The class chuckled. This was a trick of teaching patter: establish an inside joke and make callbacks to it. In his first few days at Courtland County he’d asked, “Y’all do what around here? Fish in ponds? Make mud pies?” and one of them gulped, “We go to the laser show at the CCC’s astronomy lab.” And he’d laughed. The kids thought he was mocking the innocence of it, calling it lame, so they laughed heartily, too. But he’d been generally delighted by the answer, by its decency. Now he joked about it whenever possible, it always got them on his side.
“Tessellations are the most beautiful patterns you’ll ever see, they have the most truth you’ll ever encounter” he began, “and you can find their perfect representation in nature.”
As he spoke, he made his way around to the front of his desk and, with a purposeful squat, hopped on the top, swinging his legs back and forth. He could fall apart and cry and call it a cleaving to Laurel, he could feel his throat ache with tears even now, as he lectured, but he couldn’t show it. Of course he couldn’t show it, he knew, though a part of him wondered why, would forever wonder why. A part of him was always twelve years old. This was the one thing about Charlie that had fascinated him: did chimpanzees, like humans, contain a multitude of selves? When he’d raised the question with Laurel, playfully, one night early on in the experiment, as they lay before sleep, she’d gotten indignant. “Of course they do,” she’d sputtered. But the way she’d said it, it was obvious she hadn’t thought of it before, was only defending this answer because she loved Charlie and she couldn’t bear to think of him as different from herself. That was, perhaps, the source of their cleaving in a nutshell. Laurel could not conceive of anyone that she loved as not being of the same mind as her. That is what she’d said when he’d raged at her about it all: Ginny and Lyle and the breast-feeding and the humiliation. “I never asked because I thought you would agree, Charles. I thought we were of the same mind.” Himself, he knew he could love those of a different mind, but even he had his limits.
Anyway, all the evidence, from Charlie’s dull glare, demanding grasp, and general obnoxiousness pointed to “no” for his original question. Chimps, or at least Charlie, appeared to contain not multitudes but only one self, stretched thin with need and longing. But maybe Charlie was an exception or maybe developmentally he was stuck at being a toddler or maybe the answer was just that Charlie was an asshole, pure and simple.
“Can someone give me an example of a tessellation in nature?” Charles asked.
“A honeycomb,” Jen A. answered.
“A pineapple. I mean, like, the skin on a pineapple,” Jen C. added.
“Good,” he said. “Those are good examples.”
It started from the back of the class. He didn’t realize what it was at first. It honestly sounded like somebody retching and he was momentarily panicked: the one thing that dazed him in a classroom was when a kid was sick. He couldn’t even stand it when his own kids threw up: he would leave the room and leave it to Laurel. His palms began to sweat at the thought of having to deal with it, all while trying not to retch himself. But that wasn’t it. He glanced at the girls in his front row and saw that the Jens wouldn’t look at him, instead were slowly blushing. Megan and Kristen were the same. It was only outdated Doreen who could look him in the eyes, and when she did he realized, with a start, that she was crying.
The boys, his fans, looked murderous. Hakim was staring straight ahead in a mounting, unvoiced rage, his fists clenched and vibrating on his desktop. This was what made him listen closer to the sound. It was wordless and bass and hollow. At first he thought maybe it was supposed to be an owl call, and that was weird, why would one of the louts disrupt a lecture with an owl call?
Charles cocked his head and made a theatrical show of listening again. He thought this would stop it, would put the girls in front at ease, but it didn’t. The sound grew louder.
It was hooting, he realized. It was supposed to be hooting and then it struck him: it was a really bad imitation of a monkey. He sat back against his desk. He folded his arms across his chest, still trying to control the class, while inside he only wanted to cry.
The hooting grew louder.
It was baffling, how even rebellion came in only one shape: slouched shoulders, head low, insult the obvious. In Boston, it had been to call him a nerd, to make fun of his smarts, but this was so far from an insult it made Charles love those students more. Of course, here in Courtland County, they would go after Charlie.
