Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Miriam had said that she would rather handle matters with Andrew in her own way, but they had laughed and asked her if she were trying to be The Total Woman. Kathryn told her that if Andrew refused to respect her personhood, she should take a lover, but Jayne contended that self-awareness was a healthier approach. She insisted that Miriam attend assertiveness training class with her, so Miriam went twice, because she didn’t want to say no. Usually when other people insisted on a thing, and Miriam didn’t care much either way, she let them have their own way. She had noticed, though, that some people nearly always cared a great deal about everything-such as where they had lunch and when they went-so that Miriam seldom got the default of getting to choose. But each thing was too trivial in Miriam’s view to be assertive about. Somehow, though, they added up.

  The jeweler’s clock said 12:20, and she only had another block to go. Miriam slowed her walk to a trudge, but she still arrived for 12:30 lunch at 12:23. She decided, against her own inclinations, to go into the Post and Lentils and wait. It had been Kathryn’s choice today, so lunch would be one of the Post’s thirty-seven salad combinations, with commentary from Kathryn on the nutritional value of each ingredient. Miriam wished she’d bought a newspaper. She hated waiting with nothing to do. Jayne would not come for another fifteen minutes-to show that, as an executive, she was not tied to the clock hands. Miriam had nearly memorized the menu by the time Kathryn arrived.

  “Well, hello, there, Miriam. How are you?”

  Miriam wondered why Kathryn always seemed surprised to see her when they met for lunch every week. In fact, the Vietcong streak in Miriam’s mind bristled at the inevitable greeting, but the meek and courteous part that was usually in control of her actions mumbled: “Fine. And you?”

  She let Meek and Courteous continue the conversation on automatic pilot while the rest of her considered the question of why Kathryn made her uncomfortable. She was friendly, even effusive, but… but it was that gushing kindness-the way the Homecoming Queen treats the fat girl, as if to say: “You know you’re not worth it, and I know you’re not worth it, but I’ll be kind to you to show everyone what a swell person I am.” Miriam thought that putting up with Kathryn might be good practice for when she was eighty and was treated that way by everybody.

  “Am I late?” cooed Kathryn. “I hope you didn’t mind waiting.”

  Miriam said no, she never minded waiting. Sometimes, of course, she did mind, and she made great violent scenes in her head, scenes that were always scrapped when the other person arrived. Usually, though, she enjoyed a short wait. It was like a little breather offstage while you waited for your next scene. She would study the trees and the sky, and perhaps run over a bit of forthcoming dialogue, making sure to stay in character, and by then whoever she was waiting for turned up, and her self-awareness dissolved in a flurry of civilities.

  “God, I’m tired,” Kathryn was saying. “It can’t be my blood sugar. I just had it checked.” She pulled a bottle of pills from her purse and studied it thoughtfully. “More iron? Maybe I should have kelp today.”

  Miriam didn’t smile. She was studying the abstract painting hanging above the booth and wondering how anybody could pay to have such ugliness about them, regardless of its technical merit. She had wanted to be an artist herself once, until it was impressed upon her that being able to draw well had nothing to do with it. She still liked to look at paintings, but she wondered why no one ever did pleasant or harmonious things. Suppose I had to hang that in my bedroom for a year, she would say to herself. She once ventured this opinion to Kathryn and Jayne, and they had smiled at her together and gently explained that paintings were not supposed to be pretty; they were supposed to reflect life. Miriam had wanted to answer that an artist of all people ought to be able to see the beauty in life, but the conversation had gone on by then to other topics.

  “Having lunch with the Gorgons today?” Andrew had asked her. It was his oft-stated opinion that the y’s in Kathryn and Jayne’s names were their compensation for a missing, but coveted, male chromosome. He said he got along perfectly well with Jayne when he needed library material put on reserve, and since Kathryn was a secretary for the department next door to Geology, he often said hello to her in the halls, but their friendship with his wife did not extend to him. Perhaps, in fact, it excluded him automatically. (But she didn’t want to think about Andrew.)

