Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

  “Of course you won’t break any,” her mother said. “I didn’t mean—go ahead, if you want to.”

  Charlotte stood and stacked Knox’s plate onto hers. They had been eating off a set of heavy, chipped Provençal dishes her mother had bought during her first trip to Europe and kept stored except at this time of year, red and green, painted with horses, chickens, cows. Charlotte gathered some soiled utensils in one hand and lay them carefully on top of the plates. She carried her load into the kitchen without saying anything else, keeping her eyes trained straight ahead as she walked easily, smoothly, out of the room.

  Her parents exchanged a look. Knox, wanting nothing more than to return to the grace she’d been hanging in only minutes before, flicked at the stem of her glass hard enough for her fingernail to hurt. She wanted to follow Charlotte into the kitchen and demand to know what her problem was. Just because she wasn’t able to dominate the conversation tonight, was having trouble following—but here was the content of her parents’ look, a mixture of forbearance and frustration. Her mother looked away from her father and caught Knox’s gaze, smiled sadly. Knox stared back. In doing so, she felt something in her snap into place. She ran her tongue over the back of her teeth, stood too. She picked up her glass and walked around the table, stopping behind her mother’s chair, and leaned down and kissed her mother on the top of her head.

  “Anyone want dessert?” she said to her parents and Robbie, straightening. “I’m gonna help clear.” The peppery, alkaline smell of her mother’s hair spray clung inside her nostrils. She was lightening, returning to her proper role, annoyed at herself for letting Charlotte get the better of her. As she spoke she could hear the note of natural superiority in her own voice, the confidence in belonging that she was free to draw on when she remembered to. She reached around to pick up her mother’s plate.

  “Bring in some of those brownies the McGaugheys dropped off, pal,” her father said. “Robbie needs to fatten up his little body.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Knox said. She snickered as she said it, hoping Charlotte could hear her. She would laugh as loud, as long, as she wanted to, laugh until her father felt like the funniest man on earth.

  In the kitchen, Charlotte was bent over the dishwasher, unloading clean pans. The plates she had brought in from the table sat at the bottom of the sink, hot water from the tap streaming onto them full blast, throwing drops onto the counter. She extracted a colander from the lower rack of the dishwasher and set it on the floor; it wobbled on its metal feet. Knox put her glass down on the counter and bent to pick it up.

  “I can put this stuff away for you,” she said to Charlotte’s back.

  Charlotte twisted to face Knox. The color in her face had risen; her hair was tucked behind her ears, flattened at the crown of her head, hanging tangled past her shoulders. Charlotte dragged it roughly away from her face like this when she was in a mood, or trying to concentrate; Knox could see the runnels her damp fingers had left.

  “You might as well,” Charlotte said. “I don’t know where anything goes anymore.” One side of her mouth twitched into a half smile. Her bare toes seemed to flex on the kitchen mat, the white polish on them chipped away to nothing. She still doesn’t care what she looks like, was what flashed into Knox’s mind. Doesn’t need to. This familiar thought evoked the old pride and anxiety all at once—her father’s proprietary clutches, the exaggerated compliments her mother used to shore Knox up, the need in Knox herself to look, to look, to look, to look, to peer endlessly at photographs, always know where Charlotte was in a room, memorize the way a thin chain fell around her neck, the shape of her head in profile, the way a day’s worth of sunburn reddened her eyebrows, the merits of certain colors—pink, black, a bright shade of turquoise—against her skin; like someone who stood too close to a canvas, she had trouble seeing what she was meant to in Charlotte’s particular, random alchemy of features, and so kept looking until she had to turn away confused, exhausted; all this mess rose in her now, and she felt sick of it already and glanced down at her shoes. This was part of what it meant to have a beautiful sister (and whether it had to do with proximity or jealousy or both or neither was impossible to say); one could understand it but not ever quite see it, however cross-eyed one went trying.

  “Ugh,” she said, despite herself.

  “What?”

