I Am Charlotte Simmons Read online

And Mike had given him an annoyed look. Ordinarily Mike used good judgment, but sometimes … What was so special about this particular piece of ass that he couldn’t make it ten more feet to his bedroom? Anybody on the basketball team could point at any girl on campus and have her in his room in ten minutes or close to it—so what was the big deal? One time when there had been four of them at once … all four completely shaved … The memory of it aroused him a bit … but annoyance quickly overcame the stirring in his loins. Mike could be so goddamned thoughtless. He, Jojo, had had a rough afternoon. For the past ten minutes he had been thinking about only one thing in the world: coming back to this suite, sitting in this easy chair, and zoning out on a little TV. And now, on the floor right in front of the TV, was a two-backed beast slogging away and going unhh unhh unhh.

  With an accusing sigh, Jojo tossed the remote onto the seat of the easy chair and went into his room and shut the door. He could see them in his mind’s eye, and for a moment, despite himself, he felt the old tingle again. He focused on his resentment and fought it off.

  3. THE MERMAID BLUSHED

  Daddy, at the wheel of the pickup truck, Momma, over by the passenger-side door, and Charlotte, sandwiched in between, were driving down Dupont University’s showiest approach, Astor Way, an avenue flanked by sycamores whose branches arched over from either side in the summer months until they met to form a lush, cool green tunnel with a thousand little places where the sun peeked through. The sycamore trees were so evenly spaced they made Charlotte think of the columns she had seen in Washington when she was there with Miss Pennington.

  “Well, I’ll be switched,” said Momma. “I never in my life—”

  Instead of finishing the sentence, she lifted her hands and made a tunnel shape like the arch of trees and looked at Charlotte with a wide-eyed smile. It was about two p.m. Ever since four-thirty this morning, when they left Sparta in the dark, Momma had been primed to be impressed by Dupont.

  Daddy turned into a tree-shaded parking lot marked LITTLE YARD, and their old pickup became part of a busy swarm of cars, vans, SUVs, and at least one yellow Ryder rental truck, disgorging freshmen, parents, duffel bags, wheelie suitcases, lamps, chairs, TV sets, stereos, boxes … and boxes … box after box … boxes of every conceivable size, or every size Charlotte could think of. What on earth were her new classmates bringing in all those boxes—and what did she lack? But that was a fleeting concern.

  Young men wearing khaki shorts and mauve T-shirts with DUPONT in yellow letters across the chest were helping people unload their cargo, piling it on heavy-duty dollies, and pushing the immense loads out of the lot and toward the building. Charlotte had been assigned to Edgerton House, “house” being the term Dupont used instead of such unclassy, bureaucratic State U. terminology as “Section E, freshman dormitory.” It wasn’t part of any “dorm,” either. It was a house on Little Yard. Little Yard would be home to all sixteen hundred incoming freshmen. It was the first dormitory ever built at Dupont. A hundred years ago it had housed every student in the university.

  The parking lot was so busy and the trees had such dense foliage, Charlotte barely saw the building itself at first. In fact, it was gigantic and seemed even more so thanks to its heavy, brownish rusticated stone walls. The wall she was looking at extended the entire length of the long block it was built on. No fortress ever looked more formidable, but only intangible matters concerning that huge structure were on Charlotte Simmons’s mind. They had obsessed her thoughts throughout the ten-hour drive from Sparta: namely, what her roommate would be like and just what the ominous term “coed dorm” actually meant.

  All spring and all summer Dupont had been a wondrous abstraction, the prize of a lifetime, the trophy of all trophies for a little girl from the mountains; in short, a castle in the air. Now it was right in front of her at ground level, and this was where she would be living for the next nine months, and dealing with—what? Her roommate was a girl named Beverly Amory, from a town in Massachusetts called Sherborn, whose population was 1,440, and that was really all she knew about Beverly Amory. Well, at least she was a small-town girl, too. They had that much in common … As to what coed dorm life really was, she knew even less. Whatever it was, the concept, now that the time had come, was alarming.

  Charlotte, Momma, and Daddy had gotten out of the pickup, and Daddy was heading toward the rear to open the fiberglass camper top and the tailgate, when one of the young men approached, pushing a dolly, and said, “Welcome! Moving in?”

