“Well,” she said with an exhale when I finished. “That’s quite a story.” Adia watched me now, made some calculation. I had passed a test and Adia had decided I was one of them.
At the Breitlings, it was never quiet. Their two great passions were rhetoric and music. Adia and her mother were rhythm heads. My father loved music, too, but the Breitlings were different. They were not collectors and they were not merely fans. Their passion for music was both religious and profane: they revered and craved it at the same time. Their stereo was on from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m., when Marie’s wheel did its final revolution of the night, and she gave the poor, overworked motor of the turntable a break.
When it was just me and Adia, she chose the records. If Marie was there, she was the one in charge, constantly changing discs to keep up with the unending mix in her head. Nina Simone and Sly and the Family Stone—the only records she and my father shared, besides Labelle. Marie even allowed rap music, a fact that astonished me. My parents hated rap and I thought that hatred was shared by anyone over thirty. The only thing Marie banned was any white singers. White composers were fine, she said. She loved classical music. Bartók was her favorite. But, she confided with a laugh and a shrug, she couldn’t stand the sound of white people singing.
“Except for Joni Mitchell,” Adia said.
I snorted.
“What’s so funny?”
But I could never explain it to her.
It was exhausting to be with the Breitlings. Black people could love Joni Mitchell but still claim to hate white singers. It was one of an elaborate set of rules that Marie imparted to Adia, who parroted them back to me as if I had not been in the room at the same time she heard them. It was a long list, the work of many years’ worth of debate.
We’d had our own version of these rules back home in Dorchester, but they had been rules of what you weren’t supposed to do in public, what you weren’t supposed to do around white people. Laugh too loudly, show anger, dress raggedy, show any sign of disorder or chaos. Fit perfectly—without strain—into space.
The Breitlings’ list was different. According to them, these were the things black people did not do: eat mayonnaise; drink milk; listen to Elvis Presley; watch Westerns or Dynasty; read Time magazine; appreciate Jack London; know the lyrics to Kenny Rogers’s songs; suffer fools; enjoy the cold or any kind of winter. Here were the things black people did do: learn to speak French and adore Paris; instinctively understand and appreciate anyone from a small island or a hot place; spank their children; obsessively read science fiction and watch Star Trek episodes; prefer sweet foods to salty.
The debate over whether or not black people were natural swimmers was a very old one between the two of them, an argument that was full of in-jokes and constructed of rhythms I could not follow.
Living in all-white Courtland County, Marie gave her daughter these specifications so that Adia could spot a real black person as soon as they came along, avoid all the mirages. That’s what I thought it was at first and it put me on the defensive because surely, in this analogy, I—in my tennis shoes and wannabe white-girl bangs—would be the mirage. And who would ever want to think of themselves as not really water but actually a trick of the desert?
As I got to know them better, I realized the rules were for Adia herself as much as they were for the world around her. Marie nursed Adia on a bitter pabulum of omnipresent, always-lurking oppression. To ready her daughter for the assault on her rights that Marie was sure was coming, she had given Adia a very simple list of instructions on how to be black. All Adia had to do was follow them and her whole self would be secure. It was intoxicating. I wanted them to tell me their rules forever.
And yet they never could give me the straightforward answer of how they got stranded in the blizzard of whiteness that was Courtland County. Sometimes they called Adia’s father a jazz musician, sometimes a physicist, sometimes a planetary scholar, sometimes a poet.
What was clear was that Marie came to Courtland County with the man who himself had been lured there as an affirmative action hire at Courtland County Community College, in whatever was his true discipline. “But this place was too much for him,” Marie would say, smoke streaming from her nostrils. “He had to go back down south.”
They claimed he sent periodic interplanetary dispatches—whether this was a metaphor or something they believed had truly happened was always unclear. He also sent money, which covered the rent for the Main Street storefront, and the records and the magazines.
For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t follow him down south. I think they stayed because, by the time I met them, they had comfortably settled into the roles of professional angry black women and the idea of living anywhere else was unimaginable.
Marie took on the burden of talking about race for Courtland County. And for her part of the deal, she got this one scrap of land where she could dictate all the rules. The troubling thing, of course, which Adia and Marie never mentioned, was the lack of actual fellow black people. The black people in Spring City didn’t count. Marie and Adia only mentioned them when decrying the segregation that caused that town’s existence.
Marie’s loud protestations about the lack of black history celebrations in town had resulted in a sheepish and hastily thrown together assembly each year at the public library, where all the white children and Adia sang praises to peanuts and open-heart surgery and air-conditioning underneath a store-printed banner that read THE WONDERS OF BLACK INNOVATION. Even the high school, in a misguided but genuine attempt to appease Marie, put on a turgid adaptation of The Wiz the previous year, which Adia, with her profound gift for contrarian gestures, refused to take part in. Without her, the cast was all white and deadly earnest. Marie attended every performance anyway, a good sport, and cheerfully lacerated the poor cast members after each show for their inveterate cluelessness.
“You children can’t help it, of course,” she told them, and they accepted her criticism with a comforting humility.
Courtland County bowed to Marie’s demands because the people there, like well-meaning decent and caring people anywhere, were loath to think of themselves as racists but also loathe to think of race at all.
