Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  “Good!” Mrs. Muncy snorts, exactly the way she used to do whenever someone said something stupid in class. “You were the most talented student I ever had,” she says to Crystal, putting her lips in a severe, straight line. She sets the Santa candle back down decisively on the table and turns and leaves, clutching her old-fashioned jet-beaded bag close to her as she heads for the door. She looks like a little black crow, Crystal thinks. Mrs. Muncy makes her bleak way through the brightly dressed, busy women and leaves.

  “Well!” Crystal says to Sue.

  “Old bitch,” Sue says, and Crystal laughs. But she isn’t so sure. It occurs to her that she should find a job—that she could find a job. Maybe a teaching job. The jobs she had before were exactly that: just jobs, none of them having anything at all to do with her education or with all this ability which some people thought she had. She had taken whatever jobs she could get, depending upon whatever man she was with. Face it. But it was also true that she used to be good at certain things. She might be able to get a teaching job right here, for instance. Of course she doesn’t have a degree in education—she isn’t certified—but probably they won’t be as picky here in Black Rock as they might be somewhere else. Crystal grins, remembering Mr. Roach: his plump white hands, his quiche Lorraine. She might just go by the Board of Education tomorrow and ask. It wouldn’t hurt anything just to ask, even if school has already started.

  “Crystal!” Sue is practically yelling at her. “This lady wants to buy a paperweight.”

  “Sorry,” Crystal says. She adjusts the ruffles on her striped apron and takes the woman’s money, smiling.

  The next day she goes by the Board of Education—just to inquire about the possibilities—and to her surprise they say that in fact they will have an opening in two weeks at the ninth-grade level, since a Mrs. Marcum has gotten pregnant.

  “I’ll take it,” Crystal says.

  BUT THAT FIRST DAY, Crystal is awake for hours before it’s time to get up, going over her lesson plan in her mind. Mrs. Marcum has said she ought to have a lesson plan every day, so she will. She will do everything she’s supposed to. In fact, she has Mrs. Marcum’s own lesson plans for the first week and a half, since Mrs. Marcum did them so far in advance. Mrs. Marcum learned to make these lesson plans as an education major at Longwood, a teachers college in Farmville, Virginia, where she also studied adolescent and child psychology and philosophies of testing, among other things. She knows the ropes, and she has made it quite clear to Crystal that Crystal does not. Mrs. Marcum is one of those early-aging women with a saggy, doughy face but a surprisingly trim body aside from the pregnancy, no hips at all and skinny legs. “Don’t let a thing get by you,” she advised Crystal. “The harder you are, the more they’ll learn. If you start off too easy, they’ll walk all over you, believe me. You’ll never get it back.” Crystal is not sure what “it” is. She’s not sure why she’s doing this at all, and as she lies in bed it seems that the most sensible thing to do would be to go back to sleep. But she knows she can’t do it. She slept so much in the hospital, for days and days and days. Remembering those days—or not remembering them, that’s most accurate—she shudders. This time, she really cannot. Must not: there. She hears Lorene getting up and then she can smell the bacon frying. OK.

  Crystal gets out of bed and puts on a black pleated skirt and a black-and-white striped blouse. She looks in the mirror for a long time, putting her makeup on. Does she look like a teacher? Does she? What will her students think? Crystal has a headache right behind her eyes. It’s raining, too, outside; beyond the window, fog covers the top of the mountain.

  “You look nice, honey,” Lorene tells her when she goes downstairs, and this helps some, but Crystal can’t eat much breakfast and she still has the headache, even later, after three Bufferins, when she faces her first class.

  They come in after the first bell and go right to their seats, which seem to be predetermined—probably by Mrs. Marcum, Crystal realizes. In alphabetical order, no doubt. Her hands are sweating as they fill up the desks and she opens Mrs. Marcum’s grade book and her lesson plan book on her desk, smoothing the pages again and again. The tardy bell rings. The ninth-graders look at her with cold little narrowed eyes. Crystal stands up.

  “Hello,” she says in a voice which rings in her ears. “I’m Miss Spangler, your new ninth-grade English teacher. Mrs. Marcum’s replacement.”

  The ninth-graders continue to stare, and a radiator hisses in the corner.

  “Here,” Crystal says. “I’ll write my name on the board.” She takes the chalk from the desk where Mrs. Marcum has urged her to keep it locked away so it won’t be stolen, turns to the blackboard and writes MISS SPANGLER across it in large block letters.

