Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

LOVE ON FIRST BOUNCE

I SQUINTED BACK at the glass double door of Taylor High. Despite the glare of the afternoon sun and the glares of departing seniors, who kept jostling me back and forth as they passed, I saw Carol Lee’s grinning face in the doorway. She was twitching with excitement. I could tell by the way she was hugging her notebook as if it were a teddy bear and the way the ponytails over her ears bobbed up and down. She kept looking all around, obviously for me, so I prepared to be bored. By the time she fought her way through the crowd and reached the bottom step, I had an expression of utter disdain.

“Guess what, Elizabeth!” she said in tones of breathless excitement.

“I cannot imagine,” I said wearily. Trying to guess what Carol Lee Jenkins was excited about was always an exercise in futility. It could be anything from a B on a biology lab quiz to Neil Sedaka’s using her name in a song. (I kept telling her that she was not entitled to take “Oh! Carol” personally. Fat lot of good that did; she mooned over it for weeks.)

“There’s the cutest boy whose locker is right across from mine! I just noticed him.”

“Oh? Who is he?” I was only slightly curious.

“I don’t know. I think he’s a senior, though. He has the same lunch period as mine. I bumped into him after second period.”

I started to say “Accidentally?” and then thought better of it. Actually, I didn’t want to know. Encouraging Carol Lee only increases her intensity. Instead I said, “What does he look like?”

“Well, he’s kind of hard to describe, but he’s very cute. He has feathery brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses.”

“Incredible,” I said. She was too wound up to hear my sarcasm, but mentally I applauded my efforts.

“There he is. Coming out over there! Look! No-over there, stupid!”

I sniffed loudly and purposely stared in the opposite direction. “Good grief!” I hissed. “Do you have to point?”

“Look!” she pleaded.

I dutifully turned, expecting to see the president of the school or the star football player. Carol Lee was just idiotic enough to flip over somebody like that, but the object of her affections was not one of the school’s superstars. “You mean the one who’s bouncing?”

“Hey, yeah,” Carol Lee took only a moment to consider my description before she cheerfully agreed. “That’s exactly what it is: he’s bouncing.”

I’d never seen the boy with the weird gait before. I would have remembered that walk. He sort of loped along, bobbing up at every other step, like a rubber duck caught in the current of a bathtub drain. He was nice-looking in an ordinary kind of way: not too tall, not muscle-bound, definitely not a jock. He walked by himself, instead of surrounded by a clump of laughing madras-and-Weejun-clad companions, so he wasn’t one of the popular kids, into school politics and serious partying. All the candid shots in the yearbook seemed to be of the same eight people, laughing and posing prettily, with every hair in place, and he wasn’t one of them. He wore a plaid sport shirt and tan chinos, instead of a black turtleneck and black jeans, which meant that he wasn’t one of the “posturing poets for peace” crowd, either. I couldn’t place him in the rigid social hierarchy of Taylor High. He was just a guy who happened to be in school here.

I wondered what had made Carol Lee notice him in the first place. Of course, there is no telling what will attract Carol Lee to a guy; her affections are as random as tornadoes, and of similar duration. She likes to build souls for mysterious strangers; I suppose getting to know someone would spoil the effect. For one entire bewildering week in eighth grade, though, she actually had a crush on my brother Bill. Even she recognized the absurdity in that, and after a couple of chances to observe him closely, while she was visiting me, she gave it up. Bill would not notice someone flirting with him unless she used a flamethrower, and having lived a few doors down from him for most of her life, Carol Lee found it hard to fantasize about Bill as Mr. Wonderful. As I kept reminding her: she knew better.

I looked at her latest victim with clinical interest. Being a freshman, I knew by some sixth sense that the bouncer was definitely a senior, but despite that aura of upperclassman grandeur, he looked like a big kid. Except for the oversized glasses, he had a round cherub face and a pleasant, if absentminded, expression.

Just before he reached the square of sidewalk where we were standing, I dropped my eyes and gazed intently at a wad of chewing gum fossilized in the pavement. As soon as he was out of earshot, Carol Lee breathed rapturously into my ear, “He smiled at me, Elizabeth! He actually smiled at me.”

“What did you expect him to do? You were staring at him like he was Baldur the Beautiful. He probably thought you were a dangerous lunatic, and he was trying to pacify you by not making any sudden moves.”

Carol Lee wasn’t listening. “His eyes are the most beautiful shade of brown,” she sighed.

“Like horse manure,” I said briskly. “Can we go home now?”

It is a half-mile walk from the high school to Sycamore Street, where Carol Lee lives-around the corner and two houses away from me. I yawned all the way home, listening to Carol Lee’s endless babbling about the mysterious senior. There was no point in trying to work up any enthusiasm for her latest obsession, because Carol Lee fell in love about every three weeks, always with some good-looking total stranger, and after she wore herself out scheming over ways to meet the object of her affections, and speculated endlessly on what he was “really” like, she would lose interest and direct her attention to another victim.

Honestly, I thought, she might as well develop a crush on Paul McCartney; he is no less unattainable than any of her other crushes. Carol Lee disdained movie poster romances, though; she dwells in possibility, which in her case is a very long commute from real life. She never actually dated any of her idols; in fact, I think she barely spoke to any of them. The chief victim of her delusions was me: I had to hear about Mr. Wonder-of-the-Week in our nightly phone conversations. The only thing that made it bearable was the short duration of each crush. About the time I got bored with hearing about the Piggly Wiggly bag boy or the minister’s son, her fantasies had a cast change, and the whole process began again. I predicted that this crush would last exactly one week: the time it would take Carol Lee to notice that the bouncing Mr. X wasn’t wearing his class ring.

A week later, though, Carol Lee’s ravings showed no sign of tapering off, and I was beginning to worry.

Friday night the phone rang.

“Elizabeth! I found out what his name is. You know-the boy.”

Of course I knew. She had scarcely talked about anything else in days. “Hello, Carol Lee,” I said. That was encouragement enough.

“His name is Cholly Barnes, and he’s-”

“Charlie?”

“No. Cholly. C-h-o-l-l-y. It’s a family nickname. Short for Collins or something. My informant wasn’t sure. Anyhow, he goes to the Grace Methodist Church, and he drives a green Chevy. He’s a photographer for the yearbook staff, and he plays the guitar. He likes apples-”

“And he’s going with somebody else.”

“What?” gasped Carol Lee. “Oh. You noticed that he’s not wearing his class ring, didn’t you? He lost it on a fishing trip. Actually, he doesn’t date much.”

“According to the FBI wiretap, I suppose?”

She laughed. “I just talked to a couple of girls who know him, that’s all.”

“Like his mother and sisters?”

“He doesn’t have any sisters,” Carol Lee replied promptly. “But Daddy knows his grandfather.”

“Oh, Carol,” I said (and I was not quoting Neil Sedaka), “have you no sense of decency? What will you do next? Start peeking in his windows?”

“Hey, that gives me an idea!”

“Oh, no…”

“Tomorrow is Saturday. We can go for a bike ride.”