Charlotte
The reporter was on us by the end of January. That careening, desperate Thanksgiving dinner badly frightened Miss Toneybee-Leroy. Dr. Paulsen was worried, too, despite her attempts, with cookies and confidences, to hide it. For weeks, her mouth was a blush of yellow chalk dust.
My mother tried to convince the two of them that there was nothing to worry about. Uncle Lyle and Ginny were too disgusted with our family to ever talk. The whole business was just as mortifying to them as it was to us. The ultimate rebuke, for them, was silence.
But no one at the Toneybee believed her. She was not, at that point, a credible source. They decided, in another showing of Dr. Paulsen’s clammy, frenzied cunning, to scoop themselves.
After a Christmas spent watching Charlie scrape the wrapping off shoe boxes filled to the brim with Raisin Bran, after a New Year’s Eve celebrated in the dim glow of our father’s television set while Callie lit a noxious stick of incense at midnight for good luck and prosperity, the cheap oils in the stick bringing in a new year dank and far too sweet, we had a guest for dinner.
All I remember about him was his soft belly that poked through the button gaps of his dress shirt. It made me queasy whenever I caught a glimpse of it. He never announced himself as a reporter and my mother never called him that, either. She said only, “This is Paul, he’s our guest for the day. He’s here to learn more about the experiment. Please be polite, girls.”
Paul played catch with my mother and Charlie and fast-forwarded through Max’s videotapes and ate dinner with us, during which he attempted to win me and Callie over with the voice of an adult unused to children—all brightened vowels and sly teasing. I stonewalled most of his questions, but Callie, of course, helpfully and happily chattered away about her love for Charlie. She taught Paul to sign I love you and Hello, giggling when he bungled the movements.
Paul’s article came out in February, just in time for Black History Month. We saw it on a Sunday, on the front page of the science section of the Boston Globe. There was a photo Max snapped of us, unaware, months before: me and Callie and Charlie and my parents making spaghetti. To the Toneybee’s credit, they did not crop our father out of the picture. The caption read BREAKING BREAD WITH AN UNUSUAL BROTHER.
The article itself detailed Charlie’s sign acquisition, his love of my mother, Callie’s love of Charlie. There was a short paragraph about the book Man or Beast? and a brief quote from Frances Gorey, but these were buried beneath a longer interview with Miss Julia Toneybee-Leroy, who was featured in a full-length photo on the inside page, smiling gummily, the skeleton of Daisy, yellowed now, on the table beside her.
“Everyone’s going to see this,” I choked to my mother.
“I thought you would like it.” She looked pained. “I thought you would be proud.” She slowly realized her mistake. “Maybe it won’t be that bad,” she said hopefully. “How many high-schoolers read the science section of the Boston Globe?”
But she was wrong. The reaction at school was surprisingly swift. The biology teacher clipped the whole article out and tacked it to her classroom bulletin board. The history teacher did the same. The principal made an announcement over the loudspeaker at lunch: he mentioned me and my father by name. By second period I found out that a gaggle of freshman girls raided the library and cut the picture of our family out of the paper and taped it to the inside of their locker doors. The girls who did this were not the most popular ones, of course. The most popular could not have cared less. The girls who did this were the quieter ones, the studious ones, the vegetarians, the ones who stickered their political beliefs across their binders. The ones who actually read classroom bulletin boards.
I am not proud to say that I reveled in the attention. I thought it was a bit of good luck. If I couldn’t have Adia, maybe I could at least have fans. I thought those girls were outliers, the first to pick up on my value. The more popular ones would come later. Maybe, I thought, maybe I had been wrong to suppress Charlie for so long: maybe the very thing I hated was my ticket to acceptance. At the very least, at the very most, it gave me a chance to triumph over Adia. In the cafeteria, at lunch, I signed for anyone who asked.
What was most surprising was that no one in Courtland County seemed disturbed by the mention of Frances Gorey’s book. It was true that her research was only referred to in passing as “unfounded allegations.” Courtland County simply believed that this part of the story didn’t apply to them. They didn’t care about history, only biology, only the deep pleasure of gazing into another living animal’s face, only the here and now. Charlie became for them a teen idol, magnified in newsprint.
This did not devastate me. I was, in fact, relieved. I didn’t want to explain the Toneybee to anyone and I didn’t want to have to feel guilty for living there anymore. But I know it devastated Adia. We still weren’t speaking, of course. Photocopies from the Man or Beast? she owned began littering the high school: stacked on the tables in the library, left in the cafeteria. She did all this anonymously, but of course it was her work. But they were not censored, nobody swept them away. They were left out in plain sight for weeks on end, patently unread, their edges curling up in disuse.