  “Can’t you do cursive?” somebody asks.

  “What?” Crystal turns.

  “Cursive,” repeats the black-haired girl in the second row. “You know, cursive. Where you link your letters together. Mrs. Marcum won’t take anything if it’s not in cursive. She gives you an F if you print.”

  “Oh.” Crystal can’t think of what to say next. They used to call it longhand when she was in school. She flushes, fiddling with the chalk and looking at them (“Maintain eye contact at all times,” Mrs. Marcum said), as a low rolling contagious giggle starts somewhere in the back of the room and crawls forward across the desks. They’re laughing at her. Or are they? Better not press it. She’ll write on the board some more. Crystal turns and prints: WORK FOR TODAY, followed by the page number and the exercise numbers from the grammar book, but while she’s putting up the exercise numbers there’s a commotion at the back of the room, and a door slams as loud as a shot. She turns to see a boy come slouching into the room and take a seat in the back row, slamming his books down hard on the desk. Just then a blond girl in the front row passes a note across the aisle right in front of her, and Crystal for a minute is caught up in trying to decide if she should take it away or not. She could: all she’d have to do is reach out and grab it. But on the other hand…

  “Good morning, Miss Spangler.” The boy in the back has a nasal, insolent voice. “How are you today?”

  “I’m fine,” Crystal snaps. “But you’re late for class.” Amusement ripples across the classroom again at this exchange, and Crystal feels she’s scored her first point, or maybe half a point.

  Which she loses right away when another student says, “Aren’t you going to mark him tardy?” and before she can answer, the little blonde right under her nose says, “Of course she’s not, stupid. She doesn’t even know his name. She doesn’t know any of our names. She hasn’t even called the roll.”

  Crystal sits down, pulls the roll book closer, and starts: “Abbot, Janice. Blackman, Eugenia. Claris, Susie Louise. Clapp, Pamela. Dark, Ross Junior…” She has twenty-six ninth-graders in this class. Sure enough, they’re seated in alphabetical order except for the boy in the back row, who apparently sits where he wants. He looks like he’s twenty if he’s a day, although of course he couldn’t be. His name, surprisingly, turns out to be Lee Fontaine Hallahan. “Everybody calls me Bull,” he says.

  “Lee Fontaine Bull Hallahan,” Crystal says, and he says, “Yo.” Most of the girls say, “Present,” and most of the boys say, “Here,” but some of the boys try funny voices which Crystal ignores.

  “OK,” she says when she’s called the roll. “Since I’m new at this, it will probably take me a little while to learn all these names. Please open your books and get out your pencils and paper. The exercise on page eighty-eight has to do with punctuation, semicolons, and periods and commas, which I understand you’ve been studying for some time. So get busy on that right now, and then we’ll check them together in class.”

  The black-haired girl in the second row raises her hand, speaking out over the noise of rustling papers and shifting books. “Don’t you want to hear us recite first?” She has a prim little lisp because of her braces.

  Crystal stares at her. “Recite what?”

 
“Every time we do a new unit in the grammar book, we have to memorize the rules before class. Then we have to come up to the front and say them in class and if we can’t do it we have to write them a hundred times for home-work.”

  “There’s nothing in the lesson plan about that,” Crystal says.

  “Well, we do it. We do it every time. Like for today one of the rules is ‘The semicolon divides elements of equal importance, such as independent clauses’.”

  “Show-off,” Ross Junior says.

  “It would take all period for everybody to say that,” Crystal says.

  “It does take all period.” The black-haired girl, whose name in the grade book is Clara Sparrow, purses her lips smugly.

  “Well, then, when would you do this?” Crystal points to the exercise number she’s listed on the board.

  “Probably for homework,” Clara Sparrow tells her airily. “It takes a real long time for us to recite.”

  “OK,” Crystal says. “OK.” She stands up and comes around the desk and sits on top of it. The ninth-graders watch every move. Crystal sits on the desk swinging her foot and looks at them and then suddenly they seem so small. They’re hardly more than children, most of them, with braces or pimples or uncooperative hair. She remembers, too, that this is the room where she had health class and also maybe the room where she had American history, and nothing has changed since then. The same green paint is still on the wall, and even the desks look the same. Printed heads of the Presidents parade across the top of the blackboard, and a large chart of French verb endings hangs at the back of the room. Maybe she had French here, too. No matter. Crystal smiles.

