Mrs. Amory said, “Sounds like a wise man, your father.”
Daddy said, “Oh, ’deed he was, when he had a notion.”
Part of Charlotte was proud of Daddy for not caring to put the slightest gloss on the way he made a living. He was perfectly comfortable with who he was. Part of her cringed. She had a general idea what a chief executive officer was, and Cotton Mather was so big, everybody had heard of it.
Mr. Amory had no response to Daddy’s remarks except to nod four or five times in a ruminating mode.
To rescue a drowning moment, Mrs. Amory said, “Charlotte, I feel like we know hardly anything about you. How’d you happen to come to—to choose Dupont? Where’d you go to secondary school?”
“Secondary school?”
“High school.”
“In Sparta. Alleghany High School it’s called. I had an English teacher who told me to apply to Dupont.”
“And they gave her a full scholarship,” said Momma. “We’re real proud of her.” Charlotte could feel her cheeks turning red, and not because of modesty. Momma said, “Whirred you go to high school, Beverly? How many high schools they got in Sherborn?”
Beverly glanced at her mother. Then she said to Momma, “Actually, I went to school in another town, called Groton.”
“How far away was ’at?”
“About sixty miles. I was a boarder.”
Charlotte didn’t know exactly what Beverly was saying to Momma, but somehow the way she had put it to her was patronizing.
“Jeff,” said Daddy, chowing down the last forkful of his gigantic plate of Sam’s Sweet Chickassee, french fries, and tomato slabs, “this was a great idea of yours! You need sump’m that’ll stick to your ribs if you’re gon’ do what we’re fixing to do, drive all the way back to Sparta, North Carolina, tonight. One thang they know at these Sizzlin’ Skillets, they know how to give folks enough to eat.”
From Mrs. Amory’s plate only one thing had disappeared—a morsel of chicken breast, less than an inch square, from where she had peeled back the fried skin. The vast plate remained a mountain of food. Warily, gingerly, Beverly put a piece of hamburger about the size of a nickel into her mouth and chewed it slowly for a very long time. Without a word, she got up and left the room. In a few minutes, she came back, her face absolutely ashen. Her mother gave her a look of concern—or censure.
Charlotte barely noticed. A single phrase, drive all the way back to Sparta, North Carolina, tonight had hit her with a force she would never have dreamed possible—not her, not Sparta’s prodigy whose future would be filled with great things on the other side of the mountains.
A little later on, once the Amorys and Simmonses had gone their separate ways, Charlotte stood in the parking lot of the Little Yard next to the pickup truck as Momma and Daddy said their good-byes.
Momma was smiling and saying, “Now, you remember what I said, honey, don’t you forgit to write. Everbuddy’s gonna want to know ’bout—”
Without a word Charlotte threw her arms around Momma and nestled her head next to Momma’s, and her tears began rolling down Momma’s cheek.
Momma said, “There, there, there, my good, good girl.” Charlotte clung to Momma for dear life. Momma said, “Don’t you worry, little darling, I’ll be thinking of you every minute of the day. I’m real proud of you, and you’re gonna do real well here. But you know what I’m the proudest of? I’m the proudest of who you are, no matter whirr you’re at. I ’spec’ there’s ways Dupont iddn’ gon’ be good enough for you.”
Charlotte lifted her head and looked at Momma.
“There’s gon’ be folks here wanting you to do thangs you don’t hold with,” said Momma. “So you jes’ remember you come from mountain folks, on your daddy’s side and my side, the Simmonses and the Pettigrews, and mountain folks got their faults, but letting theirselves git pushed into doing thangs iddn’ one uv’m. We know how to be real stubborn. Can’t nobody make us do a thang once we git hard set against it. And if anybody don’t like that, you don’t have to explain a thang to’m. All you got to say is, ‘I’m Charlotte Simmons, and I don’t hold with thangs like ’at.’ And they’ll respect you for that.” They-at. “I love you, little darling, and your daddy loves you, and no matter whirr you’re at in the whole wide world, you’ll always be our good, good girl.”
