by Lee Smith
Jerold burned like a dark meteor, “exploring new space,” as he said, in his work. It was fine to be a part of this excitement, for a while, especially in the night when Jerold came sweating out of sleep to her, swimming upward out of the dark strong current of his dreams. When he was on top of her, then all the old intensity came back and the way he made her feel was wonderful again, was like it used to be back at the beginning in the room on Rivington Street when she never felt so much alive. She understood him, Jerold used to tell her over and over at the end, because she was also doomed. But this was wrong, and he was crazy; even at the beginning, he was crazy. She did not then nor had she ever believed she was doomed. “Become.” That was another thing Jerold used to like to say. “You are just becoming, baby. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about anything. You’ll get there. Don’t think. Live. Breathe. Get high. That’s all you’ve got to do.” He used to tell everyone that.
“Miss Spangler?” It’s Eugenia Blackman herself, beet red with her diamond-patterned knee socks falling down. Students aren’t allowed in the teachers’ room, Crystal knows, unless they have a special message.
“Yes, Eugenia,” she says.
“Well…” Eugenia twists her foot around and picks at little balls on her sweater. Mrs. Mooney does not look up from her grading.
“We were wondering, I mean, I’m on the cotillion committee, and we were wondering if maybe you could chaperone the sweetheart dance next week.” Eugenia’s words come out in a rush.
“I’d love to,” Crystal says, and Mrs. Mooney says, “Ha,” enigmatically. She thinks girls like Crystal are a dime a dozen with all their smart ideas. But they burn out fast enough. Get married or pregnant or both, or take to crying in the bathroom and then decide to get their license in real estate. Mrs. Mooney has seen plenty of them come and mostly go. Eugenia blushes, closing the door, and Crystal writes the date of the sweetheart dance in her memo book. She used to have a sweetheart, but he died. Becoming, she thinks, as she writes, “Very Interesting” on Johnny Malone’s paper about how he hopes to go to trade school if he can ever pass ninth-grade English. Becoming: maybe so.
CRYSTAL FALLS INTO the rhythm of teaching school so easily that it’s as if she has never done anything else. It’s like there’s a part of her which knows how to do it already, like the part which was up on the baby mobile. She chaperones the sweetheart dance; she serves on a curriculum review committee for the eighth and ninth grades; she serves two weeks of lunch duty in the cafeteria. She attends bake sales and talent shows. After thinking about Jerold a great deal when she first began work and found that she could think of him, she thinks of him less and less. She’s very busy.
This is a coup of sorts, but another coup concerns Bull Hallahan. One spring day when she asks him to come back for a few minutes during lunch period so that she can find out whether he was or was not listening while she read the poems aloud to them that morning, she gets really exasperated because he won’t pay attention to her at all. He keeps looking out the window, where all the noise is coming from. Finally Crystal says, “Bull! Will you pay attention or not? I’m trying to ask you something.”
Bull turns his big head slowly in her direction. “What, Mrs. Spangler?”
“Miss,” Crystal says for the fifth or sixth time.
“What?”
“Miss Spangler, not Mrs.”
“Oh,” Bull says. He’s only fifteen, but he has lines in his face already, and all of them run down. He has, Crystal thinks, jowls.
“I’m trying to ask you something. It’s my lunch hour, too, remember,” she starts in again, but then because Bull Hallahan continues to look so woebegone she attempts to get him into a better humor. “What are you looking at, anyway, out that window?”
Bull Hallahan gives a long profound sigh. “Martha Bell Rice,” he says.
“Is that your girl friend?”
“No, ma’am.” Bull Hallahan shakes his head. “I ain’t got no girl friend.”
“Well, that surprises me,” Crystal says. “A big old boy like you.”
Bull continues to look out the window. “I can’t get one neither,” he tells her. “Lessen I can get my driver’s license.”
Crystal just looks at him for a while, and he looks at Martha Bell Rice out the window where she is practicing with the other majorettes: she throws her baton up in long slow circles, and her curly hair blows in the wind.
“I tell you what,” Crystal says to Bull Hallahan. “You quit coming to my nine-o’clock class and use that period for your study hall. Then you come in here every day at lunchtime, and I’m going to teach you something. I’m going to teach you how to read.”
But Bull Hallahan shakes his head. “I don’t know about that,” he says.
“What we’re going to use for our textbook is the driver’s manual,” Crystal tells him. “And we’ll study it until you can pass that test.”
Which takes a full two months of lunchtimes, as it turns out. And it works, even though Lorene swore up and down you can’t teach a Hallahan anything. But when they finish, Bull Hallahan passes his driving test, even though Martha Bell Rice had gotten herself, in the meantime, pinned to a Deke at East Tennessee State. Bull Hallahan may have a broken heart, but at least he can read; not anything hard, but signs, newspapers, labels—enough to get by in the world. Crystal feels really good about Bull Hallahan, about this whole year, in fact. She’s already signed her contract for the next year, too; Mrs. Marcum had a seven-pound boy in April and a postpartum depression after that, and she won’t be back for a couple of years. Summer has crept up slowly and now school is nearly over and Crystal can’t believe it. Her students pile up her desk with presents: a loaf of homemade bread; Estée Lauder powder from the Rexall; a paper bag of string beans, picked that morning in somebody’s mama’s garden. When the last class leaves on the last day, she sits at her desk surrounded by presents as the final bell rings in her ears, and the silence after its ringing lasts and lasts. But Crystal feels fine, ordering books for next year.
