Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Charlotte didn’t know whether to sit here with her feet up—or run for it. But oh God, she couldn’t sit here with her feet up forever. So in a frenzy she stood up, hoisted her pajama bottom and put her bathrobe back on, picked her toilet kit up off the floor, departed the cubicle, rushed to the row of basins. She had to wash her hands! She heard a toilet flush and then the clack of somebody sliding a cubicle side-bolt lock open. Then another.

“Hey! Yo! You didn’t come by to see, dude.”

“You’re weird. Why don’t you hang it up on the wall over your bed?”

Same deepened manly voices…Charlotte lifted her eyes, and in the mirror she could see two boys—mere boys! Neither looked more than fifteen or sixteen! Babies dropping their voices a couple of octaves in a desperate desire to sound like men! Each had a can of beer in his hand. But that was not allowed! Both were bare from the waist up. One wore a towel around his waist, only that and flip-flops. He had such a tender coating of baby fat over his cheeks, neck, and torso, it made Charlotte think of diapers and talcum powder. The other wore khaki shorts and boots. He was the leaner of the two but still at that mooncalf stage in which the nose looks enormous because the chin hasn’t caught up with it yet. He threw his head back, lifted the can to his mouth, tilted it almost straight up, drank for what seemed like forever with his Adam’s apple pumping up and down like a piston, then jackknifed his body and shook all over, as if in ecstasy, and cried out, “IT TASTES SO GOOD WHEN IT HITS YOUR LIPS!”

The baby face in the towel laughed and laughed.

They were walking straight toward Charlotte—and wound up at basins not far from hers. They clanked their cans of beer down on the narrow shelf of glass. Charlotte began drying her hands on her towel. With peripheral vision she could tell the baby-fat, baby-faced boy was looking at her.

“Hi,” he said. “Nice bathrobe.”

She ignored him.

“Seriously,” said the other, the thin one with the teenager nose. “Awesome plaid. What’s your clan?”

The baby face laughed and laughed and said, “Kmart.”

Then the outsize nose laughed and laughed.

Charlotte ignored them both and picked up her toilet kit. Her face was burning. She knew it must be scarlet.

The boy with the nose said behind his hand in a mock whisper, “No capeesh. Must be a foreign student. The Scotch count as foreign students, don’t they?”

Laughter, laughter, laughter.

Just before she turned to leave, Charlotte saw in the mirror a girl coming toward the basins. She was clad in a towel, too, but had somehow wrapped it around her body from just beneath her arms to just above her knees. There was no longer the sound of a shower running. The girl had a chubby, freckled face and wet, reddish hair plastered against her head and hanging down her back.

When she reached the basins, the baby-fat boy said, “Hi, there. We’re looking for some friendly conversation and a little sympathy.”

The girl barely even glanced at them. She turned to the mirror and brought her forefingers to one eye and spread the lids apart as if looking for something lodged in it. Still looking straight ahead, she said, “I hope you find it.”

As of the moment Charlotte left the bathroom, the boys hadn’t thought of a comeback, and the girl was ignoring them.

On the way back to the room, Charlotte realized her heart was banging away. She was appalled…Coed Bathroom had seemed like a plausible, if uninviting concept, the way the Amorys had talked about it. But this was what it was! The vulgarity, the rudeness, the impudence, the virtual nudity—people parading around in towels—and drinking—barely two hours after the resident assistant Ashley’s assurances there would be no alcohol in this building, much less public drunkenness…Now Charlotte was more than appalled. She was frightened. How was she supposed to live like this?—stripped of all privacy, all modesty…Her heart kept banging away…How could this be real? This was Dupont…Channing, Matt, Randy Hoggart, and Dave Cosgrove at their drunkest would never be so vulgar.

Once inside her room, Charlotte quickly changed back into her denim shorts and her blouse, picked up her toilet kit and her towel, and went down to the Common Room. She remembered a powder room near the entrance. In the Common Room…quite a jolly burble of laughs and voices…the furniture massed in the center of the room had been moved, back to its original places, presumably. Plenty of boys and girls, her classmates, were sprawled on the leather couches and easy chairs or standing around them, having a merry time…making friends…Charlotte was too distraught to even imagine joining in…Suppose people saw her going into the powder room with a toilet kit and a towel? What would they think—or assume?

It was about as cramped as a powder room could be. She carefully locked the door and took a seat on the toilet, only to find that her excretory and egestive systems had shut down, totally. She got up. She would bathe as best she could manage. She took off her blouse and her bra. There she was in the mirror…a wretched, panicked little half-naked creature…She had forgotten to bring a washcloth. She wet one end of the towel in the tiny basin, tried to use the squirt-by-squirt soap dispenser on the wall to lather it, creating a mess mainly, and washed her armpits—

Someone was trying to open the door—only to find it locked—

Charlotte tried to speed up her primitive toilette. She needed to lower her shorts and panties, but the room was so small that if she bent over, her bottom pressed into the wall. So she stood up straight and tried to wriggle her clothes off straight down—

The doorknob began turning again, this time several times, in…an accusatory way? An ostentatious groan of a sigh came from the other side of the door.

From just outside the door a girl’s voice said, “Anybody in there?” Not very nicely, either.

Thoroughly frazzled, Charlotte said, “Not yet!”

The voice said, “Not yet?”

“I mean I’m not through yet!”

Long pause. Then the voice said, “How obvious is that?”

But she had to brush her teeth! Had to!…Finally she managed to squeeze some toothpaste onto her toothbrush. She began furiously brushing her teeth.

The voice from the other side said, “Are you really brushing your teeth in there?”

That did it. Charlotte snapped. “Shut up!” she cried. “Leave me alone! Stop sniffing at the door!”

Silence…prolonged silence…It was hard to believe, but the voice had shut up. Nevertheless, Charlotte hurried. The whole thing was too much. How long could she use a powder room as her bathroom? Maybe if she got up really early every day and brought a washcloth…

She emerged from the powder room carrying a toilet kit and a wet towel. Standing back four or five feet was a small angry girl, arms crossed over her chest. She stared sullenly at the towel and the toilet kit. She had a wide face, olive skin, a grim visage, and a mane of very long, very thick dark hair parted down the middle. As Charlotte rushed past her, the girl muttered, “Why don’t you, like, move in?”

At long last, Charlotte sat propped up against the pillow on her bed, at peace, reading a paperback of a novel Miss Pennington had recommended, Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. As the pages went by, Ethan and Mattie’s unrequited passion became more and more poignant. Involuntarily, Charlotte found herself pulling her knees up closer to her chest and wanting to close her bathrobe more protectively about her pajamas. Poor Ethan! Poor Mattie! You just wanted to help them, tell them what they could do. It’s all right for you to embrace—to declare your love—to leave that frigid little New England town where you’re trapped!