Charlotte laid her head back on Momma’s shoulder and sobbed softly. She could see Daddy standing right there, and she took her tears to him and threw her arms around his neck, which clearly startled him. Daddy didn’t hold with public displays of affection. Between sobs she whispered into his ear, “I love you, Daddy. You don’t know how much I love you!”
“We love you, too,” said Daddy.
He also didn’t know how much it would have meant to her if he could have only brought himself to say I.
Charlotte kept waving, and Momma stuck her head out the window and looked back and kept waving, until the poor, sad, brave pickup truck with the fiberglass camper top disappeared beyond the shade trees. Finally Charlotte turned around and headed back toward the stone fortress alone.
As she walked through the great arched entrance, a boy and a girl, presumably freshmen, too, passed her, chatting away. The arch was so deep, their words echoed off the stone. Did they already know each other, or had they become friends this very day?…I’m Charlotte Simmons…You are unique. You…are Charlotte Simmons…Momma’s and Miss Pennington’s words gave her a spurt of confidence. She had faced envy and resentment and social isolation at Alleghany High, hadn’t she…and been imperiously uncool…and gone her own way…and never let any of it hold her back in her destined ascension to one of the finest universities in the world. And nothing was going to hold her back now…nothing. If she had to do everything by herself, then she would do everything by herself.
But God…she felt so alone.
Beverly was already there when Charlotte reached room 516. They decided on who was going to have which side of the room—the two sides were identical, identically bare and spare—and they set about making up their beds and unpacking. What a lot of…things…Beverly had! She left her computer, fax machine, television, refrigerator, microwave, and the rest of her electrical devices in their cartons, but she unpacked more pairs of shoes than Charlotte could even imagine one girl owning—at least a dozen—a dozen or more sweaters, most of them cashmere, skirts, skirts, skirts, shirts, shirts, shirts, camisoles, camisoles, camisoles, jeans, jeans, jeans…Charlotte possessed not even the smallest of Beverly’s various types of machines. For a computer, a necessity at Dupont, Charlotte was going to have to depend entirely on the so-called computer clusters in Dupont’s main library. Rather than a dozen or more pairs of shoes, she had three: a pair of loafers, some sturdy leather sandals—“Jesus sandals,” Regina Cox used to call them—and the pair of Keds she had on.
Beverly chatted with Charlotte in a dutiful fashion. Nothing she had to say bore even a hint of the excitement of a girl heading out with another girl, her new roommate, from another part of the country, on a four-year adventure at a great university. She spoke to Charlotte from an amicable distance. She spoke with the inflections of someone who was showing an interest. When Charlotte mentioned how fascinating the French courses listed in the Dupont catalog sounded, Beverly’s comment was that the French are so resentful of Americans these days you can like feel it in the air when you’re around them. They were majorly boring, the French.
Beverly had only halfway squeezed her clothes into the closet and the bureau when it was time to go downstairs for the house meeting. The two hundred or so boys and girls in Edgerton House convened in what was known in Dupont (and British) parlance as the Common Room. It was a little bit run-down, but its proportions and decor bespoke grand origins. The ceiling must have been fifteen or sixteen feet high, with all sorts of dark wooden arches Charlotte didn’t know the name for converging in the center. Huge luggage-brown leather sofas and easy chairs, an incredible number of them, had been arranged in a vast semicircle upon the room’s acres of Oriental rugs. More leather easy chairs remained in ornate reading bays with parchment-shaded wrought-iron floor lamps. The freshmen of Edgerton House, most of them in shorts, either crammed themselves into the leather seats or stood behind this great upholstered crescent in several rows. Others sat behind them on the edges of long oaken monk’s tables that had been brought in for the meeting. As soon as she and Charlotte entered the room, Beverly drifted away to the side, where she stood with two girls she obviously already knew. Well, so what…Charlotte already felt entirely separate from her roommate, and trotting along after her at this meeting wouldn’t change that. Actually, standing in the center amid so many other girls and boys made her feel almost…whole again. They certainly did not look intimidating. In fact, with all their shorts, flip-flops, and T-shirts, they looked like large children. Surely this room must be filled with people just like herself, bright young people anxious because they knew so little of what was to come and exhilarated by the very fact that they had come this far. They were Dupont men and women—starting with this moment.