Black Mountain Breakdown (20 page)

After Lorene has signed them in, they go straight up to their room on the eighth floor, accompanied by a porter with their bags. Lorene tips him, then shuts the door. Lorene and Neva are worn out, they say. And Crystal needs her beauty sleep. The definition of beauty sleep, according to Lorene, is any sleep you get before one
A.M.
After that, according to her, doesn’t count. Neva locks both locks and pulls an armchair up against the door. “You can’t ever tell,” she says. Neva retires to the bathroom and comes back out in a billowing green lace negligee which makes her look enormous and weird, like an overgrown fairy from Shakespeare. Lorene sits down in front of the mirror to count her money and cream her face.

Crystal sits by the window and begins to read her Bible dutifully, but she can’t keep her mind on the words. She stands up and raises the window to let the hot city air of Richmond come into the room, and she gulps it as if it could tell her something; it smells like gasoline, fried food, garbage, indefinable city things. Down below her on Broad Street, traffic is all snarled up, and in the night she hears sirens scream. Somewhere down there, people are stabbing each other, people are killing other people, robbing stores, fucking each other, people are yelling and screaming, houses are burning down to the ground. All of life is going on down there without her. Even Revelations is boring compared to Richmond. “Shut that window,” Lorene says.

The next day they go shopping before the official round of activities starts with a Coke party in Capitol Park at two.
Before they leave the room, Lorene puts her money into her bra so that it won’t be stolen by Negroes. Crystal looks up and down the streets of Richmond carefully. There’s so much going on here; it’s a new world, hot and busy and rushed. They go into Miller and Rhoads, where Crystal fingers dress after dress on the long racks. Salesgirls hover around her; Lorene has told them why she’s here. “That’s just your style!” they say when she tries a sleeveless blue-and-white stripe. “It was made for you!” they say when she tries on a flowery pink shift. But Crystal doesn’t believe them. She can’t decide. She is thoroughly bemused by herself in the three-way mirrors of Richmond. Finally Lorene steps in and picks a black cotton sundress with a square-cut neck and a geometric border around the bottom.

Crystal wears it later to the Coke party, where all the girls pose on children’s play equipment while the children, dispossessed, fight in the sand or look on. “Isn’t this fun?” all the girls say brightly to one another, except for one tall girl from Manassas who whispers, “This is a lot of shit, isn’t it?” to Crystal, even while they both smile brilliantly and a photographer clicks away. Crystal stares at this girl and doesn’t answer. Is it a lot of shit?

Several times during the next few days she manages to get away from Neva and Lorene, and go out alone. She walks for a block or so, shielding her purse. She passes a Greek restaurant, an Italian restaurant, a dancing school, a shop that sells handmade leather goods. There’s an antique shop with a grandfather clock in the window and a whole family of antique china dolls. Grace would love them. The faces of the people she meets are so various, their clothes
so different, that Crystal is breathless by the time she arrives back at the John Marshall Hotel. Pigeons perch on the edge of its roof. Neva says they are nasty and carry diseases, but Crystal loves them. They are impudent city pigeons which add some sort of a finishing touch to the fluted roof. Well-dressed men sit in dark leather chairs in the lobby, reading newspapers. After the second day, the doorman nods to her. The man at the desk smiles. At the elevator, people kiss each other on the cheek in greeting. She can’t get enough of Richmond.

Richmond is so wonderful, in fact, that the contest itself becomes secondary in her mind and is something of a letdown anyway. Her dramatic recitation from Ecclesiastes is not a hit. She places fourth, though; the first three spots are won by older girls. Lorene is put out. The first runner-up is bowlegged, she declares. Actually she feels that Crystal would have won the whole thing if she had a better talent and if she hadn’t been a junior in high school. The first prize was a college scholarship; after all, as she points out later to Neva, they couldn’t very well give it to a junior; and Neva agrees. “We jumped the gun,” she says.
Next year
, Lorene thinks.

Crystal doesn’t care. She’s famous. By the time they get back home (after stopping at Natural Bridge to please her, where a loud symphonic recording of “How Great Thou Art” comes from some mysterious wooden source while they view the bridge; where Lorene buys four placemats with a picture of the bridge on them and Neva buys a pink glass vase) her picture has been on the front page of the
Black Rock Mountaineer
, and Arvis Ember interviews her
on his radio program. “It’s a memory I will always cherish,” she tells him, with that girl from Manassas in the back of her mind. “Everyone there was so sweet.”

