I Am Charlotte Simmons, page 67
In the here and now, in the struggling old pickup, Charlotte peered out at the snow, which now looked wild and demonic, lit up the way it was by the headlights. Maybe they would skid, turn over, plunge into the darkness over there on the left, down that nearly sheer incline, tumbling end over end until the old vehicle burst open and came apart. A crash—her consciousness departs, there is nihil; and ex nihilo, God comes and takes her away in the night.
Such plunges, such fatal wrecks, had occurred before on 21—but what would happen to Momma and Daddy and Buddy and Sam? No one would emerge unscathed from such a crash. She wasn’t so far gone as to wish anything to happen to their lives just to create an acceptable end to hers, one that would provide no satisfaction, no super-delicious schadenfreude for the Beverlys, the Glorias, the Mimis … and no frat-boy notoriety for … for … No, nothing must happen to Daddy and Momma, who loved her, loved her unquestioningly, Dupont or no Dupont, who would undoubtedly take her back into their bosoms, as unclean as she was. She tried to think of ways the wreck could occur so that God would come take only her away in the night.
Hours from now, when daylight came, it would be too late. Oh what a genius Charlotte Simmons is, but the little genius would not be nearly smart enough. How long would it take Momma to see clear through her and know that something fundamentally wrong had occurred—that her good girl had committed moral suicide? How long, Momma? Twenty minutes? Thirty? A whole hour? And what was she to say to Miss Pennington? That everything was fine? That she had never felt more vibrantly alive in her life—alive with the life of the mind?—and in that way allow her, the teacher who saw Charlotte Simmons as the justification for the entire forty years she had spent toiling at a country high school up in that Athens of the Blue Ridge Mountains called Sparta—allow her to have three and a half or four more weeks of illusions before little Justification’s grades for the fall semester come home in a letter to Momma and Daddy? They didn’t comprehend Rhodes scholarships and cénacles and matrices of ideas, much less Millennial Mutants. They didn’t know how nearly perfect your grade point average had to be to go to graduate school at any major university in America. But Miss Pennington would know about such things.
Daddy didn’t plunge off the road into the void. He didn’t even take as long as a depressed girl might have reasonably hoped for. In no time, there they were in the middle of Sparta, stopped at one of the three stoplights, the one where 21 crossed 18. The stoplight, which was suspended over the intersection, was rocking in the wind. The snow was really beginning to stick. There was nobody walking along the street, nobody anywhere on the street. There was the old redbrick courthouse, looking suitably ancient and mute in the darkness and the drifting snow. Could have been a movie about the early 1800s, except for the big, modern polished granite marker that had been erected on the Main Street side. They moved on … past the spot where she had jaywalked behind Regina because she didn’t have the fortitude to refuse to break the law …
“Recognize that?” said Momma, pointing to the right.
The snow was coming down so hard, it was hard to see it at first, but there it was, about two hundred feet from the road, on the upslope of the hill, looking as ghostly as the courthouse … the high school. Charlotte leaned forward, almost across Momma, and peered into the darkness and the snow. At first she felt nothing. There it was, that was all … There was the extension where the basketball court was, where the young woman who had held forth as valedictorian. There it was—it was just a building, a dark, dead building in the middle of a storm. The tears caught her unaware. They seemed to be pouring down from the sinuses beneath her cheekbones. Thank God she had a handkerchief. She stifled them by burying her head in it and feigning a coughing fit, and Daddy inadvertently helped by saying, “Look’t the motel.” Mo-tel. “All I see’s three automobiles.”
They were already beyond the town. The only lights now were the old pickup’s headlights reflecting off the snow, which was coming down in great gusts and spinning crazily before the dusky rusky forests.
“Well, good girl,” Momma sang out, “know where we’re at?”
Charlotte pretended to come awake with a start.
“Look familiar?” said Momma. “You been away for four whole months!”
