We Love You, Charlie Freeman

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “What is it for?”

  “It’s not for anything,” Callie said defensively.

  “But you must want it for something,” she insisted.

  “I just want it,” Callie said.

  Her mother sighed. “I guess, sure. I’ll do it.”

  The first time Callie threw the cape over her shoulders, she felt it. It was just like the book said. She felt anointed. She stood on top of the toilet in the bathroom—because of Charlie, there weren’t any other mirrors in the house and she wanted to see the whole length of herself. She balanced on the closed toilet seat and looked and looked for a change.

  She met her own eyes in the mirror. Nobody looked her in the eye anymore—not her father, not Charlotte, not even her mother—she winced when she saw Callie’s fat cheeks or the folds of her neck. All of them looked away, like they were embarrassed, like she embarrassed them.

  But now, when Callie held her own gaze, she saw that she was stronger than everyone else. Her whole skin went flush with the knowledge. She bunched the red velvet up in her fists and very carefully climbed down from the closed toilet seat, trying not to fall.

  “It’s good?” her mother asked when she came out of the bathroom. “You’re happy?”

  “Yeah,” Callie said. “It’s good.”

  THEIR FATHER CALLED the new apartment an “efficiency.” Charlotte said that sounded sad, but Callie liked the word.

  “You’ll see,” her father assured them as he drove from the Toneybee to the new place. “It’s really fun.”

  The Volvo stayed at the Toneybee with their mother. When her father picked them up for their first weekend visit, he drove a brown sedan with the name and number for Uncle Lyle’s garage painted in peeling white letters on the back fender. He parked it in front of the institute gates, but he didn’t get out of the car. He sent Lester up to get them.

  The apartment was in Spring City. He had two rooms at the top of a sagging Victorian. The walls were a grease-spotted dingy gray, the kitchen drawers lined with layer after layer of faded contact paper.

  The first room had a couch. “It pulls out,” he explained. There was a single wooden chair and a small television with a set of pliers duct-taped to a switch where a knob used to be. All around the front room were the moving boxes they’d put together only a few months before in Boston. Her mother’s handwriting was still on them: Books—Charles. The second room held a dresser and a twin bed, as slim and girlish as the cot Callie slept on at the Toneybee.

  Charlotte wouldn’t put her backpack down. She swung it in front of her and held the sides protectively.

  “Where’s the kitchen?”

  “Well, it’s like camping,” her father explained. He stepped across the room, stood in front of a closet door. “We’re gonna make all our food on this.” He opened the door to reveal a plastic bookshelf with a hot plate on the top rung and a toaster oven on the bottom.

  “You don’t even have a microwave?” Charlotte asked.

  “Well, you don’t really need it with the toaster oven and the hot plate,” he said.

  “But what if we want popcorn?”

  Her father considered the kitchen in the closet, defeated.

  “We’ll make it on the burner,” Callie said, after a pause. “We’ll cook it in the pan. See, Charlotte, it’s like camping.”

  Her father touched the top of her head, grateful. It was good, at least, Callie thought. Things could be good here already.

  By the end of that first visit, Callie knew what she had to do. She had to cleanse the place to make it right. It would be her gift to her father.

  The next weekend, she smuggled two plastic gallons of whole milk out of the Toneybee cafeteria and packed them in her rolling suitcase. In the efficiency, she took the cartons into the small bathroom and poured them into the tub. There was no way to be secret about it, so Callie took this as an opportunity to tell her father about magic.

  “I’m starting here,” she called to him. “Because places of water are very powerful.”

  “Callie, this place is yours. You just have to clean up after yourself” was all he called back.

  When both gallons were emptied, Callie pulled on her Mickey Mouse bathing suit, the cartoon grin stretched to oblivion across her stomach, and sat down in the tub.

  Her book said bathing in asses’ milk and rose petals was a way to ensure a good beginning. But, it turned out, two gallons weren’t enough, and Callie ended up huddling over a meager puddle, the backs of her thighs just skimming the surface, her fingers crumbling up petals from a handful of mums, the closest thing she could find to a rose in December.