LORENE BUYS A charter membership in the country club being built at the Breaks. After the courts are finished, Crystal takes lessons from the imported pro and soon has a little tennis group, two of the Lord wives plus Sue Mustard Matney. They try to play twice a week all summer whenever the weather is good and the Lords are in town.
Lorene’s new car arrives, a big surprise. Crystal takes bridge lessons. She goes to Myrtle Beach for a week with Lorene and Odell. Agnes buys another Laundromat, this time up on Slate Creek, and Bobbi Lord gets an au pair girl. That September, Roger Lee Combs gives up a lucrative insurance agency in Alexandria and moves back to Black Rock with his wife Judy Bond Combs and their little twin girls, coming home to go into the coal business with his first cousin Lewis Dean Wright. Everyone feels that Roger Lee and Judy are a big addition to the community. Judy Bond Combs joins the Junior Women’s Club and she and Crystal are very friendly, but Judy never asks her over, of course. Speculation rises and dies. Crystal is working very hard at the junior high school; sometimes the comments she writes on her students’ papers are longer than the paper themselves. Everybody is delighted with her teaching: such a nice, quiet young woman, and all that education to boot. Neva divorces Charlie, who promptly declares bankruptcy and leaves town with his girl friend. Crystal teaches Silas Marner, and her uncle Garnett suffers a slight stroke.
One time, in the middle of the night, Jules calls up. “Crystal?” He slurs the word into the phone. “Crystal?”
“This is Crystal.” She has been up late grading spelling tests. “Who is this?” Crystal tries to keep her voice down so she won’t wake up Lorene.
“Want to speak to Crystal.”
“This is Crystal. Who is this—Jules?”
“What are you doing, Crystal?”
“Well, I was asleep; if you really want to know.” Crystal gropes for a cigarette, putting as much ice into her voice as she can manage. It’s just like Jules to call up in the middle of the nigh
t when she hasn’t heard from him for two years.
“I mean at home. What you doing at home, Crystal.” It’s not a question but a statement, trailing off at the end.
“What? I can’t hear you,” Crystal says.
“At home. What you doing at home.” Jules’s voice is faint across miles and miles, almost the whole continent.
“I’m teaching ninth-grade English at the junior high school,” Crystal says. “I love it. Next year I’m going to put in applications for a teaching job in Richmond.” Or Atlanta, she thinks. Or Charlotte, or maybe even Washington.
“There’s something sad, Crystal. I thought I would tell you about it, thought you might like to know. The only kind of man I like is the kind you can’t live with, the kind you pick up in a bar.”
“What?” Crystal burns a hole in her yellow robe.
“The kind I’m attracted to,” Jules says softly across the whole country, “is the kind I could never love.”
“What?”
“Isn’t that tragic, Crystal? Don’t you find that tragic, too?”
“Do you want anything special or are you just drunk or what?” Crystal is annoyed to hear her own voice shaking so much.
“Go away,” Jules says. “Go away, go away.”
“Well, you’re somebody to talk,” Crystal starts out, not knowing what she’ll say next, but there’s a click on the other end of the line and Jules has hung up. She holds the buzzing receiver for a long time in her hand. Isn’t she doing well now? Isn’t she? Yes. Isn’t she finally happy? Why does Jules have to call up out of the blue like this? Crystal remembers when she was little and Jules tore the heads off all her paper dolls. She used to keep them in a Stride-Rite shoe box and he got hold of it and decapitated every one. She understands more about that now than she did then, of course. Since he couldn’t have them, he didn’t want her to have them, either. Probably. She is sure it was something like that. Well, he still can’t have them. Crystal thinks now. But I can. Yet Jules’s call upsets her and she never tells anybody about it. She loves Jules, after all. The trouble is that she still loves everybody. It’s as though Jules has reached down inside her and plucked one note on an antique musical instrument, and the echo goes on and on, a high painful keening note. The next day, trying to teach her third-period class what a metaphor is, Crystal feels ill suddenly and has to go back to the faculty lounge and throw up. She cancels her classes, goes home, and sleeps for the rest of the day. The next day she feels fine.
Now, Sykes, on the other hand, is around all the time. He is still a deputy sheriff, with two dogs trained to kill on command penned up behind his new brick house. Sykes and his wife have three small children, slightly slant-eyed and roly-poly, who get into everything. Lorene won’t keep them unless she has to; they wear her out, she says. Crystal gets a kick out of Sykes’s wild kids and his wife. She is small and plump like her children, but her arms and hands are slim. Sykes gets drunk at the new country club and tells everybody that Bunny can do acupuncture. But she can’t. Bunny is always in a good humor, always giggling “Hee-hee-hee” behind her hands. Crystal likes Bunny especially because Bunny appears so delighted all the time, so happy with whatever you say to her. “Yes?” Bunny squeals in delight, making it a happy question. “Yes?” she always answers.
