All This Heavenly Glory (8 page)

About these conclusions, C.A. will discover many years later that kids in Iowa actually and also:

a) smoke pot

b) have sex

c) run away

and also get abused by their parents in a variety of ways just like in every other state, nevertheless when it comes to her
attention that Chris had a brief period as a stoner she will be completely stunned and then ask him why he never shared.

Further evidence of the greatness of Iowa living is also noted accordingly. Charlotte Anne’s stepmother does laundry and cooks
and cleans and goes to Little League games and takes everyone to drive-in movies and to City Park to go swimming (somehow
also managing to squeeze in graduate school at the same time) and supplies a bottomless trove of snacks never allowed by her
real mother, grape Kool-Aid and candy and gum and huge tubs of
ice
cream (and chocolate sauce) and Chex Mix and Pop-Tarts any time of the day and when they go to the store she says, “Pick
out whatever cereal you like,” and Charlotte Anne puts a box of Froot Loops in the cart like she’s died and gone to heaven.
She learns the “Iowa Corn Song” and sings it often.

It pretty much goes like this for the entire month of July.

Charlotte Anne’s father drives her to the airport on July 31 and the plane-boarding scenario is reversed except for Cedar
Rapids Airport is pretty small and so she can actually see her dad waving in the terminal from her window on the sixteen-seat
plane, which brings us back to the whole tears thing, because although Charlotte Anne generally keeps such things to herself,
a phenomenon occurs whereby she bursts into tears, certain that her father cannot see her waving back, because he keeps waving
(about the waving: the Byers side of the family has a thing about waving goodbye to visitors until they are loo percent certain
the visitors are out of sight—it’s just what they do, and it will always inspire in Charlotte Anne an uncontrollable urge
to burst into tears until she’s about thirty-seven and it occurs to her to insist that her dad stop waving because she just
can’t take it anymore).

So then Charlotte Anne arrives back at LaGuardia and the first thing her mother says to her is, “You’ve gained weight,” and
the next time and the time after that her mother will amend this to, “You always gain weight when you go to your father’s,”
making it almost remarkable that the teen/adult Charlotte Anne doesn’t have more issues with food than she does, and the truth
is that she probably does gain weight on these trips given the extant Willy Wonka universe in Iowa, but another truth is that
C.A. Byers is kind of wishing that her mom would just say, “I missed you.”

A
LTHOUGH FIFTH-GRADER Charlotte Anne Byers and her new best school friend (such distinctions being crucial in assuaging the anxieties of the best
day-camp friend, best in-the-building friend, and all-around/real/true/first best friend), Rachel Richmond, still play with
Barbies, their respective interests are turning toward other things. Rachel Richmond is trying to figure out how to keep her
tube top up and wondering what it would be like to live in Hollywood. Charlotte Anne is thinking of a career change. After
an impressive early career as an opera singer, she is beginning to have a stage fright that will ultimately spell the demise
of her operatic career, and sometime during the rehearsals for P.S. 166’s fall production of
The Wizard of Oz,
in which she was to play the lead role of Dorothy, Charlotte Anne asked to trade roles with Rachel, who was playing the Cowardly
Lion, to no one’s objections. (Charlotte Anne’s mother assured her daughter she respected her decision to decline the lead,
although she did casually note in the same breath that Rachel sang out of tune, which in her household was a crime unequaled
by any other atrocities.) Charlotte Anne has also recently won the school spelling bee and, as a fortuitous by-product of
her having just seen
West Side Story
at the Regency, first prize in a competition to write a caption for a photo of two pigs kissing (“Maria! I just met a girl
named Maria!”), for which she received a check in the sum of ten dollars. Her more recent profession as a child model and
actress has been the most short-lived; in spite of her freckle-faced good looks, a local commercial in which she was supposed
to slurp up a noodle out of a bowl of soup and say, “It’s slurpy delicious,” ended in a recast on the first day of shooting
due to Charlotte Anne’s inability to smile on cue. Fifth-grader Charlotte Anne Byers is not the sort of actress inclined to
think about motivation, but without some due cause simply cannot manage more than what comes across on film, apparently, as
a knowing closed-mouth smile, which the director naturally felt might be a little disturbing to the population at large who
might not want to buy noodle soup from a kid who looked like she maybe knew something about this product, or something about
the advertising world, or something about anything a fifth-grader ought not to know something about, not to mention that she
was neither a soup-slurper nor the kind of kid who’d use a made-up word unless she made it up herself. The end of her modeling
career may be a marginal disappointment to her mother, who spent seventy-five bucks on professional photos, but not any kind
of disappointment at all to Charlotte Anne, who, after the success of the pig caption, is more interested in a writing career.