  Miriam sometimes wondered why she kept up the lunch dates. The staff computer class where she had met them was long since over, but their habit of a weekly luncheon persisted. Still, you had to eat somewhere, and Miriam could not face the paper-bag lunch five days a week. It made it too easy to spend your hour running errands instead of eating, and then you were more tired than when you started. She supposed that she had nothing better to do: many, if not most, university friendships amounted to no more than that.

  “I can’t eat too much today,” Kathryn was saying. “I’m playing racquetball this afternoon with Kit. I didn’t get to see him last weekend because his daughter was down visiting. I think we have our relationship more clearly defined now…”

  Miriam wondered what she was going to think about until Kathryn finished her monologue. She always thought of it as the Cosmo Speech. Whenever you go out to lunch with an unattached woman over thirty, her conversation always comes around to a speech that sounds like a feature article from the magazine: His Career/My Career; His Kids/My Kids; or, most often, He Says He Loves Me, But He’ll Screw Anything That Moves.

  Miriam had heard variations on all these themes enough to know that it was never wise to offer any advice, particularly common sense, which almost always amounted to Dump the Creep. So she tried to look earnest while they talked, and behind the glazed look in her eyes she thought about her other regular outing “with the girls,” as Andrew facetiously put it, although surely everybody in the Chataqua County Garden Club was over fifty. Except herself, of course. They were meeting tonight. Since refreshments were served at the meeting, she had told Andrew that she would be leaving him a salad to eat with the leftover lasagna.

  She had expected Kathryn and Jayne to approve of the Chataqua County Garden Club (a “sisterhood,” of sorts), but oddly enough they hadn’t. They had not come right out and said so, but their attitude implied: Of course it is chic for professors (and their wives) to move out into the country, but not so far out as Miriam and Andrew have moved… and not to socialize with the… locals. Once, Miriam had made the mistake of mentioning that one of their neighbors had offered them some deer meat. Jayne had been unable to eat another forkful of lentil loaf, and for the rest of the lunch hour they had said dark things about the “carnivores” who were native to the North Carolina hills.

  Miriam understood that the proper country place for university people to live was south of the campus town, in Williamson County, a lovely, unspoiled rural haven, with an herb shop, a “free press” (the word Nicaragua was always contained on page one, while on the back pages were vegetarian recipes and ads for goat’s milk and meditation classes), and evening yoga classes at the Alternative Children’s Academy. If Miriam and Andrew should wish to pursue rural living, according to Kathryn and Jayne, they should do so in Williamson County with the civilized people. Miriam had mentioned this to Andrew, and he’d laughed about it and said that he didn’t see why all those Earth Shoe People didn’t just move to California, but that maybe they wouldn’t have to. Maybe, he said, California would just suck them right across the country like a giant vacuum cleaner. After that, Miriam told people that she didn’t want to live in Williamson County because of a fear of tornadoes.

  Andrew had agreed to move there only because it was so much cheaper than closer places, but Miriam liked Chataqua County. Conversations with the neighboring farmers made a nice change from all the university talk that she got during the rest of the week. (Most of the farmers had been to college, too, but they weren’t Academic-which is not the same thing as being educated.) Sometimes Barbara down the road would tell
her about an auction at the old schoolhouse in Sinking Creek, and they’d go for the evening, packed tighter than baled hay in the little auditorium, eating hot dogs from the 4-H concession stand, and watching somebody else’s life pass before them as a string of possessions. Sometimes they’d bid on an applewood rocking chair or a collection of old kitchen utensils, but never on the really nice pieces of furniture or the silverware. Dealers always jacked the price up on those. Or the university people. “You got to watch out for the skinny women with no makeup, wearing jeans and an old cashmere sweater,” Barbara warned her. “They got all kinds of money.”

  Chataqua County was lambs in the spring, and Ruritan apple butter, and the garden club. One Tuesday a month in the Sunday-school room of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church, two dozen ladies would meet to compare flower arrangements, discuss civic projects (like taking baked goods to the senior-citizen home), and catch up on all the news. It had taken Miriam a good while to follow it all, being the only one “not from around here,” but she was beginning to get it sorted out now.

