I Am Charlotte Simmons

Lost Province Entr’Acte

“Dear Momma and Daddy,

“I’ll admit my eyes blurred with mist when I saw you drive off in the old pickup.”

The old pickup?…my eyes blurred with mist?…She sighed, she groaned, deflated. What on earth did she think she was writing? She lifted her ballpoint from the top sheet of a pad of lined schoolroom paper and slumped back, or as far back as you could slump in an exhausted wooden chair with no arms. She looked out the window at the library tower. It was lit up ever so majestically in the dark. She saw it, and she didn’t see it. Beverly’s cast-off clothes mashed on the floor, Beverly’s web of extension cords plugged into surge-protector strips and knuckle sockets in midair, her rat’s nest of a percale-sloshed unmade bed, her littered CD cases, uncapped skin-care tubes, and spilled contact lens packets, her techie alphabet toys, the PC, the TV, the CD, DVD, DSL, VCR, MP4, all of them currently dormant in the absence of their owner, each asleep rattlesnake-style with a single tiny diode-green eye open—her roommate’s slothful and indulgent habits were all over the place…Charlotte was sort of aware of it and sort of wasn’t really.

She rocked forward with another trill of low-grade guilt to confront her letter home…the old pickup. Daddy is totally dependent on that poor, miserable old truck, and I’m treating it like it’s something quaint. Eyes blurred with mist…Yuk! She could just imagine Momma and Daddy reading that. The “pretty writing”…

She riiiiiiippped the sheet off the pad—then saved it. She could use it for scratch paper. She hunched over the desk and started again:

“Dear Momma and Daddy,

“I hope I didn’t seem too sad when you left that day. Watching you all drive off made me realize”—she starts to write, what a long journey I have set out upon, but the pretty-writing alarm sounds again, and she damps it down to “how much I was going to miss you. But since then I have been so busy studying, meeting new people, and”—she grandly thinks of figuring out Dupont’s tribal idiosyncrasies, already knowing she’s going to settle for “getting used to new ways of doing things, I haven’t had time to be homesick, although I guess I am.

“The classes haven’t been as hard as I was afraid they would be. In fact, my French professor told me I was ‘overqualified’ for his class! Since he had a peculiar way of teaching French literature, in my opinion, I wasn’t unhappy about switching to one a little more advanced. I have a feeling that it is harder to get into a university like this than it is to stay in it. I suppose I shouldn’t even think like that, however”—she starts to write lest I have a rude awakening—and how is lest supposed to sound in Alleghany County?—then downscales it to “because it might be bad luck.”

“The library here is really wonderful. You remember it, I’m sure, the tower, the tallest building on campus? It has nine million books, on every subject you can imagine, sometimes so many you hardly know where to start. It is really busy, too. There are as many students using the library at midnight as there are in the middle of the day. The other night I went there”—changes it to “I had to go there”—“kind of late, to use a computer, and there was only one computer not in use in a cluster of about 25 of them. I made a new acquaintance when we”—starts to write got into an argument, instead writes—“couldn’t figure out which of us was next in line.” So much for that—no name, no gender.

“My best friend so far is a girl from Cincinnati, Ohio, named Bettina, who lives on my floor. We met one night when each of us was having a hard time sleeping and decided to go down to the Common Room on the first floor and read for a while. Bettina is a very cheery and energetic person and not shy at all. If she wants to meet somebody, she just pipes right up and says hello.

“Generally I sleep very well. The only problem is that Beverly goes to bed really late”—starts to write 3, 4, even 5 a.m., instead writes—“2 a.m. sometimes, and it wakes me up when she comes in.”

She slumped back in the chair once more and stared out the window a few light-years into the darkness. This, she figured, was it. Right here was the point where she either cried out or she didn’t cry out. Momma, only you can help me! Who else do I have! Listen to me! Let me tell you the truth! Beverly doesn’t just return in the dead of the night and “go to bed really late”! She brings boys into bed—and they rut-rut-rut do it—barely four feet from my bed! She leads a wanton sex life! The whole place does! Girls sexile each other! Rich girls with fifteen hundred SATs cry out, “I need some ass!” “I’m gonna go out and get laid!” The girls, Momma, the girls, Dupont girls, right in front of you! Momma—what am I to do…

But she stiffened and swallowed it all. Just one little mention of…sex…and Momma the Wrath of God would head east in the pickup, and haul her back to Sparta, and the whole county would hum like a hive: “Charlotte Simmons has dropped out of Dupont. Poor thing thinks it’s immoral there.”