  When she finally got out of the tub, cold and a little embarrassed, her skin had the same rancid smell as Charlie’s breath, and she knew, in her heart of hearts, she had not changed anything. She wiped the milk off the back of her legs and turned on the hot water. No matter. This wasn’t defeat. She would just have to try again.

  Callie could hear the TV blaring as she rinsed down the tub. Her father’s TV got terrible reception so he and Charlotte only ever watched the Saturday night movie, spasmodically beamed in from channel 38 in Boston. It was always an action movie, never a romance, never a musical. It bored Callie, but her father and Charlotte never changed the channel. Unstirring, they watched warehouses billow with flames and plate-glass windows burst into shimmering mists and crimes tear whole cities apart, all while Callie went about creating her devotions.

  For her next spell, Callie turned her attentions to the bedroom. The book said the most powerful charm was one that included your familiar. Callie tried to cut a few strands of Charlie’s hair from the back of his head, but he was too wary. She settled on collecting stray fur from the lint brushes her mother was always running over their coats and sweaters. She gathered all the hair up into a ball and sealed that into a plastic sandwich bag, which she brought to the efficiency, along with a thick red candle she swiped from the holiday display at school. While her father and Charlotte sat in the scramble of light from the TV set, Callie closed the bedroom door and set the candle on the room’s one windowsill. She lit the wick and threw the whole mess of hair at the flame. Only a few strands caught. They made a quick, satisfying sizzle before they filled the bedroom with a terrible perfume and spattered one long greasy gray streak on the ceiling.

  That streak, the rotten smell, the hiss of the hair burning: all of it had to be signs that the spell would work. But when she came out of the room, stinking of burning hair, she was confronted by the sight of her father and Charlotte, still dormant on the couch, unraptured.

  Her supplications grew more intense. She began to speak a mantra, chanted thirty times in a row, at least five times a day. By repeating words, her book told her, your soul called out to what you wanted most in the world and made your desire known. What you wanted most could finally find you and answer you, all you had to do was ask.

  So Callie spent all her days asking. She chanted in the morning, during lunch, at night while doing her homework, before she went to sleep. The tip of her tongue hurt from so much chanting. Her jaws popped. When she was alone, she chanted in her full voice, loud enough for the stars above to hear and respond, but when she was around others she chanted under her breath. She didn’t want to disturb anybody. At the Toneybee, the sounds of her muttering were washed over by Charlie, who screeched and raged and cooed. At school, her teacher reprimanded her for mumbling and so during the day, Callie chanted with her fingers. Good things are mine and I am good things, she signed. She’d made up the words of the mantra herself. She was proud of it.

  Sometimes Callie confused the order of the words and then, afraid that this meant the spell couldn’t work, she would have to begin the ritual all over again. She repeated it so much that she no longer kept her chanting to only five times a day. She did it nearly all the time. She learned to move her lips at an imperceptible flutter, so that no one could tell she was speaking. Her mouth dried and soured f
rom devotion.

  Even when she wasn’t chanting, when she was washing dishes or playing with Charlie or walking to the bus stop, her own thoughts would abruptly stop speaking and then it was only the chant, only those words: Good things are mine and I am good things. The words made her brain hum. It wasn’t a bad thing. It became something she longed for, because those words were better than her own thoughts. They were better because they contained only love: no doubt and no anger, and most of all, no loneliness. She believed with all her heart that these words could fulgurate her family’s destitution and she could burn back their happiness.

  So her father and Charlotte sat on the couch and Callie chanted for them. Sometimes one of them would reach out for the pliers on the television set, wrench them to the left to turn down the volume of a thousand petty destructions, and listen instead to the drone of Callie’s longing as if it were their own.