  “You know,” Knox said, taking a breath. She would be too old and wise now to wear herself out. “Just let me do this. Mom and Dad never get to see you. It’ll take me one second.” She pointed to a tin canister on the kitchen island. “Take those brownies in,” and she heard the note of command in her voice, adjusted to protect herself from any accusation of bossiness. “Just don’t eat them all before I get back in there, okay?” The water was still splashing uselessly into the sink; Knox moved past Charlotte to shut it off, but Charlotte leaned into her and wouldn’t let her pass. She rested her forearm on Knox’s shoulder, and Knox had to look into her eyes.

  “I want to stay in here with you,” Charlotte said. She bowed her forehead until it touched Knox’s. The place where their skin met was almost hot, and Knox could smell her sister’s oily, bready breath and the apple-scented shampoo she’d borrowed from Knox’s bathroom for her shower. Charlotte jerked her head back up and smiled, but Knox had seen real fear and pleading pass over her face. In her surprise, Knox had a clear thought about herself, like a caption: Making her feel punished is never hard like I think, it never feels as good, I never remember this till it’s too late. She nodded and turned off the faucet; the subsequent quiet sounded like noise.

  “I never get to see you, either,” Charlotte said, and bugged her eyes out, her mocking composure regained. She arched her back against the counter and folded her hands across her stomach, her fingers woven together. “Plus,” she said, her voice sounding happier, more charged than it had all through dinner, “if the brownies are in here, and we’re in here—”

  Charlotte leaned back too far, and one of the heavy dishes slipped off the wet counter and crashed to the floor. She sprang up and away from the broken pieces at her feet, looked down at them, and put her hand to her mouth. She looked at Knox, whose own mouth was open, who could sense her parents and Robbie glancing up at one another in the next room.

  “Oh Jesus,” Charlotte said.

  “You’re kidding me,” Knox said. They watched each other. Knox felt poised to laugh; sheer not knowing what would happen next wheeled like a bird in her chest, knocking thrillingly against her throat, her ribs, trying to fly out.

  “Was that my plate,” her mother called. “Charlotte? Tell me that wasn’t one of my plates.”

  Knox and Charlotte kept their eyes on each other. They didn’t move. Knox could feel a tiny splinter of glass tacked to the skin of her arm. She could feel her heart beating and feel that Charlotte was tied to her in this moment; she wouldn’t do a thing until Knox did, would follow Knox’s lead.

  Knox swallowed. “I dropped it,” she called back to her mother. “It just fell right out of my hands—sorry.” Her tongue felt coated; articulation always seemed more difficult when she was lying; this had been true since she was a child. Charlotte made a face and waved her arms as if pressing the air at her sides down and away. No, she whispered.

  “I think I can glue it,” Knox said loudly. She could hear a lilt in her words that sounded exaggerated; she looked at Charlotte, whose own speech hadn’t been accented for years, whose mouth spread into a grin, though her wide eyes searched Knox’s face. Oh my God, she was mouthing.

  No sound from the next room. Then her father said, “Don’t worry about it, honey.” It was unclear whether he was speaking to Knox or their mother, but there was a finality in his tone; her father of all people wasn’t going to let a small accident mar a family evening. Knox could hear Robbie saying something, though she couldn’t make out his words; then her mother’s even voice answered him, there was a brief tink of silver, a marbling of ice and liquid in a pitcher as it was passed,
tipped, and the moment was over.

  Charlotte squatted and began picking up the larger shards gingerly. Knox fetched a trash bag from the cupboard under the sink, squatted, too, and held it open for her.

  “Always hogging the spotlight,” Charlotte said softly. When Knox glanced up at her, she smiled.

  “Careful of your feet,” Knox said.

  When the pieces were all placed at the bottom of the bag, Charlotte walked on the balls of her feet to the pantry closet and returned with a broom and dustpan. Knox took them from her and set to sweeping the floor clean. She scanned for stray chips, bits of glaze along the baseboards, pushing everything into a small pile. It satisfied her, this task. She felt better than she had when she’d first walked into the kitchen. Charlotte bent to angle the dustpan for her, truce ghosting the air between them. It didn’t need to be said that Knox could better afford to have broken something; she wasn’t leaving in a few days; she didn’t fear looking inept or foolish in front of their mother, the way Charlotte seemed to; Charlotte was the one who had let herself become too defensive, had been afraid—wasn’t that it?—to go back into the breakfast room alone. And another thing that Knox had difficulty keeping in mind until she found herself in an instant like this: she and Charlotte both understood that they loved each other most purely when Charlotte was slightly in her debt. It inspired this shared quiet in them, a tenderness; it had been like this forever.