So she writes, “By the same token, when I get up in the morning at my usual time, it wakes Beverly up. We are getting used to each other, however, even though we don’t have many opportunities to spend time together. There seem to be a lot of her prep school friends here, and she also spends a lot of time with”—starts to write her boyfriend(s), instead crosses out the also and writes—“a lot of time with them. I’m not sure she has ever heard a Southern accent before.” She strikes out the previous sentence. Despite what a couple of people have said, she essentially has no regional accent. “Beverly and I get along fine, however.

“You wouldn’t believe how important sports are here! The big football and basketball stars are celebrities. Everybody on campus knows them by sight. There were four basketball players in the French course I started out in, and they were so tall they made everybody else feel like a midget. I met one of them. He was very friendly and complimented me on my performance in the class. The athletes like to pretend they don’t care about academic work, but I think this one really is interested, even though he acts as if he isn’t.” Dying to write He immediately invited me to grab some lunch, which is the prelude to grab some ass—but doesn’t take even one step down that road.

“Living in a coed dorm was strange at first. Pretty soon, though, the boys just seem like neighbors ‘across the way.’ ” Dying to write, By now I hardly notice them except when Beverly brings her hookups up to the room to give them some fresh meat. Actually writes, “That doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot to learn about Dupont, but every freshman is in the same boat. The freshmen girls go around in little ‘herds’ ”—puts quotation marks around herds, doesn’t want to characterize them to Momma and Daddy as dumb animals, especially since that is what they are, dumb, frightened, rich rabbits, chronically, desperately, in heat—“so that they won’t feel both confused and lonely. Confused is bad enough!

“So everything is going along pretty much the way I hoped it would. I have to pinch myself to make sure this isn’t just a dream and I really am a student at one of the best universities in the country.” Thinks: where one and all make Channing and Regina look like harmless four-year-olds. “Dupont isn’t Sparta, but I’ve already come to believe that growing up in Sparta has advantages that people I’ve met from places like Boston and New York have never had.” Would love to write, They don’t realize that not everything you say has to be ironic or sarcastic and cynical and sophisticated and sick, virulent, covered in pustules, and oozing with popped-pustular sex. If only there were a way to slip that sentiment into a letter to Momma—without her exploding! Settles for “Some things money can’t buy.”

“I didn’t mean to make this letter so long. I should have written you before now to bring you up to date. Give my love to Buddy and Sam; also to Aunt Betty and Cousin Doogie. Tell them I miss them and that everything is going fine.

I love you,

Charlotte.”

She slumped back again…There it was—one long, well-intentioned lie.

For a long time she just sat in the chair and looked out the window in something close to a trance. The floodlights down below sent shadows up the sides of the library tower as if they weren’t shadows at all but great washes of watercolor. The undersides of the compound arches and decorative out-croppings caught the light here and there. What if she called Miss Pennington? She would be a lot more objective than Momma. She was wise as well as intelligent…Miss Pennington…She tried to imagine it—but what did Miss Pennington know about sex on the other side of the mountain? Nothing. How could she know? She was an old, homely spinster who had lived all her life in Sparta. Charlotte immediately chided herself for thinking that way about someone who had been so good to her. Yet it was true. “Spinster”—would anybody at Dupont even be aware of the word? No, the sex-obsessed know-it-alls of Dupont would sneak through Miss Pennington’s blood/brain barrier and swim through her arteries and veins like liver flukes until they found evidence, no matter how far-fetched, of lesbianism or tran-sexuality or something else disgusting. They would roll her in their muck, all the while piously “defending” her right to her “orientation.” What hypocrites they were! Still, what did—how could—Miss Pennington know about it all? And she already knew what Miss Pennington would say: “Get busy, start a project, ignore them.” Be yourself, be independent, march to a different drummer, swim against the current—they’ll admire your courage, the way they do here—Oh, Miss Pennington! You don’t understand. In Sparta that was so easy. It was easy maintaining my pose, looking down my nose at the Channings and the Reginas all day with a Little Scholar’s sneer as they called me an “uptight cherry” and a lot of other things, and asked me—Regina once said it to my face—when I was going to “give it up.” It was easy, because at nightfall the skirmish was over, and I went home to Momma and Daddy and Buddy and Sam. Oh, I was superior to them, too, even to Momma. How backward I knew my family to be by the time I was thirteen! But that poor old shack out County Road 1709 was always there; it was mine. It reeked of kerosene and a coal grate, but no one could touch me, no one would try, no one could look Daddy in the face when his eyes went cold, no one dared provoke Cousin Doogie to the point where he bared his fangs. Once he threw rocks—“thhhhhhoo rrrocks,” as he spluttered it out later—at big Dave Cosgrove when Dave winked a sarcastic wink and said, “Reckon you ain’t fixing to give me no cherry on ice, hunh, Charlotte?”…rocks might’near big enough to kill him. Then Cousin Doogie stood there with another rock in his hand and said, “Try talking that way again, fat boy. I ain’t rammed a spit up a pig’s ass in a long time.” Dave, who must have weighed eighty pounds more than Cousin Doogie, just slunk away. That was why he went limp when he crashed the party after commencement. There was Cousin Doogie.