He had waited, expectantly, for days after the article for something like this, but it hadn’t happened. He’d been perplexed by the girls who’d swarmed his desk for news about Charlie. He’d been most worried about Charlotte, but she seemed to take it in stride. It seemed, perversely, to gain her more friends. This saddened Charles, but it seemed to make Charlotte happy: he spied her sometimes, in the lunch room, caught up in a thick mass of girls, telling stories and giggling and nodding enthusiastically. Still he braced himself. He waited. And nothing had happened so he’d told himself he was being silly and let his guard down.
So it was here now. The hooting grew louder and louder and Charles leaned back against the desk, his heart racing, love on his tongue, feigning detachment. He told himself, I am not angry, I am not angry, I am not angry. He would put it aside. It was what he always did. One of the worst things to do was to lose your temper, was to let them see your anger. It was true of children. He didn’t like to make sweeping generalizations, but he had learned it was true of white people, too. Anger had to be carefully deployed. Children and white people, they expected you to become angry, they thrilled at it, a little bit. They pretended to be afraid, but it was a game some of them liked to play with black men. His students back in Boston had done the same: he had never wanted to give them the satisfaction of getting angry.
He took in deep, slow breaths. He tried to think of what would be the best next move.
Someone screeched “eee-iiii-oooo” and this gave him something to work with. He turned and smiled brightly and said, concise and clear, “Let’s get one thing straight. A bunch of little boys are not capable of embarrassing me. I’m still the one who decides whether you pass or fail. No amount of noise changes that.”
There was more rustling. One of the kids in the back leaned forward: a long, skinny tibia of a freshman named Martin Wade. He’d never had a problem with Martin before. In fact, Martin had always struck him less as defiant and more as terminally bashful. But now Martin leaned forward, one oversized Adam’s apple bobbing with self-loathing and fear, and he shouted loudly, “Ooga booga, ooga booga,” to the laughs of his friends.
And Charles turned around and called back without thinking, “You know, you’re awfully lucky you boys are white.”
He didn’t know why he said it. It had broken out of him. He’d wanted to speak with love: that was all that he’d asked for that day, but now there was a shocked silence. Martin still leaned forward, his mouth agape. Oh shit, Charles thought. I’m fired for sure.
And then, a miracle. The whole classroom broke into relieved laughter. The girls up front giggled through their tears, his fan boys laughed expectantly. Hakim’s whole face broke into a proud, wide grin, even though his hands stayed clenched in fists. Even Martin Wade grinned. “Oh, you burned,” the boy beside him called out, then swatted Martin’s stringy tricep.
How did they get the joke? Charles wondered as he smiled thinly at the class. How did they get the joke?
He let the laughter wash over him. It was the first time he’d spoken truthfully in Courtland County, without pretense. It was the first time he’d spoken the truth without trying to make it a joke. He let the laughter wash over him and he watched the light spattering against the back wall of his classroom, dashing and dappling and turning his classroom walls to mud.
Charlotte
“Jesus,” Adia said, “your dad is good.”
By the end of the day, the whole school knew about his outburst. He had become, in the constant rete
lling, a kind of folk hero. The same girls who hovered around me at lunch came up to me as classes let out, eager to talk, breathless with my father’s transgression. Adia, who had quickly found her way back to my side, glared at them until they backed away.
“I can’t believe they don’t care.” We lay now, curled together in the blankets on her bedroom floor. “They have to at least care.”
I didn’t say anything, only tried to concentrate on her side pressed against me.
“You can’t talk to those girls anymore.” She settled in closer. “Or if you do talk to them, you have to tell them the truth.”
“C’mon, Adia.” I played with her fingers. “They’re my friends—” She took her hand out of mine. “Or . . . we’re friendly. I’m not gonna start lecturing them about this stuff.”
“You’re just scared.” Adia sighed. “You’re always so scared.”
I slid further under Adia’s blankets. “Don’t say that,” I said, very small.
“It’s the truth.” Adia sat up. “I think we can both agree you’re not a very brave person, Charlotte.”
“Neither are you,” I said, even smaller.
