Now Charlotte could feel herself smiling like a six-year-old who has just stopped crying. She kept smiling and nodding and expressing profound thanks, and she really hadn’t meant to take up her time on the very first night.
Charlotte stood up, and Ashley stood up and put her arm around her shoulders as she walked her to the door. “I’m sorry, tell me your name again?”
“Charlotte Simmons.”
“Well, Charlotte, I’ll tell you something. This isn’t Sparta, North Carolina, but I think you’re gonna find it isn’t Sodom and Gomorrah, either.”
By eight-thirty, back in room 516 once more, Charlotte felt as tired as she had ever been in her life. She had been up since three o’clock this morning and on edge the entire time. Watching “Jeff” and “Valerie” of Sherborn, Boston, and Mather Insurance and “Billy” and “Lizbeth” of County Road 1709, Sparta, and the next thing to unemployed, fend with the problem of breathing the same air—had been draining, excruciating. She decided to take a shower, get in bed, read for a bit, and then go to sleep.
Her heart sank. My God…take a shower? In a coed bathroom? The thought was mortifying, yet she had no choice. She changed into her pajamas, her slippers, and her Scottish plaid polyester flannel bathrobe, picked up her toilet kit and her towel, screwed up her courage, and headed down the corridor. Things were quiet, thank God. On the way she nodded tentatively at a girl and then a boy, each alone and looking as lonesome as she felt.
She entered the bathroom slowly and softly, as if stealth was of the essence. It was a large, windowless, feebly lit room with rows of weary old yellowing white basins and urinals, gray sheet-metal toilet cubicles, narrow shower stalls with old mauve-gone-russet curtains for privacy…One of the showers was running…Other than that, the place seemed to be miraculously empty. Perhaps if she hurried—into a toilet cubicle. She had been sitting down no more than fifteen seconds when she thought she heard a faint grunting sound. Then—a prodigious pig-bladdery splattering sphincter-spasmed bowel explosion, followed by, in rapid succession, plop plop plop and a deep male voice—“Oh fuck! Splashed right up my fucking asshole!”
Filthy! The crudeness, the grossness, the vulgarity—above all the fact that there was a boy or a man inhere…egesting…no more than three or four cubicles down the row from her!
“Shit—a—brick!” said a deep male voice in a cubicle only slightly farther away. “What the fuck you been eating, Winnie—month-old sushi?” He made a mocking vomiting sound. “You’re fucking…morbid, dude. I need a gas mask.”
Sure enough, a nauseous, putrid, gaseous odor was in the air.
Charlotte lifted her legs and pressed her feet against the door, lest these brutes see her slippers in the space beneath the door or the walls and become aware of her presence.
“Don’t be so fucking heartless,” said the first voice. “My asshole’s cold. That was a fucking bull’s-eye.”
The second one laughed. “You’re a human disaster area, Winnie, is what you fucking are.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. That was a terrible performance, dude! Terrible! You want to see a perfect, noiseless turd? I mean perfect? Just swing on by here before you leave. I won’t flush it.”
“And you know what you are, Hilton? You’re a pervert.”
“Don’t try to talk your way out of it. You got to come by here and learn how to take a shit.”
Charlotte didn’t know whether to sit here with her feet up—or run for it. But oh God, she couldn’t sit here with her feet up forever. So in a frenzy she stood up, hoisted her pajama bottom and put her bathrobe back on, picked her toilet kit up off the floor, departed the cubicle, rushed to the row of basins. She had to wash her hands! She heard a toilet flush and then the clack of somebody sliding a cubicle side-bolt lock open. Then another.
“Hey! Yo! You didn’t come by to see, dude.”
“You’re weird. Why don’t you hang it up on the wall over your bed?”
Same deepened manly voices…Charlotte lifted her eyes, and in the mirror she could see two boys—mere boys! Neither looked more than fifteen or sixteen! Babies dropping their voices a couple of octaves in a desperate desire to sound like men! Each had a can of beer in his hand. But that was not allowed! Both were bare from the waist up. One wore a towel around his waist, only that and flip-flops. He had such a tender coating of baby fat over his cheeks, neck, and torso, it made Charlotte think of diapers and talcum powder. The other wore khaki shorts and boots. He was the leaner of the two but still at that mooncalf stage in which the nose looks enormous because the chin hasn’t caught up with it yet. He threw his head back, lifted the can to his mouth, tilted it almost straight up, drank for what seemed like forever with his Adam’s apple pumping up and down like a piston, then jackknifed his body and shook all over, as if in ecstasy, and cried out, “IT TASTES SO GOOD WHEN IT HITS YOUR LIPS!”
The baby face in the towel laughed and laughed.
They were walking straight toward Charlotte—and wound up at basins not far from hers. They clanked their cans of beer down on the narrow shelf of glass. Charlotte began drying her hands on her towel. With peripheral vision she could tell the baby-fat, baby-faced boy was looking at her.
“Hi,” he said. “Nice bathrobe.”
She ignored him.
“Seriously,” said the other, the thin one with the teenager nose. “Awesome plaid. What’s your clan?”
The baby face laughed and laughed and said, “Kmart.”
Then the outsize nose laughed and laughed.
Charlotte ignored them both and picked up her toilet kit. Her face was burning. She knew it must be scarlet.
The boy with the nose said behind his hand in a mock whisper, “No capeesh. Must be a foreign student. The Scotch count as foreign students, don’t they?”
Laughter, laughter, laughter.
Just before she turned to leave, Charlotte saw in the mirror a girl coming toward the basins. She was clad in a towel, too, but had somehow wrapped it around her body from just beneath her arms to just above her knees. There was no longer the sound of a shower running. The girl had a chubby, freckled face and wet, reddish hair plastered against her head and hanging down her back.
When she reached the basins, the baby-fat boy said, “Hi, there. We’re looking for some friendly conversation and a little sympathy.”
The girl barely even glanced at them. She turned to the mirror and brought her forefingers to one eye and spread the lids apart as if looking for something lodged in it. Still looking straight ahead, she said, “I hope you find it.”
As of the moment Charlotte left the bathroom, the boys hadn’t thought of a comeback, and the girl was ignoring them.
On the way back to the room, Charlotte realized her heart was banging away. She was appalled…Coed Bathroom had seemed like a plausible, if uninviting concept, the way the Amorys had talked about it. But this was what it was! The vulgarity, the rudeness, the impudence, the virtual nudity—people parading around in towels—and drinking—barely two hours after the resident assistant Ashley’s assurances there would be no alcohol in this building, much less public drunkenness…Now Charlotte was more than appalled. She was frightened. How was she supposed to live like this?—stripped of all privacy, all modesty…Her heart kept banging away…How could this be real? This was Dupont…Channing, Matt, Randy Hoggart, and Dave Cosgrove at their drunkest would never be so vulgar.
Once inside her room, Charlotte quickly changed back into her denim shorts and her blouse, picked up her toilet kit and her towel, and went down to the Common Room. She remembered a powder room near the entrance. In the Common Room…quite a jolly burble of laughs and voices…the furniture massed in the center of the room had been moved, back to its original places, presumably. Plenty of boys and girls, her classmates, were sprawled on the leather couches and easy chairs or standing around them, having a merry time…making friends…Charlotte was too distraught to even imagine joining in…Suppose people saw her going into the powder room with a toilet kit and a towel? What would they think—or assume?