I Am Charlotte Simmons (12 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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Beverly glanced at her mother. Then she said to Momma, “Actually, I went to school in another town, called Groton.”
“How far away was 'at?”
“About sixty miles. I was a boarder.”
Charlotte didn't know exactly what Beverly was saying to Momma, but somehow the way she had put it to her was patronizing.
“Jeff,” said Daddy, chowing down the last forkful of his gigantic plate of Sam's Sweet Chickassee, french fries, and tomato slabs, “this was a great idea of yours! You need sump'm that'll stick to your ribs if you're gon' do what we're fixing to do, drive all the way back to Sparta, North Carolina, tonight. One thang they know at these Sizzlin' Skillets, they know how to give folks
enough to eat
.”
From Mrs. Amory's plate only one thing had disappeared—a morsel of chicken breast, less than an inch square, from where she had peeled back the fried skin. The vast plate remained a mountain of food. Warily, gingerly, Beverly put a piece of hamburger about the size of a nickel into her mouth and chewed it slowly for a very long time. Without a word, she got up and left the room. In a few minutes, she came back, her face absolutely ashen. Her mother gave her a look of concern—or censure.
Charlotte barely noticed. A single phrase,
drive all the way back to Sparta, North Carolina, tonight
had hit her with a force she would never have dreamed possible—not her, not Sparta's prodigy whose future would be filled with great things on the other side of the mountains.
A little later on, once the Amorys and Simmonses had gone their separate ways, Charlotte stood in the parking lot of the Little Yard next to the pickup truck as Momma and Daddy said their good-byes.
Momma was smiling and saying, “Now, you remember what I said, honey, don't you forgit to write. Everbuddy's gonna want to know 'bout—”
Without a word Charlotte threw her arms around Momma and nestled her head next to Momma's, and her tears began rolling down Momma's cheek.
Momma said, “There, there, there, my good, good girl.” Charlotte clung to Momma for dear life. Momma said, “Don't you worry, little darling, I'll be thinking of you every minute of the day. I'm real proud of you, and you're gonna do real well here. But you know what I'm the proudest of? I'm the proudest of who you are, no matter whirr you're at. I ‘spec' there's ways Dupont iddn' gon' be good enough for
you
.”
Charlotte lifted her head and looked at Momma.
“There's gon' be folks here wanting you to do thangs you don't hold with,” said Momma. “So you jes' remember you come from mountain folks, on your daddy's side and my side, the Simmonses and the Pettigrews, and mountain folks got their faults, but letting theirselves git pushed into doing thangs iddn' one
uv'
m. We know how to be real stubborn. Can't nobody make us do a thang once we git hard set against it. And if anybody don't like that, you don't have to explain a thang to'm. All you got to say is, ‘I'm Charlotte Simmons, and I don't hold with thangs like 'at.' And they'll respect you for that.”
They-at
. “I love you, little darling, and your daddy loves you, and no matter whirr you're at in the whole wide world, you'll always be our good, good girl.”
Charlotte laid her head back on Momma's shoulder and sobbed softly.
She could see Daddy standing right there, and she took her tears to him and threw her arms around his neck, which clearly startled him. Daddy didn't hold with public displays of affection. Between sobs she whispered into his ear, “I love you, Daddy. You don't know how
much
I love you!”
“We love you, too,” said Daddy.
He also didn't know how much it would have meant to her if he could have only brought himself to say
I
.
Charlotte kept waving, and Momma stuck her head out the window and looked back and kept waving, until the poor, sad, brave pickup truck with the fiberglass camper top disappeared beyond the shade trees. Finally Charlotte turned around and headed back toward the stone fortress alone.
