âand how was she to seize it? “I'm fine, Momma.” She gulped back some tears. “It's just this past week. If I didn't know better, I'd say it's been ⦠awful, Momma. I've been under so much stress?” She regretted “stress.” She knew Momma would spot it right away for the trendy term it was. What was stress, when you got right down to it, but just plain weakness when it came to doing the right thing? “We had tests all weekâand I never got half the sleep I neededâI've been lonesome, Momma. I never thought I'd get lonesome. Miss Pennington was always telling me how independent I am and how unique and everything. I'm not unique, Momma. I get lonesome like anybody else. I had to go all the way to Pennsylvania to realize how many folks I've always had around me here at home, folks who will do about anything to help me.”
Momma disengaged from the embrace, although she kept an arm around Charlotte's waist. She smiled and gestured toward the table Daddy built. “Then you're going to love tonight.”
“Tonight?” A shadow passed over Charlotte's face, but Momma didn't notice that.
“Tonight we're going to get a chance to see just how good Daddy's
table really is. Iâwe've invited some folks over for supper, folks I know you'll want to seeâ”
Horror at the thought: “You
have
?”
Momma didn't pick up the horror, merely the surprise. “Just a few special folks ⦠Miss Pennington ⦠Laurie ⦠Mr. Thoms and Mrs. Thoms. They're all
dying
to hear about Dupont and all.”
“No
,
you can't
,
Momma!”
It just burst forth from her throat before she even considered how it might sound.
Momma looked at her, baffled.
“Not tonight, Momma! I just got home. I need a little timeâ” She couldn't dream up what for.
“But you
know
you like them all. I invited them
special.”
Charlotte realized that her reaction had revealed exactly what she wanted to hide. On the other hand, that didn't relieve the pain of such a prospect at all. With a manufactured calm she said, “I know, Momma, but you never
asked
me or anything.”
“Well, darling, I'm real sorry. I was thinking it would be a nice surprise. Laurie? Miss Pennington? Mr. Thoms? You want to tell me why you're so upset?”
“I'm not upset, Momma. The only thing is ⦔ She couldn't think up what the only thing was. She couldn't dream up a serviceable lie. It occurred to her that never before had she had to dream up lies in this house, other than little white lies. On the other hand, deep down she realized that lying was not foreign to her nature. Anyoneâor certainly sheâwho has been praised so highly so regularly and for so long keeps within her the means of patching up punctures on the road. “I guess I was surprised, that's all.”
She knew she didn't have it in her to ask Momma to call it off. But ohmygod, Laurie and Miss Pennington. She wasn't actress enough to fool them even if there were nothing serious to fool them about.
How could she possibly get through it? The machine was racing again, punched up to maximum power with the heat on HIGH. It didn't slow down even when it had stretches of nothing to do. It dug out and inflamed shortcomings that had been in a dormant state. At graduation Mr. Thoms had announced her as the winner of Alleghany High's prizes for French, English, and creative writing. At supper tonight there would be nothing to indicate to him that she had kept any special interest in these fields at Dupont. She knew there had always been a self-centered side of her character that showed itself publicly as thoughtlessness in her treatment of others.
After last night it was obvious that she should have brought Buddy and Sam some kind of souvenirs of Dupont for Christmas ⦠T-shirts or, if they cost too much, photographs of Treyshawn Diggs and André Walker, any little thingâor for Momma and Daddy, for that matter, maybe Dupont coffee mugs or something ⦠but had she? Ohhhh no; and there was no way to get them now. Instead, she'd have to get the boys the usual piece of junk from Kyte's ⦠which always looked like it came from Kyte's.
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 houseâthe 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 â¦
the finale â¦
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 vehicleâ1709 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 supperâshe insisted on calling it supper, because having four people over for “dinner” sounded suspiciously like a partyâthat 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 fuckedâ
there! there you had it
âgetting her pop-top poppedâ
by a known twisted serial sex offender, a callous frat boy who then broadcasts the delicious news to the entire Dupont University campusâ
and it fucking freaked him out because she was a virgin!
In a delirium of juvenile boyfriend madness she had sacrificed everythingâvirginity, dignity, reputation, plus her ambitions, her mission, her promises and obligations to everyone who had stood by her, educated her, served as her mentorâand 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.
Â
Â
The boysâBuddy and Sam and their friends Mike Creesey, and Eli Mauckâcame into the kitchen from outside, breathing hard, giggling, taunting each otherâ“Here's the way you throw!” Sounded like Buddy.
“Buddyâ” 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 â¦
How could it be? The half-hour segment was already over, used, spent fruitlesslyâand 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 encounteredâi.e., when they are severely depressed.
The depressed girl wants only to disappear. The notion of “looking her best”âshe 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 partiesâmerely had folks over for supperâMomma 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 mistakenâthe wonderful “mystery” that had been the delight of her childhoodâand 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 excitementâwhich 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 friendsâespecially 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 hardworkingâassuming they could find work within a fifty-mile radius of Spartaâand 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 theeâfor 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?
Presently, a rap on the front door, where Daddy had rigged up a homemade knocker. Charlotte's heart was kicking up again, beating far too fast. Daddy opened the doorâ
âthe beaming face of Mr. Thoms (the way he smiled at her at graduation as she mounted the stage!). As he shook hands with Daddy, you could see the plaid liner of his raincoat, his navy blazer and necktie, his dark wool pantsâthe thought flashed through Charlotte's mind: how unusual wool pants wereâyou could go for weeks at Dupont without laying eyes on a pairâand he backed up against the doorway to usher his wife inâvery pretty she was, a brunette, beautiful in a way, a strong but perfectly formed nose, lips that seemed to be curved into a continual flirtatious smile, drowsy eyes, rather heavily made up for Sparta, but she had a chilly look about her, a lean, grim set to her jaws and the faint vertical line of an ever-incipient frown in her forehead. Her clothes were not at all unusual or fashionable, a plain slate-blue dress and a magenta cardigan sweater with a somewhat prissy line of pearl buttons down the front. Momma was greeting the Thomses with great animation.