  Miriam’s favorite part of the garden club meetings, though, was the plant lore. The older women, especially, were full of tales about healing plants, and herbal teas, and old traditions. “You know why they’s a mountain ash planted beside most every door in Scotch Creek?” they’d ask her. “Why, because the mountain ash is the American kin of the rowan tree back in Scotland. My grandmother used to say that in the old days, folk thought a rowan would protect you from the evil spirits, so them Scots that came over here went on a-planting ’em by the doorway.”

  Miriam was always afraid that someone from Sociology with a tape recorder, or one of the Earth Shoe People, would find out about the garden club and horn in, but so far they hadn’t. Last November, when Kathryn was dating the latest divorce-casualty in Appalachian Studies, she had suggested that they drive out for the meeting, but Miriam had put her off by reminding her that it was hunting season, and perhaps not entirely safe. The matter had rested there.

  “Sorry I’m late,” said Jayne, not sounding sorry in the least. “Some guy needed a reference, and I could not get him off the phone.” Jayne was the humanities reference librarian, a job she described as “having to suffer fools gladly.” She was in her not-to-be-mistaken-for-a-secretary outfit: navy blue straight skirt and blazer, blue tailored blouse, red foulard tie. Sleek, short haircut; no mascara. Sometimes, Southern-born professors over sixty absentmindedly called her “dear,” but everyone else got the message.

  She sat down and looked meaningfully at Kathryn before picking up the menu. Uh-oh, thought Miriam.

  “So,” said Jayne, glancing through the salad list. “What have you been talking about?”

  “Nothing much,” said Kathryn. She meant, I haven’t said anything yet.

  Miriam said, “I think we’d better order. I need to get back.”

  Kathryn glanced at her watch. “It is getting late.”

  The waitress appeared then, and the next few minutes were occupied with detailed instructions-“Iced tea. Very light ice.” “Is that low sodium?”-and so on. Miriam toyed with a pink packet of saccharin while these proceedings were taking place. She was trying to think about something else.

  “How is Andrew?” asked Jayne, trying to make it sound perfunctory.

  “He’s fine,” said Miriam. He doesn’t know that I know. I wondered if he suspected that you did. Andrew had forgotten that she had taken the university computer course for staff. As a professor, he had an electronic mailbox, and one day (just for fun?) she had accessed his “mail” on her terminal. The password was easy to figure out. True to his specialization, Andrew alternated between aquifer and mineral. Miriam did not know what she had expected to find on the university computer system. Love letters, perhaps, since Andrew had been preoccupied lately. She supposed, after all, that electronic mail was just as private as the other kind. Or just as un-private.

  So she had found out about Andrew’s project weeks ago, and now that it was nearly to the press-release stage, Kathryn must have learned about it from gossip in the department of… Andrew’s co-conspirator. He had not discussed it with her, of course. He was going to present her with a fait accompli. He would make a lot of money from the sale, and as the letters from the other professor had stated, “There weren’t many people to be considered.” Chataqua County was not populous. She knew that sooner or later the weekly luncheon would be devoted to a discussion of Andrew and his project, but Miriam did not want to “articulate her feelings” with Kathryn and Jayne. They’d be on the same side for once, but she preferred to handle matters in her own way.

  She had already talked the matter over with the garden club. A couple of the older ones had to have things like “toxic chemicals” and “groundwater” explained to them, but finally they understood why she was so upset about Andrew’s offer to sell the farm to the university for a landfill. She told them about some of the chemicals that certain departments couldn’t dump down the sink anymore, and what had happened to the pond on campus when they used it for dumping.

  After that there had been complete silence for a good three minutes. And then the talk returned to gardening. At first Miriam thought that the issue had been too complex for them to understand. She wondered if she ought to explain about cancer and crop contamination, and all the other dangers. Listening to their calm discussion of plants, she thought that they had just given up considering the problem altogether, but looking back on it later, she understood.

  “Cohosh sure does look nice in a flower arrangement, doesn’t it?” said Mrs. Calloway. “Nice big purple berries that look like a cross between blueberries and grapes. There’s some up the hill behind our place.”

