I Am Charlotte Simmons Page 9

  Charlotte couldn’t think of what on earth to say, and so she just said, “Yes, sir,” and felt like a child.

  “This is quite a day,” said Mr. Amory. “Are you ready for all this?” He swept his hand toward the windows, as if to take in the whole campus.

  “I think so,” said Charlotte. “I hope so.” Why couldn’t she come up with anything more than this juvenile politeness?

  “When I was starting out as a freshman here—’

  “In the Dark Ages,” said his daughter.

  “Oh, thank you, dear. See what a respectful roommate you have, Charlotte? Anyway, as I recall”—he aimed a wry smile at his daughter—“through the fog of my Alzheimer’s onset”—he beamed once more at Charlotte—“is that it’s big, or it seemed big to me at the time, but you really get used to the place very quickly.”

  Beverly’s mother was saying to Daddy, “How do you do? Valerie Amory. It’s so nice to meet you. When did you arrive?”

  Before Daddy could say anything, Mr. Amory said, “Oh, brother. Let’s see where we’re gonna put all these things.”

  He had turned around and was talking to the young man who was tending the dolly … tall, slender, athletic looking … sun-bleached brown hair brushed down just slightly over his forehead. Charlotte took in every detail. The dolly bore an enormous heap of … stuff.

  Mrs. Amory was greeting Momma. She took her hand and said, “Mrs. Simmons …” with a smile, a deep look into the eyes, and an inflection that bespoke a sympathetic if inexplicable confidentiality. “Valerie Amory. This is such a pleasure.”

  “Why, thank you, Valerie,” said Momma, “it’s just real nice to git the chance to meet you all! And you can call me Lizbeth. Most everbuddy does.”

  Out the corner of her eye, Charlotte caught, or thought she caught, Beverly staring at her waist-high denim shorts.

  “Beverly,” Mr. Amory said, “you sure you didn’t forget anything?” He stared at the mound of things on the dolly and shook his head and then smiled at Momma and Daddy. He surveyed the room and said to his daughter, “Where do you think you’re gonna put all this?”

  From the graphics on the cartons, Charlotte could make out a kitchenette refrigerator—that was the really big box—a microwave, a laptop computer, a fax machine, a digital camera, an electric toothbrush, a television set …

  Mrs. Amory had turned to Charlotte and, clasping her hand with both of hers, was saying, “Well … Charlotte.” She brought her face closer to Charlotte’s and peered profoundly into her eyes. “We’ve been so anxious to meet you. I can remember this very day so well myself. It wasn’t here, it was at Wellesley, and I’m not going to tell you when! But four years from now”—she snapped her fingers—“you’ll wonder where on earth—”

  “Oh, Dad,” Beverly was saying, “you have to worry about everything. Just put it anywhere. I’ll take care of it.”

  Mrs. Amory turned abruptly to Beverly and said, “Hah hah hah, darling.” Then she said to Momma, “I hope Charlotte’s better organized than—”

  A thump on the floor—“Oh, shit!” said Beverly.

  Everyone turned toward her. She was already stooping over to pick up her cell phone. She stood up again and, surprised by the silence, looked about quizzically. Charlotte saw Mrs. Amory glancing sideways at Momma, who looked like she had turned to stone. If anyone had said Oh, shit in her presence in her house—anyone—Momma would have let her know she had no mind to tolerate it.

  Mrs. Amory forced a laugh and, smiling and shaking her head, said, “Beverly … did I just hear you say, ‘Oh, darn’?”

  Beverly obviously didn’t know what she was talking about. Then it dawned on her, and she opened her eyes wide and put her fingertips over her lips in the classic attitude of mock penitence.

  “Oops,” she said, looking about and misting the air with more effusions of irony. “Sorry.” Without skipping a beat, she turned toward the handsome young man in the mauve T-shirt who was beginning to unload the dolly. “Just anywhere … Ken.” She gave him a coquettish smile. “I’m terrible with names. It is Ken, isn’t it?”

  “Just anywhere?” said Mr. Amory. “You’ll need a loft for just anywhere.”

  “Kim,” the young man said.

  “Anhh … I thought I heard Kim, but I just didn’t—I’m Beverly.” It seemed to Charlotte that she looked at him a couple of beats longer than necessary before continuing in a small but somehow flirtatious voice, “What year are you?”

