Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

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.

“Navy blue.” She nodded. “I approve. You’ve made your statement without being obvious. Now just be relaxed and try to enjoy yourself. And for heaven’s sake, don’t talk about Anthony!”

“I have no small talk,” I said mournfully. “What can I say to this person?”

Vicki thought for a moment. “Well,” she said. “I used to pretend to be an exchange student from Denmark. That was always good for a tour of the campus, but that won’t work for you, Mary Frances. It takes practice. You’re just going to have to play it by ear.”

“Are you sure this is what I should do? Go out with this guy?”

“I’m positive. It’s exactly what you should do.”

“What’s he like, anyway?”

“I have no idea. I have never met him. Was that the house phone?” She jumped up and ran out into the hall, and I heard her say: “By the grace of God and the genius of Alexander Graham Bell, you have reached the third floor of Addison Hall…” It was too late to invent a migraine. He was here.

She walked me down the stairs for moral support. “It’s going to be just fine, Mary Frances. Let go of the banister.” We peeped out the doorway into the parlor and saw him standing nervously in front of the gilt-frame mirror.

Fortunately, he looked nothing like Anthony. He was tall and angular, with hair, eyes, and skin all the same neutral shade of tan. His face was impassive. He looked as if he had never had a thought in his life.

“I couldn’t warm up to him if we were cremated together!” I hissed to Vicki.

“He looks like a moron. Now go out there and be charming!” she hissed back, giving me a push.