Everybody keeps trying to get Crystal a date. She is still so attractive, after all. But Crystal won’t have a date with anybody, so tragic rumors grow up around her in the junior high school, propagated by her students, who are too young to know anything real about her past. The old fiancé-who-died-in-a-car-wreck-on-the-way-to-the-wedding rumor starts. Crystal is amused. She refuses to go out with Bobbi Lord’s recently divorced brother or Babe’s director from the Barter Theater in Abingdon. Once Sykes and Bunny try to get Crystal a date with an old Army buddy of Sykes’s who is passing through town.
“We will be going to the Hukilau Room in Bristol for some dinner, yes?” Bunny lilts into the phone. “Maybe we dance some.”
“I’m sorry, Bunny, but I’ve got a whole set of term papers to grade.”
“You cannot come, yes?” Bunny seems transported by delight.
Tired at last of waiting around for Crystal to get married, Lorene gets married herself. She and Odell tie the knot in a brief ceremony in the Spanglers’ front room on Valentine’s Day. Garnett officiates, leaning on his cane. Garnett looks old and sick, Lorene wears a white pantsuit and Crystal wears a light-green jersey dress. Babe McClanahan comes over from Abingdon at Lorene’s request to read aloud from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Odell grins and grins during the ceremony, and his gold tooth winks in the light. Later, he and Lorene will drive off in Lorene’s new car for two weeks in Hilton Head, South Carolina.
During the ceremony, Crystal stares out the window into the front yard, where Lorene’s forsythia blooms riotously, illogically, amid the last gray tatters of snow.
It’s awkward talking to Babe. Babe is the one who is awkward, perhaps because she used to idolize Crystal so much. Babe’s red hair is long and curly, and makeup rings her eyes. She wears violet stockings beneath her long black skirt.
“Are you happy with your career?” Crystal asks, trying to make conversation. They don’t seem to have much in common anymore. “Do you like working with the Barter?” She gives Babe a cup of punch.
“It’s what I always wanted to do,” Babe answers, staring at Crystal curiously, but Crystal goes on giving out little cut-glass cups of punch. Crystal is happy that her mother has finally married Odell. She is happy to give out punch. In fact, she made the punch herself from a recipe in Southern Living: two parts ginger ale, one part cranberry juice, a lot of raspberry sherbet. Unspiked because of Garnett. Later Babe leaves, too, in her little blue sports car, and Crystal watches her go, trying to remember what she had always wanted to do. Teach English? Surely not. On the other hand, she’s good at it. She’s successful. Babe is successful. Agnes is successful. Jubal Thacker is certainly successful, with his TV show The Divine Ministry now shown over sixteen stations in the Southwest. Crystal watched it once, saw little Jubal heal a fifty-six-year-old man who had never walked in his life. Crystal watched the man throw his wheelchair into the wings. But probably the most successful of them all is Mack Stiltner, whose second album has just been released by Columbia. He has had two gold singles already. Sometimes, idly, Crystal thinks of calling him up. But she knows she will never do it. He’s married, for one thing. To a starlet. She saw their pictures together on the cover of a movie magazine in the Piggly Wiggly while she waited in line at the checkout. “Collies Brought them Together,” the headline read. Thinking about it, Crystal smiles. Some people she knew are not successful, though: Pearl Deskins was arrested recently for shoplifting in the Ben Franklin—Sykes told her about it. Other people are dead. Crystal turns from the window with a shiver and helps them throw rice on Lorene.
Giggling like a girl, Lorene runs out through the rice and vanishes into Valentine’s Day. Lorene and Odell seem like a perfect match to Crystal, who could never have conceived of such a marriage years ago. If anybody had predicted it then, she would have laughed and laughed. Agnes and her mama and the cleaning girl help Crystal clean up, and then that’s done and they leave, too, and suddenly the house seems so large and empty that Crystal gets into the car and drives up to Dry Fork.
AGNES, NEXT DOOR, removes her girdle first and then goes in to talk to her mama, who is watching ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
“Well, that’s over with,” Agnes says, sitting down.
“It was real nice,” her mama comments dreamily, watching TV. “It’d be nice if Crystal would get married now, too.”
“Well, she won’t,” Agnes says.
“Now, Agnes, how do you know? She might. You never can tell. Why, Babe might even marry again, too, one of these days. She said she’s got a new part, did you hear? Going to play a crazy woman.”
“She won’t even have to act for that one,” Agnes snaps. She can’t for the life of her see w
hy her mama is so fascinated with Babe’s acting, with her “career.” After all, Agnes has a career, too. But every time Babe gets a part in something new, Agnes has to drive her mama all the way over to Abingdon to look at it. Her mama is star-struck, that’s what. Second childhood coming on. But Agnes herself is not as interested in what Babe does as in what Crystal does. It was clear from the word go how Babe would turn out, and once she got out of high school she knew what she wanted to do and she did it and never looked back. It was never so clear what Crystal would do; that’s the difference. And Agnes is all mixed up with Crystal some way. For instance, nobody can make her so mad.
