The sadness of that sentence sat between the two of them until Charlotte stopped it. She flipped over her hand. “Charlie doesn’t count. Who are your human friends?”
“Charlie is a hominid.”
“Callie, he is not your friend.”
“He is. Charlie is my friend. Max is my friend.”
This was even worse than claiming Charlie’s friendship. Callie knew it as soon as it was out of her mouth, the wrongness of it. And Charlotte, of course, drove it home.
“They pay Max to be here. He’s not your friend.”
“Well, then, you don’t have any friends, either.” Charlie had moved from grooming her hair to grazing at the lint on her sweater. She focused on keeping her arms limp, on the feel of his fingertips through the weave of the cloth.
“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said again.
Callie shook her head. “Shh.” She pointed to the screen. “We’re trying to watch.”
“Well, good for you.” Charlotte got up from the couch.
“I’m doing what we’re supposed to be doing here, Charlotte.” Callie kept looking at the screen as she spoke. “I’m doing my job.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Max tells me all the time. Dr. Paulsen does, too. They say that being Charlie’s sister is the most important part of the project. So I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, but you’re not doing your job.” And then she turned to Charlotte, her face set smug and triumphant.
“You’re being so stupid right now,” Charlotte said.
But Callie wasn’t. That’s what she couldn’t understand. Or she couldn’t understand how Charlotte didn’t see it. Without you, I have nothing. They had slept side by side every night of her life and now they didn’t anymore. But maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe it didn’t matter that Charlotte’s breath was no longer the first thing she heard in the morning and the last thing she heard at night. Maybe it didn’t matter that she and Charlotte no longer signed to each other in love, only contempt. It didn’t have to matter now that she had Charlie.
But Charlie didn’t want her. What Callie felt for him was messy and sweaty and desperate, and it drove him away. “Chimpanzees are social animals,” Dr. Paulsen told her. “They need hierarchies to be happy and they are discerning.”
“What does discerning mean?” Callie asked.
If Charlie lived with other chimps he would have been the beta, Max explained. He would have been the one cringing in the corner, the one who ate last and got teased first. But what was wonderful about the experiment was that nobody teased him here; Callie only hugged and clapped for him. Here, Charlie ate first. Callie knew that should have made him loving. But it didn’t. “Chimpanzees want to dominate whatever social group they are in,” Max said. And Callie asked, “Even humans?” and he had told her yes, even humans, delighted that she was catching on. “They will try to challenge each member of the group until they win or until they are bested. They’re not dumb about it, either. They’re strategic. They start off with the weakest member of the group and work their way up,” Max said.
Callie only nodded.
Every affection she gave him was met with a pinch. His kisses had teeth. He swatted her hands when she tried to sign to him. Sometimes he groomed her hair with perfect kindness, carefully trailing his fingers through the grease at the back of her neck, and sometimes he took the strands of her hair between two of his fingers and twisted and pulled until it was ratty and scratched at the scalp. He raked his fingernails across her skin when she held him. He spit into the palms of her hands. But Callie always forgave him. She couldn’t back down. If she didn’t have Charlie, if she didn’t believe that every pinch and slap and bite and loogie were signs of love, then she didn’t have anything.
So she began to eat. At first, it was to steel herself against Charlie. A cut, a flick of a nail, were easier to bear when her blood was all mixed up with sugar. When he turned his back on her, she could suck stray cereal dust off her fingers as a balm.
When Callie reached the Toneybee in the afternoons, before she went upstairs to the apartment, she would sneak into the cafeteria. She pressed herself close to the cereal dispensers, cupped a hand to their funnels and turned the plastic dials to fill her open palms with stiff marshmallows and oxidized raisins. She turned the dials carefully: she didn’t want the rush of cornflakes against plastic siding to give her away.
She would crawl over the serving lines, hoist herself up to the bar reserved for hot plates, press herself against the chafing dishes, feel briefly the hot, unclean breath of the heat lamps, inhale the stench of floor wax and industrial gravy, and marvel at her own invisibility.
