Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“My best friend so far is a girl from Cincinnati, Ohio, named Bettina, who lives on my floor. We met one night when each of us was having a hard time sleeping and decided to go down to the Common Room on the first floor and read for a while. Bettina is a very cheery and energetic person and not shy at all. If she wants to meet somebody, she just pipes right up and says hello.

“Generally I sleep very well. The only problem is that Beverly goes to bed really late”—starts to write 3, 4, even 5 a.m., instead writes—“2 a.m. sometimes, and it wakes me up when she comes in.”

She slumped back in the chair once more and stared out the window a few light-years into the darkness. This, she figured, was it. Right here was the point where she either cried out or she didn’t cry out. Momma, only you can help me! Who else do I have! Listen to me! Let me tell you the truth! Beverly doesn’t just return in the dead of the night and “go to bed really late”! She brings boys into bed—and they rut-rut-rut do it—barely four feet from my bed! She leads a wanton sex life! The whole place does! Girls sexile each other! Rich girls with fifteen hundred SATs cry out, “I need some ass!” “I’m gonna go out and get laid!” The girls, Momma, the girls, Dupont girls, right in front of you! Momma—what am I to do…

But she stiffened and swallowed it all. Just one little mention of…sex…and Momma the Wrath of God would head east in the pickup, and haul her back to Sparta, and the whole county would hum like a hive: “Charlotte Simmons has dropped out of Dupont. Poor thing thinks it’s immoral there.”

So she writes, “By the same token, when I get up in the morning at my usual time, it wakes Beverly up. We are getting used to each other, however, even though we don’t have many opportunities to spend time together. There seem to be a lot of her prep school friends here, and she also spends a lot of time with”—starts to write her boyfriend(s), instead crosses out the also and writes—“a lot of time with them. I’m not sure she has ever heard a Southern accent before.” She strikes out the previous sentence. Despite what a couple of people have said, she essentially has no regional accent. “Beverly and I get along fine, however.

“You wouldn’t believe how important sports are here! The big football and basketball stars are celebrities. Everybody on campus knows them by sight. There were four basketball players in the French course I started out in, and they were so tall they made everybody else feel like a midget. I met one of them. He was very friendly and complimented me on my performance in the class. The athletes like to pretend they don’t care about academic work, but I think this one really is interested, even though he acts as if he isn’t.” Dying to write He immediately invited me to grab some lunch, which is the prelude to grab some ass—but doesn’t take even one step down that road.

“Living in a coed dorm was strange at first. Pretty soon, though, the boys just seem like neighbors ‘across the way.’ ” Dying to write, By now I hardly notice them except when Beverly brings her hookups up to the room to give them some fresh meat. Actually writes, “That doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot to learn about Dupont, but every freshman is in the same boat. The freshmen girls go around in little ‘herds’ ”—puts quotation marks around herds, doesn’t want to characterize them to Momma and Daddy as dumb animals, especially since that is what they are, dumb, frightened, rich rabbits, chronically, desperately, in heat—“so that they won’t feel both confused and lonely. Confused is bad enough!

“So everything is going along pretty much the way I hoped it would. I have to pinch myself to make sure this isn’t just a dream and I really am a student at one of the best universities in the country.” Thinks: where one and all make Channing and Regina look like harmless four-year-olds. “Dupont isn’t Sparta, but I’ve already come to believe that growing up in Sparta has advantages that people I’ve met from places like Boston and New York have never had.” Would love to write, They don’t realize that not everything you say has to be ironic or sarcastic and cynical and sophisticated and sick, virulent, covered in pustules, and oozing with popped-pustular sex. If only there were a way to slip that sentiment into a letter to Momma—without her exploding! Settles for “Some things money can’t buy.”

“I didn’t mean to make this letter so long. I should have written you before now to bring you up to date. Give my love to Buddy and Sam; also to Aunt Betty and Cousin Doogie. Tell them I miss them and that everything is going fine.

I love you,

Charlotte.”

She slumped back again…There it was—one long, well-intentioned lie.

For a long time she just sat in the chair and looked out the window in something close to a trance. The floodlights down below sent shadows up the sides of the library tower as if they weren’t shadows at all but great washes of watercolor. The undersides of the compound arches and decorative out-croppings caught the light here and there. What if she called Miss Pennington? She would be a lot more objective than Momma. She was wise as well as intelligent…Miss Pennington…She tried to imagine it—but what did Miss Pennington know about sex on the other side of the mountain? Nothing. How could she know? She was an old, homely spinster who had lived all her life in Sparta. Charlotte immediately chided herself for thinking that way about someone who had been so good to her. Yet it was true. “Spinster”—would anybody at Dupont even be aware of the word? No, the sex-obsessed know-it-alls of Dupont would sneak through Miss Pennington’s blood/brain barrier and swim through her arteries and veins like liver flukes until they found evidence, no matter how far-fetched, of lesbianism or tran-sexuality or something else disgusting. They would roll her in their muck, all the while piously “defending” her right to her “orientation.” What hypocrites they were! Still, what did—how could—Miss Pennington know about it all? And she already knew what Miss Pennington would say: “Get busy, start a project, ignore them.” Be yourself, be independent, march to a different drummer, swim against the current—they’ll admire your courage, the way they do here—Oh, Miss Pennington! You don’t understand. In Sparta that was so easy. It was easy maintaining my pose, looking down my nose at the Channings and the Reginas all day with a Little Scholar’s sneer as they called me an “uptight cherry” and a lot of other things, and asked me—Regina once said it to my face—when I was going to “give it up.” It was easy, because at nightfall the skirmish was over, and I went home to Momma and Daddy and Buddy and Sam. Oh, I was superior to them, too, even to Momma. How backward I knew my family to be by the time I was thirteen! But that poor old shack out County Road 1709 was always there; it was mine. It reeked of kerosene and a coal grate, but no one could touch me, no one would try, no one could look Daddy in the face when his eyes went cold, no one dared provoke Cousin Doogie to the point where he bared his fangs. Once he threw rocks—“thhhhhhoo rrrocks,” as he spluttered it out later—at big Dave Cosgrove when Dave winked a sarcastic wink and said, “Reckon you ain’t fixing to give me no cherry on ice, hunh, Charlotte?”…rocks might’near big enough to kill him. Then Cousin Doogie stood there with another rock in his hand and said, “Try talking that way again, fat boy. I ain’t rammed a spit up a pig’s ass in a long time.” Dave, who must have weighed eighty pounds more than Cousin Doogie, just slunk away. That was why he went limp when he crashed the party after commencement. There was Cousin Doogie.