Callie sat on the floor, watching me.
“You never swim anymore, anyway,” she said.
“I might.”
I hadn’t unpacked all my clothes yet and I knelt on the floor, searching through a duffel bag for a T-shirt long enough to reach my knees.
“You won’t.”
I stood up. Leave, I signed.
Callie began shifting through the rest of my moving boxes as if she would discover something new there, as if she didn’t know all of my belongings already. It didn’t matter to her what she wore—bright green overalls and a two-piece bathing suit, with Minnie Mouse’s head on the chest, her little girl stomach pouting over the waistband. She strummed her fingers across her paunch in an upbeat rhythm, unashamed, stopping every so often to reach into her overalls and hitch her bathing suit bottom over the fat on her hips.
“You’re too old for Minnie Mouse,” I told her.
“I don’t care,” she said, but she crossed her arms over the face on her chest.
She took a prism paperweight out of a box, held it up to her left eye, and pointed it at my bedroom window. She made sure to flash the light from the glass in my face, tracking me around the room, annoying me until Max and Charlie joined us.
Charlie wanted to touch everything: my books, the clothes in the duffel bag, the ragged cardboard flaps on the moving boxes. He stretched his hand out at the flash from the prism in Callie’s hand. Callie shook the light at him until he opened his mouth wide and a dry, husking sound came out.
“What’s that?” I asked, alarmed he would start crying.
Max said proudly, “He’s laughing.”
I had a bunch of old cutouts from National Geographic pinned to the wall—maps of the world. While I sifted through a pile of oversized sweatshirts, Max walked Charlie to each map. He took him past the Americas, Antarctica, Asia. He stopped in front of each and signed its title to Charlie.
“He can’t understand countries,” Callie told him.
“I know,” Max replied. “But it’s good for him to understand that there’s a word for everything.”
When Max got to Africa, he opened his palm wide, spread his fingers over an imaginary hump, and then clamped them shut into a fist.
Callie gasped. I began laughing.
“What is it?” Max said.
“Max,” I sputtered.
“What is it?”
“What was that?”
“What do you mean?” He started to make the sign again. “It’s Africa.”
“No!” Callie shrieked, eyes sliding from me to Max, unsure whether to laugh or to be afraid. “Don’t do that!”
“Who told you that’s Africa?” I said.
“The last ASL tutor here.”
Callie decided to laugh.
“It’s not?” Max hesitated. “She was wrong?”
“No, it’s not.” I said primly.
“Africa is this.” Callie curled her fist into the sign for the letter A, circled her face, and touched her thumb to her nose, flattening the tip.
“Aw, Callie,” Max stuttered, and he began to turn red. “Don’t do that. Please don’t do that.”
“Why?” She kept her hand to her face.
“Because it’s racist.” He looked up at both of us now.
I laughed harder. “It is not.”
“It is. Look, you’re touching your own nose for Africa. You’re pointing to your own nose and you’re making it flat . . .” Here he hiccoughed, glanced once again to the ground, then up and rushed through the rest, forcing himself to meet my eye. “And some people, a long time ago, used to believe that all Africans had, you know, a flat nose and that it was inferior.”
Callie pressed her thumb down hard and wheezed out, “A flat nose is inferior.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Max groaned. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, your sign is wrong,” I crowed, triumphant. “This”—I copied his first gesture, making the hump—“means something dirty.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It doesn’t mean ‘Africa,’ ” I said. “It means . . .” I lost my will for a moment. But then I looked at Max, his eyes wide and skeptical, and I gained it back again. “It means ‘tits,’ ” I said, and had the satisfaction of seeing him finally look away.
Callie gasped. “Charlotte!”
Max was even redder now, but he was not going to admit defeat. Instead he said, carefully, to the floor, “Who told you that?”
“They showed us at camp last summer.” No one had actually shown me. A couple of older boys had pointed at my swelling T-shirt and made the sign and I figured it out from there.
