Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  “Try it on,” Roger says. He puts it on her finger. The ring is much too large and they both laugh at how funny it looks on Crystal’s small hand.

  “I guess I could tape it,” she says.

  Roger Lee turns Crystal around and kisses her, but Crystal doesn’t pay too much attention. She’s thinking about what her mother will say, about showing the ring off to Agnes and Babe and everybody else, about wearing it to school on a chain around her neck.

  Sue Mustard kisses Crystal, too, later, on the cheek, when they all get back together at the Jeep and Roger breaks the news. “I just knew it!” says Sue. “You all make the cutest couple!”

  Even Crystal knows this is true.

  LORENE CLAPS HER hands when she sees Roger’s ring, and hugs Crystal tight, and then she calls Neva to tell her the news. “Such a nice family,” Crystal hears her say into the phone. Grant, though, is sick that afternoon, napping, and when Crystal goes in to tell him the big news his response is unsatisfactory. All he does is smile into the shadows, beyond the glow of his lamp. “That’s nice, honey,” is what he says, and then he turns over to sleep. So Crystal feels disconnected, funny in the middle of her stomach, and at supper she doesn’t eat much even though Lorene has made three-bean salad, usually one of her favorites. She puts Roger’s ring in the middle of the table and it sits there, shining at her, while they eat.

  “Haven’t you got some homework, honey?” Lorene asks her after supper. After all, it’s Sunday night: school tomorrow. Algebra. Crystal doesn’t think she can possibly face algebra when she’s so much in love. It ought to be morning and she ought to be wearing a long lace dress, running through flowered fields. Instead it’s Sunday night, dark and cold, and she’s got fifteen problems which she can’t possibly solve by herself. Crystal puts three Band-Aids on the inside of Roger’s ring, to keep it on her finger, and then she gets her books and puts on her coat and goes next door, where Agnes and Babe and their parents are all in the front room around the television, watching Sea Hunt.

  “Look!” Crystal drops her books on the floor. “Look what Roger gave me today!” She holds out her hand in the air.

  “Well, shoot!” Hassell hollers. “You girls are growing up too fast for me.”

  “Ooh, let me see,” Babe cries, running across the room. “Ooh, it’s so big,” she says.

  “I suppose this means that you and Roger are going steady.” Agnes uses her passing-judgment voice, which Crystal has heard before. Agnes sits on the love seat in her church dress, the navy-blue knit for the fuller figure which her mama made, adding a sailor collar onto the pattern to make Agnes look more her age. She doesn’t get up to see Roger’s ring.

  “That’s right,” Crystal says. She sits in the chair by the window; when she looks out, she can see her own house, and she wonders if Grant’s asleep.

  “Now, what does ‘going steady’ mean, exactly?” Agnes’s mama looks up from the crocheting in her lap.

  “Well, I don’t know.” Crystal giggles. She hasn’t thought about it just that way.

  “I guess we’ll finally get some peace and quiet out in that driveway now,” Hassell teases. “It was getting so busy over there on the weekends I was getting ready to ask the town to put up a traffic light.”

  “Yeah, you sure are popular,” Babe says without a trace of envy. “When I get in high school I’m going to be that popular, too.” Babe pirouettes on the plastic runner in the middle of the floor.

  Their mama smiles. “You’ll have to learn how to stand still first,” she says.

  Agnes stares straight at the TV, where a clue has washed up on the beach and Lloyd Bridges, out walking his dog, has found it.

  “Well, you all were just made for each other,” Babe goes on, and Crystal is getting embarrassed. “I’m not going to go steady until I’m about twenty-seven,” Babe adds. “I’m going to play the field.” It’s something she has read in a magazine.

  “Why, Pauletta,” her mama says faintly, and Hassell guffaws.

  “Whoever I marry is going to give me everything I want,” Babe says. “He’s going to be rich and real handsome. One thing I want,” she adds after she’s thought awhile, “is about forty pairs of shoes.”

  “What’re you going to do with that many shoes, Pauletta?” Hassell asks.

  “Dance,” Babe says. She’s dancing right now.

