I Am Charlotte Simmons (11 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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Daddy said to Mr. Amory, “There's a Sizzlin' Skillet just before you git to the campus? Bet it's not more'n half a mile from here. I ate at a Sizzlin' Skillet near Fayetteville once”—
wunst
—“and it was real nice; real good and real quick.”
More silence. All three Amorys looked at each other in a perplexed fashion, and then Mr. Amory turned on the most patient smile yet and said, “All right … let's by all means go to the Sizzlin' Skillet.”
Charlotte stared at Mr. and Mrs. Amory. They both had deep suntans and absolutely smooth, buttery skin. Compared to Momma and Daddy, they were so soft—and sleek as beavers.
Daddy excused himself and left the room. A few minutes later he returned with a bemused look on his face. “Strangest darn thing,” he said to the room. “I was looking for the men's bathroom? And some folks down 'eh, they told me iddn' any men's bathroom. Told me this is a coed dorm, and there's one bathroom, and it's a coed bathroom. I looked in 'eh, and I seen boys
and
girls.”
Momma compressed her lips severely.
“Oh, I wouldn't worry about that,” said Mrs. Amory. “Apparently they get used to it very quickly. Isn't that what Erica said, Beverly? Beverly has a good friend from school, Erica, who was a freshman here last year.”
“Certainly didn't bother Erica,” said Beverly in an airy, nothing-to-it manner.
“I gather the boys are very considerate,” said Mrs. Amory. Charlotte could tell she was making an effort to calm the country folks' fears.
Momma and Daddy looked at each other. Momma was doing her best to hold herself back.
The six of them went down to the parking lot, and Daddy pointed out their pickup truck with the camper top and said, “Whyn't we all go in our pickup? Me'n' the girls can sit in the back.” He looked optimistically at Beverly. “We got some sleeping bags back 'eh we can sit on.”
“That's nice of you, Billy,” said Mr. Amory with his patient smile, “but we might as well take ours. We've got six seats.” He pointed at a huge white Lincoln Navigator SUV.
“Well, as I live and breathe!” said Momma in spite of herself. “Whirred you folks git that? I don't mean to pry.”
“We rented it,” said Mr. Amory. Anticipating the next question, he said, “You call ahead, and they'll bring it right out to the pla—to the airport for you.”
So they drove to the Sizzlin' Skillet in the Lincoln Navigator. It was all leather inside, with windows as dark as sunglasses and strips of exotic wood, polyurethaned, here and there. Charlotte was glad they hadn't seen what was under the old pickup's camper top, or inside the cab, for that matter.
The Sizzlin' Skillet had quite a sign on its roof: an enormous black skillet, eight or nine feet in diameter, with THE SIZZLIN' SKILLET written in huge curvy letters on the pan. Around the skillet were rings of red and yellow lights.
From the moment one walked in, an astounding array of hot, slick colors screamed for attention from every direction. Everything was …
big
… including, straight ahead, up on the wall, some alarmingly detailed color photographs of the house specials: huge plates with slabs of red meat and gigantic patties of ground meat fairly glistening with … ooze … great molten slices of cheese, veritable lava flows of gravy, every manner of hash brown and french-fried potato, fried onion, and fried chicken, including a dish called Sam's Sweet Chickassee, which seemed to consist of an immense patty of skillet-fried ground chicken beneath a thick mantle of bubbling cream sauce, all of it blown up so large in the photographs that slices of tomato—the only vegetable depicted, other than lettuce and the fried potatoes and onions—created an impression of overwhelming weight.
There seemed to be a lot of people peering into the dining area but not going in, and Mr. Amory said rather hopefully, “Looks pretty crowded, doesn't it. I guess we ought to try someplace else.”
Charlotte swung her head about to see what Beverly thought—and
there she was, her back turned, holding on to her mother's arm and leaning her skin and bones against her shoulder, pointing at the photographs of the deluges of gravy and cream, and, no doubt thinking the Simmonses were looking the other way, made an
eeeeyuk
face, as if she wanted to throw up.
