—for fear that cool Channing Reeves and the others might think she was enjoying all the applause and might resent her even more.
Now the applause receded, and the moment had come.
“Mr. Thoms, members of the faculty, alumni and friends of the school”—her voice was okay, it was steady—“parents, fellow students, fellow classmates…”
She hesitated. Her first sentence was going to sound awful! She had been determined to make her speech different, not merely a string of the usual farewell sentiments. But what she was about to say—only now did she realize how it would sound—and now it was too late!
“John, Viscount Morley of Blackburn”—why had she started off with such a snobby name!—“once said, ‘Success depends on three things: who says it, what she says, and how she says it. And of these three things, what she says is the least important.’ ”
She paused, just the way she had planned it, to let the audience respond to what was supposed to be the witty introduction to the speech, paused with a sinking heart, because her words had all but shrieked that she was an intellectual snob—
—but to her amazement they picked up the cue, they laughed appropriately, even enthusiastically—
“So I can’t guarantee this is going to be a success.”
She paused again. More laughter, right on cue. And then she realized it was the adults. They were the ones. In the green rectangle of her classmates, a few were laughing, a few were smiling. Many—including Brian—looked bemused, and Channing Reeves turned to Matt Woodson, sitting next to him, and they exchanged cool, cynical smirks that as much as said, “Vie count wha’? Oh gimme a break.”
So she averted her eyes from her classmates and looked beyond to the adults and soldiered on:
“Nevertheless, I will try to examine some of the lessons we seniors have learned over the past four years, lessons that lie beyond the boundaries of the academic curriculum—”
Why had she said lie beyond the boundaries of the academic curriculum, which she had thought was so grand when she wrote it down—and now sounded so stilted and pompous as it fell clanking from her lips—
—but the look on the faces of the adults was rapt and adoring! They looked up in awe, thirsty for whatever she cared to give them! It began to dawn on her…they saw her as a wonder child, a prodigy miraculously arisen from the rocky soil of Sparta. They were in a mood to be impressed by whatever she cared to say.
A bit more confident now, she continued. “We have learned to appreciate many things that we once took for granted. We have learned to look at the special environment in which we live, as if it were the first time we had ever seen it. There is an old Apache chant that goes, ‘Big Blue Mountain Spirit, the home made of blue clouds, I am grateful for that mode of goodness there.’ We seniors, centuries later, are grateful, too, grateful for the way…”
She knew it all so completely by heart, the words began to roll out as if on tape, and her mind began to double-track…Try as she might to avoid it, her eyes kept drifting back to her classmates…to Channing Reeves…Why should she even care what Channing and his circle of friends and admirers thought of her? Channing had come on to her twice, and only twice—and why should she care? Channing wasn’t going to any college in the fall. He’d probably spend the rest of his days chewing and spitting Red Man while he pumped gasoline at the Mobil station or, when he lost that job from shiftlessness, working out in the Christmas-tree groves with the Mexicans, who did all the irksome toil in the county these days, a chain saw in his right hand and the nozzle of a fertilizer spreader in his left, bent from the weight of the five-gallon tank of liquid fertilizer strapped on his back. And he’d spend his nights rutting around after Regina and girls like her who would be working in the mail room at Robertson’s…
“We have learned that achievement cannot be measured in the cold calculations of income and purchasing power…”
…Regina…she’s pathetic, and yet she’s part of the “cool” crowd, the “fast” crowd, which shuts Charlotte Simmons out because she’s such a grind, such a suck-up to the faculty, because she not only gets perfect grades but cares about it, because she won’t drink or smoke pot or go along for drag races at night on Route 21, because she doesn’t say fucking this and fucking that, because she won’t give it up…above all, because she won’t cross that sheerly dividing line and give it up…
“We have learned that cooperation, pulling together as one, achieves so much more than going it alone, and…”
But why should that wound her? There’s no reason. It just does!…If all those adults who were now looking up at her with such admiration only knew what her classmates thought of her—her fellow seniors, for whom she presumed to speak—if they only knew how much the sight of all those inert, uncaring faces in the green rectangle demoralized her…Why should she be an outcast for not doing stupid, aimless, self-destructive things?
“…than twenty acting strictly in their own self-interest…”
…and now Channing is yawning—yawning right in her face! A wave of anger. Let them think whatever they want! The simple truth is that Charlotte Simmons exists on a plane far above them. She is not like them in any way other than that she, too, happened to grow up in Sparta. She will never see them again…At Dupont she will find people like herself, people who actually have a life of the mind, people whose concept of the future is actually something beyond Saturday night…
“…for as the great naturalist John Muir wrote in John of the Mountains, ‘The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains—mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature’s workshops.’ Thank you.”
It was over. Great applause…and still greater applause. Charlotte remained at the podium for a moment. Her gaze swept over the audience and came to rest on her classmates. She pursed her lips and stared at them. And if any of them was bright enough to read her face—Channing, Regina, Brian…Brian, from whom she had hoped for so much!—he would know that her expression said, “Only one of us is coming down from the mountain destined to do great things. The rest of you can, and will, stay up here and get trashed and watch the Christmas trees grow.”
She gathered up her text, which she hadn’t looked at once, and left the stage, and for the first time she let herself bathe in the boundless admiration, the endless applause, of the adults.
The Simmonses had never before had a party out at their place on County Road 1709, and even now Charlotte’s mother wasn’t about to call this a party. Being a staunch member of an up-country denomination, the Church of Christ’s Evangel, she regarded parties as slothful events contrived by self-indulgent people with more money than character. So today they were just “having some folks over” after commencement, even though the preparations had been under way for three weeks.
It was a beautiful day, and thank God for that, Charlotte said to herself, thinking mainly about the picnic table, which was over next to the satellite dish. The folks were all out back here in the yard in the sunshine, although it wasn’t exactly a yard, more like a little clearing of stomped dirt with patches of wire grass that blended into the underbrush on the edge of the woods. The curiously sweet smell of hot dogs cooking was in the air, as her father manned a poor old spindly portable grill. The folks could help themselves to hot dogs from the grill and potato salad, deviled eggs, ham biscuits, rhubarb pie, fruit punch, and lemonade from off the picnic table. Ordinarily the picnic table was inside the house. If it had rained and all these people—Miss Pennington, Sheriff Pike, Mr. Dean the postmaster, Miss Moody, Mrs. Bryant, Mrs. Cousins who had painted the Grandma Moses–style mural in Mrs. Bryant’s shop—if they had had to cram themselves inside the house with all her kinfolk and her father’s and mother’s friends and had discovered that the only table the Simmons family had in their house to eat on was a picnic table, and not only that, the kind that has a bench—a plain plank, built in on either side in place of chairs—Charlotte would have died. It was bad enough that Daddy was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Everybody could get a good look at the tattoo of a mermaid that covered the meaty part of his right forearm, product of a night on the town when he was in the army. Why a mermaid? He couldn’t recall. It wasn’t even drawn well.