Once she was over the serving trays and into the kitchen proper, Callie could really eat. Cold pasta salad from Saran Wrapped silver tureens, dehydrated flakes of mashed potatoes from the box, handfuls of croutons and bread crumbs from the canister. In the walk-in freezer, she carefully tore at the cartons of concentrated fruit juice. She bent her head to each smooth surface and with her two front teeth, shaved bits of ice off into her open mouth, all that sugar mortifying the taste of loneliness. For the rest of her life, Callie would search for something as sweet as frozen orange juice held underneath her tongue, in the chilled, mildewy air of a refrigerator at three o’clock on a school day afternoon.
The meat, she saved for last. Row after row of naked chicken legs, the skin prickled with oversized pores, sausage links coiled like cornrows and pounds of ground beef. This was her favorite. She scooped small bits of it out with her fingers, then patted and smoothed the mounds whole to cover her tracks. The taste of raw ground beef was sharp and metallic, like eating gold. Callie would lick the tips of her fingers until the corners of her mouth shined with oil.
The first time she went upstairs, lips glossed with grease, Charlie had bounded to her and grasped her head between his hands. His grip was strong; she could not have moved her head if she tried. She felt afraid of him, for the first time. She heard her mother shriek, Max mumble something, and Callie thought: Charlie’s going to bite my lips off. She didn’t struggle. She sighed, gave into her fate, breathed in the dead milk on Charlie’s breath as he bent his mouth to hers. But he did not bite. Instead, her eyes closed, she felt the softest whiskering and then something unbelievably warm, something vibrating with heat, brush against her face. Charlie was very slowly and very carefully licking the last little bit of raw meat from her mouth. After that, Callie made sure to eat the ground beef every day that she could. It was worth it, to feel the warmth, the delicate delay of Charlie’s strength, as he kissed the greed off of her.
It didn’t seem possible that she could get so big from all of that. It genuinely surprised her when she did. How much was a ten-year-old supposed to weigh, anyway? She did not, honestly, see the difference between 100 pounds and 150 pounds. All Callie knew was that now her thighs chafed together when she walked, rubbed themselves raw on each stride. She had always been chubby, but now little pellets of flesh grew on her arms. Skin tags, that’s what Dr. Paulsen called them. Her mother asked her to examine Callie before she took her to an actual pediatrician. Dr. Paulsen, in her green rubber gloves, poked at the sagging undersides of Callie’s arms. “Skin tags are common among the obese,” Dr. Paulsen explained, and Callie started at that word. The thousand humiliations of the flesh, being stuck in a form that did not feel like yours. It must be horrible to be Charlie.
As Callie grew heavier, she became invisible. She had always been ignored at school but now, even at home, she was an overfed, slightly grimy ghost. The only two people who really paid attention to her were Dr. Paulsen and Max. Both of them were as embarrassed by her bulk as the rest of her family, but instead of politely ignoring it, they gave her aggressive compliments.
“Look at the camera, please, Callie,” Dr. Paulsen would direct. “You’ve got such a pretty face.”
“You look nice today, Callie, terrific,” Max said, even when the stitching on the thighs of her pants was split, even when a blouse broke
open along the seams of the fat on her back.
The compliments made Callie uncomfortable. She dutifully waited for them, and she always said thank you but she knew something was wrong. When Dr. Paulsen and Max told her she looked nice, her mother never echoed them. She busied herself with Charlie or some piece of equipment in the room when Callie was being praised.
But none of this made her less eager. Charlie loves me more. She knew he signed to her the most, she was sure of it.
Charlie didn’t sign much with any of them at first. Her mother said he was too shy, but Callie knew it was because he was proud. He didn’t like the questions her mother and Max asked. Anyone could see that. “Where is the blue ball? Is the rice tasty? Where is the red ball?” Those questions were boring. No wonder he didn’t answer.
Callie’s questions for Charlie were better. Do you miss your mother? Do you ever wish you were someone else? Do you think you have brothers and sisters? What did you dream about last night? Charlie didn’t sign back, he would only fix her with his distant stare, but Callie did it anyway. She was patient. She had time.