Max shook his head. “Well. I guess we both have a lot to learn.”
“How do you not know that?” Callie began to laugh again.
Max turned his face to Charlie. He was going to overlook us.
“It’s not his fault,” I told Callie, loud enough so he could hear. “Don’t be mean. Max only knows white-people sign language.”
Max stiffened but didn’t respond. He wouldn’t play with us. He was just going to let my insult hang out in the air, till the juice dripped out if it, till it dried out and curled in and broke up into dust.
“Girls,” my father called from the hallway, “Max, are we ready to go?”
Max rubbed Charlie’s back. “We’re ready,” he answered, and stalked out of the room.
Callie stood up to follow. Before she left the room, she turned and gave me a cool once over.
“Your bathing suit is stretching funny.” She signed Africa at my chest, across the boobs.
Callie and I followed my father, Max, and Charlie down our back wooden staircase, into the big baroque hallway. We went through a last set of heavy double doors and then we were outside. Across a balding lawn, there was a short run with barbed-wire fencing strung along its sides. The fencing scrambled down to a pond with a small island in the middle and a motorboat lying belly up in some weeds on the shore. There was a deep gauge in the soil, hardened into stiff mud, from dragging the boat back and forth.
“The chimps like to swim?” my father asked.
“No, they hate water,” Max explained. “It’s terrible getting them into the boat, but they love it once they’re across and on the island.”
I walked over to the boat. The shoreline was just patches of brittle grass, blistered with dirt. The water shined bright from far away, but up close it was a dull brown. And the current was off. It didn’t ebb back and forth like a normal pond—it churned in little circles.
I pointed. “Why’s it doing that?”
“That’s the pump,” Max said. “It’s a man-made pond. Miss Toneybee-Leroy had it put in a long time ago, back in the fifties I think.”
I spread out my towel. Even on the driest piece of grass, the mud bled fast through the terry cloth, stained the front of my T-shirt brown.
Callie ignored the mud. She surged into the water until it came up to her knees. My father followed. Max stood beside my towel for a little while, watching them. Charlie clung to his neck, a wary look on his face. Callie suddenly turned in the water, rushed toward my father, and with one heavy push swooped a wave of water at him, laughing. Charlie flinched.
“He’s nervous,” I said.
Max glanced down at him. “We could walk him around a bit to distract him.”
“All right.”
Charlie wouldn’t let Max stand him on the ground, so he rode on his hip instead. We started walking toward the woods.
“You know, Charlotte,” Max began. “I really am sorry.”
“For what?”
“Just . . . everything. The way we’ve started, I guess.”
“You shouldn’t be sorry. I’m the jerk.”
We were on a lesser used footpath, the trees and bushes overgrown, and Max held back some branches so that I could pass.
“See?” I said. “You can’t even deny it. So don’t say you’re sorry.”
He laughed.
“I don’t think you’re a jerk.”
“You’re just being polite.”
Charlie began to fidget, reaching for the leaves we passed. “Do you like it here?” Max began again.
“You always ask us that.”
“Everyone here just wants you and Callie to feel comfortable.”
“Well, I’m comfortable.”
“I’ve known you long enough to know that’s a lie.”
“You wouldn’t want to hear the truth.”
“Yes, I would.”
“It would make Dr. Paulsen cry.”
Max smiled and I smiled back.
“She would cry,” I continued. “She’d choke on the chalk in her pocket.”
Max laughed again. “Nothing gets past you.”
Despite myself, I flushed at the compliment.
“I think I can handle it, though.”
“Fine.” I stopped on the path. “You want to know what I think? I’ve never seen so many white people in one place in my life.” I scanned his face for his reaction. I wanted him to wince, but he didn’t. Instead he nodded.
“I suppose that’s strange.”
“It is.” I waited some more.
“Well, we’re all happy you’re here, you know.”