Suddenly talkative, or talkative for him, Daddy assured Mr. Amory that they'd get a table sooner than it looked like. See there?—you go up to that podium there and let them know you're here, and you'll be surprised how fast things move. So Mr. Amory set his jaw and led their procession up to the podium, which turned out to be a gigantic wooden thing, like a podium on a stage but much wider and made of massive slabs of wood. Everything at the Sizzlin' Skillet was …
big
. There was a short line just to get to the podium, but it did move along.
Behind the podium stood a bouncy-looking young woman dressed in a red-and-yellow—evidently the Sizzlin' Skillet colors—shirt-and-pants outfit. The shirt was adorned with some kind of brooch—in fact, a three-inch-long miniature of the Sizzlin' Skillet sign outside.
She gave Mr. Amory a perky smile. “How many?”
“Six. The name is Amory. A, m, o, r, y.”
She wrote nothing down. Instead she handed him something the size and shape of a television remote. It had a lot of little lenses in a circle on one end and a number—226—on the other. “We'll signal you when your table's ready. Have a sizzlin' good meal!”
Mr. Amory looked at the object as if it had just crawled up his leg. On its shaft was an advertisement: “Try our Sizzlin' Swiss Steak. You'll yodel!”
“It'll go off when our table's ready,” said Daddy, pointing to the device. “That way we don't have to git in a line. We kin go over't the gift shop or something.”
Daddy led them to the gift shop, where there seemed to be a lot of souvenirs, dolls, and candy bars, all of them abnormally big, even the candy bars. Mr. Amory held the … device up in front of his wife without comment. “Hmmm,” she said, cocking her head and smiling in a way that made Charlotte uneasy.
The Amorys kept looking at the people milling about. Many, like Mr. Amory, were holding the device. Immediately in front of Daddy and Mr. and Mrs. Amory was an obese man, probably forty-five or so, wearing a cutoff football jersey with the number 87 on the back. Between the bottom of the jersey and the top of his basketball shorts a roll of bare flesh protruded. Next
to him was a young woman in black pants who was so wide her elbows were cushioned on the tube of fat around her waist, and her forearms stuck out to the side like little wings.
“Do you and your parents go to Sizzlin' Skillets often?” Beverly said to Charlotte.
Charlotte caught a whiff of condescension. “We don't have anything like this in Sparta,” she said.
Near the see-through, where you could look in and see the cooks working in the kitchen, a single sharp piping whistle sounded, and red and yellow lights began whirling around. It was the thing in the hand of a big woman wearing what looked like a mechanic's jumpsuit. She beckoned impatiently to two little girls and headed for the dining area.
“See?” said Daddy. “Now she's gonna go over't the podium and show the woman the lights going around and the number, and somebody'll show 'em straight to their table.” Over
there …
another piping whistle. “What'd I tell you?” said Daddy. “It don't take long. And I pledge you my word, you won't be leaving hungry.” He was smiling at all three Amorys, going from one face to the other.
Mrs. Amory smiled briefly, but her eyes had gone dead.
Even though he was prepared for it, when the high-pitched whistle burst out of
the thing
and the red and yellow lights started whirling, Mr. Amory jumped. Daddy couldn't help laughing. Mr. Amory gave him a 33° Fahrenheit smile and a single chuckle: “Huh.” He carried the thing to the podium with his thumb and forefinger, the way you might transport a dead bird by the tip of one wing.
Their table had a slick bright yellow vinyl-laminate top. The room was packed. The surf of what seemed like a thousand enthusiastic conversations rolled over them. Cackles, chirps, and belly laughs erupted above the waves. The waitress, wearing one of the little skillet pins, arrived not with an order pad but with a black plastic instrument that looked like a pocket calculator with an aerial. The menus, coated in clear plastic, must have been fifteen inches tall and were full of color photographs similar to the outsize ones on the wall. After considerable study, Mrs. Amory ordered a fried-chicken dish and asked the waitress to please leave off the skillet-fried hash browns and the deep-fried onion rings. The waitress said she was sorry but she couldn't, because—she held up the black instrument—all she could do was enter the number of the dish, which was instantly transmitted to the kitchen. Mr. and
Mrs. Amory looked at each other and accepted this setback patiently, and everybody ordered, and the waitress pushed a lot of buttons.
