I Am Charlotte Simmons Read online

  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 Detroit 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.

  The less Charlotte talked to Momma, the more she talked to Miss Pennington, and Momma was aware of that, too, which gave Charlotte something else to feel guilty about. She talked to Miss Pennington about schoolwork, writing, and literature, and Miss Pennington assigned her books to read, including books in history, philosophy, and French, that she would never encounter in the regular curriculum at Alleghany High. Miss Pennington persuaded the biology teacher, Mrs. Buttrick, and the mathematics teacher, Mr. Laurans, to recommend advanced textbooks in their fields and to go over her answers to the questions and solutions to the problems that appeared at the end of each section. But most of all, Miss Pennington talked to her about her future and why she should aim for Harvard, Dupont, Yale, or Princeton—and for the limitless triumphs that waited beyond such universities. But Miss Pennington was a spinster and, despite her unlovely appearance, a dignified woman with perfect manners, and her interests were in things higher than the question of how far a girl should or shouldn’t go with Brian Crouse if they happened to be alone in a car or someplace after dark. The only person Charlotte could talk to about all that was Laurie, and Laurie was as confused and innocent as she was.

  She was still gazing at Miss Pennington when she heard, or thought she heard—above the general burble of voices and Mr. Dean’s discourse on Dupont’s current basketball stars—the throaty revving roars of a car somewhere out front of the house, the kind of car that boys used for drag racing. Then the noise stopped, and she once again set about keeping track of what Mr. Dean was saying, in case she had to respond.

  It wasn’t long, however, before she heard a boy’s loud mocking voice. “Hey, Charlotte, you never told me you were having a party!”

  Coming around the side of the house, by the septic tank, were four boys, Channing Reeves, Matt Woodson, and two of their buddies, Randall Hoggart and Dave Cosgrove, both of them great big football players. A couple of hours ago all four had been wearing the kelly-green robes and mortarboards, but now Channing and Matt had on T-shirts, ripped jeans, sneakers, and baseball caps on backward, and Randall Hoggart and Dave Cosgrove wore shorts, flip-flops, and “beaters,” which were white strap-style undershirts—an ensemble calculated to display their huge calves, arms, and chests to maximum effect. Channing, Matt, and Randall had big lumps of chewing tobacco in their cheeks and were expertly spurting great brown streams of tobacco juice on the ground as they came swaggering toward Charlotte.

  “Yeah, Charlotte, but we know you’d a invited us if you’d a thought of it!” said Matt Woodson in the same sort of loud, arch voice as Channing’s, whereupon he looked to Channing for approval.

  All four of them began flicking glances at one another and laughing in tribute to their mutual fearlessness and the finesse of their sarcasm. Dave Cosgrove had a twenty-ounce “tall boy” can of beer in his hand, but the voices, the smirks, the laughs, and the swaggers were quite enough to make it obvious that they had been drinking ever since commencement and perhaps before.

  Charlotte was stunned, and in the next instant—before she could possibly explain to herself why—she was humiliated and shamed. The party grew silent. You could hear the sound of a hot dog sizzling on the grill. And then she felt fear. Smirking, the drunken band of intruders headed straight toward her with huge strides, as if oblivious to the adults and any respect that might conceivably be due them. She felt rooted, as in a dream, to the spot where she stood. In the next moment, Channing was right in front of her. She was frightened by the insolent way the flesh of his forehead showed through the sizing gap in the back of the baseball cap even more than by the noxious lump in his cheek.

  Leering, he said, “I just come for a little graduation hug.” With that, he reached out and tried to take hold of her upper arm. She jerked it away, he reached out to try again, and she screamed, “STOP IT, CHANNING!”

  Suddenly a huge arm was between Charlotte and the boy. Sheriff Pike—and now the entire mass of his body separated them.

  “Boys,” said the Sheriff, “you’re gonna turn right around and go home. You don’t git two chances, you git one.”

  Channing was clearly startled to see the sheriff, whose arms were so big they stretched the sleeves of his polo shirt. He hesitated and then evidently decided he dare not lose face in front of his comrades.

  “Aw, come on, Sheriff,” he said, mustering a big grin, “we been working hard for four years to graduate. You know that! What’s wrong with a little celebrating and coming by to see Charlotte? She was our valedictorian, Sheriff!”

  “You’re drunk, is what’s wrong
,” said the Sheriff. “You’re either going home right now or you’re going in right now. What’s it gonna be?”

  Still looking at Channing, Sheriff Pike reached over and took hold of the can of beer in Dave Cosgrove’s hand. Dave took such a deep breath he seemed to swell up. He stared at the Sheriff, then stared at someone behind the Sheriff, and surrendered the big can without a peep. It was only then that Charlotte realized that three men had come up beside her, just a step back from Sheriff Pike—Daddy, big Otha Hutt, and Cousin Doogie. Daddy still had the big long fork from the grill in his hand. Doogie was about half the size of Sheriff Pike, and Randy and Dave, for that matter, but the way he narrowed his eyes and curled his lips back in a hideous smile, revealing the big gap in his front teeth, made the teeth that remained look like fangs. Everybody in the county knew how much Doogie Wade loved to go brawling. Slugging, kicking, biting, elbows to the Adam’s apple, or plain-long old-fashioned Saturday-night rock fights, it was all the same to Doogie Wade.

  The Sheriff raised the beer can up to his nose, sniffed it, and said, “If one a you’s not drunk, you git to drive the whole bunch a you outta here. Otherwise, you’re gonna walk.”

  “Well now, hey, Sheriff,” said Channing, but his proudest weapon, insolence, had disappeared. He spat, but without the gusto of a moment ago.

  “Filthy,” said the Sheriff, eyeing the arc of the brown spittle. “And ’at’s another thang. This ain’t your property to spit on.”

  “Aw, Sheriff,” said Channing, “how can anybody”—innybuddy—“keep from—”

  Before he could utter another word, Daddy, standing right beside Charlotte, said in a strange, low, even, toneless voice, “Channing, if you ever set foot on this property again, you gon’ git crawled. If you ever try to touch my daughter again, that’ll be the last time you got anythang left to want a woman with.”