Here, now, at Dupont, when she came “home,” she wasn’t getting away from it all—right here was where she had to wallow in it all. Right here, in her “own” room, which was supposed to be a place of peace, sleep, and refuge—right here was where she got her nose shoved in the filth. It wasn’t so much a thought as an instinct: what she needed was somebody wise who also knew and who would assure her that yes, her situation was unjust, and yes, it was her duty to hold firm and remain independent, a rock amid the decadence all around her. That person, in the Dupont catalog, would be the R.A. Ha ha, a joke. Her R.A., Ashley, had immediately taken her for a hopelessly innocent little country girl and told her a sentimental lie about “dormcest.” She could just see Ashley’s “sincere” face and her flyaway tangles of blond hair—

Bango!

—the blond hair, the blond hair and the freckles: Laurie. Only a freshman herself, at North Carolina State, but Laurie was levelheaded and mature, at least compared to other girls at Alleghany High, and she was religious—New River Baptist Church, the Better Sort of Baptists, the in-town Baptists, as opposed to the foot-washing Baptists out in the countryside, even though the Better Sort also baptized people with full immersion in the New River at Easter when the water was still ice-cold. Laurie had convictions!

Charlotte got up from the chair and picked up the “room” telephone, a white portable. The instrument itself belonged to Beverly, but Charlotte could use it, entering her own code when she made a call. It was hardly ever used. Beverly lived on her cell phone, and Charlotte, like her folks, would do almost anything to avoid “calling long distance.” She felt reckless and oddly exhilarated. She punched in Information in Raleigh, North Carolina, for North Carolina State, hung up, and then punched in General Information at State. All this was going to cost money, but with giddy abandon she refused to think about that now. A recorded voice answered and instructed her to press this if she wanted this, or this for this, or this for this or…It was bewildering. She had to hang up and dial again…flinging money out the window. This time she concentrated on the disembodied instructions and pressed this for this…and this referred her to this or this or this, and this instructed her to punch in the first four letters of the last name, which she did, MCDO, which led her to a series of automated voices that went through the McDodds, McDolans, McDonoughs, and McDoovers before finally reaching the McDowells, whereupon another voice took over and ran A. J., Arthur, Edith, F., George, H. H., and Ian McDowell by her before reaching L. McDowell. Charlotte was frantic. She had never been in phone-mail jail before. She took a wild stab and responded yes to L. A squad of patched-together digital voices gave her L. McDowell’s number.

God knows what the Information calls alone cost. But now she’s drunk on her own heedlessness. She punches in the number, stretches the coiled cord, and sits back down in her chair. Seven rings, eight rings—not there, even if L. is Laurie—

“Hello?” Loud rap music in the background.

Terribly embarrassed: “May I speak to Laurie McDowell?”

Hesitation…“This is Laurie…”

Charlotte is elated! Laurie! Why hadn’t she called her in the first place? Laurie will know! Laurie will understand! Shivers of delight. She wants to laugh, she’s so happy. Almost a shriek: “Laurie! You know who this is?”

“No-o-o-o …”

Carried away by joy, she giggled, “Regina Cox.”

“Regina?—Charlotte!”

Shrieks, laughter, interjections, I-can’t-believe-its, more shrieks and laughs. The rap music is banging away. “Knock it on some fox’s box, my cock”—blip: Doctor Dis. Since when was Laurie interested in rap?

“Regina…Charlotte, you are like totally—Ohmygod, I mean the day Regina—where are you?”

“In my room in the dorm.”

“At Dupont?”