As she walked through the great arched entrance, a boy and a girl, presumably freshmen, too, passed her, chatting away. The arch was so deep, their words echoed off the stone. Did they already know each other, or had they become friends this very day? …
I'm Charlotte Simmons
…
You are unique. You … are Charlotte Simmons …
Momma's and Miss Pennington's words gave her a spurt of confidence. She had faced envy and resentment and social isolation at Alleghany High, hadn't she … and been imperiously uncool … and gone her own way … and never let any of it hold her back in her destined ascension to one of the finest universities in the world. And nothing was going to hold her back now …
nothing.
If she had to do everything by herself, then she would do everything by herself.
But God … she felt so alone.
 
 
Beverly was already there when Charlotte reached room 516. They decided on who was going to have which side of the room—the two sides were identical, identically bare and spare—and they set about making up their beds and unpacking. What a lot of …
things …
Beverly had! She left her computer, fax machine, television, refrigerator, microwave, and the rest of her electrical devices in their cartons, but she unpacked more pairs of shoes than Charlotte could even imagine one girl owning—at least a dozen—a dozen or more sweaters, most of them cashmere, skirts, skirts, skirts, shirts, shirts, shirts, camisoles, camisoles, camisoles, jeans, jeans, jeans … Charlotte possessed not even the smallest of Beverly's various types of machines. For a computer, a necessity at Dupont, Charlotte was going to have to depend entirely on the so-called computer clusters in Dupont's main library. Rather than a dozen or more pairs of shoes, she had three: a pair of loafers, some
sturdy leather sandals—“Jesus sandals,” Regina Cox used to call them—and the pair of Keds she had on.
Beverly chatted with Charlotte in a dutiful fashion. Nothing she had to say bore even a hint of the excitement of a girl heading out with another girl, her new roommate, from another part of the country, on a four-year adventure at a great university. She spoke to Charlotte from an amicable distance. She spoke with the inflections of someone who was
showing an interest.
When Charlotte mentioned how fascinating the French courses listed in the Dupont catalog sounded, Beverly's comment was that the French are
so
resentful of Americans these days you can like
feel
it in the air when you're around them. They were majorly boring, the French.
Beverly had only halfway squeezed her clothes into the closet and the bureau when it was time to go downstairs for the house meeting. The two hundred or so boys and girls in Edgerton House convened in what was known in Dupont (and British) parlance as the Common Room. It was a little bit run-down, but its proportions and decor bespoke grand origins. The ceiling must have been fifteen or sixteen feet high, with all sorts of dark wooden arches Charlotte didn't know the name for converging in the center. Huge luggage-brown leather sofas and easy chairs, an incredible number of them, had been arranged in a vast semicircle upon the room's acres of Oriental rugs. More leather easy chairs remained in ornate reading bays with parchment-shaded wrought-iron floor lamps. The freshmen of Edgerton House, most of them in shorts, either crammed themselves into the leather seats or stood behind this great upholstered crescent in several rows. Others sat behind them on the edges of long oaken monk's tables that had been brought in for the meeting. As soon as she and Charlotte entered the room, Beverly drifted away to the side, where she stood with two girls she obviously already knew. Well, so what … Charlotte already felt entirely separate from her roommate, and trotting along after her at this meeting wouldn't change that. Actually, standing in the center amid so many other girls and boys made her feel almost … whole again. They certainly did not look intimidating. In fact, with all their shorts, flip-flops, and T-shirts, they looked like large children. Surely this room must be filled with people just like herself, bright young people anxious because they knew so little of what was to come and exhilarated by the very fact that they had come this far. They were Dupont men and women—starting with this moment.
Facing the assembly was a young woman in jeans and a man's-style button-down shirt. Charlotte was fascinated by her. She stood there in front
of two hundred strangers with such an easy confidence. She was beautiful but casual, with an athletic figure—and such amazing blond hair! It was very curly but very long, wild, yet combed just so. She seemed the very essence of collegiate glamour. She identified herself as a senior and the R.A., the resident assistant, of Edgerton House. She was there to help them with any problems that came up. They should feel free to ring her up, e-mail her, or knock on her door at any time. Her name was Ashley Downes.