“You all just stare at us. At me and Callie. It’s weird sometimes. And everyone asks too many questions.”
Again, he nodded. I had confirmed something for him.
“I hope you don’t think I’m one of the ones who ask too many questions.”
“You’re the worst of all.”
He laughed and turned to walk back to the pond.
I followed. As I walked behind them, Charlie shifted on Max’s hip. Dr. Paulsen had warned us not to hold his gaze for long, that he would take this as a threat, so I only met his eyes for only a moment and then focused on watching Max’s back, the shift of his shirt as he carried Charlie up the hill. But Charlie kept angling his head to catch my eye, and when he did, he would grin when I turned away, taking pleasure in his dominance.
Max murmured something low to Charlie, something that sounded like “calm down.” Then he called to me, “You don’t have to play with him if you don’t want to.”
But I was stubborn. Charlie sought my gaze and every time, despite my annoyance, I submitted, I lowered my eyes and then looked back up at him. I didn’t like the patterns of this game, but I wouldn’t break them. I kept going, to Charlie’s squirming delight—a grudging act of kindness, not given willingly, not given happily, certainly not given with love, only defiance. You don’t know me, I signed to the space between Max’s shoulders. I can be good. I can be better.
Charlotte
I wasn’t sure if I could still smell it. Through the cloud of diesel and old chewing gum and cracked leather seats in the very back of the school bus, I thought I could still faintly smell Charlie’s urine on the cuffs of my sweater. It was under a layer of synthetic lilies, courtesy of the half bottle of detergent my mother poured over the shirt, but still, I thought it was there. I leaned my head against the bus window, scanned the road up ahead for signs that we were getting closer to Courtland County High School.
The night before, I’d carefully chosen my new school clothes—a polka-dot blouse and stretch stirrup pants and a white hair scrunchie—and laid them out on my bed. I had scrutinized every part of the outfit, weighing one against the other, hoping they might equal up to something that could be read as good. My mother, Charlie always with her, came to inspect the final choice and as she pressed her hands against the seat of the pants, testing to see if they were too sheer, Charlie unhooked his leg from her side and a stream of piss dribbled from the corner of his diaper and down over my outfit.
“Oh, Charlotte, oh honey, I’m sorry.”
My mother was full of contrition, but Charlie didn’t care. He only watched her calmly as she knelt and gathered up my clothes and doused them with the detergent and then perfume and then finally sprayed them all down with air freshener. In the morning, I sniffed the damp sleeves and breathed in the ruin and I would have worn something else, but there was my mother, asking hopefully, “How is it?” and I pulled the shirt over my head.
“It’s not bad. I can still wear it.”
She sighed, relieved.
I was the only student on the bus so I was not able to tell if the stink was real or part of my imagination. I was not sure yet if it was going to spoil the only good thing about moving to the Toneybee Institute. Here, in Courtland County, I had the benefit of being unknown. Back home in Dorchester, I had been with the same kids since kindergarten and they all remembered me as the know-it-all who got uppity and insulted everyone in a secret language she spoke with her hands. At the start of eighth grade, some of the other girls spread a rumor that my signing was not to be trusted. They said it wasn’t much different from what Jamal German did when he looked you in the eyes and rubbed on himself in public. After that, every time I lifted my hands to sign, the girls all turned away. They squealed to each other, “Ooh, she nasty.” They didn’t even bother to say it to me.
In Courtland County, I would be new. And I thought, for sure, that I would be the only black girl. I decided this would be an advantage. These kids had probably never even seen a black person before. There would be no other real black people to compare me to, only the ones on TV. And every television sitcom I had ever watched had told me that black kids were infinitely cooler than their white counterparts and that white kids knew this. I’d never had white classmates, but I took these plots as an article of faith. Back home, I only learned what was cool by listening to others’ conversations. Here, I reasoned, those scraps of intelligence could be worked into a social genius. They wouldn’t know I was a mess. My clothes would seem up to date in the Berkshires, not horribly out of fashion. My hollow brass door-knocker earrings strained my earlobes and knocked against my neck as the bus jerked. But I had to believe that out here, in this wilderness of whiteness, everything I wore would stand in stark relief, become urbane sophistication, the trump card of biologically ordained, racially innate coolness.
