I Am Charlotte Simmons (3 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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“We have learned that achievement cannot be measured in the cold calculations of income and purchasing power …”
… Regina … she's pathetic, and yet she's part of the “cool” crowd, the “fast” crowd, which shuts Charlotte Simmons out because she's such a grind, such a suck-up to the faculty, because she not only gets perfect grades but
cares
about it, because she won't drink or smoke pot or go along for drag races at night on Route 21, because she doesn't say
fucking
this and
fucking
that, because she won't
give it up
… above all, because she won't cross that sheerly dividing line and
give it up
…
“We have learned that cooperation, pulling together as one, achieves so much more than going it alone, and …”
But why should that
wound
her? There's no
reason
. It just
does
! … If all those adults who were now looking up at her with such admiration only knew what her classmates thought of her—her fellow seniors, for whom she presumed to speak—if they only knew how much the sight of all those inert, uncaring faces in the green rectangle demoralized her … Why should she be an outcast for not doing stupid, aimless, self-destructive things?
“ … than twenty acting strictly in their own self-interest …”
… and now Channing is
yawning
—yawning right in her face! A wave of anger. Let them think whatever they want! The simple truth is that Charlotte Simmons exists on a plane far above them. She is not like them in any way other than that she, too, happened to grow up in Sparta. She will never
see
them again … At Dupont she will find people like herself, people who actually have a life of the mind, people whose concept of the future is actually something beyond Saturday night …
“ … for as the great naturalist John Muir wrote in
John of the Mountains
, ‘The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains—mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.' Thank you.”
It was over. Great applause … and still greater applause. Charlotte remained at the podium for a moment. Her gaze swept over the audience and came to rest on her classmates. She pursed her lips and stared at them. And if any of them was bright enough to read her face—Channing, Regina,
Brian … Brian, from whom she had hoped for so much!—he would know that her expression said, “Only one of us is coming down from the mountain destined to do great things. The rest of you can, and will, stay up here and
get trashed
and watch the Christmas trees grow.”
She gathered up her text, which she hadn't looked at once, and left the stage, and for the first time she let herself bathe in the boundless admiration, the endless applause, of the adults.
 
 
The Simmonses had never before had a party out at their place on County Road 1709, and even now Charlotte's mother wasn't about to call this a party. Being a staunch member of an up-country denomination, the Church of Christ's Evangel, she regarded parties as slothful events contrived by self-indulgent people with more money than character. So today they were just “having some folks over” after commencement, even though the preparations had been under way for three weeks.
It was a beautiful day, and thank God for that, Charlotte said to herself, thinking mainly about the picnic table, which was over next to the satellite dish. The folks were all out back here in the yard in the sunshine, although it wasn't exactly a yard, more like a little clearing of stomped dirt with patches of wire grass that blended into the underbrush on the edge of the woods. The curiously sweet smell of hot dogs cooking was in the air, as her father manned a poor old spindly portable grill. The folks could help themselves to hot dogs from the grill and potato salad, deviled eggs, ham biscuits, rhubarb pie, fruit punch, and lemonade from off the picnic table. Ordinarily the picnic table was inside the house. If it had rained and all these people—Miss Pennington, Sheriff Pike, Mr. Dean the postmaster, Miss Moody, Mrs. Bryant, Mrs. Cousins who had painted the Grandma Moses—style mural in Mrs. Bryant's shop—if they had had to cram themselves inside the house with all her kinfolk and her father's and mother's friends and had discovered that the only table the Simmons family had in their house to eat on was a picnic table, and not only that, the kind that has a bench—a plain plank, built in on either side in place of chairs—Charlotte would have died. It was bad enough that Daddy was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Everybody could get a good look at the tattoo of a mermaid that covered the meaty part of his right forearm, product of a night on the town when he was in the army. Why a mermaid? He couldn't recall. It wasn't even drawn well.
