All This Heavenly Glory (7 page)

About this comic book:

Charlotte Anne is of course pro-Betty, as it is already being established to her that the Veronicas of the world are an obstacle
to be overcome, which is arguably a sort of victimy stance for a nine-and-a-half-year-old to be taking and which sort of contradicts
the whole independence thing, because why would she even care about/need any Veronicas at all if she were so independent,
except for everyone needs a friend, even if they do sometimes try to steal your Archie. Charlotte Anne has formally proposed
to Archie Comics that they put out a Betty comic without Veronica, which doesn’t happen for several decades but when it finally
does happen she will say it was her idea and someone will say to her,
Let it go.

She buckles her seat belt, pulling it tightly across her lap as instructed, and crosses her legs at the ankle (“Like a lady,”
her mother has been known to say), trying to tuck her white anklets and loafers as far under her seat as they will go.

About these loafers:

An astute observer might realize they look not only oversized but also not especially feminine; in fact, they were purchased
in the men’s department at Harry’s Florsheim. Charlotte Anne’s mother, an opera singer of modest income, a single mom who
remembers the depression, is on a budget and reasons that men’s shoes are cheaper and that Charlotte Anne has the large feet
that run in their side of the family. She is not thinking about the possibility that maybe men’s shoes do not do anything
to minimize the large size, or that there might be any embarrassment suffered by fourth-grader Charlotte Anne on account of
her wearing men’s shoes (hence the tucking), there is only a characteristically strange logic, in this case about saving money,
that never includes, say, thrift-store girl’s shoes, sale shopping, or some similar cost cutting that would result in age/gender-appropriate
footwear.

The view from seat
II
A is a good one. The weather is clear and she can
see
the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial in Riverside Park, where she plays frequently with her friend Tracy Corman. Tracy Corman
has a pogo stick, which might bump her up into a firstbest-friend position were it not for her creepy brother. Charlotte Anne,
who knows nothing firsthand of sibling relationships, is pretty sure that at ages nine and eleven, playing hide-and-seek with
your clothes off is not a game of hide-and-seek she cares to participate in, plus also Tracy is on the long list of friends
who rampantly lop off doll hair and lose parts of games and so there are often few things to do at Tracy’s house besides pogo
(which turns out to be way less fun in practice than in theory, where C.A. can pogo more than two times before falling over),
or play games she has no interest in that don’t require game pieces, like naked hide-and-seek. Her experience with siblings
thus far has been generally unpleasant; big brothers who hog the TV, little sisters who have never been seen smiling. That
said, she thinks she might like to have a sister, not a twin because she thinks twins are creepy, but one who was otherwise
pretty much exactly like her, for company.

A stewardess brings Charlotte Anne a pair of wings and a deck of cards and explains that she will be met in Chicago by a TWA
representative who will escort her to her connecting Ozark Airlines flight to Cedar Rapids (Charlotte Anne thinks all this
personal attention is fabulous until she’s about twelve, when she is somehow able to persuade her family to let her find her
connecting flight herself, at which time she is already five foot six and can pass for sixteen). Charlotte Anne must have
seen an episode of
Hee Haw
or something because she has a lack of confidence about Ozark Airlines she can’t exactly place, but puts this aside and arrives
in Cedar Rapids slightly late and happy to find that she still recognizes her father. She’s seen him exactly one time since
she was six.

On the car ride to Iowa City, Charlotte Anne’s father talks at some length about Chris and Cal and their games, which he feels
C.A. will enjoy. She is not sure who Chris and Cal are but has a vague memory that they might be friends of her grandparents
that she hasn’t seen for some time and wonders why she’s going to be seeing them now. Her father also talks at length about
how he met her mother and describes her in a nice way, which is doubly curious as the ensuing physical description does not
fit her mother, furthermore it is implied that her mother will be at the house in Iowa City when they arrive, which seems
not just unlikely but downright weird.

