All This Heavenly Glory (16 page)

And what does Jenna Ritter think? Jenna Ritter thinks mostly nice things. Jenna Ritter has neither a good nor a bad opinion
of Charlotte Anne Byers at this point, which makes it all that much harder for Charlotte Anne to be irritated by Jenna, even
though C.A. is irritated by many things at the age of twelve, not just the boys who are eight inches shorter than her and
say her smock top looks like maternity wear, not just by issues of moral outrage, but also seventh-grade math, and anything
that generally strikes her as “dumb,” which is a lot of things.

So Jenna calls Charlotte Anne to invite her over for a French “date” (why there is never any confusion or abuse, in seventh
grade, about the use of this term for an entirely platonic, girl/girl occasion, remains a mystery), in which phone call Jenna
will later claim Charlotte Anne was severely unfriendly, mostly by way of a lot of impatient huffing, and a date is arranged
for the following afternoon at Jenna’s apartment in the Dakota. Part of Charlotte Anne’s huffing is on account of Jenna insisting
they live in different neighborhoods; although they do live eighteen blocks apart, it’s still walking distance, and Charlotte
Anne says everyone knows that it’s all the Upper West Side, and interprets possible snootiness due to Jenna’s Central Park
West address (despite Jenna’s assertion that her address is actually on 72nd Street), same neighborhood or not, being considerably
fancier than West End Avenue, where Charlotte Anne lives. In fact, there is no snootiness; if anything it’s Jenna’s own attempt
to be different, but not necessarily better—Charlotte Anne and Jenna will later agree, snootiness or not, that the West Side,
overall, is better than the East Side, overall (except for the unjust location of Bloomingdale’s), due to a severe snootiness
level present on the wealthier East Side. (Which, of course, is true, and in this case, as a matter of coincidence only, fits
their paradigm.) The reality is that Jenna’s (artist) mom and (author/publisher) dad could afford to live on the East Side
and just don’t. Charlotte Anne’s (opera-singing) mother and (talent-agent) stepfather could maybe afford to bump up to Riverside
Drive, but that’s about it. Private school, at a little more than $2,000 a year, was given quite a bit of consideration, and
chosen as much for the education value as because the public middle school in Charlotte Anne’s neighborhood was seeing an
upsurge of kids throwing other kids out windows, which swung the decision to drop the cash on the side of safety. In any case,
Jenna, at her age, is showing no signs of a certain quality present in most city kids by the time they hit third grade, rich
or poor, which is a sort of calculated indifference, no doubt due to having witnessed murders and child killers and muggings,
even if only on the news. Charlotte Anne has already witnessed more than a few of these things not on the news and, as a news
junkie from about the age of ten, finds it impossible to believe, when the subject later comes up, that Jenna has not, at
the very least, seen an exposed penis at some point in her existence. (Jenna will be a little defensive on this front, since
she has in younger years seen both of her brothers naked, but Charlotte Anne insists it’s only the unwanted, grownup penis
exposure she’s talking about.) Charlotte Anne saw her first from inside a subway car at age seven; a stereotypically trench-coated
older guy, in between cars, flashed anyone in sight, explained by her mom as an example of someone way past not having it
together and firmly in full-on perverted. Charlotte Anne finds it impossible to believe that Jenna thinks New York is “beautiful,”
and although Jenna will cite Central Park, Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building as examples that Charlotte Anne
will neither deny nor confirm (annoyed at the possibility that New York might be more than one thing), when she asks Jenna,
“Haven’t you ever even run into Ugly George?” Jenna will say it’s not nice to call someone ugly even though Ugly George is
a self-monikered cable-access host who roams the streets half dressed in search of young women interested in undressing themselves
for the camera. (Not so much a precursor to
Girls Gone Wild
as a poorly lit perversion unto itself.) This is the era of garbage strikes and a Times Square inhabited by prostitutes and
drug dealers and a vague specter of that soldier kissing the nurse after the war, with the dimming fluorescence of the Bond’s
sign and the giant smoking billboard; even traveling from Charlotte Anne’s house into Jenna’s own “neighborhood” requires
traversing Amsterdam and then Columbus Avenues, which are notoriously crime ridden and generally Charles Bronson—movie-inspiring
scary, populated with men whose eyes linger on Charlotte Anne’s developing form and offer various unsavory invitations or
yell,
“Mira, mira,”
which Charlotte Anne learned from Ricky Hernandez back in public school means “Look, look,” but which translation unfortunately
came after she had already looked at a few more parts and gestures than she cared to, eventually teaching her to travel most
regions of the West Side with eyes narrowed and fixed ahead as though no one exists in her periphery at all. (Charlotte Anne’s
mother has some reservations of her own about her daughter going over to Jenna’s, but it’s less about the dangerous travel
than that she just saw
Rosemary’s Baby
on the
4:30 Movie,
fortunately C.A., even at twelve, has the good sense to point out to her mother that Satan probably doesn’t really live there,
to which she will say, “Well, it’s still spooky.”) On occasions when they convene at Charlotte Anne’s, Jenna will typically
get a ride in her dad’s Cadillac or take a taxi down 72nd and up West End Avenue, thus bypassing any less beautiful parts
of the neighborhood and arguably eliminating them from the landscape altogether. These divergent perspectives will change
very little over the following thirty years, even as the broadly defined U.W.S. neighborhood (ultimately extending up as far
as and perhaps even beyond the limits of Columbia) gains an entirely new reputation as a hub for urbans of a young and professional
kind and changes almost entirely into a neighborhood that one does not have to be afraid of except in a Pottery Barn kind
of way.