Among the three of us it was different. Marie and Adia liked to quiz me about all the signs I knew.
In their front room one afternoon, the two of us helping Marie as she mixed glazes, Adia said, “Show me the sign for bougie, Charlotte. I bet you know that one.”
“There isn’t one.”
“You’re telling me there aren’t any black deaf people?”
“Of course there are,” I said. “We’ve got our own signing. Black Deaf Sign Language.”
“Marie,” Adia called happily. “Listen to this. Tell her, Charlotte.”
Marie was just as amused as Adia. They did not find the idea sad or isolating or frightening. They were delighted.
“There has to be a sign for bougie,” Adia insisted. “There just has to be. You know we like to come up with ways to call each other out.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s what black people do. We like to call each other out. We don’t suffer fools.”
“Show us deaf Ebonics,” Marie said.
“Show us country signing,” Adia said.
“Show us how we do,” Marie said.
“Show us ghetto signs,” Adia said, and Marie abruptly stopped laughing.
“That’s enough,” she said sternly. “That’s offensive. That’s what they would want you to say.”
“They who?” I asked.
I had failed them again.
“White people.” Adia rolled her eyes. “Duh.”
“That’s enough,” Marie said again, then sat at her wheel and began working. We’d been dismissed for being too rowdy.
In her room, Adia threw herself across the mess of blankets she used for a bed—“Mattresses are colonialist,” she’d pronounced when I’d first seen it—and buried her head under a bundle o
f sheets.
“Sometimes Marie just can’t take a joke,” she muttered.
I slid down beside her. “Duh,” I said.
Adia only grunted.
She put her head on my knee.
“It’s just . . . there can be so much more, you know?”
I could feel the bell of her voice vibrate against my shins. I reached out and took her hand in mine and began to spell the alphabet. She didn’t move. After a few seconds, “What are you doing?”
“It’s all your letters. So you can sign any word you want.”
I held my breath. But Adia only allowed, “That’s true,” and I felt her hand ease into mine.
Adia’s skin was much softer than I thought it would be. She liked to use her hands to gouge and sketch and scratch so it was a surprise that her fingers were pneumatic and smooth. In the warm dark of Adia’s room, we began to practice the alphabet. I crooked her fingers, made them swoop through the air. She sat up on one elbow so she could see my hands move. We went through it once, twice, but she kept tripping on some letters and she finally threw her arm over her eyes in mock despair, “Oh, lawd te day, I’m blind.”
“Yes, yes, lawd,” Adia continued. “Lawdy, lawd. I’se is deaf, dumb, and blind.”
Then she laughed. To keep the joke going, I took her hand in mine again. “This is how the blind learn to sign.” I finger-spelled the start of her name into the soft flesh at her shoulder.
“Like Helen Keller?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like Helen Keller.”
I moved my hand to the hollow in the middle of her chest, pressed it to the skin there. The joke wavered, it threatened to break and become serious. Adia held her breath, whether to stop laughing or not, I didn’t know. I started to move my fingers to make her name again: the hard fist for a. When I pressed my little finger, held up at attention for the letter i against her chest, Adia squirmed.
“That tickles.”
“Sorry.”
But I kept my hand on her chest for a few seconds more, until Adia shrugged, rolled a little bit away from me, and said “Good night,” pretending to sleep while still pressed against me, while I slipped my hand down farther, still spelling all the way, while in the last little bit of afternoon light I watched her form beside me, felt her breath rise and fall. I focused—as I spelled into her skin, into wet—on the curve of her skull, the two perfect hollows at its base.
I WENT TO Adia’s every day after that, for the push of her skin and for revolution. Adia talked to me about change and uprising and power till she made herself hoarse, and then she lay beneath me and went quiet while I spelled into her a different kind of speech, a truer one, I thought.
Always, after, Adia kept still. Her mouth closed, her eyes muted, she was finally, briefly, smoothed over.
I lived in this lull, when it was just our breath, just our two bodies sliding very slowly away from each other. I thought it meant that we had broken into something new. Something that existed outside of the Toneybee Institute and Courtland County and what black people could and could not do. When we pressed together, when we moved our fingers against each other, we spelled past doing to simply, unquestionably being. We fell out of time.
I told myself the gibberish that I spelled into Adia’s body had become a language that we shared between us. That maybe I was being too cautious. That maybe I could open my mouth and speak and name what passed between us for what it was—love.
I was wrong about that one.
Adia spoke about what we did only once. One afternoon, all slick and warm, the bare trees scratching on her window, the faraway hiss of her mother’s kiln downstairs, Adia rolled her head off of its resting place on my knee and propped herself up on one elbow.
“Black people don’t know how to love,” she said.
I snorted, “C’mon, Adia. Another rule? Black people can’t love? That’s pretty messed up.”
“No.” Adia stuck her swollen lower lip out, made a show of pouting at my derision. “We can do it. We just don’t know how.”
Marie had recently been reading Neruda’s love poems and so that meant Adia was reading them, too.
“Marie says our ancestors were the greatest lovers,” Adia continued, unembarrassed.