It turns out that this woman, whose given name is the same as that of Charlotte Anne’s mother, is her father’s fiancee. (It
might be worth noting that her father is both a professor and absentminded, and has a lifelong habit of forgetting to mention
important things like fiancees and [thankfully distant, to date] relatives falling ill or dying. There will also be a time
when said absentmindedness results in forgetting to go for a checkup for seven years, which will cost him a prostate.)

About the name thing:

Charlotte Anne Byers is within a year of being old enough to realize that things like your dad marrying a second woman with
the same name or other people in your family having the same name are coincidental. She has one aunt on each side of the family,
both named Bonnie, each of whom has two children, a boy and a girl, thus leading Charlotte Anne to the logical conclusion
that all kids have two cousins on each side, a boy and a girl, and two aunts named Bonnie. It is not taken into account that
Charlotte Anne is herself someone’s cousin, but it might be noted that at this point she is not a girl who asks a lot of questions,
only one who has them. However weird, in this particular instance, she will come to conclude that if you are divorced and
remarry, you must find someone with the same name. This will be cleared up when her mother gets remarried about a year later
to a man with his own original name.

Her father’s new fiancee has three sons from a previous marriage, Chris, who is her age, Cal, a year older, and Mike, several
years older and who appears to be a hippie. (Charlotte Anne has heard about hippies from her mother and it isn’t good, but
the only identifying clues in this case are Mike’s tendency to use the phrase
far out
and his abundant Afro.) Charlotte Anne’s future stepmother shows her to her room, where she can unpack. It seems like a better
idea to do this immediately than to go downstairs and talk to the three future brothers she had no idea about.

Sewn into the center lining of her eggshell-white Samsonite suitcase is a dime.

About this dime:

This is not any kind of factory mishap or practical joke made by humorously-minded Samsonite workers. The dime has been placed
there by Charlotte Anne’s mother. Much is made of the dime in the weeks before C.A.’s departure. “It’s for a phone call,”
her mother had said, “in case of emergency.” Also sewn into the lining is Charlotte Anne’s home phone number (which privately
irritates her, as she’s known that and her address as well as those of several of her friends and even her old address in
Louisiana by heart since first grade). At this point it is nowhere near Charlotte Anne’s head that any number of emergencies
could arise when she might not be in close proximity to her Samsonite suitcase, for example, let’s say she gets mugged waiting
in baggage claim. Or gets separated from either one of her parents. Charlotte Anne’s mother is thinking of one emergency only.
She has reason to believe that Charlotte Anne’s father might try to keep her in Iowa, and it does not occur to her that this
dime and its location and function, made known to young C.A. Byers in no uncertain terms (“Your father is out to get me,”
her mother had said, “so if he kidnaps you, all you have to do is find a phone booth and call the police”), might be better
located in a lining closer to Charlotte Anne’s actual person, say inside her coat, or her dress or shoe even. In fact, C.A.
Byers has a ten-dollar bill in her purse as well as thirty-seven cents in loose change with which many calls could be placed
and which she is unlikely to lose as she is a particularly responsible nine-and-a-half-year-old, going so far as to point
this out to her mother while she was sewing the dime in, to which her mother had said, “This is a whole different thing,”
and then “Crap,” poking herself with the needle due to the inherent awkwardness of trying to sew something into a hard suitcase.
The casual tone in which this possible kidnapping/police-phoning had been conveyed is not what reassured Charlotte Anne of
her safety, but rather that unlike her mother, Charlotte Anne is not even remotely concerned about her father kidnapping her.
(She is, however, somewhat concerned about her mother. She seems a little stressed.) It might be said that outside of the
law offices of Stephenson, Lloyd, and Pierce, all communication between her mother and father from 1967—present has been funneled
through Charlotte Anne herself. Mostly, her father finds no real reason to communicate with her mother at all (resulting in
what will be a protracted resentment in the early part of C.A.’s adulthood; long-distance charges being somewhat prohibitive
at this time, the child Charlotte Anne gets it into her head that he’s trying to avoid talking to her mother, and although
they will have a large stash of letters and eventually e-mails over the years, Charlotte Anne would like to have heard her
dad’s actual voice a little more often and will continue to berate him somewhat into his seventies, years after long-distance
charges drop significantly), but things like travel plans, while fixed in some ways (according to the custody agreement, every
other July/August, every other Easter vacation, every other Christmas vacation), require, at the very least, a communication
insofar as flight times and exact dates are concerned which utilizing the United States Postal Service tends to slow down
some. That said, Charlotte Anne is never sure how a sentence that begins, “Tell your father…” is going to end. It might be
“that you are arriving on Ozark flight 257 on the twenty-eighth,” and it might be “that I’m tired of these head games:’ Charlotte
Anne has numerous questions about how it might be that her mother and father are playing any kind of games with this decided
lack of communication.