In addition to taking over the role of Dorothy, and of equal importance, Rachel Richmond knows about boys. Fifth-grader Charlotte
Anne, who is not necessarily ready to become directly involved with boys, becomes aware that Rachel has some useful information
that could help her in the future. (Also, Rachel Richmond’s very cool parents invited their daughter’s twelve best friends
to see the original Broadway production of Hair for her tenth birthday [one or two, whose parents felt the material was unsuitable,
declined], which cast album Charlotte Anne subsequently begged her mother to drop the four dollars and ninety-nine cents for,
and played until it skipped, and which album’s score she would memorize in its entirety [which racy-lyric-singing-along-to
is curiously never questioned at Charlotte Anne’s house]). Rachel Richmond has a boyfriend. Ricky Hernandez, who played the
Scarecrow, has been going out with Rachel since the beginning of the year, except for the week when she “quit” him after he
came to school with a hickey he’d gotten from Yolanda Jones (Wicked Witch of the West, or “Wicked Witch of the West Side,”
Rachel called her). Charlotte Anne has no interest in ever being the recipient of a mouth-shaped bruise on her neck and is
sure that if any such thing somehow occurred without her consent, she wouldn’t go around showing it to everyone like the boys
always did. Nevertheless, in the event of a possible hickey, fifth-grader Charlotte Anne Byers wants to be prepared.

One day after school, Rachel Richmond organizes a game of Spin-the-Bottle in the playground, participants being mostly
Wizard of Oz
cast members, including herself, Ricky Hernandez, Charlotte Anne, Sue Ellen Smiley (Glinda), Paul Schwartz (the Wizard),
and three boys from the fourth grade who played monkeys. Rachel gets the group to form a circle, puts a Coke bottle in the
center of the circle, and proceeds to explain the simple rules of the game, that when it’s your turn, you spin the bottle
until it points to someone of the opposite sex, and then you kiss that person. (No instructions are provided on the kissing
itself, which Charlotte Anne feels might be useful, from the looks of things.) Charlotte Anne, witnessing the hideously moist
displays of nine-and ten-year-old kissing, is, during the first few turns, both hoping the bottle will not spin her way and
considering her options in the event that it does. For sure she knows she is not going to kiss Rachel’s boyfriend, even though
he’s the cutest boy by a wide margin, and the sight of Paul Schwartz and Sue Ellen Smiley’s tongues will figure in considerably
to her desire to put this event off indefinitely. What eventually happens is that when it’s her turn to spin, the bottle points
toward one of the monkeys, all of whom are interchangeably monkey-looking in her mind (not to mention that she’s several inches
taller than the tallest boy in her own grade, and the tallest monkey is about a foot shorter than she is), and Charlotte Anne
takes a good long look at the monkey in question and runs all the way home.

Miraculously, due to her association with the increasingly popular Rachel Richmond, the Spin-the-Bottle incident does little
to damage Charlotte Anne’s social standing, and she and Rachel start having regular play dates, often at Rachel’s house on
85th and Riverside, which Charlotte Anne thinks is the coolest imaginable place to live ever. Rachel Richmond and her brother
have their own penthouse apartment. Her mother and stepfather live directly across the hall, and a babysitter lives with Rachel
and her younger brother, Kenny, but the kids’ apartment is separate and distinct from the parents’ apartment, with its very
own front door. (The kids’ bathroom is in the hall in between the two apartments, but Charlotte Anne sees this as a minor
inconvenience, given the overall incredible greatness of their having their very own apartment, plus there are no other apartments
on the top floor but there’s a beaded curtain at the top of the stairs anyway.) Most super fantastic of all to Charlotte Anne
is the decor. Everything in the apartment is red, white, or blue, and there are three tiny bedrooms and a closet along one
wall of the apartment, on which wall and continuing across all the doors is a wide red, white, and blue stripe that bends
around the corner when it meets the wall, continuing almost all the way to the end of the next wall, where it ends in a giant
arrow. (Across the hall, Rachel’s mother and stepfather’s apartment is done in a similarly mod scheme, in black, white, and
silver, with foil wallpaper, black lacquer shelves, and other items like a white leather chair in the shape of a hand [which
Charlotte Anne admires but doesn’t ever want to sit in as it seems too weirdly literal, like she might just as well be sitting
on someone’s real hand].) The kitchenette, always stocked with plenty of Tab and a full bowl of M&M’s, has a counter with
three chrome-and-vinyl bar stools that swivel, one each in red, white, and blue, which makes Charlotte Anne feel very grown-up
when drinking the Tab out of a tall glass with a straw. Rachel sometimes tries to make a game out of the kitchenette by pretending
they’re in a bar, smoking pretzel rods, but the only guy who’s ever at the bar is Kenny, who has a habit of spitting pretzel
crumbs when he pretends to exhale, and enjoys tossing their Pekingese up in the air like a football, which Charlotte Anne
thinks is neither funny nor attractive.

