Nurse of the Crystalline Valley

By Mary Collins Dunne, ©1977
Cover illustration by Edrien King

Meredith Hale looked out of the bus window and gloried in what she saw: beautiful snow-capped mountains, snug little houses tucked beneath snow-covered trees. A virtual paradise! Meredith had left her unhappy home to accept a nursing job at Mountain Hospital in Crystalline Valley. Her mother, Blanche, and her second husband, Warren, had separated, and Blanche relied on Meredith for companionship. But now Meredith was out of that unhappy, tense situation. She was looking forward to a more relaxed life with Jill Nolan, a longtime friend, and three other girls. She would be able to make a living and enjoy the resort area. Skiing had always been one of her favorite outdoor activities, and the prospect of winter sports during her off-hours was very exciting indeed. What she did not anticipate, however, filled her with increasing confusion. Her relationship with Lotus Johnson, one of her housemates, deteriorated, and she became involved with several men: Günther Wahl, the handsome ski instructor; Lyle Slater, a millionaire’s son; and Bruce Engel, manager of the valley’s lodge. Bruce was everything she could hope for, but he did not seem at all interested in her. She had hoped, by moving to Crystalline Valley, to find peace, but instead, all she found was more confusion.

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES
“That’s what caught my attention about you, Meredith. You were different from these bubble-heads. Strong and independent. You could talk about things. You’re intelligent and interesting. Of course, it didn’t hurt that you were a knockout in the looks department, too.” 

REVIEW:
Meredith Hale has left her childhood home in Boise, Idaho, largely because her mother Blanche has separated from her husband, Warren, and is being so whiny about it! Blanche was a shocking seven years older than her 39-year-old husband, and after four years of marriage, Warren had had an affair with another woman. Meredith “had always felt Blanche carried much of the blame, driving Warren into the controversial temporary relationship.” It must be acknowledged: Affairs usually are controversial, and the victim usually carries the most guilt.

So she’s off to Crystalline Valley, where she moves into a three-bedroom house with three other women. She works at Mountain Hospital, but we don’t hear much about that. Rather we learn a lot about the characters populating the local ski resort: Günther Wahl, who drives a Ferrari and yet is strangely working a low-paying job as a ski instructor; Bruce Engel, who grabs her arm the first time they meet and who she decides is a “brash overbearing male,” but in the next minute is pining tragically for; young beautiful Althea Emerick, who is married to an old wealthy man and who Meredith decides is just useless arm candy, but is shocked to discover the woman is actually a talented figure skater and an excellent skier, “not a fragile hothouse bloom after all”!

Meredith soon starts dating Bruce, but early on, after she “tests” him by mentioning that another woman is very attractive, I couldn’t help hoping he would come to his senses and run. After a big dance she attends with Bruce, he doesn’t call, and she’s obsessing about everything that happened to try and figure out what went wrong. So she decides he’s “playing the field” and starts jealously observing her roommate Lotus, who must be trying to steal her man, the minx! Speaking of minxes, she starts dating Lyle Slater, a millionaire’s slacker son who she meets after he’d broken his leg skiing. Meredith uses her high-class date to snub Lotus, but the outing isn’t that great, because she decides that Lyle is just seeing her to piss off another woman. “She was angry at the thought of being used to further a private quarrel,” she decides—again with exactly zero evidence, a habit she displays with alarming frequency. Soon Bruce calls, and pages of moping are swept under the rug. On their third date, she’s in love! But wait, the next day Meredith decides Bruce doesn’t love her and she’s made a fool of herself—there’s that jumping to conclusions again—and now she’s back to moping, but still not finding any sympathy for her mother. 

Then Meredith is on a chair lift with a ten-year-old girl and it stalls! “‘Kelly, sit up straight at all times!’ She had not meant fear to tinge her voice, but its nervous tremors had crept in,” because the only danger on a ski lift is when you’re not moving, and nurses are so prone to panic. More than six long pages later, the ski lift is moving and they get off it and ski down the mountain. Back at the apartment, only Lotus has the brains to see the self-aggrandizing Meredith, who “couldn’t resist making the story as dramatic as possible,” for what she is. “I’m sure nobody else in the valley has your outstanding courage. True grit, if I ever saw it,” she snarks, asking when’s big day? What day is that? “The day you go to the white House to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor,” she replies. I like Lotus!

