Just give her time. There would be many more things she would root out to torture herself with. She was in that state.
All day she manufactured reasons why she shouldn’t leave the house—the snow…town would be a mess (of people she didn’t want to see…they would be ringing out like bells with questions about “Dupont”)…on a day like this she should just do some reading to prepare for finals…the finale…She should be on hand in case the angel decided to come during the day…She puzzled over what would look like an accident…If she stumbled and fell before a car or, better, a big high pickup barreling along 1709, fell in such a way that the driver himself wouldn’t even be able to tell that she “threw herself” in front of his vehicle…But nobody was barreling along 1709 today in a pickup truck or any other vehicle—1709 hadn’t been plowed yet, and even the biggest pickups were just inching along like everybody else.
Fortunately, Momma was so busy getting ready for the supper—she insisted on calling it supper, because having four people over for “dinner” sounded suspiciously like a party—that she didn’t pay all that much attention. When Charlotte told her she was studying for her final exams, it didn’t seem odd. The truth was, Charlotte couldn’t read in her present state. To a depressed girl, words on a page become irrelevant, impertinent, as do images on a screen. She had brought home a barely two-hundred-page book Mr. Starling had recommended, The Social Brain, by Michael Gazzaniga, who was famous for studies of patients in whose brains the neural pathways connecting the two halves of the brain, the corpus callosum, had been severed. A month ago she had found Gazzaniga’s work fascinating.
Sitting on the “easy chair,” she opened the book at random. “Why is it the more a human (brain) knows, the faster it works, while the more an artifact (computer) knows the slower it works?” The sentence did not connect with her mind. She would find no reason to answer the question. What on earth did it matter whether the brain worked faster than the computer, or vice versa? Who in God’s name had the luxury of caring? How irrelevant it was! What did it have to do with her getting fucked—there! there you had it—getting her pop-top popped—by a known twisted serial sex offender, a callous frat boy who then broadcasts the delicious news to the entire Dupont University campus—and it fucking freaked him out because she was a virgin! In a delirium of juvenile boyfriend madness she had sacrificed everything—virginity, dignity, reputation, plus her ambitions, her mission, her promises and obligations to everyone who had stood by her, educated her, served as her mentor—and tonight she would have to look Miss Pennington in the eye.
She sought to slow down the passage of time by breaking the afternoon into half-hour segments. For the next half hour I have nothing to fear. No one will invade my life. I can do what I want, which is to lie back in this chair and do nothing, not even think. (Fat chance of that, of course. She knew the machine would not slow down for a moment, would not cool down even this much in the next half hour any more than it had in the last half hour.) I have the entire half hour, and after that, another one, but I’m not going to look ahead. Ahead, in due course, about four-thirty, the sun will go down, but I do not exist in the period from now to four-thirty. I live only in this half hour, which is entirely removed from the rest of time.
The boys—Buddy and Sam and their friends Mike Creesey, and Eli Mauck—came into the kitchen from outside, breathing hard, giggling, taunting each other—“Here’s the way you throw!” Sounded like Buddy.
“Buddy—” That was Momma.
“You throw that way your ownself, Pants on Fire Girl!”
“Buddy! You boys take your boots off before you come in the house. Look at you!”
“Awww…”
Buddy, Sam, Mike Creesey, Eli Mauck…the machine was racing so fast…racing so fast so fast so fast…
How could it be? The half-hour segment was already over, used, spent fruitlessly—and she was ten minutes into the next! There weren’t many left. By five o’clock, there might as well have been none. The guests were invited for “supper” at six, and in Alleghany County, people were on time.
Ordinary vanity disappears when a girl is depressed. In fact, for most girls, that is the only time after they reach puberty that that particular unnatural state is ever encountered—i.e., when they are severely depressed. The depressed girl wants only to disappear. The notion of “looking her best”—she doesn’t deserve to look her best. Looking her best is a mockery of what she really is. She put on the same old print dress she graduated in (and first went to the Saint Ray house in!), taking the precaution of letting the hem out, which brought it down practically to her knees.
Momma called out from the kitchen, “Charlotte! You about ready?”
“Yes, Momma!” It irritated Charlotte to have to report in for duty like that. For someone who didn’t give parties—merely had folks over for supper—Momma was awfully nervous. The rich smell of roast turkey was in the air…and mashed sweet potatoes whipped up with mashed carrots, plus white raisins, if Charlotte wasn’t mistaken—the wonderful “mystery” that had been the delight of her childhood—and the sharp odor of the vinegar that would be poured over chopped onions to put on the boiled snap beans…The smells brought back all the wonderful Thanksgivings and Christmases of her childhood, those moments of special excitement—which she now experienced all over again with the poisonous residue of nostalgia. How much more completely delusional could those peaks of childish well-being have been? What warning did the little genius have that her first stop beyond the olfactory heaven that Momma created would lead in a few frantic blinks straight to sheer rot, sheer animal rutting, to spiritual as well as physical debauchery, to the present moment, when she dared not show her shamed face to the world, not even to lifelong friends—especially to lifelong friends?
Momma said, “Now, Charlotte, I’m counting on you to remind me that Mr. Thoms’s wife is named Sarah, not Susan. I’m always about to call her Susan. Don’t see her very often.”
Momma was smiling, but Charlotte could see that she was nervous. She was insecure about having the Thomses over. There were no what you might call social classes in Alleghany County; there were just respectable people and people who weren’t respectable. Respectable people were churchgoing, devout, took education seriously even if they weren’t well educated themselves, didn’t go out drinking where people could see them drinking, were hardworking—assuming they could find work within a fifty-mile radius of Sparta—and were neighborly in a good old country way.
Nevertheless, within the ranks of the respectable, there were different levels of status, and wealth and position did not go unnoticed. Mr. Thoms had no wealth, or none that anybody knew of, but he had position. He was a good-natured man who always acted like Just Folks, and he had taken a real interest in Charlotte; but his wife, Sarah not Susan, was something of an unknown quantity. Neither was from hereabouts, but Mr. Thoms was from Charleston, West Virginia, and he fit right in. Both were college graduates with M.A. degrees. Mrs. Thoms was hired right away, as soon as Martin Marietta opened their plant. She was from Ohio or Illinois or one of those states and was considered a bit standoffish, or reserved, depending on how much it mattered to you. Charlotte would have bet anything that Mrs. Thoms’s presence was what Momma was nervous about.
Headlight beams swept over the two front windows and then slid to the side as a car pulled into the driveway.
“Somebody’s here,” Momma sang out cheerily…and began looking about the room as if giving it one last inspection. Cheerily, yes, but it wasn’t like Momma to simply say the obvious. Charlotte took it as another sign that Momma was nervous. But what was nervous compared to petrified, doomed? Who would it be? Please God, don’t let it be Laurie and Miss Pennington! Laurie was supposed to pick up Miss Pennington and drive her over. Let it be Mr. and Mrs. Thoms! They know less! Please, God, just one more segment, I beg of you, just fifteen minutes! Fifteen minutes with only the Thomses to deal with! I beseech thee—for so little, for only fifteen minutes with those who are only mildly threatening, which is to say, ever-so-slightly more innocuous! Is that too much to ask?