  “Yeah,” said Daddy in a wary tone.

  “Can I give you folks a hand?”

  He was smiling, but Daddy wasn’t. “No thanks.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay. If you change your mind, let one of us know.” Whereupon he went off, pushing the dolly toward another vehicle.

  Daddy turned to Momma and said, “He’d want a tip.”

  Momma nodded sagely over this insight into the wiles of life here on the other side of the Blue Ridge.

  “I don’t think so, Daddy,” said Charlotte. “They look like students to me.”

  “That don’t matter,” said Daddy. “You’ll see. When we git in’ere, you’re gonna see those ‘students’ standin’ere waiting and folks digging into their pockets. ’Sides, what we got, h’it won’t take much to tote it.”

  So Daddy opened the fiberglass camper top and lowered the tailgate. Charlotte really hadn’t brought a whole lot, just a big duffel bag, two suitcases, and a box of books. Daddy had gone to the trouble of putting the camper top over the bed of the pickup, not so much to protect her things from the weather, which the TV said would be fine all over the East, as to provide some privacy in case he and Momma had to spend the night here for some reason. They had their sleeping bags rolled up on the truck bed and an Igloo cooler with enough sandwiches and water to get by.

  True to his word, Daddy toted the two heaviest things himself. He put the duffel bag up on his shoulder and somehow carried that whole box of books under his other arm. Goodness knows how he did it, except that he was strong as a bull from all the hard work he’d done in his life. The literature from Dupont had said to come dressed ready for “moving in,” and so Daddy had on an old short-sleeved plaid sport shirt that hung out over a pair of the thorn-proof gray twill pants he wore when he went hunting. Charlotte immediately monitored the parking lot and was relieved to see that most of the other fathers were dressed more or less the same as Daddy: casual shirts and pants and, in some cases, shorts … although there was something different about theirs. Naturally, she checked out the other female freshmen with that same swift sweep of the eyes, and that was a relief, too. She was afraid they might be all dressed up, although she didn’t really think they would be. Practically all of them were wearing shorts, just the way she was. Hers were high-waisted denims with her sleeveless cotton print blouse tucked in—“blouse” was the word Momma used—an ensemble designed to show off not only her trim athletic legs but also her small waist. She saw immediately that most of the other girls were wearing flip-flops or running shoes, but she figured her white Keds fit in fine with the running shoes. She didn’t see any other mothers dressed quite like Momma, who had on a T-shirt and a denim jumper that came down below her knees. A pair of athletic socks rose up from out of her striped sneakers as if to meet the hem of the jumper. Never in her life had Charlotte possessed the strength to entertain … Doubts … about Momma’s taste, any more than her authority. Momma was Momma, which was all there was to say about Momma.

  Momma carried the bigger suitcase and Charlotte the other one, and they were heavy enough, but Daddy’s feat was really something. People were staring at him, probably because they wondered how one man could carry such a load, which made Charlotte proud, or marginally proud; but then she noticed that the way Daddy had his arm around the box made his forearm look huge, which in turn made the tattoo of the mermaid look huge … and reddish from the strain … which in turn made the mermaid look as if she
were blushing. Was that what they were all actually staring at? Despite herself, Charlotte felt shamed, for she did entertain doubts about Daddy’s taste and the tattoo in particular.

  Amid a rumbling caravan of dollies, they went through the Little Yard’s great arched entryway and its fifteen-foot-high stone corridor and out into a courtyard … the Little Yard, which turned out to be a quadrangle the length of a football field, with ancient trees on a lush green lawn bordered by boxwood hedges and big red-orange poppies blazing amid beds of lavenderish blue nepeta and crisscrossed by worn walkways that looked as if they had been there forever. The entire yard was enclosed by the rows of houses, which, by the looks of them, had been built in different stages and in slightly different styles. The place conjured up a picture of a fortress whose interior drill ground has been magically transformed into an idealized, arboreal, floribunda landscape. The rumbling, the rattling, the aluminum clanking, the creaking, the squeaking, the jerking, the jouncing of the dollies ricocheted off the walls. What colossal heaps of things the young men in the mauve T-shirts were pushing and pulling and humping to the houses! At Edgerton, they, the boys in mauve, were carting everybody else’s belongings onto the elevator, but Daddy was having none of that. He marched right on with his prodigious load. He was sweating, and the mermaid was really blushing now.