“No,” Adia sang now, “no. I don’t think so. I’m much, much, braver than you are.” She turned on her side, away from me, and crooked her arm around her sketch pad. “Even your father is braver than you.”
She was so engrossed she didn’t hear me as I slid across the space between us and kissed the back of her neck, right where it met her skull. I could feel the very slight bristle of her hair, the tiny bit of it left by the errant razor blade. Adia jerked forward as if I had pinched her.
“What was that for?” she said, sharply, glancing over her shoulder.
“I’m braver than you.” I kissed her arm.
She pulled her arm away, rubbed the back of her neck, as if she was trying to get off some stain.
“I’m braver than you are,” I said again, pushing forward. The only thing to do now, I realized, was to keep going. If I backed down now, she would be right.
“Get away,” Adia hissed, but she didn’t move. She hadn’t turned on her side toward me, either. She was still stubbornly rubbing the back of her head, her face turned out toward the room.
I inched closer to her, until I was pressed up against her back, until I wrapped my arms around her front and slipped my hands underneath her T-shirt. When I kissed the back of her head again, she didn’t flinch. She didn’t move at all. She went terribly, terribly still, not even a breath, not even a sigh. Then her spine curled into me and she collapsed down and that was it.
She wouldn’t get under blankets afterward, though I did immediately, despite the heat in Adia’s house. Instead, when she was awake again, she stood up, in only that too-big T-shirt, and began to pace the room.
“I told you I was brave,” I said, if only to see what she would do next. If only to see how she would keep the game going. I didn’t want it to be a game anymore. I spoke to give her a chance to make it stop but she only nodded curtly. “I’ve got something better.”
I pulled on my sweater. I got up and stood in front of her to stop her pacing. Side by side, she was only an inch or so taller than me. Her eyes had gone all drowsy again, her mouth half open and she breathed sweet, “You’re really going to like it.”
She knelt down to pick up the notebook she’d been worrying, rummaging through it until she found the page she wanted. She pulled back the cover and handed it to me.
There was my mother, her neat Jheri curl scribbled into a nest of worms. There was Callie, then myself, our cheeks and lips distended, our chests and stomachs and laps doubled into a mass of half circles. In the drawing, Adia gave us both buck teeth, and Callie didn’t have any eyes, just two blank discs for glasses like Little Orphan Annie. In the middle of us was Charlie, a tail circled around his midsection. My mother brandished a glass pitcher with a facsimile of the Kool-Aid Man’s smile plastered across it. “Who wants grape drink?” she was asking. On the plates in front of us were heaping piles of fried chicken. All of our mouths outlined in wide rubbery, thick red lips.
“Do you like it?” Adia shook my knee. “It’s good, right?”
My hands felt too weak to hold up the notebook. “Why did you draw this?”
“You don’t get it.” Adia laughed. “I knew you wouldn’t get it.”
“It’s ugly,” I said.
“It’s ironic.” Adia nodded proudly, and then she stood back, scanning my face for a dawn of recognition.
Marie’s favorite word, and now Adia was adopting it as her own. But neither one had ever succeeded in explaining what it meant to them.
“Why did you draw Callie’s eyes like that? And what did you do to my teeth? Why did you make us so ugly?”
Adia assured me that that, too, was irony. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “That’s what your mom is doing to you. She’s making you ugly like that, by making you stay there, making you be in that experiment. That’s why she’s feeding you the Kool-Aid. I can’t believe you don’t get it.”
“You made us so ugly.”
“Because that’s how they see it. That’s how they all see it: Max and Dr. Paulsen and those dumb girls at school, the ones pretending to be nice to you. You’re ugly to every last one of them. That’s what the cartoon is about.”
“But you drew it.”
Adia shook her head impatiently. “That’s what everyone thinks about you, anyway. But they’re too polite to say it. That’s your problem, Charlotte. You’re afraid of making people answer for things.”
I just made you answer, I thought to myself. I just made you answer after months of you and me asking the same question to each other over and over again, and you don’t care.
