Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

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.”