  “Listen,” she says. “I don’t ever want to hear you recite rules. Never. I don’t care so much about this exercise either. In fact, this is how much I care about this exercise.” Crystal leans back on the top of the desk and erases the directions she wrote on the board behind her. Clara Sparrow’s mouth opens and then shrinks to a perfect little pink O. “Now,” Crystal says. “Let’s start over. One thing I don’t seem to have written down anyplace is what you’ve been reading—besides library books, I mean. Don’t you have a literature book?”

  Ross Junior raises his hand. “No, ma’am. We didn’t get it yet. We’ve been doing grammar first because it’s the most important. Later on we can read.”

  “What about writing? How many writing assignments have you done?”

  “How many what?”

  “Writing assignments. You know, papers. Or whatever Mrs. Marcum called them,” Crystal says, very conscious again that she never went to Longwood, but not caring suddenly at all.

  “Ross Junior told you,” Clara Sparrow says. “He told you. We have to do grammar first.”

  “Well, not anymore.” Crystal draws a deep breath. “I’m going to find those literature books and you’ll have them tomorrow morning. If I have to order them, you’ll have them as soon as they come. In any case, as soon as we get them, you will read them along with grammar, or spelling, or whatever else we may be doing. Got that?” The class is nodding like so many puppets; heads bob all over the room. “Now,” Crystal goes on. “We don’t have very much time, so hurry. Get a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. Close those grammar books. Or something. Get them out of your way. Now, concentrate, or you’ll run out of time. What I want you to do is write a good long paragraph about yourself, using—now listen—at least two semicolons, two commas, one colon, and plenty of periods correctly. Got that?”

  They don’t get it. Crystal repeats the directions and then writes them out on the board.

  “That’s too hard,” says Clara Sparrow, who has never made a grade below ninety-three in her whole life. Her bottom lip trembles; she chews on the end of her pencil.

  “What do you want us to say about ourselves?” Ross Junior asks. “Do we have to have a topic sentence?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Crystal causes a collective gasp in the room. “Look. Say something interesting. Say anything you’ve got on your mind. Now start.”

  They start, heads bent over the desks, and Crystal stretches out her arms and then rubs her neck. She’s as tired as if she’s been running. Then, looking around the room, she comes to Bull Hallahan, down low in the desk he is ludicrously too big for, staring at her in a way she can’t quite figure out. He’s not even pretending to work.

  “Bull,” Crystal says sharply. “Get on it.”

  Bull Hallahan mumbles something she’s glad she can’t hear, and bends his head down over his desk. OK.

  When the bell rings Crystal takes up the papers, but Clara Sparrow doesn’t want to turn hers in. “It’s not neat enough,” she says. “I can copy it over in study hall.”

  “That wouldn’t be fair to the others,” Crystal points out. “Give it here. Come on, Clara.”

  “But it’s not neat.” Clara is wailing.

  “I don’t care if it’s neat or not.” Crystal loses patience. “I care if it’s interesting and if it’s right. I don’t care a thing about neat.”

  “You don’t?”

  Crystal grins. “No, honey. You don’t even have to write in cursive unless you just want to. You can print all you want, for all I care. This is not going to be a handwriting class.”

  “We’re too old to print!” Clara screeches, finally relinquishing her paper to Crystal as she runs out of the room, and Crystal laughs.

  “Lord,” she says, and the whole 9 A.M. class leaves laughing.

  The 10 A.M. class goes more easily because she is more relaxed, and the 11 A.M. class is fine, too, except that she is beginning to feel like a broken record by then and except for a little boy named Norman Little, who falls like a stone from his desk right onto the floor a few minutes before the bell rings for lunch. Crystal leaps forward, but the class laughs. “That’s just Norman,” they tell her. “He does that sometimes.”

  “Why?” Crystal asks. “What’s the matter with him?”

  Norman Little lies curled on his side, one hand under his cheek.

  “He’s always done that,” they say. “He’s got some kind of fits.”

  “Fits,” Crystal repeats, and later, smoking a cigarette in the teachers’ room during her free period, she asks Mrs. Mooney about it. Crystal’s glad she has the free period along with Mrs. Mooney, an older woman with black lace-up shoes and a certain amount of sense. Mrs. Mooney has taught history for twenty-five years. When Crystal was in school, Mrs. Mooney was teaching up on Council in the one-room school building at Fletcher’s Ridge. Now that building has been torn down and the Council kids are bused here, and Mrs. Mooney with them. Although she looks like she still teaches on Fletcher’s Ridge, Crystal thinks, with her rough red face and her long gray hair pulled back any old way.