It turns out that the little girl Meredith “rescued” on the ski lift is Lyle Slater’s niece, and his rich father wants to pump Meredith’s hand. Now Meredith, who had been disinclined to meet the Slaters, is determined to go only to irritate Lotus, without a thought for her own hypocrisy or whether she might have deserved the little poke from “Henna-head,” as Meredith maturely dubs Lotus.

Bruce, still valiantly dating this psychopath even after discovering that she’s also dating Lyle, quizzes her about Lyle and his family. She does little to put him at ease, and the date ended “without much rapport, but she felt a comforting warmth. If he was jealous, it showed he had feelings for her.” She should not be at all surprised, but is, when she learns that Bruce is dating Lotus! “What I’d like to do, Meredith thought grimly, is pull that dyed hair out by its roots,” because it’s all Lotus’s fault!

Now, intent on wreaking undeserved vengeance, Meredith decides that “hobnobbing with the Slaters seemed like a roundabout way of getting back at Lotus Johnson.” She meets with Mr. Slater at his house, where she has sherry and a clam-cheese puff (these rich folks and their gourmet canapes!). Meredith immediately gets on a high horse because Mr. Slater had figured out what day was her afternoon off, and “sat, quiet and sulky,” as Mr. Slater without irony tells her that she has aptitude and perspicacity, and asks her to use her influence on Lyle to keep him from running around with his wild friends and settle down to some purpose. She immediately decides that he’s trying to force her to marry Lyle and stomps out, indignant—but the next day she’s the cat who swallowed the canary, that “the older man had found her fit and worthy to be brought into his tightly knit family. Yes, I’m sure I could get Lyle, she thought without vanity.” I’m not sure what she calls it, but I probably wouldn’t use that word, either. Arrogance is more like it.

She nods briefly to sanity in passing when she realizes that “she had always despised people who used people, and here she was doing it, using Lyle to impress Lotus and to shake up Bruce,” but maybe it’s her lack of success with either plan that really has her rethinking her morals. Because the next day she seeks out ski instructor Günther to play more games on Lotus and Bruce. She scores a date, but on their way to a restaurant out of town, the Ferrari runs out of gas. “How lax of Günther, she fumed, not to check the gas tank before setting out on a long, deserted road.” Needless to say, once Günther gets back after a long, cold walk to find gas, he aborts the date and takes Kay home. Narrow escape!

Perhaps because she got nowhere with Günther, she’s longing once again for Bruce. Then, waiting for him outside his office for their next big date, she sees a woman storm angrily out his door and learns that the woman has just been fired. Bizarrely, though she knows nothing of the situation, Meredith becomes furious with Bruce and stomps off, deciding it’s over! He should be so lucky! When rich old Mr. Emerick is brought into the hospital with a heart attack and his wife is AWOL, she decides—did I mention zero evidence!—that she’s off with Bruce somewhere. Bruce shows up at the hospital, and she’s furious that he dare show his face after he was “out looking for excitement with someone else’s woman.” Honestly, Meredith is a psychotic who should not be allowed anywhere near dangerous drugs, let alone a nursing license.

Bruce explains that the victim of the fired woman’s crime was a poor single waitress with two children to feed, but regardless he’d had another chat with the fired woman who had admitted the theft and was “hostile and defiant,” so everything he’d believed about the situation is proved true. For one quick second Meredith realizes her hypocrisy and decides she will never be jealous again! Then, as she sees the heart attack victim’s wife’s devastated face, she wonders without batting an eyelash, “How could anyone make snap judgments about other people?” But life is going to bloom and prosper for sweet people like Meredith Hale! I threw up in my mouth as I closed the book.

Meredith is a horrible person: immature, selfish and inconsiderate, with absolutely zero self-awareness. Sure, she’s come to her senses at the end, but she’d had flashes of insight at other moments in the book and gone right back to her appalling ways within minutes, so I have no confidence that she will stay on the straight and sane this time. This book is written in a flat, dull prose, with bizarre details that go nowhere (someone steals Meredith’s cake and won’t confess to the crime!). I kept hoping the object of her psychotic affections would wise up, but they only had about five dates, so I guess there wasn't time. The only exciting thing about this book was my realization that the author, Mary Dunne Collins, had written one other fairly bad book, so with this she may be in contention for a Worst Author ribbon come time for the Annual VNRN Awards! Stay tuned!