The house was a tiny one-story wooden box with a door and two windows facing the road. The only halfway ornamental touch was the immovable awnings over the windows, made of wooden slats nailed in place. The door opened directly into the front room, which, although only twelve by fifteen feet, had to serve as living room, workroom, TV room, playroom, and dining room. That was where the picnic table stood ordinarily. The ceilings were right down on top of your head, and the whole place was soaked with a countrified odor that came from using coal stoves and kerosene space heaters. Until Charlotte was six, they had lived belowground in what was now the foundation. Charlotte had thought nothing of it at the time, since they were far from being the only ones. A lot of families started out that way if they wanted their own place. Folks would buy themselves a little scrap of earth, maybe no more than one-fifth of an acre, dig a foundation, put a tar-paper roof over it, stick the pipe from the potbellied stove—used for heating as well as cooking—up through the tar-paper roof, and live down in the pit until they could scrape together enough money to build aboveground. When they finally did, the result was always pretty much what you saw right here: the little box of a house, the rusting septic tank off to the side, and the stomped dirt and wire grass out back.
Laurie McDowell had just left the picnic table carrying a paper plate of food and a white plastic fork and seemed to be going over to talk to Mrs. Bryant. Laurie was a tall, slim girl with quite a head of curly blond hair and a face that absolutely glowed with goodwill—and goodness—even though her nose was curiously wide and blunt atop the graceful and lissome rest of her. Her father was an engineer with the state, and her house was a palace compared to Charlotte's. But Charlotte didn't worry about Laurie. She had been here many times and knew how things were. Nobody else from the class had been invited. There were only kinfolk and genuine friends here, and they were having themselves a real picnic, or seemed to be, and making a fuss over the star of the moment, Miss Charlotte Simmons, who stood in their midst in the sleeveless print dress she had worn under the commencement gown.
“Well, I'll be switched, little lady!” exclaimed her father's former foreman at the Thorn McAn shoe factory in Sparta—since removed to Mexico—or China—a big, paunchy man named Otha Hutt. “Everybody told me”—
everbuddy tole me—
“you was smart, but I never knowed you could get up and give a
speech
like that!”
Like'at.
Sheriff Pike, who was even bigger, chimed in. “The way you did up there”—
up'ere
—“I'm claiming you as a kissin' cousin, gal, and best not be nobody trying to tell me any different, neither!”
“I can remember you when you was no more'n thhhhhis high,” spluttered one of her real cousins, Doogie Wade, “and shoot, you could talk circles around everybody way back thhhhhen!” Cousin Doogie was a tall, rawboned rail of a man, about thirty, who had lost two front teeth one Saturday night, although he couldn't remember exactly where or how, and spluttered whenever he had to use words with
th
in them.
Her aunt Betty said she didn't want Charlotte to go and forget everybody once she got to Dupont, and Charlotte said, “Oh, you needn't worry about that, Aunt Betty! Right here's
home
!”
Mrs. Childers, who did dress alterations, called her “honey” and told her how pretty she looked and bet she wouldn't have any trouble finding beaux at Dupont, no matter how grand a place it was.
“Oh, I don't know about that!” said Charlotte, smiling and blushing appropriately but also genuinely, since it made Channing and Brian flash into her mind. Thank God nobody else from the class was here, just Laurie.
For Charlotte's benefit, Joe Mebane, who had a little diner out on Route 21 that offered liver-and-kidney hash for breakfast and had a lineup of chewing tobaccos and snuffs in the front window, yelled over to her father, who was busy at the grill, “Hey, Billy! Where'd all this girl's
brains
come from? Must be Lizbeth's side a the family!”
Her father looked at Joe, forced a smile, then returned to his hot dogs. Daddy was only forty-two, handsome in the ruddy, rugged fashion of a man who worked outside with his hands. After the Thom McAn shoe factory closed and then Lowe's laid off some of its loading-dock crew over at North Wilkesboro, the only job Daddy had was fill-in caretaker of a place on the other side of the ridge in Roaring Gap for some summer people from Hobe Sound, Florida. Momma's pay working half days at the sheriffs office was what they actually lived on. Daddy was depressed, but even when he was happy, he was at a loss when it came to conversational banter. No doubt he was tending the grill with such diligence in order to minimize talking to all these people. It wasn't that he was bashful or inarticulate—not in the ordinary sense. Charlotte was just old enough—just detached enough for the first time—to realize that Daddy was a product of Carolina mountain country, with the strengths and shortcomings of his forebears. He had been raised never to show emotion and, as a result, was far less likely than ordinary men
to give way to emotion in a crisis. But also, as a result, he was instinctively reluctant to put a feeling into words, and the stronger the feeling, the more he fought spelling it out. When Charlotte was a little girl, he was able to express his love for her by holding her in his arms and being tender and cooing to her with baby talk. But by now he couldn't bring himself to utter the words necessary to tell a big girl that he loved her. The long stares he sometimes gave her—she couldn't tell whether it was love or wonder at what an inexplicable prodigy his daughter had become.
