All This Heavenly Glory (12 page)

The summer after sixth grade, Charlotte Anne goes to Iowa to visit her actual dad and Clarisse goes across the country on
a teen tour (not yet twelve, Clarisse is a full two years younger than anyone else on the tour). Charlotte Anne gets several
letters from Clarisse in which her adventures escalate from seeing Wally Cox’s handprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theater (photo
enclosed) to dropping acid with a ninth grader from Tenafly named Judd. Equally as appalling to Charlotte Anne as the acid-dropping
is Judd from Tenafly. Apparently he cuts class.

Though Clarisse makes early efforts to continue the friendship upon her return in the fall, Charlotte Anne is unable to reconcile
Clarisse’s increasingly troublesome behavior; by the end of the year she will be addicted to marijuana (Charlotte Anne does
not bother to investigate the actual addictive quality of marijuana, being satisfied that seventh graders who smoke pot every
day, go to class stoned, or don’t go to class at all have a pretty bad problem) and have a twenty-four-year-old boyfriend
(refer back to list #2, item 5) with whom she has regular intercourse in the back of his head shop (twelve-year-old Charlotte
Anne has been in quite a number of newsstands offering paraphernalia unrecognizable to her but has just come to learn the
term
head shop
). Clarisse drifts away from Charlotte Anne and toward Leslie Bacon, an almost-member of the D.O.B.L. (mutually rejected upon
the basis of her loafers, which, while identical in style, were brown) who has similar proclivities and double-dates with
the twenty-four-year-old’s twenty-three-year-old business partner. (Though twelve-year-old Clarisse, like Charlotte Anne,
is already 5’6”, C.A. wonders where exactly they go on their double dates that no one bothers to say, “Um, excuse me, Mr.
Cool Ponytail Guy, shouldn’t you be
in jail?”
)

Overheard by Peter Schneck, Charlotte Anne’s horror, expressed solely and quietly to classmate Jenna Ritter by the fourth-floor
lockers, gets back to Clarisse, albeit in a somewhat altered form (“Clarisse is on drugs and doing it with some old guy” being
translated to “Charlotte told Jenna that you were a pot-smoking slut”), and the following day a slip of notebook paper falls
out of Charlotte Anne’s locker with the following list:

Reasons I Don’t Want to Be Friends with You

1. you’re uptight you should try pot it might help
   
2. you’re jealous you should try sex it might help
   
3. bitch
   

Charlotte Anne, devastated by the loss of the friendship as well as the malicious use of the list format, slowly relents to
the friendly advances of Jenna Ritter (which friendship will endure, to their continual astonishment, through disco, new wave,
grunge, and the boy bands [which Jenna loves unashamedly], as well as a troubled marriage, a variety of losses, and a few
time zones), with whom she also has things in common:

1. like French
   
2. embroidered overalls
   
3. live on Upper West Side (though this will be the cause of some debate between them; Jenna pretty much feels that if it’s
   north of her, it’s more or less the Bronx, while Charlotte Anne feels certain that her apartment on 89th and West End is both
   a recognized part of the borough of Manhattan and also a part of the Upper West Side)
   
4. aspiring writers
   
5. scholarly fathers
   
6. against pot
   
7. against sex with old men
   

Jenna and Charlotte Anne move past their initial reservations about each other (Jenna will spend the early part of seventh
grade thinking C.A. likes Clarisse better because C.A. once said she wished she were Clarisse [which memory bank of Jenna’s
will figure into their relationship in future decades, when Jenna will recall many things once said by Charlotte Anne that
Charlotte Anne will not only not remember but not think anymore, like let’s say that she wants to marry Parker Stevenson],
which was mostly just because of the toilet-paper dispenser, but she doesn’t; Charlotte Anne has early concerns about Jenna’s
mental health involving her mysterious absence in sixth grade, initially explained by a diagnosis of mono, which everyone
figured maybe wasn’t the only reason after a few months went by, and Charlotte Anne still doesn’t know why Jenna was absent
all that time but doesn’t feel compelled to ask), and Jenna’s availability/not-sleeping-with-old-men quality makes her an
increasingly desirable best school friend (eventually bumped up to best all-around friend).

1.

It is not an admission too many daughters want to make.

One brief look in the mirror confirms the obvious.

Charlotte is exactly like her mother.

Okay, maybe
exactly
is an exaggeration. In fact, what it is is that she is 50 percent like her mother and 50 percent like her father, which is
a totally weird split if you know the two. It is at best a good balance and at worst something of a psychosis. These are not
personalities that willingly share space.

Which would explain the divorce. Which would explain a lot of things.

It becomes impossible to ignore when her mother suddenly decides to move to Arizona. That this imminent move coincides with
Charlotte’s need for cash is not good for either of them in many ways. They meet for sushi on 81st and Broadway. Her mom orders
a cup of miso soup and a bowl of edamame.

That’s all you’re eating?
Charlotte says.

I’m not hungry.

Her mother has recently lost some weight.

Mom.

Edamame is very good for you. It’s soybeans. I’m not hungry, leave me alone.

Your pants are hanging off you.

I’ve been working out.

Mom.

I can’t breathe here anymore. This city is suffocating me. Your father doesn’t understand me.