A few minutes into their date, Charlotte Anne is already frustrated by Jenna’s absence of any sort of edge, and yet, a few
minutes after that, will be charmed as most are, given the opportunity, by Jenna’s unrelenting niceness (even in the face
of Charlotte Anne’s overt ho-hum attitude), her sense of humor/ability to laugh at herself, and ironically, the very unironic
overall quality Charlotte Anne claims to detest. Going into the friendship, there are certain unknowns of a similar nature
that for better and worse will help forge a bond/dependence between them that will take a lot of therapy and twelve-step work
to remodel twenty and then some years into the future. It turns out that Jenna’s mysterious sixth-grade absence/correctly-diagnosed
depression by unlicensed-therapist-in-training Charlotte Anne was due as much as anything to a letter from her former best
friend/only real friend (in this case also best building friend) Debbie Alsop, who more or less explained that she had obtained
a new best all-around friend and would no longer be needing Jenna’s association. Charlotte Anne, who still has a best building
friend and a couple of other newish school friends since the move up to seventh, is still smarting from the malicious list
from her former best school friend Clarisse calling her a bitch and implying that sex and drugs might be of use. (Charlotte
Anne would have a lifelong issue with non-dog-oriented use of this word from this point forward, even in jest. Her general
good sense of humor, even about herself, as a rule tends to show no signs of its existence in incidents of name-calling or
even when gently teased, say as by her mother and stepfather, who do it kind of a lot.)

The exact amount of seventh-grade French that gets discussed this particular afternoon, or ever, is negligible. They might
or might not sit down for a moment and open their copies of
Notre Monde
before some distraction causes them to abandon their textbooks for good. By the end of the year, Jenna’s grades will go up
and Charlotte Anne’s will go down after Mme. Goldstein’s discovery that her grammar doesn’t come close to matching her accent.
In three weeks’ time, Charlotte Anne will officially stop “tutoring” Jenna in French and officially become Jenna’s best school
friend.

Charlotte Anne and Jenna have a lot of after-school dates at both of their houses. Each has reasons for preferring dates at
the other’s house. Jenna has better food (although the menu Jenna offers tends to be a bowl of Familia cereal, frozen pigs
in the blanket, or a jar of green olives), and with the vastly bigger apartment and building, more territory and therefore
more variety, even though they quickly settle into the curious routine of an episode of
The New Zoo Revue
(there’s no accounting for this; it is a show that is considered weak even by its intended audience of preschoolers), Familia,
and a game in which they drop pins down the center of the stairwell, race down the stairs, and see who can find the pin first.
This is really what they do. Jenna also seems amused by a game in which they take the elevator to the top floor of her building,
where the four sections are connected by a series of narrow and dark corridors of maids’ rooms, inhabited by a decidedly creepy
element (notably an old guy with a very bad black toupee and thick black spectacles who always seems to be standing on his
doormat in a white t-shirt, on the lookout for some unspecified danger), followed by Jenna running away at an undisclosed
time and letting Charlotte Anne find her way back. Jenna makes a frequent point of telling Charlotte Anne how much she reminds
her of Debbie Alsop, and although Charlotte Anne does not know about the letter, she notes that Jenna makes just as many separate
points about how bossy Debbie was, which in Charlotte Anne’s mind sort of unconsciously adds up to an insult. The truth is
that Jenna envies both Debbie’s and Charlotte Anne’s apparent strength, independence, and fully formed opinions on just about
anything that might come up (a notable development, as there were several years in elementary school in which Charlotte Anne’s
opinion on just about anything tended to coincide with the opinion of whoever she happened to be talking to; it was never
that she didn’t have her own, just that she had a fear of saying out loud that let’s say she didn’t much care for the idea
of peanut butter and marshmallows together in a sandwich, for fear of alienating the peanut-butter/marshmallow-eating person;
her typical answer to any question that began with “Do you like…?” began with “Do you?” you: and proceeded from there). Charlotte
Anne in turn envies Jenna’s apparent rose-colored view of New York, although she’d never admit it, and spends much time trying
futilely to explain to Jenna the horrors of the very same.

At Charlotte Anne’s, a significantly smaller two-bedroom, activities tend to be limited to watching
Dark Shadows
and the
4:30 Movie
(which everyone knows repeats their four themes about every month, which adds up to Charlotte Anne having seen every Annette
Funicello movie ever made, and both
The Bridge on the River Kwai
and
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
about a dozen times each), avoiding Charlotte Anne’s mom, who refuses to put on pants simply because there’s company (and
who Jenna seems to like anyway), and possibly making some additions to their
Charlotte Anne Digs the Dorks, Jenna Luvs the Losers Random House Dictionary,
volume II, which contains a combination of current slang terms and words they made up altogether. Charlotte Anne and Jenna
are both writers. Jenna is planning to be a playwright. Charlotte Anne wants to make movies.