Charlotte managed to croak out, “It’s good to be home, Momma,” whereupon she pressed her face against the shoulder of Momma’s rough work jacket so that Momma would just think she was being sweet and loving and not see the tears rolling down her cheeks.
She managed to hold herself together until they entered the house and went into the living room and Daddy clicked on the light … and there it was, the picnic table, only there was a nice, freshly pressed white tablecloth over it and an arrangement of pinecones, pine sprigs, and red holly berries in a little wicker basket in the middle of it. There were some light next-to-nothing bentwood chairs she hadn’t seen before. There was the Christmas tree, as usual. There were little holly wreaths, brilliant with the red berries—must have been six wreaths—hung about the room at eye level on the walls. That was something new. The floor had been waxed. Every square inch of the room was spick-and-span. Momma had done all this … for her. Daddy was already stoking the grate in the potbellied stove. Charlotte took a deep breath. The countrified odor of a room saturated over the years in coal fumes rushed in—suffused all of her, it felt like.
A burst of laughter and a strange bray of music—the TV set was on. On the screen—a man dressed in black with a pale, totally bald head shaped like a bullet clamped by big black earphones was standing, laughing at what must have been the funniest thing in the world and pressing both hands into some sort of electrified keyboard. The keyboard was making the braying sound. Buddy and Sam, of course; first things first; turn on the TV.
Daddy stood up from the potbellied stove and went over to the boys. “Hey, turn that off! It’s after midnight! This iddn’ TV time. It’s bedtime. The Sandman’s who you boys best be turning on.”
The Sandman … Charlotte couldn’t hold back any longer. She burst into tears, although quietly. Momma put an arm around her and said, “What’s wrong, little darling?”
Thank God, Daddy and Buddy and Sam were involved in the TV set and its imminent fate. Charlotte managed to stop crying, but she could tell her eyes were red, puffy, and bleary.
“It’s nothing, Momma. I’m just so tired. That bus ride … and I had to stay up so late studying all week …”
The TV set—off. Momma still had her arm around her, the good girl. Charlotte was ashamed to look at Daddy and her little brothers, because there was no hiding the fact that she had been crying.
Momma said, “She’s just tired.”
Jes tarred. It was all Charlotte could do to keep from crying again.
When she got into bed in her old room, that little five-foot-wide slot of a room, she lay there unable to sleep, which she knew would happen. Her mind was a machine turned up high, and it wouldn’t slow down. She kept thinking about the day, her trip back home, but not the way a calm person would, in terms of sequences in the flow of time or incidents. The whole day was like scenes on a stage—dark scenery, a forbidding backdrop for the … dreaded thing, which was closing in on her still—no exit, only the end, which was inevitable. When was Momma to learn that she was unclean, polluted beyond all redemption? When was Miss Pennington to learn that her special creation, the girl who was the glory of her career, anointed in her name to keep her eye on the future and create a glory that would light up the world—when was poor Miss Pennington to learn that her prize pupil had thrown away her future, wrecked it in four short months in the most sordid and juvenile way, besotted with a frat boy—a frat boy!—the epitome of all that is immoral, mindless, childish, cruel, irresponsible, affectless, and vile among American youth?
Perhaps she should tell everybody … everything … first thing in the morning and get it over with. But what would that change? These were not matters you “put behind you and moved on” from. She was no closer to knowing what to do than she had been at the bus stop in Galax.
The wind was howling now. Good. Please make this storm long and dark, dear Lord. If morning must come, let it be grim and gray. Let the snow pile deep and paralyze the world.
She lay there listening to the storm and trying not to feel her heartbeats, which she knew were too rapid again, and praying that the moaning and keening of the wind would put her to sleep at last. Would she ever be able to sleep again? Here in her old bed, the snug harbor … where Daddy used to get on his knees and lean over her and say, “Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy, safe, and secure—ahhh,” and she always fell asleep before he could complete the crooning three times, “Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy—”
She decided to chant it to herself. In a tiny, low voice she said, “Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy, safe, and secure—ahhh … Warm, toasty, cozy, comfy, safe, and secure—ahhh … Warm, toasty, cozy—”
She stopped and slid out from under the covers. It was freezing, but that was the least of her worries. She got on her knees beside the bed and closed her eyes and pressed her palms together and let her fingertips touch her chin. She said to herself in a very low voice:
“Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Bless Momma, Daddy, Buddy, and Sam and tell them, after—”
She paused. She wanted to get it right.