The dishes arrived with astonishing speed—prompting Daddy to give Mr. Amory a cheery, comradely smile, as if to say us fellas are in this thing together, aren't we.
The dishes were …
big
.
“Jes what I told you, iddn' it, Jeff!” Daddy was now
beaming
at “Jeff,” as if good times among comrades didn't come much better than this.
Each plate was covered,
heaped
, with skillet-fried food. Daddy launched into his cream-lava-ladled Sam's Sweet Chickassee with gusto. Mrs. Amory inspected her fried chicken as if it were a sleeping animal. No more smiles, no conversation.
So Momma, apparently recovered from the
Oh,
shit
incident, said to Mr. Amory, by way of filling the conversational vacuum, “Now, Jeff, you have to tell us what Sherborn's like. I been real curious about that.”
A smile of tried patience: “It's a … just a little village, Mrs. Simmons. The population is … oh … perhaps a thousand? … perhaps a little more?”
“Go 'head and call me Lizbeth, Jeff. That's whirr you work?”
A frown of tried patience: “No, I work in Boston.”
“Whirr at?”
Patience at the breaking point: “An insurance company. Cotton Mather.”
“Cotton Mather! Oh,
I've
heard a them!”
They-em.
“Tell us what you do at Cotton Mather, Jeff. I'd be real interested.”
Mr. Amory hesitated. “My title is chief executive officer.” As if to cut off all queries regarding this revelation, he quickly turned to Daddy. “And Billy, tell us what
you
do.”
“Me? Well, mainly I take care”—
keer
—“of a house some summer people got over't Roaring Gap? Used to be I operated a last-cutting machine over't the Thorn McAn factory in Sparta, but Thom McAn, they relocated to Mexico. Maybe you know about these things, Jeff. I keep hearing on TV that this ‘globalization' is good for Americans. I don't know why they think they
know
that, because nobody ever tried it before, but that's what they keep telling us. All I know is, it ain't particularly good for you if you live in Alleghany County, North Carolina. We lost three factories to Mexico. Martin Marietta came in and built a plant in 2002. They only employ forty people, but thank God for'm anyway. That's Mexico, three, Alleghany County, one.”
Momma said,
“Billy.”
Daddy smiled sheepishly. “You're right, Lizbeth, you're right as rainwater. Don't let me git started on 'at stuff.” He looked at Mrs. Amory. “You know, Valerie, one thing my daddy told me. He told me, ‘Sonny'—he never called me Billy, he called me Sonny—‘Sonny, never talk about politics or religion at the dinner table. You either gon' rile 'em up or else clean bore'm to death.'”
Mrs. Amory said, “Sounds like a wise man, your father.”
Daddy said, “Oh, 'deed he was, when he had a notion.”
Part of Charlotte was proud of Daddy for not caring to put the slightest gloss on the way he made a living. He was perfectly comfortable with who he was. Part of her cringed. She had a general idea what a chief executive officer was, and Cotton Mather was so big,
everybody
had heard of it.
Mr. Amory had no response to Daddy's remarks except to nod four or five times in a ruminating mode.
To rescue a drowning moment, Mrs. Amory said, “Charlotte, I feel like we know hardly anything about
you
. How'd you happen to come to—to choose Dupont? Where'd you go to secondary school?”
“Secondary school?”
“High school.”
“In Sparta. Alleghany High School it's called. I had an English teacher who told me to apply to Dupont.”
“And they gave her a full scholarship,” said Momma. “We're real proud of her.” Charlotte could feel her cheeks turning red, and not because of modesty. Momma said, “Whirred you go to high school, Beverly? How many high schools they got in Sherborn?”

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