  “I’m a senior. All of us”—he gestured toward the trolley—“are seniors.”

  Mrs. Amory had turned back to Daddy, eager to change the subject to … any subject, and Boring be damned. “I’m sorry, when did you say you arrived?”

  “Oh, ‘bout half hour ago, I reckon.”

  “You live in the western part of North Carolina.” She smiled. Charlotte thought she noticed her eyes dart ever so quickly to the tattoo.

  “Yep. ‘Bout as far west as you kin git and still be in the state of North Carolina. Well—not quite, but it took us purt’ near ten hours to drive here.”

  “My goodness.” She smiled.

  Daddy said, “How did you folks git here from Massachusetts?”

  “We flew.” She smiled.

  Charlotte could see Mr. Amory’s eyes run up and down Daddy … his ruddy face with its reddish brown field hand’s sunburn … the mermaid … the sport shirt out over the gray twill work pants, the old sneakers …

  “Whirred you fly into?” said Daddy.

  “An airport five or six miles out of town—Jeff, what’s the name of the field we flew into?”

  “Boothwyn.” He smiled at Momma, who wasn’t smiling.

  “Well, I’ll be switched,” said Daddy. “I didn’t even know they had an airport here.”

  Charlotte could see Beverly Amory running her eyes up and down Momma … down to where the denim jumper descended below the knees and the athletic socks rose up …

  “Oh, it’s very small,” said Mrs. Amory. She smiled. “It’s not really an airport, I guess. That’s probably not the right term.” She smiled some more.

  The smiles seemed not so much cheery as patient.

  “Anything else I can help you folks with?” said the porter, Kim, who had now removed everything from the dolly. The way he had pushed them together, the boxes created a massive little edifice.

  “I think that’s just about it,” said Mr. Amory. “Thank you very much, Kim.”

  “No problem,” said the young man, who was already heading out the door with the dolly. Without stopping, he said, “You all have a good time.” Then he looked at Beverly and Charlotte. “And a good year.”

  “We’ll try,” said Beverly, smiling in a certain way.

  She’d practically struck up an acquaintance with him! Charlotte felt even more inadequate. She couldn’t think of anything to say—to anybody, much less to some good-looking senior.

  Momma cocked her head and stared at Daddy. Daddy compressed his lips and shrugged his eyebrows. All right—the boy hadn’t stood around waiting for a tip.

  A muffled ring, oddly like a harp being strummed. Mr. Amory reached into the pocket of his khakis and withdrew a small cell phone. “Hello? … Oh, come on …” His sunny demeanor was gone. He scowled into the little mouthpiece. “How could that possibly … I know … Look, Larry, I can’t go into all this now. We’re in Beverly’s room with her roommate and her parents. I’ll call you back. In the meantime, ask around, for God’s sake. Boothwyn isn’t so small that they don’t have mechanics.”

  He closed up the cell phone and said to his wife, “That was Larry. He says there’s some sort of hydraulic leak in the rudder controls. That’s all we need.”

  Silence. Then Mr. Amory smiled again, patiently, and said, “Well … Billy … where are you and … Lizbeth … staying?”

  Daddy said, oh, they wouldn’t be staying, they were going to turn around and drive back to Sparta, and Momma and Mrs. Amory had a little discussion about the rigors of su
ch a long round-trip in one day. Mrs. Amory said they would be flying back as soon as they could to get out of Beverly’s hair and let her and Charlotte arrange things for themselves, and besides, wasn’t there a meeting of all the freshmen in this section in a couple of hours? Hadn’t she seen that on the schedule? That was true, said Beverly, but would they mind terribly not getting out of her hair until they had something to eat—hello-oh?—since she, for one, was starving? Both Mr. and Mrs. Amory gave their daughter a cross look, and then Mr. Amory smiled at Momma and Daddy like Patience on a monument smiling at Grief and said that, well, it looked like they were going to go have a quick bite to eat, and if Momma, Daddy, and Charlotte would care to come along, they were welcome. As he remembered, there was a little restaurant in town called Le Chef. “Not fabulous,” he said, “but good; and quick.” Daddy gave Momma an anxious glance, and Charlotte knew what that was about. Any unknown restaurant named Le Chef or Le anything sounded like more money than he was going to want to spend. But Momma gave Daddy a little nod that as much as said that they probably should sit down and have one meal with Charlotte’s roommate’s parents, since they had suggested it.

  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.