  Knox swept a final circle around the pile and pushed it into the pan. She felt young, and at the same time much older than Charlotte, which she used to feel so certain was what God had meant her to be; the order of their birth had been an accident he’d committed in some addled moment. Circle, circle, stab in the back, blood runs up, blood runs back … She supposed that in no time at all she’d be back to resenting Charlotte for dizzying her with these contradictory pangs. Moments of connection between the two of them never seemed to last long anyway. Slide down my rainbow, into my cellar door, and we’ll be jolly friends, forever more, more, more … They shoved the bag, ballooning with trapped air, into the compactor together.

  “Hey, let’s go out,” Charlotte said. She bumped Knox with her hip.

  “If you want,” Knox said.

  AFTER DESSERT, Knox had driven Charlotte into town. Charlotte had made an effort at charm once they returned to the table, scooped vanilla fro-yo onto everyone’s brownie with a soup spoon, despite protests. She told them all a story about one of her temp jobs, a daylong assignment in Yonkers that involved waving convention buses into a hotel parking lot. “It paid ten an hour,” Charlotte said, “but for what? I wore one of those reflective parkas for eight hours in the rain, held cones up over my head, the heinous bellboy wouldn’t stop asking me out …” Knox giggled along with the rest of her family: generously, with relief.

  Eventually Charlotte had asked their mother if it would be all right if she and Knox went out for a bit.

  Knox’s father looked pleased at the question, at the idea of his daughters socializing as a pair. Knox shot Charlotte a telepathic message: See how easy it is to make them happy when you try? Finally learn this.

  “I never get asked to do anything,” Robbie said, but he wasn’t serious and excused himself to make a phone call.

  “Go ahead,” Knox’s mother said, dipping a finger into the melted ice cream on her father’s plate and tonguing it off with a quick motion, a sheepish look at her father. The broken plate seemed forgotten, at least temporarily. “Have a wonderful time, girls.”

  Now Knox kept her eyes on the road. It advanced toward her car in sections like fed line, reeling her in. So much wine had been a bad idea; she’d stick to Diet Cokes at the bar and feel better on the drive home. The interior of the car was cold; the vent blast hadn’t turned to heat yet. Fields stretched to the left and right of the road in the dark. Yesterday’s snow still salted the road in places, snaked in long, perfect tubes down the top rungs of fences that showed themselves in her headlights. A mare standing flush with her paddock gate stuck her neck out over it as they passed, gave them the eye. Knox left her behind, swallowed in the night like she’d never existed, and thought with a kind of awe: She’ll stand there all night, just in that spot. That’s what mares did when left out in this kind of weather. She wanted to say something about this to Charlotte; though she had to drive carefully now, this road jazzed her even more in the dark, when all that was visible of the properties she knew was contained in the small, jumpy circumference of her high beams. Though she knew it was only farmland whizzing by her windows, she sometimes supposed on this road at night that she understood the deepest wonder of sailors, or African homesteaders, both connected to and unable to plumb the depths that lay, teeming, out of their sight. But Charlotte was burrowed down in the passenger seat, the hood of her jacket pulled over her head so that part of her face was obscured. Knox thought she might be asleep and, afraid to take her eyes off the road to reach for the radio, drove on in silence.

  They reached Lexington. As Knox slowed to make a left at the viaduct, Charlotte stirred, sat up a little, and cut her eyes at Knox.

  “Where to?” she said in a scratchy voice. She yawned.

  “Well, there are so many bars to choose from,” Knox said. “Gee, let me think …”

  “There are more than just the Rosebud,” Charlotte said. “Please, Knoxie.”

  “Ned’ll be there later,” Knox said. “Besides, you won’t see anybody you know if we go someplace else. Come on.”