In April of that year, Jenna invites Charlotte Anne to her family’s house on Fire Island for a weekend. Charlotte Anne has
heard of Fire Island but has never been there. Jenna and Charlotte Anne create a new routine, modified from their city routine,
wherein their day consists of going to the beach, doing Mad Libs (somewhat less fun for the girls, who fancy themselves of
a sophisticated wit, when Jenna’s younger brother plays and much like C.A.’s own stepbrothers is inclined to use adjectives
and nouns relating mostly to things found in, near, or around the toilet), playing pinball in “town” (neighboring community
that has several small shops, bars, and restaurants), and riding bikes (during which Jenna modifies the “lose Charlotte Anne
in the building” game to “lose Charlotte Anne on Fire Island” game, by leading Charlotte Anne leisurely through several neighboring
communities and then riding away really fast to see if Charlotte Anne will find her way back, which she always does, which
always results in Jenna being slightly miffed. Neither of them bothers to think through what might occur if Charlotte Anne
really did get lost, but Fire Island is a fairly easy place to get around, being three or four blocks wide in most places
and having alphabetically lettered streets. Not to mention that Charlotte Anne is not at all stupid and easily able to navigate
the simple courses Jenna has attempted to lose her in. Another thing neither of them is bothering to think through is why
Jenna is doing this in the first place—neither is particularly competitive, and Jenna insists she just thinks it’s funny.
Charlotte Anne isn’t morally outraged, probably because she does always find her way back, but neither does she think it’s
terribly funny, writing off Jenna’s lapse in sophisticated humor to her having brothers). One of the best outcomes of the
weekend in Fire Island is that they return to school with tans (or in Charlotte Anne’s case, a sunburn and a lot of freckles),
which elevates them socially, if only the tiniest notch. Charlotte Anne will spend several more weekends at the Ritters’ on
Fire Island during the spring and summer, before she leaves for Iowa to see her real dad.

A final opportunity for humiliation is present at the annual Davis Academy event called Moving Up Day, which takes place in
the yard near the end of the school year. Although a casual occasion, each grade from one through twelve has a sign that is
ceremonially handed off to the grade below, officially marking their entrance into the higher grade. It’s a day that might
be tolerable if it were left at that, but the other focus is on various school awards in each department for excellence in
achievement, and the Jane Berman Award, named for a megastudent of days past, ostensibly awarded to the student who contributes
most to their class or to the school in terms of extracurriculars and overall good attitude, is universally (mis)understood
to be the popularity award. This year it’s Jenna’s brother Eric’s turn, for having participated in the school paper, the science
fair, and the chess club, and also for filling in for the librarian at lunchtime. (There has not been and will not be a year
when Eric Ritter doesn’t win something, for which Jenna suffers in silence, dreaming of the day she might get the Jane Berman
Award.) Charlotte Anne expresses to Jenna her ongoing moral outrage over the school administration’s perpetuating such an
elitist proposition, excluding those for being shy (Charlotte Anne likes to think of herself as shy but really has more of
a very specific attitude problem whereby if people would only talk to her first, she would gladly talk to them), or uninterested
in organizing lame school dances, or building one more tired-ass papier-mâché volcano for the science fair. (In fact, Eric
Ritter’s project had been a compelling dissertation on his working theory that DNA samples could be used forensically in any
number of ways, which the sixteen-year-old would later regret was left unpublished.) An after-school date on this day includes
a recap of the day’s travesties and some solace in the distraction of
Father Knows Best,
unfortunately negated when some kid grabs Charlotte Anne’s bus pass on 86th Street and C.P.W. and heads west to trade it
for maybe a loose joint, only to be chased by an irritated Charlotte Anne, who is generally no kind of vigilante but is bigger
than her would-be mugger by about a head, snatching the bus pass back in front of a bunch of stoop hangers on 87th who laugh
and cheer. This small victory goes essentially unnoticed by Charlotte Anne—still bitter on behalf of Jenna, who she feels
is misguided in feeling only disappointment this day—as she heads home to call Jenna about the near-mugging and make one more
effort to convince her friend to share the rage. Jenna has come to believe that Charlotte Anne does have it together, praising
her bravery by way of example, and Charlotte Anne appreciates that Jenna thinks this, even though she is secretly beginning
to have doubts. Now that Charlotte Anne Byers has gathered some more information about Jenna Ritter, she’s not any more sure
than she was before that Jenna has it together, but has come to believe that Jenna has some non-potsmoking, overall fun and
loyal qualities that a friend ought to have. As much as anything what it is is that Jenna’s apparent optimism is so foreign
to C.A. Byers as a worldview that she’s hoping maybe at some point it’ll catch.