Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Charlotte had forced herself to smile, but she was aware that the smile didn’t involve the rest of her face. And God knows how her face must have looked. She hadn’t been able to sleep for two nights now. Maybe she should have gone to the Health Center. Maybe they would have put her in the hospital…Maybe God would have come to take her away in the night. She couldn’t imagine a better solution.

Daddy as well as Momma had immediately begun spraying her with questions about Dupont. Their blissful assumption that she would be as excited as they were to talk about it—that she would react with the same joy of triumph with which she had approached Dupont in August—struck her as naïve and irritating. How irritating, how childish it was of them to stand there with big smiles, displaying enthusiasm concerning something they knew absolutely nothing about. In other words (which she never said to herself), how uncool was that?

It made her extremely nervous, all these questions. How was Beverly? Were they getting along? What was living in the dorm like? They were so proud of her grades, even though they had just known she would set Dupont on fire. What courses did she like best? Then Buddy chimed in and asked her, teasingly, if she had a boyfriend. And Daddy said, teasingly, he wanted to hear the answer to that one.

Only Momma noticed that her little girl was deflecting the questions, saying she just didn’t know, even acting dumb, but Momma obviously wanted the weariness of the ten-hour trip to account for it. She wasn’t yet ready to consider the fact that her little genius might be moody or, as it happened, worse than moody.

The fact was, Charlotte had not minded the length and the grind of the trip at all. The trip had been the sort that people refer to as “endless.” The depressed person wants trips to be literally endless, because as long as she is in transit from one point to another, her worries, her despair, are removed from where they originated…and where they will inevitably resume. Under the circumstances, what could be better than being in a soft reclining chair in a spaceship with strangers, a spaceship in that it moves fast and makes you feel detached from earth (way up here in this chair) as you behold, from behind big sheets of thick plate glass so darkly tinted that no one outside can even see you, blissfully alien landscapes drifting by…Please, God, let it last forever—or else come take me away in the night.

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.