“—and after, dear Lord, you descend in flight and take a soulless one away this night …”
Charlotte remained stricken with insomnia throughout the storm, which began to let up around three or four a.m. She would have never known she had slept at all except for the fact that she had a dream shortly before she woke up. She was in the City of God, and it was unpleasant. Beyond that she couldn’t retrieve a thing.
Daylight created a blazing frame around the shades—whereas she had prayed for, counted on, heavy gray skies … as a shield. She could hear children romping in the snow. She got out of bed and pulled the shade back. The snow was a blinding white sheet of light that ran into the woods. There were Buddy and Sam and little Mike Creesey from just down the road, him and Eli Mauck, all of them bundled up in puffy quilted jackets that made them look like four hand grenades, playing some sort of game that had them feinting this way and that on either side of a tarpaulin-covered hulk out back.
She wanted to stay in her bed forever; but with the sun up that high, it must be well into the morning, and the dread of Momma having to come back and pry her out of bed and thereby sense how depressed she was—that was even worse than her dread of facing the world. She forced herself to rise and get dressed … in the tapered jeans and cardigan sweater she had brought from home to Dupont and worn exactly once. She hadn’t dared come home with the Diesels—on which she had blown twenty-five percent of her allowance for the semester. All were incriminating evidence … of her self-degradation. Her mind was racing again. Her head felt like the ashes from the coal grate.
She went into the kitchen and found Momma, who seemed to be puzzling over a recipe. Please, Momma, don’t say a word. Just keep on doing what you’re doing. You’re not obliged to make any fuss over me whatsoever. Only a girl who has experienced it herself has any idea of how conversations pain girls who are depressed. She vowed to summon up the willpower to act like a normal girl home for Christmas—but could she even remember?
Momma looked up from her book and smiled ever so cheerily and said, “Well! She is arisen! Did you have a good sleep?”
“I did”—dee-ud—said Charlotte, forcing a smile. “What time is it?”
“Oh … pert’ near ten-thirty. You slept nine and a half hours. Do you feel better?”
“Sure do,” said Charlotte. “I was so tired last night.” She slipped a little bit of down-home tarred into the word and then figured she’d establish a hedge against whatever might be … crushing … later on. “I still feel sort of … like woozy. I don’t know what the matter is. What are you fixing, Momma?”
“Remember once, when you were nine or ten—might a been your birthday—I been trying to recollect—and I fixed something I’d never fixed before—and you called it ‘mystery,’ and it was the first mixed vegetables you ever did like? You always wanted things plain—plain-long mashed potatoes, plain-long boiled snaps, and you hated things as had carrots in ‘em, but you liked ‘mystery’? Well, we haven’t had mystery for a long time, but I thought we oughta have it tonight, you being home.”
“Tonight?” Charlotte just said it as a response. Whether they would have mystery tonight or not was not something her mind could tarry on.
“I didn’t tell you last night, you were so tired”—tarred—“but tonight—” Momma halted and broke out a big smile. “You notice something new in the living room last night? I don’t think you did.”
The conversation was already such a burden, so heavy, inexplicably heavy, such an invasion of her mind, but Charlotte soldiered on. “No, I don’t think I did, either—oh, wait a minute. You mean the holly wreaths?”
“I reckon they are new,” said Momma, “but I’m talking about something bigger’n holly wreaths.” Big, beaming smile again. “Come on!” She headed toward the living room. Charlotte followed.