  While everybody is still laughing at this, Agnes gets up heavily and goes upstairs to take off her church clothes, not even looking once at Crystal as she goes. In her room she avoids the mirror as she undresses. It’s upsetting to Agnes that she is still growing. Crystal has stopped, apparently, at five-six, but Agnes is pushing five-ten already, with no end in sight. Her arms and legs are so long and heavy, like furniture parts. Agnes was not made to be a teenager. Already she looks like a woman, and not a young woman either. Somebody thirty at least. She hangs up her dress carefully and pulls on some green knit slacks and a long loose top that her mama made, with vertical green stripes to take away pounds. Except it doesn’t work. That morning Agnes sat by the window biting lipstick off her lips and watching Crystal come out of her house with Roger Lee, wearing tight blue jeans and a little red knit hat with a tail on it and carrying a basket of food. Roger Lee and Crystal ran holding hands to the Jeep, got in and roared off, spewing gravel exactly like Sykes used to do when he came and went, leaving Agnes still staring out the window at Crystal’s empty yard, her house, her driveway only fifty feet away. And now Agnes sits on her bed. Crystal said going steady. Going steady? High school is happening so fast that Agnes has not had time to consider that. But her own little sister Babe appears to know all about going steady, as well as everything else in the world. Babe might be obnoxious, but she isn’t dumb. Agnes feels dumb and clunky right now, like a big homemade machine. Going steady! It wasn’t so long ago that she and Crystal cut their fingers and mixed the blood and swore to have nothing at all to do with boys. But it seems like years and years. Even this summer Crystal was too dreamy and too absentminded, playing on the riverbank. Now she’s too grown up.

  All the way down the stairs, Agnes can hear Babe still talking about her husband, and Hassell is laughing so much he coughs.

  “And also I’m going to get married in the Luray Caverns,” Babe is saying. “You can do it, Mama. You really can. I saw somebody do it on television. A lot of people do it down there. Way down there they’ve got this crude but natural cross.”

  “Why, Pauletta!” their mama says. Hassell wipes his eyes. Crystal is looking at Roger’s ring.

  “What you ought to do is use wax in it,” advises Babe.

  “How would you know?” Agnes snaps.

  “Well, everybody knows that,” Babe says. “Haven’t you got any wax in the kitchen, Mama? Haven’t you got any old candles or something? Let’s go do it right now,” Babe says.

  “There’s some jelly wax in that cabinet under the breadbox,” their mama says. “You’ve got to be real careful with it, though. Melt it in that little old blue pan and don’t turn the stove up too high.”

  When Crystal and Babe go off to the kitchen, Agnes sits down on the couch. She feels tired, which is funny, since she hasn’t done a thing all day except go to church. Hassell snores, his newspaper flat on his lap. Agnes turns to her mama. “Don’t you think Lorene is too easy on her children?” she asks. “Don’t you think she’s too permissive?”

  Agnes’s mama is never asked for any opinion at all and she looks startled. She pauses for a minute, biting a thread, before she answers in her sweet slow voice. “I think Lorene has a hard row to hoe,” she says finally, and that’s all she says.

  After a little while, Agnes gets tired of sitting there watching her mama sew and listening to her daddy snore, and she can’t understand Sea Hunt either since Crystal came in and made them all miss the beginning of it, so she gives in and goes out to the kitchen where all the giggling is.

  Babe and Crystal have made a big mess, which figures, but they’ve gotten a thick glob of w
ax to stick in the ring and Crystal is tickled to death with it. The wax makes the ring stick out so far from her finger that nobody in the world could possibly think it was her own ring; everybody will know she’s going steady. “Look at it now,” Crystal says, holding her hand out to Agnes.

  “Well,” Agnes says. They look at each other across the spilled wax on the oilcloth tabletop until Crystal flushes and looks down, twisting the ring on her hand. She has gotten beautiful, Agnes sees. Some spots in her face have filled out, but her eyes are still hollow and huge, deep blue, when she raises them up to look steadily at Agnes.

  For some reason Crystal feels like she ought to apologize, which is crazy. Apologize for what? For a minute Crystal wonders if Agnes might be jealous, might have a crush on Roger herself. Could that be it? But then Crystal understands and she says, “I was hoping you could help me do my algebra,” so Agnes will know that nothing has changed. Of course they can still be friends. Even if Crystal is going steady, which she is!

  “I don’t know,” Agnes says stiffly. She sits down in a chair at the kitchen table and draws her legs up like an old woman.

