Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

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.”