The light reflecting from the field of snow across County Road 1709 was dazzling. It lit up the living room brighter than Charlotte remembered ever seeing it. The very air in the room seemed to be lit. It was magical … but in a terrifying way to a depressed girl who sought refuge in light dimmed, in the snuffing out of the light—as they called it in Momma’s Church of Christ’s Evangel—the light at the apex of every human soul.
“You see it yet?” said Momma. “It’s practically under your nose!”
Snapped back into the here and now, Charlotte concentrated on—what was practically under her nose … But of course! The chairs, eight of them, old bentwood like the ones they used to have at the little tables near the soda fountain in McColl’s drugstore, with wooden seats and the simplest sort of bent rods of wood as the backs—all of them newly sanded, oiled, stained, and polished, by the looks of them, and drawn up close to the picnic table in neat ranks, so that the backs almost touched the white tablecloth.
“The chairs?” said Charlotte. “They really were here last night?” A wisp of memory of chairs from last night … during that terrible moment of tears and agony.
“The chairs and what else?” said Momma. “What do the chairs go with?”
Charlotte studied the chairs again. “The chairs are right up against the top of the picnic table? You took those big old benches off?”
“Look at it real close.”
Charlotte lifted up the end of the white tablecloth—and there was no picnic table at all, but a real table. She looked at Momma in a wondering way. Momma’s smile was as happy as a smile could be. Charlotte pulled the cloth back farther. It was a very plain old table, with no carved ornamentation and made of loblolly woods at best, the kind of table they used to refer to as a kitchen table. It must have actually been a worktable, because there was a line of drawers with metal pulls beneath the top on both sides. But like the chairs, it had been restored to within an inch of its never-elegant life, arduously waxed and polished until a certain luster had been coaxed out of its close, bland grain.
“Where’d it come from, Momma?”
“Over’t the Paulsons’ in Roaring Gap.” She proceeded to recount, with considerable pride, how the Paulsons had wanted Daddy to take it to the dump, but he hauled it home and worked on that table for mighty near a week solid and took it all apart until the whole thing was in pieces and then put it back together until it was true and steady as a rock and got new pulls for the drawers—the ones on them when he got it were all rusty—and sanded and oiled and waxed and polished the whole thing until it was a new table.
“And don’t tell him I told you, but you know why he did it? Because his little girl was coming home from college. He knew what you must’ve thought about eating on that picnic table. He wanted to surprise you. Your daddy dud’n say a lot, but he sees a whole lot.”
“What happened to the picnic table?”
“It’s out back where it ought to be. They’re made for outdoors.”
Whereupon Momma led her back to the kitchen door and pointed out the covered hulk out in the snow. Buddy was chasing Mike around it, and Sam and Eli were laughing at them. “It’ll be real nice to have it out there in the spring.”
As soon as they returned to the living room and Charlotte laid eyes on the “new” table again, she began weeping, without even realizing it was going to happen. She forced a smile through the flowing tears and threw her arms around Momma’s neck and sobbed out, “Oh, Momma, Daddy’s such a … good … person … and you’re such a … good … person … and you all are … so … good to me …” She buried her face beneath Momma’s chin.
Momma evidently didn’t know what to say, because she just held her close for a bit. Finally she said, “There’s nothing to cry about, my little girl. I think maybe part of you’s still my little girl.”
“A whole lot of me is, Momma. That’s one thing I learned, and I had to go all the way to Pennsylvania to learn it.” Pennsylvania. For some reason she didn’t want to utter the name Dupont. “I don’t care about everyone else. I just don’t want to let you down.”
“How could you let me down? I can’t figure out what’s going through your head, my good girl. Ever since you got off that bus last night, I’ve been wondering.”
Well—would there ever be a better moment to tell her everything, to confess to everything and beg forgiveness? But what would that solve—forgiveness? Momma would never be able to call her “my good girl” again, never look at her as the same person again. Knowing it would mortify her, no matter how she found out, what were the proper words for the confession? Could she possibly look Momma in the face while she told her—and watch the face of her mother change before her very eyes as she realized what her good girl had become? But this was the moment—