  “Algebra!” Babe says. “Yuck!” She goes back in to the TV.

  “I’ve got some homework myself,” Agnes says. This is a big lie and they both know it, because Agnes always does all her homework right after school on Friday afternoons. She won’t do anything before she gets it done.

  “Thanks anyway,” says Crystal, who feels like she might cry all of a sudden, but then, looking at her face, Agnes says “Oh, OK” and does all her algebra for her in fifteen minutes flat, and they’ve got the rest of the night to watch TV and make fudge together, and Crystal is having so much fun that she doesn’t even mind when she gets melted chocolate down in all the little decorative tracings around the stone in Roger Lee’s class ring.

  CHRISTMAS HAS COME and gone and now, five days later, Crystal’s in the kitchen helping Lorene take down the tree. Crystal has felt jittery and peevish ever since school closed for the holidays. School was something regular, a schedule to hold on to. As she reaches for the ornaments she turns her hand back and forth slightly, looking at the new pearl ring which Roger Lee gave her for Christmas. Now she wears his class ring around her neck, the pearl ring on her right hand. The pearl ring has two real pearls in it, entwined by golden leaves. It’s called a friendship ring. Unfortunately, Crystal doesn’t like Roger Lee so much now that football season is over, but she doesn’t see him so much either. Since the end of the season he has been working at the American Oil station downtown. That’s how he got the money to buy her this ring. Sometimes when she’s driving through town with Lorene, Crystal sees him out there all grease-stained and dirty, and she waves and waves from the car. Other times Roger calls her from the pay phone at the gas station. She loves to hear the dime drop into the slot, the traffic noise of the street behind his voice. She likes to drive by the station and wave to him or talk to him on the phone more than she likes being with him. Mack Stiltner has never called her, not once, and sometimes she thinks she imagined that time at the Rexall. Of course Mack Stiltner is so trashy anyway—he wouldn’t dare to call! And Roger certainly is sweet to her. He had her over to his house for dinner on Christmas Eve and she watched all of them open their presents, which all the Combses do on Christmas Eve. Mr. Combs had bought the whole family a new twenty-one-inch TV and it was all wrapped up with a bow and they were all pretending that they didn’t know what it was. Then they sat surrounded by wrappings and watched Bing Crosby. Later, in the car, Roger Lee gave Crystal the ring. “I love you,” he said. “I love you, too,” said Crystal, and when she said it she meant it, but as soon as he had taken her home she wasn’t so sure.

  Crystal’s hands move silently like birds, wrapping up the ornaments in tissue and putting them into the box. It’s an easy job, since Lorene didn’t have much of a tree. Just an artificial one from the dime store, three feet high and white, sitting on a round table in the conversation area. Lorene had put mostly blue ornaments on it and then sprayed it with blue spray. Crystal thought it looked pretty, but Jules said, “My God!” when he came in and saw it for the first time. He hurt Lorene’s feelings. Jules hurt everybody’s feelings, in fact. Crystal didn’t like him at all. Neither did anyone else, including Babe, who came over to deliver presents and after observing Jules reading a book for a while asked in a loud stage whisper how come he was such a fruit. When Jules lowered the book and looked at her, Babe said, “Lordy!” and scatted home. Crystal didn’t know why he was such a fruit, either. Jules was thin and very pale, with a high, balding head; his horn-rimmed glasses made his eyes huge when you looked at him head on. Behind the glasses, one eye had a tic in it that it had had for years. Jules’s fingers were skinny and twitchy, plucking here and there. His smile was heavily sardonic.

  When he opened the set of polished wood coat hangers that Lorene had ordered for him, he said, “Oh, thank you, Mother,” sarcastically. Then he got up and went over and kissed her on the forehead, which she had wrinkled up anxiously while she watched him open his gifts, and said, “Thank you,” again, in a nice voice. Then he went over to the window and leaned his forehead against it while everyone—Crystal, Lorene, and Sykes—was quiet, and outside they could hear the littlest Thackers yelling, “Bang, bang,” as they raced through their yard. “Oh, shit,” Jules said, and went upstairs.