“Yeah…at Dupont…”

“I can’t say you sound very excited. What’s it like? I can’t believe this! Like a hundred times I’ve been on the verge of calling you! I totally have!”

“Me, too—same thing.”

“The Dupont girl!” said Laurie. “Tell me everything! I’ve been like totally dying to know. Wait a minute, let me turn down this music. I can hardly hear you.”

Laurie and…all these totally s? The rap band banging in the background began to digit down, and the last thing Charlotte heard distinctly was Doctor Dis making one of those crude rap half rhymes, “…take my testi-culls, suck ’em like a popsi-cull…” For a moment she worried that the distraction would make Laurie forget what they were about to discuss, namely, Dupont. At the same time she didn’t want to pounce right back onto the subject herself, for fear of revealing how eager she was to talk about it.

Laurie returned to the telephone. “Sorry, I didn’t know I had it on so loud. You know who that was, the singer?”

“Doctor Dis,” said Charlotte. She left it at that. She didn’t want things to go off on a tangent about some stupid illiterate singer, if you could call rap singing. At the same time, she had a terrible itch of curiosity. “I didn’t know you liked rap.”

A bit defensive: “I like some of it.”

Dead air. Silence. It was as if the conversation had leaked out a hole. Charlotte ransacked her brain. Finally, “Is it like here? All anybody plays at Dupont is rap and reggae, except for the ones who like classical music and all that. There are a lot of musicians in my class.”

“Rap and reggae are really popular here, too,” said Laurie, “but there are a lot of kids, guys especially, who listen to country and bluegrass? I got enough of that in Sparta. But other’n’at, N.C. State’s like totally cool. It’s big! The first two weeks it liked to drive me crazy, it’s so big.” Liiiiked—sounded almost like locked. It was a relief to Charlotte to know that somebody else was in college with the Sparta accent, the Sparta diction, the Sparta “other’n’at,” the Sparta “liked to” for “almost,” the Sparta declarative sentence that modestly questions itself at the very end. Laurie would understand, if she could ever get her back on the subject. “At Dupont,” Laurie was saying, “do you have to do everything online?”

“Well, a lot of—”

Laurie talked right over the top of her. “Here you register for classes online, you turn in assignments online, if you need to ask a T.A. something about homework, you do it online—but I don’t mind.” With great enthusiasm she proceeded to tell Charlotte about the endless number of things that made N.C. State cool. “Everybody’s always talking about how State is an aggie college and all that? Well, there are a lot of really cool kids here. I’ve made so many friends?” Free-uns. “I’m glad I came here.”

Charlotte didn’t know what to say. Laurie liked it there. Since misery loves company, that was a disappointment.

Laurie said, “Well—what’s up with you? You’ve got to tell me all about Dupont!”

“Oh, it’s great, or I guess it’s great,” said Charlotte. “They sure tell you enough it’s great.”

“What do you mean?”

Charlotte told her about the speech by the dean of Dupont College at the “frosh” convocation, the medieval banners, the flags of forty-three nations, the name-dropping, the Nobel-dropping—

“That’s what they say, and what do you say?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “It probably is that great, but I don’t know what difference it makes.”

“Oh wow,” said Laurie. “You’re sure jumping for joy.”

Charlotte said, “Do you live in a coed dorm?”

“Do I live in a coed dorm? Yeah. Practically everybody does. Do you?”

“Yeah,” said Charlotte. “What do you think of it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Laurie. “It was weird at first. The guys were totally loud all the time. But now it’s like calmed down. I don’t think about it much anymore.”

“Have you ever heard of sexiling?”

“Yeah…”

“Has it ever happened to you?”

“To me? No, but it happens.”

“Well—it happened to me,” said Charlotte. “My roommate comes in about three o’clock in the morning and—” She proceeded to tell the story. “But the worst thing was the way she made me feel guilty. I was supposed to know that if she gets drunk and picks up some guy somewhere and brings him up to the room, that’s more important than me being able to stay in my room and get some sleep before a test in the morning.”

A pause. “I guess it’s the same way here.”

“At Dupont,” said Charlotte, “everybody thinks you’re some kind of—of—some kind of twisted…uptight…pathetic little goody-goody if you haven’t had sex. Girls will come right out and ask you—girls you hardly even know. They’ll come right out and ask you—in front of other girls—if you’re a V.C., a member of the Virgins Club, and if you’re stupid enough to say yes, it’s an admission, like you have some terrible character defect. They practically sneer. If you don’t have a boyfriend, you’re a loser, and if you want a boyfriend, you have to have sex. There’s something perverted about that. Don’t you agree with me? This is supposed to be this great university, but it’s like if you haven’t ‘given it up,’ as Regina used to say, then you just don’t belong here. I’d say that’s perverted. Am I right—or do I just not get it or something? Is it like that there?”