But Charlie’s accident. I sat in the very back of the bus. I had claimed the seat of rebellion, but at each stop made, no one sat next to me. A few boys would start toward it, ready to claim the last seat for themselves, but when they saw me sitting there they stopped halfway down the row, slid into the first free bench, their eyes skidding over me. They couldn’t possibly catch it from that far away. I kept my forehead pressed to the glass of the window, the grease from my braids making a gauzy halo on the pane.
The leather of my bus seat creaked. A girl eased in beside me. She was grasping a stack of books to the front of her faded purple fleece jacket. Tortoiseshell glasses were perched on top of her head like a crown and she had a silver canteen in her hand. When she unscrewed it, I smelled fresh coffee. I was instantly impressed. Back in Dorchester, nobody was that adult. Even the bad kids, the ones who dragged on cigarettes before class, even those kids only drank hot chocolate.
The girl dumped her books on the expanse of seat between us. She gave me a guarded smile. “You’re new.”
“Yeah,”
“I’m Melissa. You live in Spring City,” she declared.
“No,” I said, confused. “I live here, in Courtland County.”
“Where?”
I didn’t want to say the Toneybee Institute. I vaguely pointed to my left, toward the highway underbrush dashing beside us. “Back there.”
“It’s okay if you’re from Spring City. I volunteered there this summer at the food bank. I’d much rather be from there than boring Courtland County.”
“I’m from Boston,” I said.
“But didn’t you just say you live in Courtland County?”
“Yeah, I do. Now.”
Melissa studied me over the lip of her canteen. She took in the earrings, the scrunchie, the front of my shirt. She swallowed her coffee. “Okay,” she said.
She thought I was lying and wha
t was worse, for some mysterious reason, she had decided she should humor me.
She sat her canteen down between us and opened a book. I turned toward the window and pretended to write her off.
Boys were always easier to figure out. Whenever I spoke, their eyes opened wide, as if I had pulled down the collar of my T-shirt and my nipples sprouted mouths that spit my words out for me.
The boys looked at you like they knew something about you, but you knew they didn’t, not really. They only thought they did, and though their stares were unsettling, there was nothing to actually be afraid of in them. What they thought they knew about you wasn’t real, was some story they made up behind their eyes, easily guessed at, predictable, and ordinary, as mysterious and complex as the plot of a Road Runner cartoon.
It was always the girls who were different. Melissa’s expression was the same as the girls’ in Dorchester. Their heavy-lidded eyes would light first on their friends’ faces, then on the better-looking boys’, then quickly to the front of my chest. Their mouths would harden, register something mysterious in the upturned curl of a lip. The Dorchester girls sucked their teeth—one long thin whine of displeasure—tossed their heads, and then their gaze flitted away again.
I wanted more than anything to know what they were thinking. I knew that, for just a moment, I had entered their consciousness, but how and where I entered I could not tell. They looked at you like they knew a secret about you that you didn’t even know yourself yet. Like they’d picked up some scent that you didn’t know you carried, emanating from some sincere and deeply embarrassing gland, secreted away in an obscure fold of your skin, pushing out an unfiltered, humiliating stink that bloomed with rude honesty, announcing the precise condition of your very self.
Courtland County High School was like a tidy office park. It was a slate building, all sharp angles and darkened windows. The lawns out front were the same oppressive green as the woods around the Toneybee. The grass was immaculate: not a single stray potato-chip packet, not even a muddied footprint near the sidewalk border.
Inside, things were just as officious. It was especially odd to have a locker to myself, and even stranger that the lock worked, was not angrily bent over on itself by some unknown fist.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 9