  She pulled onto Broadway, then made a left and drove the few blocks to the oldest part of town where the former courthouse stood, where the sidewalks were wide, bricked, and crumbling. The Rosebud, its tiny glass front crowded with neon signs, was one of the few functioning businesses on its block. Cars lined either side of the narrow street it stood on; Knox finally drove around the corner to park. As she walked with Charlotte through the door of the bar she felt a guilty awareness of why she’d wanted to come here; it was one thing not to know how to look at Charlotte at home without feeling stymied by every strange and competitive feeling she thought had evaporated when her sister had left home for good—but quite another to be trailing close behind her as they wove through a crush of people toward the back of the room, under the bolted televisions tuned to the local news, where there was a bit more space to be had and at least the possibility of conversation. Here, among the grooms she knew and the people she recognized as having gone to her grade school, or from the halls of UK, Knox felt not confused or wary but conferred upon by Charlotte’s presence. Billy, the assistant manager at Poplar Hill and a friend of Ned’s, flicked his eyes upward as Charlotte brushed past his table, following her as she moved; then, seeing Knox, smiled in recognition and half stood from his chair to reach for her hand and clasp it hello. “Buy you a beer later?” he shouted, and Knox jerked her head sideways toward the area they’d be sitting in, nodded, kept moving. She waved to the skinny, underage son of one of her parents’ friends who was standing near the brass tap, thought if she found herself next to him in the course of the night she’d tease him about being here in light of the early wake-up he had waiting for him in the morning; he was mucking out at the Horse Park this year in penance for some high school misdeed. She kept close to Charlotte, who must have first begun coming here at sixteen, whose picture was buried among the curling snapshots tacked to the wall by the entrance, who, according to Chuck the owner, warranted careful watching during the period she frequented the place so she didn’t “do anything stupid,” which Knox took to mean downing a shot or three too many, or perhaps going home with somebody who was sure to brag about it at the bar the very next night. She didn’t know, really. She did know that she had tried to use an old license of Charlotte’s the first time she herself had attempted to get in here, years ago, and that Chuck had laughed his ass off and turned her away from the door. We already know that face, sweetheart. Come again when you’ve got your own picture to show and we’ll talk. Knox had never really liked coming to the Ro
sebud; she’d let Ned drag her along occasionally, but preferred her own porch or the next day’s lesson plans to this noisy, predictable scene. Yet here she was, preening her way toward the back as if she came here every night of her life. She felt the eyes upon them both as she and her sister—the one whose name people knew, the one who didn’t come home all that often—chose an isolated table near the ladies’ room door and sat down.

  “Well,” Knox said breathlessly. “Are we having fun yet?”

  It seemed as if Charlotte were still waking up. She blinked, then smiled. She looked Knox straight in the eye, holding her gaze until Knox finally glanced away, at which point Charlotte sloughed off her coat and draped it over the back of her chair.

  “Do you want anything?”

  “I’m okay,” Charlotte said. “Maybe in a minute.”

  “Me too,” Knox said. She would make sure they had a good time tonight, she thought. The jukebox kicked on; a country tune trilled out of a speaker behind Knox’s head. I go walkin’, after midnight, out in the moonlight … A knot of college girls near the bar raised their plastic cups and joined in.

  “This place,” Charlotte said. “Nothing ever changes.” She laughed, rolling her eyes a little.

  “Sorry,” Knox said, and in that moment she did feel sorry. “In New York you must go to a new place every night.”

  “No, it’s all right.” She put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “I don’t mind. Sometimes it’s nice when things stay the same. Anyway”—she focused on Knox’s face again—“I’m just glad to be out of the house. How is everything, Knoxie?” The emphasis in this last sentence fell on the word “everything,” and Knox felt herself flushing at the question, as if she were expected to give an accounting of some complicated life whose reach extended far beyond the boundaries of her own. She pictured the cabin that, just at this moment, stood full of held silence, the eggshell-colored comforter folded down at the end of the bed, the squeeze bottle of dish liquid that was just less than one-third full (she’d buy a spare on her next grocery run) balanced on the edge of the kitchen sink. The car in the parking lot around the corner, its backseat piled with papers, manila files, going cold again in the winter dark; the keys in her jeans pocket; the two rolls of toilet paper in the basket on the floor of her bathroom. What was there to say about any of it?