Mr. Dean, the postmaster, was saying, “I sure do hope you like basketball, Charlotte! What they tell me is, at Dupont everybody's just plain-long
wild
about basketball!”
Charlotte only halfway heard what he was saying. Her gaze had strayed over to her little brothers—Buddy, who was ten, and Sam, who was eight—as they chased each other, dodging and weaving between the adults, laughing and carrying on, excited by this extraordinary thing, a party, that was taking place at their house. Buddy ran between Miss Pennington and Momma, who tried, but not very hard, to get him to slow down. What a contrast they made, Miss Pennington and Momma, Miss Pennington with her thinning gray hair and her fleshy bulk—Charlotte would never entertain a word like obese where Miss Pennington was concerned—and Momma with her lovely lean figure, so youthful looking, and her thick dark brown hair done up in a complicated plaited bun. When Charlotte was a little girl, she used to love to watch her put it up that way.
At this moment the two women were deep in conversation, and Charlotte experienced a surge of anxiety, two kinds of it. What did Miss Pennington make of all this? Over the past four years Charlotte had spent many hours talking to her at school and at Miss Pennington's house in Sparta, but never out here. What did she think of Cousin Doogie and Otha Hutt with his
I'll be switched
and, for that matter, Momma and her
Cain't git'm do a thang
and her
Arland
for Ireland and her cement for cement and her
D
etroit for Detroit? Miss Pennington probably didn't make all that much more money than Momma and Daddy. Miss Pennington's house, which her parents had left to her, wasn't much bigger than theirs, either. But Miss Pennington had taste—a relatively new concept to Charlotte—and cultivation. Her house was
decorated
, and everything was kept just so. Her property out back was even smaller than theirs, but she had a real
yard
, planted all over with real lawn grass and bordered with boxwood and flower beds, all of which Miss Pennington took care of herself, even though any real exertion
left her out of breath. Charlotte used to talk to Momma about Miss Pennington a lot, but she didn't anymore. She was beginning to have the guilty feeling that Momma was jealous. In her own roundabout way Momma would ask Charlotte if Miss Pennington was sophisticated, worldly-wise, and erudite, and instinct told Charlotte to tell a little white lie along the lines of “Oh, I don't know.”
While Mr. Dean talked on about Dupont and national championships, in the peculiarly male compulsion to display knowledge, Charlotte cut another quick glance at her mother. Momma's face had strong, regular features, and she should have been beautiful, but her expression had narrowed and hardened within the tight limits represented by this tiny little place out on County Road 1709. Moreover, she was intelligent and shrewd enough to know most of that. She had found two means of release from her bind. One was her fervent religious faith; the other was her daughter, whose phenomenal intelligence she had recognized by the time Charlotte was two. Throughout her elementary and junior high school days, she and Momma were about as close as a mother and daughter could get. Charlotte kept nothing from her,
nothing
. Her mother led her by the hand through every crisis of growing up. But Charlotte reached puberty shortly after entering Alleghany High, and a curtain closed between them. Perhaps in any age, but certainly in an age like this, there was nothing more critical in a girl's life than her sexuality and the complicated question of what boys expected from it. From the very first time she brought it up to the very last, her mother's religious convictions, her absolute moral certainty, ended discussions as soon as they began. In Elizabeth Simmons's judgment, there were no dilemmas and ambiguities in this area, and she had no patience for sentences that began
But,
Momma, these days or But, Momma, everybody else
. Charlotte could talk to Momma about menstruation, hygiene, deodorants, breasts, bras, and shaving her legs or armpits, but that was the limit. When it came to matters such as whether or not she should hook up in even a minimal way with a Channing or a Brian and whether or not girls who
kept it
until they got married were becoming rare, Momma closed any such line of inquiry as soon as Charlotte tried to open it up, no matter how indirectly, since there was nothing to discuss. Momma's will was stronger than hers, and she wasn't about to experiment in this area in willful repudiation of Momma's dictates. Instead, she worked it out in her mind that she was going her own way and wasn't about to sink to the level of Channing Reeves and Regina Cox; and if they called her uncool, then she was going to wear Uncool as a badge of honor and be as different from them
morally as she was in intelligence. The terrible moment had come, however, when even someone as nice as Brian gave up on her.

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