I thought of Marie, her golden tooth flashing from behind her stout lips as she pronounced the word lovers with relish. I flushed.
“In Africa, we were kings and queens.” Adia was warming to her subject, to the sound of her own voice. She stretched, and I watched all the smooth round muscles of her back contract underneath her brown skin. I wanted to reach out and kiss them, each one, but I knew she would shrink from me now, would be annoyed at any interruption. I sucked my teeth instead, rolled my eyes.
“Kings and queens,” I murmured.
“Yes.” Adia, impatient now. “Marie says the men loved the women fully and wholly and the women accepted their love. Like a tribute. You know, Cleopatra on the Nile and all that. In Africa, it was the man’s job to offer love and the woman’s job to accept it. But all that’s ruined now. Marie told me.” Adia sighed.
Her skin was still damp, her bare arms flexing. “But we’re getting it back,” I said shyly.
She snapped up as if I’d pinched her.
“You and I will have to learn,” Adia told me. “Marie says so. We’ll have to find kings.” I thought maybe this was another kind of flirtation. Adia looked slyly at me through her lashes. Then she said, “We don’t want to go queer like white girls do.”
I reached for her to make her stop. I began again to finger-spell against her skin, to find our way into that other existence, but while my fingers worked I made sure to kiss Adia hard, to bite her on the lips and tongue until they swelled, so that when we were finished the quiet would keep and she could not talk us back into history.
THAT NIGHT WHEN I went back home to the Toneybee, my own lips were bruised and smarting. I ate dinner and I brushed my teeth and I lay in bed and I thought about what Adia told me. After a while, I got up and went to Charlie’s room.
In the dimness, I didn’t see him at first. But then, in the farthest corner, I saw some rustling in a mess of blankets. Charlie sat up. I moved toward him. He tilted his head and scratched underneath his arm. He sniffed loudly. I could smell him and I realized with a start that he could smell me, too. I watched his nostrils grow wide. I heard his stomach rumble, heard him make a tiny swallow at the back of his throat. He yawned, blinked languorously.
I held up my hand and signed to Charlie the one thing I knew for certain.
I love Adia Breitling. I like girls.
Charlie blinked again, more quickly. And then he raised his hand and signed it back to me, his fingers swift and nimble: I like girls, I like girls, I like girls.
The game played by younger siblings everywhere. I repeat what you say until you cannot take it anymore, until you are enraged by your own echo. He’d done it to me before and it had made me furious.
But now, as I watched him reflect my love for Adia, I felt only the overwhelming need to touch him. But I knew the moment I reached out for him, he would bristle. So I sat, grateful, watching his fingers mirror mine until he stopped.
He yawned and scratched his cheek and blinked again, and then he pushed himself up onto his haunches and away from me. He made a point of turning his back, busying himself with his nest of blankets, until he threw himself on the floor with a groan and covered his eyes with his hands, ready for sleep.
I stood up, careful not to step on his blankets and closed his door behind me.
Callie
Callie didn’t care. If Charlotte didn’t want to come home anymore, that was her business. Callie would watch all the Westerns with Charlie.
Westerns were Charlie’s favorite kind of movie. Callie didn’t like them, but that was not important. Callie was the family member that Dr. Paulsen trusted to take care of Charlie’s collection: videotapes of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Johnny Guitar. Johnny G
uitar was Charlie’s favorite. He sat as close as possible to the TV set during every Joan Crawford close-up and would purse his lips into a kiss and press it against the screen, fitting his own fleshy mouth over her bloodred trembling one. But what he really liked best about the Westerns were the sound effects: the hollow thud of horses’ hooves and the whistling theme songs. He would sit back on his haunches and rock back and forth, yes yesing the gunshots with a perpetually nodding head, riveted from the opening scenes of big empty gray sky to the closing monochrome sunset.
Without Charlotte, the only sounds in the apartment after school were gunshots, the soft purr of the gears turning over in the VCR and Charlie’s heavy breathing. If Joan Crawford wasn’t on the screen, he busied himself with grooming Callie. It’s why she sat beside him. I hate Johnny Guitar, she signed into the arm of the sofa as Charlie raked his fingers through her hair. His palms got greasy with activator spray and the familiar musky scent of her scalp.
Charlotte didn’t smell like home anymore. Charlie’s nostrils flared and Callie flared hers, too, hoping to pick up whatever he did.
“God,” Charlotte would say. “You don’t have to sniff like that.”
And Callie would turn away.
The first afternoon when Charlotte was late she had still cared enough to bristle at the rebuff. “Well, hello to you, too,” she’d said.
Callie made a brief little flutter of annoyance in her seat. Charlie, also annoyed at the interruption, rearranged himself at her back, burrowed his fingers deeper in her hair.
Hello, Callie signed. She reached for the remote and turned up the volume. Charlie tugged appreciatively at a snarl at the nape of her neck.
“Look,” Charlotte started, “I’m sorry.”
Callie gazed at the TV screen. Charlotte put her backpack on the ground and sat down next to her on the couch.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said again. “I’m sorry I have a friend.”
“I have friends, too,” Callie said. Too quickly.
“Who are your friends?”
“Charlie is my friend.”
We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 12