Before unpacking anything else, Charlotte Anne takes off the white men’s shoes (which will remain in the back of the closet
until her return flight home) and removes from her suitcase a pair of red Keds, which she is in the middle of tying when Chris
knocks on her open door bearing stickers. “I thought you might want some of these for your door. I had some doubles:’

Charlotte Anne takes the Wacky Pack stickers, her favorite, and shuffles through the pile. “I have a bunch of these,” she
says, handing back an All-Brain Cereal, which she thinks is especially gross anyway.

Chris, apparently unoffended by the lack of a thank-you, which is less about poor manners than poor social skills, takes back
the All-Brain, adding, “That one is super gross anyhow, right?” (which as far as C.A. is concerned proves his greatness as
a potential brother with whom she has this critical thing in common) and offers to give her any other doubles in the future.

“Your mom lets you put stickers on your door?” she asks her new brother.

He nods and shows her his door, right next to hers. It is covered with stickers. “I have almost all the Wacky Pack first series
but I still need a Botch Tape,” he says.

“Nobody has Botch Tape,” she says.

“I know, right?” The new about-to-be siblings silently contemplate this travesty for a moment by looking down at their shoes.
“Look what else.” He shows her the inside of the closet he shares with Cal. There’s a smaller door inside the closet that
goes to the attic. “It’s a hideout and junk.” Charlotte Anne nods. Secretly she thinks this is the coolest thing ever. The
closest thing she has to a hideout is the floor of her closet and a cramped space behind the living-room curtains.

Chris and Charlotte Anne become fast friends, which to nineand-a-half-year-olds in the early seventies means primarily a shared
love of
Brady Bunch
reruns, Wacky Packs, obviously, Mad Libs (although both Chris and Cal are inclined, as boys, to make excessive use of words
like
toilet
and
poop,
which aren’t all that funny to Charlotte Anne), and anything grape-flavored, although she finds their use of the term
pop
to describe what C.A. refers to as
soda
to be kind of old-fashioned. Additionally, Chris and Cal do have many games and remarkably most of these games have all the
needed pieces, due to their mother’s diligence about putting things away. But mostly, Chris and Charlotte Anne ride bikes
and watch TV and eventually create a somewhat complex society based on spying on her dad. It’s meant to be funny, the joke
of which is that the kids are spying on/observing the dad’s movements and behaviors but which movements and behaviors tend
to be innocuous, in fact often there is little or no movement at all, thereby producing what the kids find to be wild humor
(a sample from the S.D.W.S. ,-Secret Dad Watchers Society] minutes: io:43 a.m. Dad moves paperweight to left of original position.
Think: What does this mean?). This society will end up having considerable paperwork and even a treasurer, which somehow Cal
agrees to do and ends up financing the entire operation with just under ten of his own dollars, which, when the operation
finally disbands (never uncovering anything critical about C.A.’s father), the kids will split equally even though it was
Cal’s money, with no complaint from Cal. Charlotte Anne, having already seen kids in New York subjected to:

a) penis-exposing dads

b) murderous nannies

c) pot-smoking moms

and

d) naked brothers

can only conclude that life in Iowa is easy and happy, always, that none of the above would ever happen in such a place, and
said conclusions are entered in her notebook for future reference.