  Charlotte caught two of the boys in the mauve shirts sneaking glances at it. One said to the other in a low voice: “Nice ink.” The other tried to suppress a snigger. Charlotte was mortified.

  Charlotte’s room, 516, was up on the fifth of the building’s six floors. When she got off the elevator, she found herself looking down a long, gloomy old corridor in which frowning adults were popping in and out of doorways, pointing this way and that, yammering about God knows what, amid a tumbled clutter, extending as far as the eye could see, of empty boxes, some gigantic, lying every which way from one end of the corridor to the other, with so much in the way of lurid lettering and illustrations and so many closure flaps thrust out it looked like an explosion. Boys and girls stood by phlegmatically, secretly appalled in varying degrees that their parents insisted on walking the face of the earth in plain view of their new classmates.

  The young men in the mauve T-shirts were pushing their heavy dollies through this cardboard chaos like icebreakers. On the landing of a stairwell near the elevator, there was a huge garbage can the color of drained veal with boxes, bubble paper, lacerated shrink-wrapping, Styrofoam peanuts, and other detritus gushing out of it. On the floor of the hallway, what you could see of it, were … dust balls … more dust balls than Charlotte had ever seen in her life … everywhere, dust balls. Toward the far end of the corridor Charlotte spied two barefoot boys. One was clad in only a polo shirt and the towel he had wrapped about his waist. The other wore a longsleeved shirt with the tail hanging out over a pair of boxer shorts, and he had a towel slung across his shoulders. Boxer shorts? Both boys were scampering across the corridor into the men’s bathroom, judging by the towels and the toilet kits they were carrying. But no pants? Charlotte was shocked. She glanced at Momma—and was relieved to see that she hadn’t noticed. Momma would have been more than shocked. Knowing Momma … she would have brought God’s lightning down on somebody’s head. Charlotte hurried her into the room, 516, which was fortunately just ahead of them.

  Given the grandeur that was Dupont, the room seemed terribly bare and, like the hallway, worn and exhausted. A pair of tall double-hung windows, side by side, equipped with yellowish shades but no curtains, looked out onto the courtyard. The courtyard appeared rather grand from up here, and the windows let in plenty of light. That much you could say for the room. But the rest of it was gloomy and tired: a pair of single beds with cheap metal frames and mattresses rather the worse for wear, a pair of plain wooden bureaus that had seen better days, a pair of small wooden tables that couldn’t properly be called desks, a pair of straight-backed wooden chairs, yellow ocher walls that could have stood a coat of paint, small dark wood baseboards and ceiling cornices that might have been handsome once, a wooden floor gone gray with use … and crawling with dust balls.

  Daddy unzipped the big duffel bag and allowed as how they might as well take out the bedclothes and get started making up the bed, but Charlotte thought she ought to wait for her roommate and not just arbitrarily decide which side of the room would be hers, and Momma agreed. Then Momma went to the windows and said you could see the top of the library tower from here and a couple of smokestacks. Daddy was of the opinion that the smokestacks meant that Dupont had its own power plant, it was so big. And they waited.

  They could hear the dollies rolling out in the hallway and the young men in the mauve DUPONT T-shirts grunting and occasionally swearing under their breath as they bulled their loads through the sprawling dump of boxes. At one point, there was the unmistakable shriek of two girls thrilled by the fact that they had run into each other. That gave Charlotte a hollow feeling. It hadn’t occurred to her that there might be entering freshmen who already … had friends. From somewhere down near the elevator a boy exclaimed, “Gotcha! Who’s your daddy?” Came the reply: “Oh, man, ‘Who’s your daddy.’ How completely douche-baggy is that?” Then a woman’s mannered voice: “Kindly spare us your … ‘colorful’ terminology, Aaron.” Charlotte could tell by the boys’ stressed voices that they were trying to assert themselves as manly and cool purely out of a nervous fear that the other males in this dorm might think they weren’t.