LORENE PUTS ALL
of Crystal’s trophies and ribbons up on the mantel in the front room, and boys from the surrounding towns—Pikeville, Richlands, Haysi, Welch—begin to call her up. Crystal has a different date practically every night. She likes all these boys. They all have cars and they have change in their pockets. They adore her and Crystal likes them all, even the dumb ones, even the sarcastic ones, even the ones with deep, fake laughs. She likes their pressed pink shirts and their yellow shirts and their Madras pants. It’s a funny thing, but she doesn’t feel real when she’s by herself, or perhaps it’s only that she doesn’t feel again the way she felt with Mack or the way she felt the night when she was saved. Crystal continues to read her Bible and to discuss with Jubal the workings of the Lord, but the glory is fading fast. It’s only when she’s talking to Jubal or to her uncle Garnett and sees in their eyes herself—
Crystal saved
—that she is conscious of her salvation.

Youth group is a bore. One night their leader, Mrs. Robert Haskell, tells the girls of the MYF never to pet, because boys can become so excited during the act of petting that they can literally
die
if they don’t have a chance to relieve themselves. Girls have more control, of course, so girls are responsible for seeing that petting does not occur. The girls of the MYF nod seriously. Life-and-death decisions are safe with them. Crystal looks out the window. There’s a silver
mine out there someplace, and a hollow tree a man lived in.

The next afternoon she has a date with a boy named Woodrow Morris, a tall lanky boy, a doctor’s son, from Richlands. He has driven all the way over here to date her after meeting her at the MYF district meeting a month before. Crystal introduces him to Lorene, who is impressed, and then gets into his baby-blue convertible and they drive across Fletcher’s Ridge to the Breaks, a picnic area maybe forty minutes away from Black Rock. It’s early fall, September, and red and gold leaves fall on her hair and all over her new plaid A-line skirt; they rustle in the back seat of Woodrow’s convertible. Woodrow asks Crystal if she has any hobbies. He parks on an overlook. Woodrow’s Adam’s apple sticks out; he wears loafers. “I hope to become a surgeon like my father,” he says. “Let’s go sit over there,” she suggests, pointing, and they get out of the convertible and sit in the fallen leaves at the edge of the cliff for their picnic.

After they eat their sandwiches and drink their Cokes, Woodrow kisses her, tentatively. Crystal kisses him back, harder. “Oh Crystal,” Woodrow says. She guides his hand to her breast, unbuttoning the monogrammned shirt she bought last summer at Miller and Rhoads in Richmond. “Oh baby, Crystal, you don’t,” he says.
“Oh Crystal.”
He tries to say a lot more, but Crystal kisses him and puts her hand between his legs and finally she says, “Listen, Woodrow, would you please please please just shut up?” He does. After they’re through, they lie on their backs in the dusty leaves and Woodrow plans out their whole future. He’s going back to Hampden-Sydney in a week; Crystal will
come for a weekend. Crystal will come for Winter Weekend. Crystal doesn’t even bother to listen. Woodrow thinks this is a big deal, but it’s not. Because she knows something that Woodrow does not know even if he is so smart: this doesn’t matter. This doesn’t make any difference. Woodrow kisses her neck and her hair. “Oh Crystal,” he says.
“Oh Crystal.”

Other times she lets other boys touch her and she doesn’t care. Sometimes she lets them go all the way, too, and she doesn’t care about that either. She doesn’t care what Mrs. Robert Haskell thinks about it either—or what Mrs. Robert Haskell would think about it, if she knew. Because it’s only when she’s with boys that she feels pretty, or popular, or fun. In the way they talk to her and act around her, Crystal can see what they think of her, and then that’s the way she is.

During her senior year, Crystal wins two more beauty contests before she gets tired of them altogether. She dates more boys. She reads two books by William Faulkner which she stumbles upon quite by accident in the public library. The grammar in these books is complicated. She loves them. She reads some foreign books, such as
Les Misérables
and
Fathers and Sons
. Jean Valjean of
Les Misérables
is just her style: a lot of anguish and intensity, as she tells Agnes, who is not very interested in either one. Crystal writes a sonnet comparing life to a rose: first the bud, the bloom, then the falling petals in a high, cruel wind. She writes a term paper on “Nature in Mark Twain,” with twenty-six footnotes, but Miss Hart gives her a B on it because she typed the bibliography wrong.