She was the first person who saw Charlie do it. He started to sign with his hands behind his back. He did this only occasionally, but when he did, it sometimes went on for hours. Her mother, Dr. Paulsen, Max, none of them, could figure it out until Callie told them all, “He’s telling us what happened a long time ago. When he signs behind him, he’s telling us what happened in the past.” She’d learned it by catching one of the litanies of signs, something about a ball, and realizing it described a misstep in a game of catch he’d made the evening before.
“You’re a genius,” Dr. Paulsen said. And her mother smiled. “Think of that, a chimp with a sense of history,” her father joked. And Max said he didn’t think it was possible, it was beyond what any one of them had imagined when they’d started. “But you could imagine it, Callie.”
She’d flushed at that, a real compliment. Overwhelmed, she ducked her head and turned to Charlie. She signed to him, You’re so smart. You are beautiful. You are the smartest brother in the world.
But Callie knew none of it mattered because Charlotte didn’t care.
Charlotte
“You don’t think it’s creepy when Charlie does that?” I asked Max.
He laughed. “Why is it creepy?”
But I couldn’t explain it to him.
It was after dinner. Max had dinner with us every night, after Callie’s big discovery. Sometimes he had a bulky video camera riding his shoulder, but he didn’t like that, you could tell it made him uncomfortable to film us. He was always jerking his face back from the eyepiece so that he could look at us directly and he turned the camera off as soon as everyone was done eating.
Dr. Paulsen was trying to be nonchalant about it, but I could tell she was excited. Every time Charlie signed behind his back, she would stop talking and just watch.
“Maybe you’re jealous,” Max teased. “Charlie’s getting a lot of attention.”
“You don’t think it’s possible he’s just fooling you?”
What was most unnerving were the things Charlie placed in the past: some were references to games and toys he had, but there was also a string of nonsense—all the signs we’d taught him, but out of order.
“That’s pretty cynical.”
“You’re going to ask Charlie about his past lives? Reincarnation?”
“Maybe.”
This was the problem with Max. He was no good to play with. I found it insulting. It made me want to poke at him more.
Max began to pack up the camera. I followed him to the door.
“Well, you guys better hurry up with all this stuff so we can move back to Boston already.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Max said. “Besides, I thought you were starting to like it here.”
“What’s there to like?”
He shook his head. “Good night, Charlotte.”
It wasn’t until closer to bed that my father noticed Max left behind his camera bag. “Just bring it up to his office and put it outside his door,” my father told me. “Hurry up, now, before you go to sleep.”
Max’s office was on the floor above our apartment. It was a wide room with too-tall ceilings with murals painted across them. It wasn’t his office, actually: it was Dr. Paulsen’s, and Max worked there at a smaller desk beside her large one.
My father told me to leave the camera bag outside his door, but when I got there the lights were still on. I pushed open the door. I put the bag on Max’s desk. And that’s when I saw it. A book titled Man or Beast? and then a semicolon holding back a spill of words I did not understand, sublimation, subaltern, a whole pool of words above the author’s name: Dr. Frances Gray. Printed across the very top of the book, in block letters UNCORRECTED PROOF. I probably would not have picked up the book if it didn’t have that portrait of Julia Toneybee-Leroy as its cover.
I flipped through the pages—a lot of chapter headings with more confusing words, like liminal space and hegemony and appropriation. In the middle of the book was an insert of pictures. It was hard to tell what they were supposed to be at first. Each one had underneath it, written in tiny, cramped script, Study of Nymphadora by Dr. Terrence Gardner.
At first I thought it was a drawing of two enormous peach pits, side by side. They were done in carefully wrought red ink, the lines sharp and small and eager and frantic. In the corners, up and down the sides, were equations: sines, cosines, brackets.
I stared at them for a long time until I knew. I recognized the slope of a back and the insides of legs. And then I felt sick. I looked and I looked, turned more and more pages, and then I began to cry.
Nymphadora of Spring City, 1929
“Do you know I can only play one song on the piano?”