  By and by, she heard a girl talking out in the hall near the door, apparently to herself: “Edgerton. We just got here. Eeeeeeyew, there’s like trash all over the place, and they’ve got this like big plastic garbage can—are they all like this? This one’s beat up and busted, if you ask me …” The voice was coming closer. “Ummmm, we did … He’s cute … Ken, I think, but it could’ve been Kim. Would they name a boy Kim? … I can’t just walk up and say, ‘So, what’s your name?’ … Ummmm, I don’t really think so …” Now the voice was just outside the door. “Fresh meat?”

  In the doorway appeared a tall girl with a cell phone to her ear, a canvas sling over her shoulder … a girl so tall and thin that Charlotte thought she must be a model from a magazine! … long, full, straight brown hair with blond streaks … big blue eyes set in a perfectly suntanned face … but a terribly thin face, now that Charlotte got a better look, so thin it made her nose and her chin look too big, giving her a slightly horsey look. A long, terribly thin neck rose up out of a pale, chalky blue T-shirt … even Charlotte could tell it was one of those fine cottons, like lisle … hanging outside a pair of khaki shorts … perfectly tanned, long, long, oh-so-slender legs … so slender they made her knees seem too big … just as her elbows seemed too big for her awfully skinny arms. Still on the cell phone, she kept her eyes cast down at some nonexistent point in midair without so much as a glance inside the room … a mock grimace, and she said, “Eeeeeeyew, that’s gross, Amanda! Fresh meat.”

  Then she looked up, saw Charlotte, Momma, and Daddy, and—the cell phone still at her ear—opened her eyes wide as if in surprise, gave them a big smile, and made a little fluttering gesture with her other hand. Then she cast her eyes down again, as if drawing a curtain, and said into the cell phone:

  “Amanda—Amanda—Amanda—I’m sorry, I have to go now. I’m at my room … Uhhunh, exactly. Call me later. Bye.”

  With that, she pushed a button on the cell phone, slipped it into the canvas bag, and beamed another big smile toward Momma, Daddy, and Charlotte.

  “Hi! I’m sorry! I hate these phones! I’m Beverly. Charlotte?”

  Charlotte said hello and managed a smile, but she was already intimidated. This girl was so confident and poised. Somehow she immediately took over the room. And she already had a friend at Dupont, apparently. They shook hands, and Charlotte said in a timid voice, “These are my folks.”

  The girl directed her smile toward Daddy, looked him right in the eye, extended her hand, and said, “Hi, Mr. Simmons.”
r />   Daddy opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He just nodded deferentially and shook her hand … limply, Charlotte could tell, and she could feel shame weighing down her confidence. Oh God, the mermaid! Charlotte thought she saw the girl flick a glance at Daddy’s forearm … When he took her hand, it disappeared inside his. What does that big callused hand feel like to her?

  The girl turned to Momma. “Hi, Mrs. Simmons.”

  Momma wasn’t at all intimidated. She shook the girl’s hand and sang out, “Well, hi there, Beverly! It’s real nice to meet you! We been looking forward to it!”

  A woman’s voice: “That says five sixteen, doesn’t it?” Everyone turned toward the doorway.

  In came a middle-aged woman with a lot of pineapple blond hair teased and fluffed and brushed back in a certain way, followed by a tall, balding man, also middle-aged. The woman wore a simple sleeveless dress that came down to just above her knees. The man had on a white open-necked polo shirt, revealing the puffy onset of jowls, and a pair of khakis and some sort of leather moccasins—and no socks. Behind them, in came one of the young men in the mauve T-shirts … rather handsome … carefully pushing a dolly over the threshold. There must have been a ton of stuff on it, piled six or seven feet high.

  “Mummy,” said the girl, “come meet the Simmonses. Dad …”

  With a big, friendly smile the man came over to Daddy and shook hands—Charlotte could have sworn that he, too, took a quick look at the mermaid—and said, “Hey! How are you? Jeff Amory!”

  “Billy,” said Daddy. That was all he said: “Billy.” Charlotte was mortified. The man shot a glance at Daddy’s gray work pants. Charlotte shot a glance at Mr. Amory’s khakis and at Mrs. Amory’s dress. To a girl from Mars, or Sparta, North Carolina, they were dressed essentially the same as her parents. So what was it about them—

  Mr. Amory was greeting Momma, saying, “How are you? Jeff Amory!” Then he turned to Charlotte, pulled his head back, beamed a big smile, opened his arms as if coming across a long-lost friend, and said, “Well—you must be Charlotte!”