Agnes is accepted at VPI, where she plans to major in
home economics, but VPI is not good enough for Crystal. Oh no. Because Lorene is in charge of that. Lorene has plenty of rivet money laid by, plus insurance money from Grant, and she has her sights set high. Even East Tennessee State University is not good enough. Lorene envisions herself as a visiting mother-in-law, with Crystal married to a brain surgeon. It’s time for some culture, Lorene feels, some society. Crystal should meet a better class of people. Jules writes a letter of advice on the subject, in which he tells Lorene above all to get Crystal out of the South. Lorene sniffs and throws this letter away. She pores over college bulletins, checking the clothes and the prices, ignoring the course offerings, settling at last on a fancy school in Maryland. Crystal doesn’t care about college. She won’t even look at the booklets. She dates boys and daydreams and reads books, and then it’s spring again, then graduation and summer and she and Agnes go off to Girls’ State.

Girls’ State, an annual occurrence, is held each summer at Radford College, while Boys’ State is held simultaneously on the campus at VPI, up the road in Blacksburg. A fine sum of state money goes to support both these projects. The purpose of Girls’ and Boys’ State is to teach future leaders about representative government. So Girls’ State is just like the government in Richmond. There are elections; lobbies and factions; bills to be considered, rejected, or passed; caucuses to attend.

Crystal is only a Congressman from the Ninth District, but Agnes has been maneuvering for the first three days and on Thursday she gets herself elected Secretary of the General
Assembly. Today, Friday, she will take the minutes and call the roll at the General Assembly meeting, and she has bought a special notebook for this event, plus three new ball point pens in different colors.

The girls sleep thirty to a bunch in a cluster of giant, barrackslike dormitory halls at Radford. Agnes and Crystal have been placed in the same building, but they are not in the same dormitory hall. Each morning they are awakened by a bugler playing reveille, and they must get right up and wash their faces and dress and show up fifteen minutes later, ready to say the Pledge of Allegiance and salute the flag. In many ways, Girls’ State is like a big camp. Most of the girls are really too old for this sort of thing, and there are not many budding politicos among them. A lot of them are just waiting for Saturday night, when they will have a dance with the boys from Boys’ State.

That Friday morning, Crystal awakens an hour before anyone else. This in itself is strange, because although she often has trouble falling asleep, she always sleeps dreamlessly and interminably until someone or something wakes her up. She never wakes up by herself. She never wakes up for no reason. But this particular morning, she’s suddenly wide awake and tingling from head to toe. Lying flat in her bed in her top bunk, Crystal runs her fingers over her breasts and down over her pelvic bones sticking up, down over the length of her body. She knows it’s not time for her period. Maybe she’s sick. But she doesn’t feel sick. She’s simply wide awake, and she knows that something’s going to happen.

Crystal raises herself up on one elbow and pushes the
hair out of her eyes and looks around to see what it might be. The vast gray room is shadowed and furred in the funny light of the early dawn. The twenty-nine other girls are all sleeping, heads on their pillows or their pillows pushed to one side, some arms hanging limp off the beds. The air is palpable, light gray. It stirs and sways with their breathing in sleep. Sometimes, somebody murmurs something that Crystal can’t hear distinctly, something absorbed immediately into the thick sleeping air of the room. Crystal leans down to look at the girl on the bottom bunk; Diane Phillips from Danville, Virginia. Diane sleeps with her black hair in green foam rollers. Her sheet has twisted down to expose her to the waist, flat-chested under a cheap pink nightgown. Diane’s head is skewed to one side and her eyes appear partly open, the pale lids fluttering, but she, too, is sound asleep, breathing with her mouth open. Crystal watches Diane for a long time and sees one saliva bubble form, then burst, then reform on her lower lip. Maybe Diane has sinus.

The window is level with the top bunk, so Crystal turns to stare out, but she can’t see much—the corner of another building, brick too, a part of a courtyard, a tree, a fountain, a wall. Her view is partly obscured by the mist that clings to everything here in the mornings, persistent mist which rises only when the girls have pledged allegiance and the sun is fully up. While Crystal stares out the window, the air around her seems to move, the sounds of breathing intensify, and there is a swell, a rising movement of the air. At first she feels disconnected, then oddly terrifyingly buoyant, borne up on the gray moving air and floating. It’s being in this top
bunk, she thinks. That’s all. I’ve never slept in a top bunk before. She wishes it would stop, expects it to stop—maybe it’s something she ate. Only the rising current never stops, and even though Crystal lies, or falls, back on the bed, she’s in it now and it has taken her up and up and up. She struggles to sit up, but she can’t. Her body doesn’t respond or move although she can raise her head, can thrash it from side to side on the pillow to stare out wildly into the softening, lightening room where no one stirs, no one moves, no one is yet awake. She can’t believe they’re still sleeping when all the air has turned to wind now, loud and roaring, tossing her and sweeping her along. How can they be asleep? Crystal twists her neck again and looks out the window. Something moves in the mist by the single tree. She tosses her head to get the hair out of her eyes and looks again. It moves.