  Grant was so sick on Christmas Day that Dr. Lewis had to come and give him a shot. He had a virus, the doctor said, with some complications. The trouble with a virus, the doctor added, is that you never know where it will settle. Fat little Dr. Lewis looked around at all of them in the front room by Grant’s side when he said it. Dr. Lewis sighed; he had to get on home. Like everybody else in town, he knew all the Spanglers and the Sykeses and all about them, he had known Grant as a young man, and he remembered quite well the day that Iradell drove into the cliff. “Merry Christmas,” Dr. Lewis said, and after he gathered up his things Crystal turned the overhead light off in the front room and fixed her daddy’s covers. “Keep your chin up,” Dr. Lewis said to Lorene as he went out the back door.

  Sykes had brought expensive presents for everybody: a mohair sweater for Crystal, a watch for Lorene, a new red silk robe for Grant, a Scheaffer fountain pen and pencil set for Jules. Sykes didn’t say where he got the money. He didn’t say how he was doing in school either. He did say he didn’t see why anybody should pay to go to school when the Army would educate you free. Sykes ate a lot while he was home and told Lorene what a good cook she was, and every time Crystal came into the room he winked at her. It was as though they shared some secret, but they didn’t. It made Crystal really nervous the way Sykes winked.

  One night when Roger Lee came over, Sykes stayed at home and they all watched a bowl game on TV, Roger Lee and Sykes deeply engrossed in the plays and hollering out just like they were really there, Lorene smiling in the rocker, Crystal on the floor leaning back against Roger’s knees. Jules stayed two days and Sykes stayed three, and now they both are gone.

  But the house seems different somehow and empty, and Lorene’s bustle and talk get on Crystal’s nerves. This afternoon she doesn’t feel like doing much of anything, and Lorene is trying to get her to go over to Neva’s. All the Sykeses will be there: they’re having a potluck dinner. Lorene puts the last of the ornaments into the box and seals it with tape. She puts the tree into a plastic bag. Crystal sighs, thinking of her aunts’ tree, which Nora and Devere cut down in the woods. It reaches to the ceiling, standing in front of the fireplace, and the smell of it fills the whole parlor.

  “I wish you’d go,” Lorene says.

  Crystal opens the kitchen door and looks out. Only four-thirty, but it’s already dark. The snow by the steps is gray and dirty, trampled. Black Mountain is invisible, but Crystal can feel it there.

  “Shut the door,” Lorene says.

  Crystal shuts the door.

  “Go on and get dressed, honey. Put on that new jumper, I want to show it to N
eva.”

  “I guess I’ll stay here,” says Crystal. “You can tell them I’m staying with Daddy.”

  “Your daddy is better. He can stay by himself.” Lorene is large and insistent; it seems to Crystal that she’s swelling up to fill the whole kitchen.

  “I just don’t want to,” Crystal finally says. She tries to think of a reason Lorene will accept. “Roger’s going to call.”

  “Oh,” Lorene says. “Well, all right, then. But I wish you’d go.” What Crystal doesn’t say is that she doesn’t want to see her uncle Garnett because she knows he will take her aside and tell her it’s about time she accepted Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior, the way he always does. Or listen to her uncle Edwin’s jokes, or say how cute Susie and Edwin’s baby is, or have Neva discuss her hair, or do anything at all with her loud Sykes cousins.

  Lorene goes upstairs to get dressed and Crystal goes in to see her daddy. She finds him half propped up on his couch, holding a deck of Bicycle playing cards.

  “Want to play some blackjack?” he asks. His old blue robe is wrinkled around his chest.

  “Sure,” Crystal says. It’s a long time since he has felt like playing cards.

  Grant deals her two cards and they start. In a little while Lorene comes back down all dressed up in a forest-green pantsuit, and comes to stand by the sofa.

  “You look good, honey,” Grant says, looking up. The virus has left his eyes brighter and his face even thinner than ever.

  “Thank you, sir,” Lorene says, as chipper as can be, but she clutches at her purse in an unaccustomed fluster and tells them about the ham turned to Warm in the oven.

  “OK,” Crystal says without looking up. “’Bye, Mama. Tell everybody hello.”

  “Don’t you let Roger Lee come over here if I’m not home,” Lorene says.

  Grant deals Crystal a five of clubs and a four of diamonds.

  “Hit me,” Crystal says as Lorene leaves.

  Grant deals her a seven of clubs and then a jack of hearts and she’s busted the way she usually is; she will never hold her cards, but always goes for more. It tickles Grant the way she plays.