Rachel Richmond also has a lot of Barbies, most of whom, to Charlotte Anne’s surprise, still have their original hair. “Boys
like long hair,” she says. At Rachel’s house, an afternoon of Barbies is a little different. Rachel Richmond’s Barbies have
sex. Usually, after a brief courtship with a Ken (something like “Hey Ken, what’s up? Wanna come over?”), Rachel’s Barbie
will start mashing on top of the Ken, most of the time with her clothes still on, screaming, “Oh Ken oh Ken oh Ken oh Ken,”
at which point she usually tries to get Charlotte Anne to be the Ken and say, “Oh Barbie oh Barbie oh Barbie oh Barbie,” but
Charlotte Anne, who understands that it’s good to have a Ken, doesn’t much like to be the Ken in this particular Barbie game.
(At her own house, Charlotte Anne’s Barbie needs are satisfied by a Barbie and Ken fashion show, in which Barbie is heavily
featured in a variety of evening wear hand sewn by Charlotte Anne’s mom. Charlotte Anne has only one Barbie and one Ken, who
has only two outfits, a tuxedo and a pair of flesh-tone ultra suede pants with a matching fringed vest, so most of the time
Ken and Barbie appear in the grand finale in their tuxedo and wedding gown, to an audience of no one.) Plus today, Rachel
Richmond puts a Barbie book in the seat of her Barbie’s pants, with no commentary until Charlotte Anne, usually shy when it
comes to asking questions about things she finds peculiar, dares to ask why she doesn’t just put the book in the Barbie book
bag. “She’s not
carrying
it there,” Rachel says, as though this is the stupidest question ever asked. “It’s for when her stepfather beats her with
a belt.” Naturally, this is the first time Charlotte Anne has ever heard of anyone beating anyone with a belt (within the
Barbie world or outside of it), let alone preventive belt-beating measures, and although she is aware that she will soon have
a stepfather of her own, C.A. harbors no concerns about possible belt-beating, as a trust was established early on when her
soon-to-be stepfather bought her a pair of Click-Clacks (two glass balls, in this case a deep blue, joined together by a string
you hold on to in the middle, allowing you to “clack” them together, quickly banned from the market in their original form
due to a number of incidents in which the glass shattered and literally poked some people’s eyes out [there being absolutely
no subliminal concerns on Charlotte Anne’s part that she was in any danger with the almost-stepfather, or existing mother
for that matter, due to their not immediately taking away the Click-Clacks] and lending a renewed credibility to mothers everywhere
in the habit of using that phrase), creating a noise Charlotte Anne’s mother found rather annoying (which in fact
was
rather annoying, even to her almost-stepfather, except for the almost-stepfather also thought that Charlotte Anne’s mom was
especially cute when annoyed, and so Charlotte Anne and her stepfather giggled about it together, sealing the bond), solid
evidence, she felt, of his overall cool greatness and exempting him from any concerns she might have about the situation.
There is no doubt in Charlotte Anne’s mind that this is an out-of-the-ordinary Barbie game, even though she never did forget
her friend Meg Davidson telling her about the weird penis incident over at Karen Pink-Park’s house (the incident, not the
penis, being the weird part, as it belonged to their friend Karen Pink-Park’s father and was reportedly presented to Meg Davidson
as some kind of offering, which she sensibly declined). Charlotte Anne is needless to say more than a little disappointed
and disturbed that such mod parents would do such a thing to a ten-year-old girl. Rachel chooses this moment to turn around
and lift up her shirt, revealing some decidedly belt-shaped marks across her back. “There’s not always time,” Rachel says,
with absolutely no hint of sadness. “Do you ever think about what it would be like to live in Hollywood?”