Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

The dishes arrived with astonishing speed—prompting Daddy to give Mr. Amory a cheery, comradely smile, as if to say us fellas are in this thing together, aren’t we.

The dishes were…big.

“Jes what I told you, iddn’ it, Jeff!” Daddy was now beaming at “Jeff,” as if good times among comrades didn’t come much better than this.

Each plate was covered, heaped, with skillet-fried food. Daddy launched into his cream-lava-ladled Sam’s Sweet Chickassee with gusto. Mrs. Amory inspected her fried chicken as if it were a sleeping animal. No more smiles, no conversation.

So Momma, apparently recovered from the Oh, shit incident, said to Mr. Amory, by way of filling the conversational vacuum, “Now, Jeff, you have to tell us what Sherborn’s like. I been real curious about that.”

A smile of tried patience: “It’s a…just a little village, Mrs. Simmons. The population is…oh…perhaps a thousand?…perhaps a little more?”

“Go ’head and call me Lizbeth, Jeff. That’s whirr you work?”

A frown of tried patience: “No, I work in Boston.”

“Whirr at?”

Patience at the breaking point: “An insurance company. Cotton Mather.”

“Cotton Mather! Oh, I’ve heard a them!” They-em. “Tell us what you do at Cotton Mather, Jeff. I’d be real interested.”

Mr. Amory hesitated. “My title is chief executive officer.” As if to cut off all queries regarding this revelation, he quickly turned to Daddy. “And Billy, tell us what you do.”

“Me? Well, mainly I take care”—keer—“of a house some summer people got over’t Roaring Gap? Used to be I operated a last-cutting machine over’t the Thom McAn factory in Sparta, but Thom McAn, they relocated to Mexico. Maybe you know about these things, Jeff. I keep hearing on TV that this ‘globalization’ is good for Americans. I don’t know why they think they know that, because nobody ever tried it before, but that’s what they keep telling us. All I know is, it ain’t particularly good for you if you live in Alleghany County, North Carolina. We lost three factories to Mexico. Martin Marietta came in and built a plant in 2002. They only employ forty people, but thank God for’m anyway. That’s Mexico, three, Alleghany County, one.”

Momma said, “Billy.”

Daddy smiled sheepishly. “You’re right, Lizbeth, you’re right as rainwater. Don’t let me git started on ’at stuff.” He looked at Mrs. Amory. “You know, Valerie, one thing my daddy told me. He told me, ‘Sonny’—he never called me Billy, he called me Sonny—‘Sonny, never talk about politics or religion at the dinner table. You either gon’ rile ’em up or else clean bore’m to death.’ ”

Mrs. Amory said, “Sounds like a wise man, your father.”

Daddy said, “Oh, ’deed he was, when he had a notion.”

Part of Charlotte was proud of Daddy for not caring to put the slightest gloss on the way he made a living. He was perfectly comfortable with who he was. Part of her cringed. She had a general idea what a chief executive officer was, and Cotton Mather was so big, everybody had heard of it.

Mr. Amory had no response to Daddy’s remarks except to nod four or five times in a ruminating mode.

To rescue a drowning moment, Mrs. Amory said, “Charlotte, I feel like we know hardly anything about you. How’d you happen to come to—to choose Dupont? Where’d you go to secondary school?”

“Secondary school?”

“High school.”

“In Sparta. Alleghany High School it’s called. I had an English teacher who told me to apply to Dupont.”

“And they gave her a full scholarship,” said Momma. “We’re real proud of her.” Charlotte could feel her cheeks turning red, and not because of modesty. Momma said, “Whirred you go to high school, Beverly? How many high schools they got in Sherborn?”

Beverly glanced at her mother. Then she said to Momma, “Actually, I went to school in another town, called Groton.”

“How far away was ’at?”

“About sixty miles. I was a boarder.”

Charlotte didn’t know exactly what Beverly was saying to Momma, but somehow the way she had put it to her was patronizing.

“Jeff,” said Daddy, chowing down the last forkful of his gigantic plate of Sam’s Sweet Chickassee, french fries, and tomato slabs, “this was a great idea of yours! You need sump’m that’ll stick to your ribs if you’re gon’ do what we’re fixing to do, drive all the way back to Sparta, North Carolina, tonight. One thang they know at these Sizzlin’ Skillets, they know how to give folks enough to eat.”

From Mrs. Amory’s plate only one thing had disappeared—a morsel of chicken breast, less than an inch square, from where she had peeled back the fried skin. The vast plate remained a mountain of food. Warily, gingerly, Beverly put a piece of hamburger about the size of a nickel into her mouth and chewed it slowly for a very long time. Without a word, she got up and left the room. In a few minutes, she came back, her face absolutely ashen. Her mother gave her a look of concern—or censure.

Charlotte barely noticed. A single phrase, drive all the way back to Sparta, North Carolina, tonight had hit her with a force she would never have dreamed possible—not her, not Sparta’s prodigy whose future would be filled with great things on the other side of the mountains.

A little later on, once the Amorys and Simmonses had gone their separate ways, Charlotte stood in the parking lot of the Little Yard next to the pickup truck as Momma and Daddy said their good-byes.

Momma was smiling and saying, “Now, you remember what I said, honey, don’t you forgit to write. Everbuddy’s gonna want to know ’bout—”

Without a word Charlotte threw her arms around Momma and nestled her head next to Momma’s, and her tears began rolling down Momma’s cheek.

Momma said, “There, there, there, my good, good girl.” Charlotte clung to Momma for dear life. Momma said, “Don’t you worry, little darling, I’ll be thinking of you every minute of the day. I’m real proud of you, and you’re gonna do real well here. But you know what I’m the proudest of? I’m the proudest of who you are, no matter whirr you’re at. I ’spec’ there’s ways Dupont iddn’ gon’ be good enough for you.”

Charlotte lifted her head and looked at Momma.

“There’s gon’ be folks here wanting you to do thangs you don’t hold with,” said Momma. “So you jes’ remember you come from mountain folks, on your daddy’s side and my side, the Simmonses and the Pettigrews, and mountain folks got their faults, but letting theirselves git pushed into doing thangs iddn’ one uv’m. We know how to be real stubborn. Can’t nobody make us do a thang once we git hard set against it. And if anybody don’t like that, you don’t have to explain a thang to’m. All you got to say is, ‘I’m Charlotte Simmons, and I don’t hold with thangs like ’at.’ And they’ll respect you for that.” They-at. “I love you, little darling, and your daddy loves you, and no matter whirr you’re at in the whole wide world, you’ll always be our good, good girl.”

Charlotte laid her head back on Momma’s shoulder and sobbed softly. She could see Daddy standing right there, and she took her tears to him and threw her arms around his neck, which clearly startled him. Daddy didn’t hold with public displays of affection. Between sobs she whispered into his ear, “I love you, Daddy. You don’t know how much I love you!”

“We love you, too,” said Daddy.

He also didn’t know how much it would have meant to her if he could have only brought himself to say I.

Charlotte kept waving, and Momma stuck her head out the window and looked back and kept waving, until the poor, sad, brave pickup truck with the fiberglass camper top disappeared beyond the shade trees. Finally Charlotte turned around and headed back toward the stone fortress alone.