That particular session, I was lying on my side, my arm held straight along my hip, my knees bent only slightly. The pouch of my stomach lapped at the tops of my thighs. When I first lay down, Dr. Gardner had reached out and very carefully placed my hand on my hip. It was the first time he touched me. He said something about finding a “balance of form.”
My skin sprung a thousand little needles when he touched me, and so I asked that question, apropos of nothing. Dr. Gardner moved back to his seat on the floor. “You can only play one song?”
“Yes.” I was becoming an expert at unfocusing my gaze, letting my eye muscles go limp and keeping my lids only half open, letting the sunny room devolve into one yellow haze. “I can play ‘Für Elise.’ ”
“How did you learn it?”
“We had a piano. My mother bought it for me. She paid the lady schoolteacher to give me lessons. I used to feel so bad for Miss Gaines. She seemed so thin and sorrowful all the time. I thought for certain I would never grow up to be an old maid like her.”
“You aren’t an old maid.” Dr. Gardner said this underneath his breath, but he said it emphatically, and this made my whole skin feel warm.
“How did you afford a piano?”
“My mother was very industrious. She scrimped and saved for it,” I lied.
I curled up my fingers and then let them go, rested them back on my thigh.
“A woman named Timothea Hartnett used to always trick Pop out of money. She’d say the dose he gave her was incorrect, or the medicine had made her son sicker. Once she even brought her daughter, who everyone knew was born bowlegged, into the shop and tried to argue Pop set her ankle wrong when she sprained it. But my mother made right work of her. She’d stand on the church steps on Sunday morning and dog Timothea Hartnett out for her lies.” Mumma’s voice had been measured and low. Not mean. Just ruthlessly correct.
All those years of hounding people for bills: another reason it would have been intolerable to be discovered bankrupt. Too many people to smile when my parents were brought low, to say, “You see how it feels now?”
Dr. Gardner couldn’t hide his discomfort. “Your mother took pleasure in bullying a woman poorer than you?”
/> I stiffened. Then I narrowed my eyes. “She was not a bully.”
Dr. Gardner didn’t say anything. I could tell he didn’t agree.
Defensively, I began to list the meager luxuries that Mumma gave me. She bought me a set of watercolor paints; no other child in Spring City had them. I had silk stockings, which our neighbors always borrowed, and sometimes she dressed the ends of my hair in grosgrain ribbons, cut from the dusty, barely used spool in Pop’s store, paid for with our own dimes put back into the till.
“That’s probably what your Miss Toneybee-Leroy does.” I tried to keep my voice light. “She probably got a million perks from her father’s rubber factory, like free bouncing balls and tennis shoes.”
“Perhaps,” allowed Dr. Gardner.
I waited a while longer. Dr. Gardner began giving me a listing of his various academic accolades: a medical college in Scotland that was supposed to be prestigious, and then study at Harvard. Someone there had passed his name to Julia Toneybee-Leroy when she put out word among her social circles that she needed someone who excelled in the study of evolution and who was comfortable working with live animals.
“Harvard has the only scientific ape colony in the whole United States, down in Florida. I worked there for a year, getting used to them. They aren’t so bad. Poor Julia—” And here he stopped himself, as if remembering who he was talking to.
“Poor Julia what?”
“Nothing,” he said. “She just needed help in her management, as anyone would. Who knows, instinctively, how to take care of an ape?” And then he changed the subject, made me recount my day in the classroom, all the squabbles between the children I had to mediate.
When the session was done, I stood up and put on my clothes and clambered back into the bush behind his rooming house. I felt, as I crouched down into the shrubbery by the road, a burning ache in my chest and the sudden desire to punch something. I pinched a handful of leaves off the nearest bush and was rewarded with a sting in my palm. As I walked through the woods, doubled over to rub my hands against the length of my skirt to get the nettles out of them, I thought about Dr. Gardner and Julia Toneybee-Leroy. He’d badmouthed his entire race and declared himself an outcast, but he wouldn’t speak ill of Julia Toneybee-Leroy. I decided I did not like Dr. Gardner so much after all, and I resolved to hate him from then on.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 13
