Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“I’m Bettina,” said the girl.

“Charlotte.”

They were members of the first generation to go through life with no last names.

The girl looked at Charlotte with a slightly amused expression and said, “Where are you from?”

“Sparta, North Carolina.”

“Don’t know Sparta. I thought I detected a little bit of the South, though. Where’d you go to school?”

Charlotte stiffened. She had regarded herself as the cosmopolitan of the Alleghany High student body, and she fancied her speech was nearly accent-free. But all she said was, “In Sparta, at Alleghany High School.” Then, to shift the subject away from Sparta, Alleghany High, and Southern accents, “What about you?”

“I’m from Cincinnati. I went to Seven Hills School,” said Bettina. “You always wear pajamas?”

The very same once-over Beverly’s snobbish friend had given her! And the boys and girls in the hallway! What was wrong with pajamas, for God’s sake? They were certainly better than a pair of plaid boxer shorts with an open fly! But before she could work up a good head of resentment—

—a shriek. A girl came running from the entry hall into the Common Room. She shrieked again. She was slim and blond and wore shorts that showed off her perfect legs, and the shrieks were ones that any girl on earth could have interpreted. They were the cries of the female of the species feigning physical fright at the antics, probably physical, of the male. Sure enough, running in after her came a tall, lean boy with short brown hair and little bangs. Moving like an athlete, he cornered her against the back of a couch and threw his arms around her as if to drag her back into the hall. As she squirmed, she cried, “No! No! Put me down, Chris! You can’t make me! I’m not going to!”

The boy said, “You have to! That was the deal, dude!”

He dragged her out of the room. It was almost…choreographic, this gorgeous, lissome girl and this gorgeous, tall, lean, athletic boy and their charade of a struggle. The two departed Edgerton House in melodious combat.

Charlotte and Bettina sat there without saying a word, but Charlotte knew they were both thinking the same thing. The perfect her intertwined with the perfect him—while they sat marooned in this lugubrious desert of dried-out leather upholstery, the two sexiles.

Part of Charlotte wanted to get out of the place immediately, even if it meant walking around aimlessly until dawn. She refused to be lumped with this…well…homely girl.

Then she faced up to it: leaving was the last thing in the world she was about to do. She could live with the business about the accent. She could forgive the implied insult regarding pajamas. She could roll with those punches and a dozen more like them. She was dislodged, rooted out of her own bed, thrown out of her own room, discarded, adrift, helpless, deracinated practically, but at least she was not alone. At least, for however brief an interval, she had a sunny, friendly face to look into. She was eye to eye with a human being whose fate she shared—and never mind how demeaning or miserable the fate—someone she could talk to…even open up to, assuming she could find the courage—

If only she could call Miss Pennington…or Momma…Hello, Miss Pennington? Momma? You know Dupont, on the other side of the mountains? The Garden of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, where great things are to be done? Well, Miss Pennington, Momma, I plumb forgot to ask: did anybody ever tell you about being sexiled? About being marooned in a public lounge in the middle of the night so that your roommate, so-called, can rut like a pig with some guy she just picked up?

It seemed terribly important to keep the conversation with Bettina going. She ransacked her brain and finally came up with “Who were they?”—nodding toward the corner where the perfect guy had swooped up the perfect girl.

“I don’t know who he is,” said Bettina, “but she’s a freshman. I saw her the other two times I was sexiled, too. She’s always up late and got some guy chasing her. She’s hot, I guess, but she’s terribly, you know, all Oooo Oooo Oooo Oooo Oo.” Bettina cocked her head and opened her eyes wide and fluttered them in the baby coquette fashion. “If she wanted to swap legs, I wouldn’t say no, though.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” said Charlotte. But she said it in a dull, flat manner, because she was merely being agreeable. Deep down inside she wanted to say, “Then wait’ll you see mine. I used to run cross-country in the mountains.”

That revived her a bit. So gutted, disemboweled, scoured out had she been, by loneliness, she had all but forgotten the Force: I am Charlotte Simmons.

“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.