Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Charlotte’s eyes misted over. She wanted to throw her arms around this big, gruff woman’s neck, but she didn’t. What if Momma happened to come back around the corner and see her?

Daddy, Momma, Charlotte, Buddy, and Sam, just the five of them, had supper at the picnic table, which Daddy and Doogie had managed to move back into the house. It weighed a ton. It was a pretty morose suppertime, since Daddy, Momma, and Charlotte couldn’t forget what had happened earlier, and the boys sensed their mood.

As soon as they finished eating, while they were all still sitting on the picnic table’s plank benches, Daddy turned on the TV. The evening news was on, and so Buddy and Sam ran off to play outside. Some correspondent or other wearing a safari jacket had a microphone in his hand out in front of a hut, talking about something that was going on in the Sudan. Charlotte was too depressed to care, and she got up and went back to her room, which was in fact nothing but a five-foot-wide enclosure that had been partitioned off from one of the house’s two bedrooms when Buddy was born. She propped herself up on the bed and started reading about Florence Nightingale in a book called Eminent Victorians she had taken out from the library on Miss Pennington’s recommendation, but she couldn’t get interested in Florence Nightingale, either, and she began aimlessly studying the dust dancing in a shaft of light from the sun, which was so low in the sky it hurt her eyes to look out the window. Out there, about now, all over the county, people would be talking about what happened at Charlotte Simmons’s this afternoon. She just knew it. A rush of panic. All they would have heard would be Channing Reeves’s version. He and Matt and Randall and Dave went over to visit Charlotte after commencement, and it turned out the Simmonses were having a party and didn’t want them there, and so they sicced the sheriff on them, and Charlotte’s daddy threatened Channing with a big grill fork and said he’d castrate him if he ever tried to have anything to do with his precious genius daughter—

Just then Daddy called from the front room, “Hey, Charlotte, come here. You wanna see this?”

With a groan Charlotte got herself up off the bed and returned to the front room.

Daddy, still sitting at the picnic table, gestured toward the TV set. “Dupont,” he said, smiling at her in a way that was obviously intended to dispel the gloom.

So Charlotte stood by the picnic table and looked at the TV. Yes, it was Dupont, a fact she noted with an empty feeling. A long shot of the Great Yard with the breathtaking library tower at one end and a mass of people in the center. Charlotte had been there only once, for the official tour during the application process, but it wasn’t hard to recognize the famous Yard and the stupendous Gothic buildings around it.

“…in his appearance today at his alma mater amid the pomp and ceremony of the university’s one hundred and fifteenth commencement,” the voice on the TV was saying. A much closer shot of a vast audience. Up a broad center aisle a procession of mauve robes and mauve velvet academic hats was marching toward a stage erected in front of the Charles Dupont Memorial Library, a structure as grand as a cathedral, with a soaring tower and a three-story-high compound arch over its main entrance. At the head of the procession a figure in mauve carried a large golden mace. The pageantry of it made Charlotte blink with wonder, despite her conviction that all was surely ruined. A closer shot…the stage…mauve robes from one side to the other against a backdrop of gaudy medieval banners. In the center, a podium made of a rich-looking polished wood with an intricately carved cornice, bristling with microphones, and at the podium, also in mauve robes, a tall, powerful-looking man with square jaws, an intense gaze, and thick white hair. He’s orating…You can see his lips moving and his arms gesturing and his voluminous mauve sleeves billowing, but you can hear only the voice-over of a broadcaster: “The California governor struck what is likely to be the keynote of his all but certain bid for the Republican presidential nomination next year—what he calls ‘re-valuation,’ and what his harsher opponents call ‘reactionary social conservatism.’ ” A closeup of the Governor as he says, “Over the next hundred years, new sets of values will inevitably replace the skeletons of the old, and it will be up to you to define them.” The face of the broadcaster filled the screen: “He called upon the current generation of college students to create a new moral climate for themselves and for the nation. The governor arrived in Chester two days ago in order to spend time with students before speaking at today’s commencement.”

The evening news switched to the accidental beheading of two workers in a sheet metal factory in Akron, but Charlotte was still forty miles southeast of Philadelphia, in Chester, Pennsylvania, at Dupont…That wasn’t the local news, that was the national network news, and that wasn’t just any commencement speaker, it was a famous politician the whole country was talking about, and he was a Dupont alumnus speaking there, in the Great Yard!—robed in Dupont mauve!—calling for a new moral order to be created by this generation of college students—her generation! A surge of optimism revived her depleted spirits. Sparta, Alleghany High, cliques, hookups, drinking, resentments, tarantulas—Miss Pennington was right. All that was something happening up-hollow in the mountains at dusk as the shadows closed in, something already over and done with, whereas she…

“Just think, Charlotte,” said Momma with a smile as earnestly encouraging as Daddy’s, “Dupont University. Three months from now, that’s where you’ll be.”

“I know, Momma. I was thinking the exact same thing. I can hardly believe it.”

She was smiling, too. To everybody’s relief, including her own, the face she had on was genuine.

Three men in polo shirts and khakis were sitting high up in the cliffs of seats, so high that from down here on the court their faces looked like three white tennis balls. Below them sat thousands—thousands—of people who had somehow—but how?—heard about what was going on and were fast filling the first twenty or thirty rows—off-season in a vast half-lit basketball arena—on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in August.

Only a few were students. The fall semester didn’t officially begin for another two weeks. Biggie-fried fatties wearing baseball caps and mustaches that drooped down below their lip lines at the corners and work shirts with their first names in script on the breast pockets were making themselves at home in seats that cost $30,000 apiece for Dupont’s fifteen home games during the season. They could scarcely believe their good fortune…dream seats in the Buster Bowl…and you could come walking right on in.

On the court, lit up by the LumeNex floodlights right above it, all that was going on was nothing but ten young men, eight of them black and two white, playing a “Shirts and Skins” pickup basketball game. All five Shirts were wearing shorts and T-shirts, but no two shirts or shorts were identical. The only thing uniform about this bunch was their size. They were all well over six feet tall, and two, one black and one white, were seven feet tall or close to it. Anybody could see that. The upper arms and shoulders of all ten players were pumped up bodybuilder-style. The trapezius muscles running from their necks to their shoulders bulged like cantaloupes. They were sweating, these bodybuilt young men, and the mighty LumeNex lights brought out their traps, lats, delts, pecs, abs, and obliques in glossy high definition, especially when it came to the black players.