  “His brother had fits, too, as I recall,” Mrs. Mooney says, grading quizzes with her red pen while they talk. She seems to be giving everybody either an A or an F. “Little Arvon. But I don’t think he has them anymore. He works for the Appalachian Power Company now, you know. You wouldn’t think they’d hire him if he still had fits. You wouldn’t think he’d be safe in those little baskets they run up so high from those trucks.”

  “No,” Crystal says.

  “No, what?” Mrs. Mooney lifts her hooded old eyes from her grading.

  “No, you wouldn’t think so,” Crystal says. But she resolves to take Norman Little over to see somebody at the County Health Department all the same, and this is the first note she writes in the little blank notebook she bought which says “Memos” at the top. Mrs. Mooney sniffs at the smoke from Crystal’s cigarette, but she doesn’t say anything, and Crystal opens the folder of papers from her nine-o’clock class and starts to read. “I was born in the middle of the night on Valentine’s Day; which is why mama says I am so sweet,” the first paper says. “I have two dogs, they make Daddy sneeze, I plan to become a Lawyer,” Ross Junior writes. Crystal reads on, folded up in the close hot coffee-smelling stale air of the teachers’ room, sitting on a curious purple stain on the tattere
d yellow sofa. When she gets to Fontaine Hallahan’s paper, she stops. There’s nothing on it but his name written in big straggling letters like Crystal imagines a second-grader might make.

  “Mrs. Mooney,” she says. “Mrs. Mooney.”

  The older woman looks up at Crystal, but her mouth twists down in annoyance. “What?” she says.

  “This boy, Fontaine Hallahan.” Crystal holds up his paper. “He can’t even write. Look at this.”

  “Of course he can’t write,” Mrs. Mooney snorts.

  “But what’s he doing in ninth-grade English?”

  “Well, look at him.”

  “What do you mean, look at him?”

  “Just look at him,” Mrs. Mooney explains patiently. “He’s so big, where else do you think they’re going to put him? There’s nothing wrong with him, he just never learned to read, that’s all. Or write. Some of them don’t. Besides, he’s on the football team. This will be his last year, anyway. He’ll be sixteen come August.”

  “Oh,” Crystal says. “But what am I supposed to do with him in the meantime?”

  “Do whatever you want to with him.” Mrs. Mooney takes out a package of Roll-Aids and eats three. “You can ask him his questions out loud if you’ve got the time to. Or you can just let him sit there. You might as well,” she adds.

  Crystal goes back to reading papers. “If I could have anything in the world I wanted, it is ESP,” Eugenia Blackman writes in a neat little back-slanted hand. “I would like to look into the dark heart of man. I would like to know what is real and what is made up. I would like to know if granddaddy thinks at all or just sits there. I would like to know what is going to happen in the future so that if I didn’t like it, I could just stay home that day. But I would not be stingy; and use my gift for peace in the world.”

  Strangely enough these papers remind Crystal suddenly of Jerold, and she wonders what he was like at this age. She cannot imagine. Nor can she imagine him ever teaching school, although he did once; it’s one of the few facts she ever knew about him. Psychology, she thinks it was. It’s odd how little she really knows. He had been into photography and sculpture and Zen; he had had one or more fellowships and wives. These blank spots used to give her a thrill: all the dark unknowns about Jerold, but sometimes she used to wish he had a real past, anything to put your finger on. There had been no future with Jerold either, and even then she knew it. Jerold had insisted on the present, the present only, created new each day like a gift and made so intensely that it was a long time before she could smile to herself at some of the things he said. This was what Jerold created: today. Not literature. “I hate art,” he liked to say. “Art sucks.” Other days he said he was probably doing the most significant work in contemporary literature. Crystal never saw his novel. She typed one story for him, “The Puppy.” Now she smiles, thinking that the puppy was not nearly as interesting as Eugenia Blackman’s desire for ESP. As she remembers it, the only character in “The Puppy” was the puppy himself, left alone on a four-lane highway to die. The puppy tried to cross the highway and was run down, eventually, by a milk truck. “The Puppy” was symbolic, Jerold had explained, an existential parable about a lost soul in modern America, killed in the end by that which seems to nourish. It’s the bitch/mother image, he said. But apparently no one could understand it; it was rejected again and again. Editors called for plot and narrative, conventions which Jerold had outgrown.