Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

“And?” Actually I didn’t want to know.

“We can ride by his house. I found out where he lives, too. Maybe he’ll be outside, mowing the lawn or something.”

“Absolutely not. I refuse. I am not going. You can’t make me.”

I said that the whole mile over to his house. “This is ridiculous!” I said that about fifty times, too. I don’t know why I kept muttering. Carol Lee wasn’t listening, and I didn’t need any convincing.

We kept going around and around the block. I began to feel like a vulture. To relieve the monotony and take my mind off how stupid I felt, I started counting the bricks on the left side of his house. The only reason I kept going was loyalty. Carol was my friend, and it was my duty to stand by her in her madness. Sancho Panza on a Schwinn-that’s me, I thought.

He’s never going to come out. I pictured him lurking behind the living room curtains, watching two giggling freshmen in orbit around his block. There’s no way he’s coming out of that house, I thought. He’ll stay barricaded in there until doomsday. He won’t check the mail; he won’t retrieve the newspaper; he won’t go to school on Monday. He’ll never come out. He’ll probably leave instructions that when he dies, they are to cremate him in the toaster oven and flush his remains down the toilet. Meanwhile we’ll just keep circling. And Carol will never leave. We’ll be doomed to an eternal bike path around this block. I could hear Rod Serling solemnly describing our trajectory: “Elizabeth MacPherson and Carol Lee Jenkins, two typical teenage girls with ordinary hopes and dreams, who started out on a Saturday morning bike ride, and ended up perpetually circling, forever straining for a glimpse of Cholly Barnes as they hurtle past the brick ranch house on Maple Street, trapped in an orbital obsession known only in The Twilight Zone.”

Finally I’d had enough. I was tired, sweaty, hungry, and, above all, I felt utterly foolish. “Look, Carol Lee,” I said, edging my bike to within earshot. “I’m going home now. I’ve got motion sickness.”

“Oh, just a few more minutes,” said Carol Lee. “He’s bound to come out sometime.”

“Sorry,” I told her. “I’m all pedaled out.” As we turned the corner onto Fourth Street, I steered my bike away from Carol Lee’s and headed straight for Elm Avenue. I was going home. I glanced back to see her pumping furiously along, determined not to abandon the vigil.

I had been home about two hours-long enough to take a half-hour bubble bath, fix myself a sandwich, and immerse myself in The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker-when the phone rang.

It was Carol Lee, wailing.

I almost dropped the phone. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Oh, Elizabeth! The most awful thing happened.”

She’s been hit by a truck, I thought. She’s in the hospital, and they’ve allowed her one last phone call before they cut off her-oh, wait. I suddenly remembered who I was dealing with. This was Carol Lee Jenkins, the Star-Spangled Queen of Melodrama, to whom every hangnail was a tragedy, and she was no doubt calling on her pink Princess phone from her white lace French Provincial bedroom in perfect health.

“What happened?” I sighed.

“He saw me!”

“What?”

“He saw me. Cholly Barnes saw me. He came out to get the newspaper, and he was just straightening up as I came around the block, and he looked right at me.”

Maybe something did happen, I thought. Maybe he smiled and waved for her to stop, and then he went over to the curb to chat with her, and they hit it off beautifully, and now she’s calling to tell me that they’re going to the movies later tonight. Oh, wait, this is Carol Lee’s theoretical love life. Motto: “Not on This Planet.” Okay. Maybe he went out into his yard, picked up the biggest rock he could find, and waited for her next revolution…

“Okay,” I said. “He came out into the yard, picked up the newspaper, and saw you. Then what?”

“That’s it,” said Carol Lee. “Then I came home.”

“So he saw you. Why are you hysterical? Oh, wait. Did he catch you rooting through his garbage cans?”

“No, of course not!”

I didn’t think there was any of course about it, but I was relieved that she had restrained herself. “Okay, he saw you on your bike. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“No!” She was wailing again. “I just wanted to see him. I didn’t want him to see me.”

I told Carol Lee that if that was her idea of a romantic encounter, she would be much better off falling in love with a Paul McCartney poster, but she was not amused. Well, I thought, at least I’ve heard the last of Cholly Barnes.

I hadn’t, though.

Carol Lee continued to stake out a lunch table so that she could keep Cholly under surveillance while we ate, and her obsession with him showed no sign of letting up. She managed to discover his birthday, his dog’s name, his food preferences, and about a zillion other completely useless biographical details, all of which she regaled me with as we watched him eat. If Taylor High had offered a course in Cholly Barnes, we would have passed it with honors.

Phase Two of Carol Lee’s Doomed Romance began early in May. One afternoon she set down her lunch tray with an expression of tragic suffering on her face. I thought it was the meat loaf that had prompted this air of gloom, but as she sat down, she said, “Oh, Elizabeth, it’s May.”

I looked doubtfully at the meat loaf. “Yes,” I said. “I don’t mind May, myself.”

“But school will be over in a few weeks.”

“Yes. That prospect doesn’t distress me, either. I’ll be out of Mrs. Baxter’s geometry class forever.”

“But he’s graduating!”

“Oh.”

“I can’t live without him.”

It was useless to point out that she wasn’t even remotely living with him. “You’ll get over it,” I said, as consolingly as I could manage.

“I’ve lost him. We had so little time together.”

None, actually, I thought.

“I’ll never forget him, though,” said Carol Lee. “I’ll probably go off and tend lepers in the African veldt, or run a small lending library somewhere, and I’ll grow old and gray, with only my memories of him to sustain me. But I shall suffer in silence. I shall never speak his name again.”

I began counting the hours until graduation.

A week later the euphoric phase of the obsession returned. Carol Lee came down the steps after school, squealing in ecstasy. “Guess what I’ve got!” she said, in tones suggesting possession of the Hope diamond or an Irish sweepstakes ticket.

“Offhand I’d say schizophrenia,” I replied.

“No. Look!” She reached in her pocket and took out a small white square of cardboard. “His calling card!” she said, handing it over for inspection.

I took the slightly creased and grubby Jeremy Collins Barnes card, studying the engraved italic script with polite disinterest. “Very nice,” I said. “Where did you get it?” I pictured Carol Lee throwing him down on the floor of the hall and searching his pockets.

“One of the senior girls got it for me,” said Carol Lee. “Look on the back! He wrote on it.”

I turned the card over. There in tiny, script letters, Cholly Barnes had written: I shall pass through this world but once. If there be any good that I can do, or any kindness I can show, let me do it. Let me not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

I didn’t think he would pass at all.

But he did. He passed, and he passed us in his white cap and gown as the seniors marched in two rows down the concrete steps of the stadium on graduation night. It is hard to bounce to the beat of “Pomp and Circumstance,” but Cholly Barnes managed to do it. I watched the white tassel bob its way down the steps of the bleachers and onto the field with the rest of the senior class, waiting for commencement exercises to begin. Carol Lee sat beside