All This Heavenly Glory (19 page)

D
ATELESS CHARLOTTE ANNE BYERS attributes her condition to her old-fashioned name and decides to drop the
Anne
the summer of her sixteenth year. At the beginning of her sophomore year, Charlotte Anne had made note that two girls in
her class of forty-eight kids had come back to school with suspiciously modified noses, and she saw the name change as a less
painful makeover. Plus, it was the dawning of the age of disco and seemed time for a change. However, in what she will later
refer to as “a freak renaming accident,” Charlotte somehow mutated into Charlie (which she was no longer so enamored of as
she had been when she was eight), and a permanent name change to Charlotte would only take hold several years in the future,
after her college graduation, when she stubbornly refused to answer to anything else.

Newly renamed Charlie Byers has officially been best (all-around) friends with Jenna Ritter since the middle of seventh grade,
when she was still Charlotte Anne and when Jenna, faring poorly in French class, was assigned to be Charlotte Anne’s French
“buddy.” Though Jenna will in following years report teasingly about what Charlotte Anne refers to as a “hesitation” to get
involved with such a project, Charlotte Anne stands by her story that it was not true that Jenna’s first call to Charlotte
Anne was greeted with a petulant “What?” It could be said that Charlotte Anne had some idea that she was cooler than Jenna,
which opinion would likely not have been corroborated by anyone else in their seventh-grade class, and any vague possibility
of truth in that notion would be erased after Charlotte Anne accidentally became Charlie and Jenna cut her hair into wings.

Jenna gets a lot of dates this fall, and the newly monikered Charlie, through no fault of Jenna’s, quickly becomes known as
Jenna’s sidekick, which, considering how graciously she’d taken Jenna on in the first place, Charlotte Anne/Charlie bitterly
resents (privately—in grade school, C.A./C. Byers had, in an effort to prevent anyone else from going away, perfected hiding
a broad range of feelings when her parents divorced, and after an initial three-week nonstop crying jag, ceased crying altogether).
Her resentment is not so much directed toward Jenna as it is toward the rest of the sophomore class, who, taken with Jenna’s
makeover and possibly also by her ceaselessly friendly demeanor, naturally assume that Charlotte Anne/Charlie is some kind
of charity case, or at least is a testament to Jenna’s boundless goodwill, seeing as how Jenna and Charlotte Anne/Charlie
both have the good sense to keep it to themselves that they still spend a lot of Saturday nights at home watching
Donny & Marie
as late as their senior year (by which time Charlotte Anne will mercifully have had her own makeover, cutting bangs [which
will be her signature hairstyle for the next fourteen years], losing fifteen life-changing pounds, and miraculously and simultaneously
being the first girl in school to wear Calvin Klein jeans [nothing more than good luck and in no way indicative of any kind
of trendsetting on her par]) while the rest of their class (anyone not at the Central Park band shell getting stoned) watches
The Midnight Special.

By midwinter of their sophomore year, Jenna Ritter is going out with senior Tim Flaherty, unquestionably the cutest guy to
hit their high school since the two Dougs (Greenberg and Stein) graduated the year before. Tim is a little different, though.
Tim is from Brooklyn, imported due to his strength as a swimmer, and his excellence in sports and good cheekbones propelled
him to the highest levels of popularity available at Davis Academy (small class size and the lack of a football team [and
mercifully, the lack of cheerleaders] seem to prohibit the typically vast divisions between cliques seen in larger high schools,
and though there are two significant distinctions in the class of “parkies” [who go to the park and get stoned] and everyone
else, the lines are often blurred, because otherwise the parties would be too small). Tim is really cute but it would be an
understatement to say that Jenna is significantly smarter. But even among Upper West Side high schoolers who fancy themselves
rather sophisticated in spite of their continued
Donny & Marie
watching,
smart
is way down on the list of desirable boyfriend qualities. Tim can do the hustle.