Adia was bouncing on her heels, now, beaming. “I gave it to the school paper—”
“You did?” I felt tears in my eyes.
“Yeah, I submitted it, but Mr. Carver said he can’t publish it, that it’s too offensive. But I could see, deep down, it’s what he’s really thinking.”
“You showed this to other people?”
“So what I think we do now,” Adia continued, “is make photocopies. Like, a million photocopies. And we plaster them everywhere. In school, downtown, all over the Toneybee Institute so that everybody knows, gets, it. Everybody is confronted—”
“No,” I said.
I took my hand out of hers, pulled on my jeans, and left her room. I walked through the heat of Marie’s dark studio, out the door, and onto the cold street and into the night.
I called my mother from the only pay phone on Main Street.
“Where are you?”
“Just in town. Please come get me.”
“I can’t. I can’t leave Charlie with Callie, you know that.”
“Come get me, please. Please do it. I need you.”
“Can you call your father?”
“No.”
“Charlotte—”
“You aren’t hearing me,” I said. “You aren’t listening.” I began to cry and I heard her breathe in. She had decided something.
“All right,” she said. “I’m coming.”
I walked to the cemetery in the middle of the town green. In the dark, I balanced myself on the low iron chain that bounded the graveyard and swung back and forth, shivering off the cold.
When she came, it was just her in the car. I slid into the front seat and she reached across and held me.
“Don’t say I never did anything for you.” She laughed, gruffly into my hair. “Don’t say I didn’t listen.”
We sat like that for a long time in the car, not moving, not speaking, my face pressed hard into her shoulder to keep from shouting.
Callie
“Help me get Charlie together,” her mother said. “We have to go get Charlotte.”
But Charlie was stubborn. He wouldn’t go. He sat down on his hands and whined when Callie tried to get him up.
“We don’t have time for this.” It was the first time Callie ev
er heard her snap at Charlie. And Callie knew this was her chance.
“I can watch him,” she said.
Her mother was skeptical.
“I can. I’m old enough. You can trust me.”
Charlie was hunching over, whining louder.
“You won’t even be gone that long, right?”
Her mother nodded, uneasy. “Okay,” she said. “All right.” And then she was gone.
All day long she’d been waiting for a sign and here, provided by the hand of the universe, like the book said, was one.
She sat down beside Charlie because her heart was racing. She was so close. To calm herself, she scratched at the collar of her shirt, pulled a single, bristling Charlie hair from the weave on the front of her sweater.
Callie felt her fingers begin to cramp: this happened sometimes, when she was nervous. The very tips of her fingers would want to curl down to her palms. She took her hands out from under the blanket and pressed her right fingers down on her left wrist, feeling for a pulse. They’d been learning to do that at school. She pressed down on the flesh, felt the indentation on her skin but nothing else. Charlie’s pulse, when he let Callie take it, was fleet and stuttering and strong. Maybe that was what it meant to be a familiar. He was her better self. He was alive to the world and she was, well, not dead, exactly. Just insulated. As if she were speaking to people and watching people from very, very far away. That was what it meant, she decided. That was what would change. What she was going to do would make it better. She was sure of it.
If she backed down now, it would mean she had the bitter little soul of someone who got the steps wrong, of a coward. Her soul, she was certain, was more expansive than that. It had to be, or else what would be the purpose of her being so lonely all the time? It would be very unfair of the universe to be all those things and a shallow, artificial soul, too. To be all those things and not strong. They had to balance each other out.
Beside her, Charlie straightened himself out and busied himself with her hair. She held out her arms and he settled on her hip and she staggered with him to the kitchen. Even though she knew they were the only ones in the apartment, she still was careful not to make any noise. She spooned leftover spaghetti from the pot on the stove into a plastic sandwich bag. She poured chocolate milk into a plastic travel mug, printed with the Toneybee logo. Then she walked just as carefully to the bathroom, Charlie still on her hip, and climbed on to the edge of the bathtub to reach behind the towel-covered mirror for the medicine chest, where the cold medicine was kept.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman: A Novel Page 24