You mean my stepfather.

You know what I mean. No one understands me. I need to go.

Go?

I have to get out of New York.

This much, from where Charlotte is sitting, is understandable. Charlotte has been trying to get out of New York for years.
It’s not nearly as simple as booking a one-way flight. People get drawn back. Places seem inferior. Which fact, coupled with
an inability to function well in the place where you’re from, the place where everyone but you wants to be, can lead to anguish,
confusion, immobility, and/or a tendency to leave and come back repeatedly, alcohol and drug abuse, and sometimes a mental
state equivalent to having a cheerleader and an incubus inside your head, debating.

Go where?

Arizona.

To see Aunt Bonnie?

I’ll stay with Bonnie and then find a place.

You’re moving there?

I can’t live here anymore.

Her mother’s fingernails are bitten down as far as they can be bitten. Farther. The thumbnail on her left hand is nearly gone.
She’s got a Band-Aid on it, but Charlotte knows what’s underneath. Nothing.

Mom, why do you do that?
she asks as her mother gnaws at her remaining thumbnail.

Without taking it out of her mouth, her mom says,
I can’t help it.
And then she cackles. Her mom has a master’s degree in social work.

Stop it,
Charlotte says, pushing her mother’s hand away from her mouth.

It’s your stepfather’s fault.

Stop it.

I’m serious. I wouldn’t be under this kind of stress if he listened to me. He doesn’t think the way I do. He doesn’t care
about psychology. He says, “Get over it.” I can’t get over it.

Get over what?

Never mind. He doesn’t understand.

What doesn’t he understand? He loves you.
To say that her stepfather loves her mother is an understatement of epic proportions. Her stepfather thinks her mother is
the most beautiful, most brilliant, funniest thing ever. And she is rather obviously beautiful, with crazy thick dark hair
and green eyes, and she’s tall, with enviable super-straight posture. She’s not someone you miss when she walks in the room.
Her stepfather’s devotion to Charlotte’s mother is displayed partly in the way he looks at her after all these years and partly
in the way he laughs too loud when she says something funny even though mostly what she says that’s funny isn’t meant to be
funny, for example she likes to tell jokes except she can’t ever really remember them, and she’ll say something like,
Oh there’s this frog, and he’s in a bar, or on a bar, and he says to the bartender, “Bartender”—something about peanuts—oh
wait, I think there was a what do you call, a rabbi or a priest,
and then she cracks up, and she kind of does this when she tells stories too, and you know she knows what she’s trying to
say, but you have to kind of help her fill in the blanks, sometimes, or put the story in the right order, which is not to
say that she is stupid in any way, because she isn’t, and which is more a sort of charming characteristic than a humor-oriented
characteristic, and which arguably does have its appeal. But they do fight. About money, and trash removal, and fast driving.

I’m just tired.

Mom, just go to a spa.

I’m not spending two thousand dollars to go to a spa for three days to come back and undo two massages or some herbal seaweed
whateveryoucall bullshit —facial wrap in an afternoon at Fairway with the shoving and the bus fumes all over the pears and
beans. I need to leave.

At this point, it has become clear that there is not going to be any good time to mention the need for money, especially not
money to go to Los Angeles. Ten years earlier Charlotte had moved to L.A. with everything but her mattress, on the heels of
the fourth breakup with her then-boyfriend/boss from the pizza place (and subsequent ill-timed reappearance of same boyfriend
immediately after the purchase of the ticket but prior to the leaving of town), with some idea that she was going to meet
with superstardom, except the superstardom plan wasn’t completely thought through. For one thing, she hadn’t exactly chosen
a field; although she has since childhood imagined picking up her Oscar, the category has never been determined. There was
some thought that by the time she grew up they would give out Oscars for Best Novel (and that by then she would have written
one), or that maybe she would just get some kind of honorary Oscar for her distinctive life observations made in everyday
conversation, or the occasional letter. She had taken a few acting lessons after a creepy director suggested she had “a quality.”
But eleven days of living in a leaky Laurel Canyon house with no TV proved to be her mental equivalent of Chinese water torture,
and she flew right back. It has never been more clear to her than at this moment that she is so not adopted.

Mom, I need to borrow a little money.

This is not a good time. Why. You already owe me money. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see that.

Mom. I’m going to go see if there’s any work in L.A. My friend has an extra room I don’t even have to pay for right now.

Do I even have to bring up what happened the last time you went to L.A.?

Mom, I’m not going to move, I’m just going to sublet for six months and see what happens. I need to work. I think my friend
can get me a job on her series.

How much money?

A thousand?

Charlotte Anne. This is a very bad time for me financially. Your stepfather is going to be very upset. He doesn’t even know
right now that I’m leaving.

You’re telling me first? Mom—

I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again. He’s going to take all my money when he finds out.

No he isn’t, Mom.
He really isn’t. Charlotte’s stepfather is not vindictive. He’s just not a screwing-over kind of guy.

I need my money to go away with. I don’t know what’s in my future, career-wise. I’m not twenty-five.

Charlotte will find out later that her mother, at this time, has a total of holdings in the vicinity of a million dollars.
Charlotte, who is clearly no financial genius, has a good idea how far she could make a million dollars go even if she never
worked another day.