And actually, Charlotte Anne/Charlie attributes Tim’s sweet personality to his lesser intelligence and appreciates that he
does not consider her to be Jenna’s (inferior) sidekick, engaging in conversation with her on the rare occasion that she and
Jenna are not conjoined (a condition fostered by both girls in entirely individual fashion—for reasons never understood by
Charlotte Anne, Jenna will go out of her way to get them to dress like twins, and it did happen that on occasion they would
purchase identical or similar items accidentally [or on purpose with an agreement to forewarn the other if one was planning
to wear it any given day], but the truth is that Jenna will sometimes purposely wear the duplicate garment in spite of the
agreement, to Charlotte Anne’s great embarrassment, and if the idea of sixteen-year-olds dressing alike weren’t bad enough,
it is always Charlotte Anne who’s accused of being the copier. Charlotte Anne/Charlie drew up a written agreement after about
the fourth twin-dressing incident, but Jenna refused to sign, and Charlotte Anne was forced to retire several favorite items
from her wardrobe). She had also taken to registering for as many of the same classes as Jenna as she possibly could, with
the exception of AP Bio, which she would have absolutely failed. (Plus, in spite of being no particular kind of animal activist,
C.A. has a low tolerance for dissection of any kind.) Such is Tim Flaherty’s kindness that he eventually relays to Charlie
Byers (via Jenna Ritter) that he has a friend in Brooklyn asking if Jenna has any cute friends to fix him up with. Tim calls
Jenna who calls Charlotte Anne who reluctantly agrees to a blind date.

Several more rounds of phone calls occur negotiating the terms and conditions of the date. The date will take place in Brooklyn,
which outer borough Charlotte Anne had rarely traversed. Both girls have long-standing and to their minds completely reasonable
reservations about hanging out east of Central Park, north of 96th Street, or south of the Village, and the latter only occasionally.
They are Upper West Siders and see no good reason to leave. (Jenna does not make any effort to deny that she was in fact born
in Brooklyn, but prior to the season of Tim had not returned since her family moved to Manhattan ten years before.) Fortunately
for Tim Flaherty and his friend Chuck Farley, due to the recent release of
Saturday Night Fever,
Brooklyn has an exotic cachet as the home of disco, and Jenna and Charlotte Anne are not above the occasional adventure into
foreign boroughs, especially when the possibility of dates is present.

Also covered in the dating negotiations is mode of dress (casual), transportation (Jenna’s parents will drive them to Brooklyn,
the boys will drive them home), and does Charlie have any reservations about Chuck Farley having one testicle. (
No she does not;
Charlotte Anne tells Jenna who tells Tim who tells Chuck that it will be no problem at all that he has one testicle because
at no time will she be making contact with or even viewing any number of testicles, that evening or soon thereafter; that
he could have as many testicles as could possibly be concealed under his Sergio Valentes without suggesting themselves to
her in any way. Charlotte Anne never gets an exact transcript of the agreement relayed back to Chuck Farley but suspects Tim
was not that explicit.)

Charlotte Anne plans to sleep over at Jenna’s when they get back that night and has the foresight to bring two choices of
outfits just in case Jenna is planning to argue that dressing like twins just this one night would be perfectly fine, seeing
as how they’d be in Brooklyn, bringing two choices Jenna couldn’t duplicate anyway, finally selecting a gray cashmere V-neck
sweater she’d gotten on sale in the men’s department at Charivari. (The Calvins are, at this point, a given.) Jenna wears
a pair of slightly flared jeans with heart-shaped back pockets (also owned by C.A.), a maroon Dan-skin leotard, and a cotton
plaid shirt tied at the waist, a style she claims to have pioneered in spite of a very well-known photograph depicting Marilyn
Monroe in a tied-up gingham shirt, which Charlotte Anne suspects Marilyn Monroe herself did not pioneer. (Jenna would subsequently
begin a lifelong practice of almost patenting things, and gets a little better at it over the years, almost patenting the
E-ZPass.) Neither Charlotte Anne/Charlie nor Jenna wears a lot of makeup, but Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers are an indispensable
enhancement to their natural beauty. (During a rerun of
Donny & Marie,
they had rated all the girls in their class on a scale from “excellent” to “fair” and were the only ones in the “excellent”
category while most fell off the scale into “poor,” never questioning that they might not be home on a majority of Saturday
nights watching
Donny & Marie
if their excellence were universally recognized, always maintaining among themselves that they did so “by choice.” And that
they knew perfectly well that their excellence was not universally recognized, and that it was a travesty. Anyone with any
objectivity [not any of the girls] might argue that Melissa Myers is the prettiest girl in the class, but at 5’11” she wears
stiletto heels to school on a daily basis, in spite of most of their classes being conducted on the fourth or fifth floor
of a walk-up, and her senior quote will read “Too bad I’m just naturally better than all of you,” which doesn’t do much to
endear her to anyone outside of Studio 54 and thereby detracts from her looks somewhat.)