  Nymphadora of Courtland County, 1929

  I’d only ever been to the music conservatory the summer of my parents’ demise. When I went with Nadine, though, we walked past the green and the garden where the students performed plays; we walked past the front steps and the heavy brass doors. We went around back to the kitchens. Nadine went through the door first; I followed. She took a heavy white apron with a red cross on the chest down from a peg. The cross was so that the other workers knew she was a nurse and not a maid. Julia Toneybee-Leroy had been so secretive about what was happening in her mansion that she hadn’t hired anyone from Spring City to work there. Her employees, the cleaning staff and the cook, came from New York City and lived on the grounds. The rest of the staff was all white, and they nodded begrudgingly at Nadine as she swept past them in her red-and-white apron, and openly stared at me. I obviously did not belong. Nadine took me up a narrow little wood-lined staircase, up to a hallway covered in velvet and gilt. I gasped at how fine everything was. As I said, except for Nadine, Negroes were only allowed on the lawn of the Conservatory, never inside.

  “It’s like a palace,” I said just as something, somewhere, began to shriek. I felt it in my bones. I broke out into a cold, sharp sweat, but Nadine merely shrugged. “The apes know it’s breakfast time,” she said. “And the cook is late.”

  We walked farther down the hallway, our footsteps getting louder as we moved off the plush carpeting and onto marble. As we walked, I smelled what I’d first noticed on Dr. Gardner. The pungent, commanding stink of wild animal. It got stronger as we moved along the hallway until, as we stood in front of a door with frosted glass, I could hardly breathe. I parted my lips and sucked air in through my mouth.

  Nadine knocked.

  “Yes,” he called. I smiled, I couldn’t help myself, at the sound of his voice.

  “Dr. Gardner, it’s Nurse Morton. And Miss Jericho.”

  “Oh, yes.” He did not sound happy for the visit. “Just a moment.”

  A faint rustle of papers. Something banged somewhere and I heard him swear, softly, very softly, under his breath, “God damn it.”

  Nadine shook her head in disgust.

  “All right,” he said. “Won’t you please come in?”

  Nadine opened the door and I stepped into his office.

  My heart stiffened. The room was large, with a mural of singing angels painted on the ceiling. Dr. Gardner’s desk dominated—a large, gilded table stacked high with papers, odd metal instruments, empty picture frames, and old magazines. Behind the desk, Dr. Gardner seemed smaller than he normally did. I realized he was not smiling: that he had always smiled at me when we were alone together. When he was reaching out his hand to draw me from the bush I hid behind, when he was studying my open, naked poses, he smiled. But not now.

  “Nurse Morton,” he said. “And, of course, Miss Jericho. What is it you need?”

  I thought Nadine would leave us alone together while I made my plea. I had rehearsed it in my mind: she would introduce me and then withdraw, shut the door, and I would sit by Dr. Gardner’s elbow and rage at him. I thought, with some excitement, it would be our first quarrel.

  After that disastrous Star of the Morning meeting, when I had heard what I thought was the worst, I had gone home and lain in my bed and cried until my eyelids itched. I wasn’t so special after all. I wasn’t Dr. Gardner’s only specimen. Yet I thought I still love him, and the worst of it was, I wasn’t even horrified by this. I was scared at the idea that I might lose him and be lonely again. So I began to imagine, in great detail, our reconciliation. I would yell my recriminations at him, and he would rush to placate me. And then, little by little, I would let him win me over, until I had him telling me jokes and trying to make me laugh. And when he was anxiously trying to please me, I would say, “Some of our less sophisticated citizens”—I would make a joke of it—“some of our unevolved, you know, you’re scaring them with your tests. You’re making them uneasy. You know how we dislike uneasy. Please, for me, please stop. And what do you need all these questions for, anyway?”

  And he would laugh, too, he’d say, “Thank you for telling me, Nymphadora,” and it would become another secret joke between us. And he would stop his testing. For me, he would agree to do it and I wouldn’t have to be alone again.

  But it didn’t happen that way. Nadine didn’t leave the room. She stood beside me, her arms crossed, as if she’d turned to stone, and Dr. Gardner looked at her, puzzled, but as she was staring at me, he turned his face to mine and raised his eyebrows.