“The university no longer plays the role of parent,” she was saying, “and certainly I don't. You're on your own. But there
are
some rules—not a lot, but some, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I wasn't frank about that. First of all, alcohol is prohibited in Edgerton and every other house on Little Yard. That doesn't just mean no drinking in public, but no alcohol in the building, period. It may not surprise you to learn that there is alcohol on the Dupont campus.” She smiled, and many of the freshmen laughed knowingly. “But it's not gonna be here. Okay?” She smiled again. “In case you're worried, you're gonna discover this won't put an end to your social life.”
Charlotte came close to letting her breath out audibly. What a relief! In Sparta she had been able to avoid the sodden, drunken milieu of the Channing Reeveses and the Regina Coxes simply by going home in the evenings and studying and ignoring the upside-down contempt she felt from them and their crowd. But here? It was well known that there was a lot of drinking in colleges, probably even at Dupont. At least she wouldn't have to deal with it in this building where she lived, thank God. If the R.A. could just reassure her about one other thing—
But in no time, it seemed, the meeting was over, and the freshmen departed the Common Room far more animated and vocal than when they arrived. They were already getting to know one another. Charlotte started to hang back, in hopes of having a word with Ashley Downes privately. But eight or ten freshmen were clustered about her, and Charlotte didn't want to ask her question in front of other people. She dawdled … and dawdled … for five minutes, ten minutes, before she finally gave up.
When she returned to the room, Beverly was there, standing in front of her bureau looking into a prop-up vanity mirror with tiny bulbs ablaze along the edges. She turned around. She was wearing black pants and a lavender silk shirt, sleeveless and open three or four buttonholes' worth in front. It showed off her suntan—but also her arms, which looked almost emaciated. She made Charlotte think of an all-dressed-up stork. Her makeup did nothing
for her nose and chin. They seemed even bigger somehow. She had put a peach-colored polish on her nails; it looked great on the tips of her perfectly tanned fingers.
“I'm meeting some friends at a restaurant,” she explained, “and I'm late. I'll put away all that stuff when I come back.” She gestured toward a mountain of bags and boxes piled this way and that.
Charlotte was astonished. The very first day wasn't even over, and Beverly was
going out to a restaurant.
Charlotte couldn't imagine such a thing. For a start, she didn't know a soul. And what if she did? She had a grand total of five hundred dollars to cover all outside expenses to the end of the first semester, four and a half months from now. She was going to have to eat every meal, seven days a week, in the university dining hall. That was provided for by her scholarship. Unless somebody took her to one, the Sizzlin' Skillet was the last restaurant she was going to eat in for a long time.
Beverly left. Charlotte sat on the edge of her bed, hunched over, hands clasped, thinking and thinking, glancing at Beverly's edifice of cartons, looking out the window at the dusk. She could hear people talking and occasionally laughing in the hall outside. Finally she worked up her nerve. Ashley, the R.A., had said they could knock on her door anytime. This would be pushing it perhaps, approaching her barely an hour after the meeting, but … She stood up. Now was the time to do it, if she was going to do it at all.
The R.A.'s room was on the second floor. As Charlotte walked down the hall, she was startled to see a boy in cargo shorts, no shirt, emerge from a doorway and come dashing toward her. He was holding a small spiral notebook in one hand and glancing back over his shoulder and laughing in breathless bursts. As he hurtled past Charlotte, he said, “Sorry!”—scarcely even looking at her. Now running toward Charlotte was a girl in a T-shirt and shorts, yelling, “Gimme that back, you little shit!” She wasn't laughing. Charlotte noticed that she was barefoot. She didn't say a thing as she ran by.
Charlotte hesitated in front of the R.A.'s door. Then she knocked. After a few seconds the door opened, and there was Ashley Downes, with her amazing mane of curly blond hair. She had changed into pants and a rather low-cut tank top. “Hi,” she said in a puzzled fashion.

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