even look at a boy today, I’ll probably throw up!”
Vicki nodded. “I see. And what do you want?”
I could practically see her looking around for the mice and pumpkins. “I want Anthony back,” I blubbered. “I haven’t dated anybody else since I was sixteen! I’ll never love anybody else! I want Anthony to hold me like he used to-”
Vicki was brisk. “That’s enough of that! Hysteria makes you puffy. And you have to be presentable by seven o’clock. Go take a shower.”
I looked at her piteously, through brimming eyes. “I have to go?”
“You have to.” Then she relented a little. “Well… if it’s too much of an ordeal, then at ten o’clock you can tell him you’re a diabetic and you have to come back to
the dorm to take an insulin shot.” Vicki believed in lying.
I said I’d go.
A few minutes later I stood in the shower contemplating my own misery. My own true love had just proved to be a creep and no one understood. Maybe I should have stood on the ledge of the new library building until a whole crowd gathered and the Channel Five news department sent a camera crew over. How would you like your letter read on the six o’clock news, Anthony? Meanwhile, I was stuck going to a fraternity party with a total stranger. I was not the frat party type. Anthony and I were strictly free flicks and duplicate bridge people. It was going to be awful.
“Flush!” came a scream from the other room.
Automatically I stepped out of the path of the shower, as I heard the whoosh of a toilet flushing. Strictly a reflex action; if I’d thought about it, I would have stayed under the shower and gotten scalded. It would have gotten me out of the blind date anyway-and who knows, if my frail form were swathed in bandages in Memorial Hospital, maybe Anthony… After that I waited for somebody else to flush, but nobody did.
Addison Hall has neurotic toilets, so one important feature of freshman orientation is toilet training. If you flush while somebody is taking a shower, all the cold water to the shower is cut off, and you have an irate burn victim to confront. So we devised a system whereby if someone is taking a shower, you yell “Hush!” before you do it, so they’ll have time to crawl in the soap rack until the crisis is past. The older girls spent a lot of time in orientation programming us to yell flush. I internalized this command so well that when I went home for Thanksgiving, I got up at seven A.M. and yelled “Flush,” forgetting I was at home. My father yelled back: “It won’t obey spoken commands!”
When I got back to my room, everyone had already gone down to dinner, but there was a note on my door from Vicki: Don’t wear black! How did she know? I skipped dinner, as I thought suitable for a person in my state of bereavement. After finishing off a third of a package of Oreos to pass the time, I halfheartedly put on my navy blue church dress and went down to Vicki’s room for inspection and final instructions.
Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories Page 5