Pause. “More or less.”

“So what do you do when it comes up? What do you say?”

Long pause. “I guess I like…don’t say anything.”

“Then what do you do?” said Charlotte.

Longer pause. “I guess I try to look at it in a different way. I’ve never lived anywhere but Sparta before. College—I don’t know, I guess I think of college as this opportunity to…to experiment. I needed to like get away from Sparta for a while.”

“Well—me, too,” said Charlotte. She couldn’t imagine why Laurie was saying anything so obvious.

Still longer pause. “You think maybe it’s possible you got away, but you brought a lot of Sparta with you to Dupont?” said Laurie. “Without knowing it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just asking…like suppose it’s something to consider. I guess what I really mean is college is like this four-year period you have when you can try anything—and everything—and if it goes wrong, there’s no consequences? You know what I mean? Nobody’s keeping score? You can do things that if you tried them before you got to college, your family would be crying and pulling their hair out and giving you these now-see-what-you’ve-gone-and-done looks?—and everybody in Sparta would be clucking and fuming and having a ball talking behind your back about it?—and if you tried these things after you left college and you’re working, everybody’s gonna fucking blow a fuse, and your boss or whoever will call you in for a—”

—the fucking just slipped out and hit Charlotte in the solar plexus—Laurie!

“—little talk, he’ll call it, or if you have a boyfriend or a husband, he’s gonna totally freak out or crawl off like a dog, which would be just as bad, because it’d make you feel guilty? I mean, look at it that way, Charlotte. College is the only time in your life, or your adult life anyway, when you can really experiment, and at a certain point, when you leave, when you graduate or whatever, everybody’s memory like evaporates. You tried this and this and this and this, and you learned a lot about how things are, but nobody’s gonna remember it? It’s like amnesia, totally, and there’s no record, and you leave college exactly the way you came in, pure as rainwater.”

“Tried what things?” said Charlotte. “What’s an example?”

“Well—” Laurie hesitated. “You were talking about boyfriends and what boyfriends expect and everything…”

“Yeah…”

Laurie’s voice rose. “Charlotte! That’s not the end of the world! This is the time to cut loose! To really learn about everything! To learn about guys, to really get to know them! Really find out what goes on in the world! You just have to let yourself fly for once, without constantly thinking about what you left behind on the ground! You’re a genius. Everybody knows that. I’m being sincere, Charlotte. Totally. Now there’s other things to learn, and this is the perfect time to do it. Take a chance! That’s one reason people go to college! It’s not the only reason, but it’s a big reason.”

Silence. Then Charlotte said, “So you’re talking about…going all the way…”

Silence. Then, “Not just that, but, well—yes.”

Embarrassed pause. “Have you done that, Laurie?”

Bravely, nothing to be ashamed of: “Yes, I have.” Silence. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not all that big a deal.” Silence. “And it’s a relief. I mean—well, you know.” Silence. “If you decide you want to, all you have to do is call me up, and I can tell you—I can tell you some things.”

Laurie went on for a while, in the abstract, about how little the deal was. Charlotte kept the receiver at her ear. She let her eyes wander…the pale gray wash up the side of the tower…the curious ragged diagonal the lit-up windows on the other side of the courtyard made…the bra that had somehow gotten tangled around the high heel of a shoe underneath Beverly’s bed. Laurie was going on about how every girl was on the pill, and it didn’t cause you to gain weight, the way she’d always heard…

Charlotte had a picture in her head of thousands of girls getting up out of bed in the morning and shuffling to the bathroom with sleepers in their eyes and standing in front of a small, discolored cream-gray enameled basin with an old-fashioned zinc-gray chain attached to a black rubber stopper and a medicine cabinet with a mirror on the door, and they’re all reaching up, in a fog, thousands of college girls—she can see thousands of arms and hands reaching up, in this building, that building, the one across the way, the one behind that—incalculable numbers of buildings—they’re all reaching up and opening the cabinets and taking The Pill, which she imagined must be the size of the pills they give mules on the Christmas-tree farms for heartworm.

That was the picture, but she didn’t actually hear anything after “Yes, I have.”