  “What may I help you with?” he said again.

  “Well,” I said. “Well, see, I understand you’ve been offering the men of Spring City some work—”

  “Yes,” he said, cutting me off before I could finish. “I thought it might be helpful. Useful. We’re in a position to provide employment for many people, so we may as well be of use, don’t you agree?”

  “I suppose.” I’d tried to catch his eye as he spoke, but he directed himself toward Nadine. Eventually he turned back to me and his face was blank. There was a long silence. Nadine glanced at me. I knew what she was thinking: What is wrong with you, Sister Nymphadora?

  “Forgive me, ladies,” Dr. Gardner cleared his throat, impatient. “But why have you come this morning?”

  “Well,” I said again. “The work you’ve been giving the men. It’s just, it’s not decent.” I heard Nadine rustle beside me. She was nodding her approval of that word and I wanted to wince. Dr. Gardner raised his eyebrows even higher.

  “Decent?” he repeated. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean.”

  And this was the worst, having him condescend, having him pretend he didn’t understand. I pleaded with him with my eyes: You, above everyone else, know what I mean when I use certain words. You, above anyone else, man, woman, or Star, you understand me. Or you did. I know you did. I know you can now.

  And he saw me, he saw my eyes speaking to him and he kept his eyes dumb. My heart stiffened again, like an old leathery hide that’d been punched. I wanted to lie back, defeated, deflated, if we had been alone together I would have sunk to the floor, but Nadine, Sister Saul, she was at my side and she was nodding her head approvingly.

  So I said, miserably, in what sounded to me like a voice strangled, I said, “The questions you’re asking them, the tests you’re having them take: they’re indecent. And we wish you would stop.”

  Dr. Gardner didn’t say anything for a moment. He let his eyes flit between me and Nadine again. Then he pushed his chair back and stood up. He came around the front of the desk and stood before us. He made a cold, shrewd appraisal. Then he clasped his two hands in front of him, a mea culpa, and bowed low from the waist. It was the most submissive thing I’d ever seen him do, certainly the most polite action I’d ever seen him take, but I felt it sting like a slap to the face.

  “Apologies.” He raised his head. He kept his hands clasped together. “Your concerns are wholly understandable. But I assure you, ladies, and please also assure the men, they are unfounded.”

  “With all due respect, D
r. Gardner”—Nadine kept her eyes downcast but her voice was strong—“our people know what they saw. They know what they felt.”

  “What they think they saw, what they think they felt. Impressions. I’m sorry, the fault lies with me. I wanted fresh, unbiased impressions, so I did not explain the experiment to anyone, certainly not the subjects. You ladies may not know, but this is standard scientific procedure.”

  Nadine held her tongue.

  “It’s my fault for not explaining to the men, in a way they could understand, what I wanted—”

  “What do you want?” I had recovered enough to ask. “What is the purpose of the experiment, then?”

  “An excellent question,” Dr. Gardner said. “A really good inquiry. It’s merely a test about language. Language acquisition. That’s all it is. It’s a test to see how different kinds of brains understand language. Why, I did it myself, one of my assistants administered the test to me, and I did it myself. Nothing about it is harmful or un-Christian or indecent.” He emphasized this last word, though he did not look at me. “But I can see how it may have seemed that way. To someone who was untrained. To someone who didn’t know any better.”

  “So it is about language.” Nadine was still suspicious. She knew that this didn’t sound right.

  “Yes,” Dr. Gardner said.

  “And you say you’ve done the same test on yourself.”

  “And every research assistant who works here. I’ll show you the reports. They’re somewhere around here.”

  He turned back to his overpiled desk, sifted about.

  “Ah.” He extracted a green leather notebook from the mess, handed it to Nadine. She flipped it open, began pouring through the pages.

  “There,” Dr. Gardner said, pointing. “That log, I believe, has my results. Right beside a Negro fellow from Boston, Percy Davidson, I believe his name was. Side by side: we were tested on the same day.”