  “You wouldn’t want to use them in a salad, though,” said Mrs. Dehart thoughtfully. “Bein’ poison and all. Course, they might not kill you.”

  “We lost a cow to eating chokecherry leaves once,” said Mrs. Fletcher. “It almost always kills a cow if you let one in a field with chokecherry. I never heard tell of a human getting hold of any, though. We got some growing in our woods, but it’s outside the fence.”

  “That ain’t nothin’ to hemlock,” sniffed Serena Walkenshaw. “Looks just like parsley, if you don’t know any better. They’re kin, of course. Wild carrot family, same as Queen Anne’s lace. But that hemlock beats all you ever seen for being… toxic?”

  Miriam nodded. “I don’t suppose you find it much around here.”

  Serena Walkenshaw shrugged. “I believe I saw some in the marsh near that little creek on your place. Course, it might have been parsley…”

  Miriam felt a tug on her sleeve and looked up to see Kathryn peering at her intently. “Are you all right, Miriam? You’re just staring at your salad.”

  Miriam smiled. “I was just thinking that I had to fix a salad for Andrew tonight, before I go off to the garden club.”

  Jayne laughed. “The garden club! What can you possibly get out of that?”

  “Recipes,” said Miriam softly.

  A PREDATORY WOMAN

  “SHE LOOKS A proper murderess, doesn’t she?” said Ernie Sleaford, tapping the photo of a bleached blonde. His face bore that derisive grin he reserved for the “puir doggies,” his term for unattractive women.

  With a self-conscious pat at her own more professionally lightened hair, Jackie Duncan nodded. Because she was twenty-nine and petite, she had never been the object of Ernie’s derision. When he shouted at her, it was for more professional reasons-a missed photo opportunity or a bit of careless reporting. She picked up the unappealing photograph. “She looks quite tough. One wonders that children would have trusted her in the first place.”

  “What did they know, poor lambs? We never had a woman like our Erma before, had we?”

  Jackie studied the picture, wondering if the face were truly evil, or if their knowledge of its possessor had colored the likeness. Whether or not it was a cruel face, it was certainly a plain one. Erma Bradley had dumpling features with gooseberry e
yes, and that look of sullen defensiveness that plain women often have in anticipation of slights to come.

  Ernie had marked the photo Page One. It was not the sort of female face that usually appeared in the pages of Stellar, a tabloid known for its daily photo of Princess Diana, and for its bosomy beauties on page three. A beefy woman with a thatch of badly bleached hair had to earn her way into the tabloids, which Erma Bradley certainly had. Convicted of four child murders in 1966, she was serving a life sentence in Holloway Prison in north London.

  Gone, but not forgotten. Because she was Britain’s only female serial killer, the tabloids kept her memory green with frequent stories about her, all accompanied by that menacing 1965 photo of the scowling, just-arrested Erma. Most of the recent articles about her didn’t even attempt to be plausible: “Erma Bradley: Hitler’s Illegitimate Daughter,” “Children’s Ghosts Seen Outside Erma’s Cell,” and, the October favorite, “Is Erma Bradley a Vampire?” That last one was perhaps the most apt, because it acknowledged the fact that the public hardly thought of her as a real person anymore; she was just another addition to the pantheon of monsters, taking her place alongside Frankenstein, Dracula, and another overrated criminal, Guy Fawkes. Thinking up new excuses to use the old Erma picture was Ernie Sleaford’s specialty. Erma’s face was always good for a sales boost.

  Jackie Duncan had never done an Erma story. She had been four years old at the time of the infamous trial, and later, with the crimes solved and the killers locked away, the case had never particularly interested her. “I thought it was her boyfriend, Sean Hardie, who actually did the killing,” she said, frowning to remember the details of the case.

  Stellar’s editor sneered at her question. “Hardie? I never thought he had a patch on Erma for toughness. Look at him now. He’s completely mental, in a prison hospital, making no more sense than a vegetable marrow. That’s how you ought to be with the lives of four kids on your conscience. But not our Erma! Got her university degree by telly, didn’t she? Learned to talk posh in the cage? And now a bunch of bloody do-gooders have got her out!”