After a minor fender bender en route to Brooklyn, Dr. and Mrs. Ritter wait outside the Flahertys’ modest row house in Canarsie
until the girls wave goodbye, ushered in by an elderly woman in a housedress.

“The boys will be right up,” the woman says, seating herself on a well-worn recliner next to a TV tray cluttered with used
tissues and crossword-puzzle books. “They’re just down in the rec room fixing up. Tissue?” The housecoated woman offers the
Daitch-brand box in their direction. Tim Flaherty and Chuck Farley ascend from the basement smiling at the girls sleepily.
Tim has naturally kind of small eyes, but there is no question even for the uninitiated Charlotte Anne that the boys are stoned.
At this point, Charlotte Anne/Charlie Byers and Jenna Ritter are adamantly anti-drug (Charlotte Anne presently having no idea
that college will end up being vastly more unpleasant socially than high school and that she will begin abusing alcohol and
some downers almost immediately upon moving into her freshman dorm) and pride themselves on being “together” and having no
need to alter their minds in that sort of way. (Charlotte Anne, two Thanksgivings prior, had had the unfortunate experience
of having dinner at her stepgrandparents’ house in the Bronx; while meals there were always spectacular displays of Italian
American cooking, on this particular occasion her stepfather’s cousin produced a marijuana cigarette, inviting all present,
including Charlotte Anne, her mother and stepfather, the stepgrandparents, his mother, and his twelve-year-old son, to partake
of the substance. Charlotte Anne, her young stepcousin [removed some number of times, she never knew how people calculated
that], and step-great-aunt declined, and the ensuing dinner was an embarrassment from which she would never fully recover.
Highlights from the evening included her stepgrandfather dismissing the effects of the substance entirely on the basis of
his being a hard-core nicotine addict, his wife getting the giggles and wondering aloud why she hadn’t tried it sooner, saying,
“Pass the
bracciola,”
Charlotte Anne’s mother getting the giggles and hugging her daughter a lot, and the step-great-aunt running back and forth
from the kitchen screaming, “You’re all going to get brain damage,” “How could you offer that to my grandson!” and “You need
help! All of you!” Charlotte Anne was of a similar mind as her step-great-aunt except for the brain-damage part [further enhancing
her misery was that her mother and stepfather made some issue about her being “uptight,” urging her to “get loose,” which
created a nearly uncontainable rage inside her], but sat in stunned silence with her head practically in her broccoli rabe,
wondering how she ended up in some disastrous reverse of what was actually supposed to be going on with teenagers, and ruing
her earlier decision to stay off drugs as having led directly to this weird reversal, although she did not feel, at the time,
that partaking of the Thanksgiving marijuana with her family would stun them into a reverse reversal whereby they would be
transformed into parents who punish their kids for doing drugs and getting bad grades and having sex or whatever. Sixteen-year-old
Charlotte Anne Byers is certain that her destiny as the only child of the most bizarre family anywhere has been set, and that
she has no alternative but to hold fast to her previous anti-drug/sex/swearing stance [the latter of which is also rampant
in her household], which lasts until about her second week of college.) Mind-altering, in conjunction with Chuck Farley’s
non—Tim Flaherty—resembling-in-any-way looks, does not bode well for romance. Chuck Farley is neither hideous nor outstanding,
and to his benefit he is wearing brown jeans and a Shetland sweater, the only evidence of his disco orientation being a pair
of marshmallow shoes—brown vinyl with white platform soles —but unfortunately for him, C.A. Byers has had a lifelong big thing
about bad shoes, the wearing of which she finds personality-telling and worse for Chuck Farley, in this particular instance,
than having one testicle. Tim is actually wearing white flared polyester pants and a black shirt with four or five buttons
open, redeemed only by his not having any visible chest hair, and his being super cute.