While Adia tried to tell the world the truth, the Toneybee’s version began to proliferate. The Globe article was just the beginning: the Washington Post and the New York Times and a column in Psychology Today picked up the story. My mother started a press album where she lovingly pasted a fluttering of clippings from papers across the country. None of these articles mentioned the book, or if they did, it was only in passing. The only article that elaborated on it was the Boston Herald. She refused to clip this one: she wouldn’t even let the paper in our house. “A tabloid,” she said.
The girls at school collected as many snapshots of Charlie as they could. At first, they asked me to annotate them, provide my recollections of when a picture was taken or what happened after a lens flicked. I would oblige, trying to work in a funny story about myself or what I saw on TV the night before or what book I was reading. They listened politely and steered me back to the clippings. A few of them began angling for trips to the Toneybee, but I had enough pride to refuse this. I knew they only wanted to come to see Charlie. When it became clear I wouldn’t be introducing him to anyone, the girls backed off. I still sat beside them at lunch, stubbornly willing the conversation in another direction, any direction away from the Toneybee, but they resisted just as stridently.
So I told stories about Callie and Charlie as if they had happened to me. I did impressions. I pulled faces. I made jokes. I was a hit, for a time.
But I couldn’t stay ahead of the fad. It twisted and turned and then one day, on my way to the cafeteria to talk, once again, about Charlie, I passed some girl’s locker and I saw that she had taken a pair of scissors to her newspaper clipping and cut one straight brutal slit across the photo, straight to Charlie’s face. She’d separated his face from his surroundings by cutting it into the shape of a heart. She’d discarded the rest of us. She taped only the valentine, with Charlie’s worried, anxious face at its center, back into her locker.
The edit became popular. By the time school let out, my family was missing from all those locker doors and it was only Charlie in the center of a collection of hearts of varying size.
I slid miserably toward my father’s classroom. When he saw me in his doorway, he looked surprised.
“To what do I owe this honor?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Is it okay if I just sit here for a little bit?”
“Sure.” His expression didn’t change. He just nodded. “Stay for as long as you like.”
He turned back to his desk, began to fill his briefcase with papers. We didn’t talk until the bell rang to tell us to go home.
Charles
Last period of the day. Charles had decided that morning that he would talk about tessellations. Last period, they should have been covering sines and cosines. They should have been starting to graph, but he
just didn’t have it in him. Tessellations were his favorite.
When Charles first met Laurel, he’d told her that. He’d told her how much he loved the idea. “Everything has its place,” he’d said. “And when it’s in its place, it makes beauty.” Laurel said laughingly back, “That’s too easy.” She didn’t like easy. She never had. She liked complication. She said, “If it’s not hard, it’s not worth it,” and he had believed her. It had excited him, it still excited him, that willingness to battle. But he knew the danger of those words now. “If it’s not hard, it’s not worth it.” It wasn’t true.
A whole class on tessellations, the subject didn’t deserve a full lesson, but that morning, crumpled on his bony couch, drinking the spit of grounds and lukewarm water that drooled from his secondhand coffeemaker, he’d bookmarked the graphs in his notebook, at the lecture notes he’d penciled for himself in his straight boxy hand, and what was left of his heart had gone out of him. He knew he couldn’t bear it. For once, he wanted to speak with love. He wanted to talk in public about something he loved. And since he couldn’t speak of Laurel and he couldn’t speak of his girls, tessellations would have to do.
It was odd, this desire. It was, of course, he knew, like the ache at the back of his throat and the licks of burn in the pit of his belly and the dryness of his eyeballs and his relentless insomnia—all of it a good doctor, hell, just an especially empathetic ninth grader, would diagnose it as symptoms of the divorce. He didn’t like to call what was happening by that name. Charles called it “a separation” for his kids and he called it nothing for the people at work when they asked, after glancing at the newspapers with his picture in them, how he was doing. But to himself and to Laurel, he called it by its true name: the cleaving. He always said it as a sad joke, though. “Should we talk about the cleaving?” But Laurel wasn’t having it. “Just call it what it is,” she’d say, sad and a little annoyed, and he would answer, still laughing, that that was what he was doing. That was its true name.
She didn’t want the divorce and neither did he, not really, not deep down. But she’d left him no choice. She’d shown herself to be the worst of what anyone could think of her, and not just in front of him; they could have recovered, maybe, if he’d been the only one to see her shame. But in front of Dr. Paulsen and that boy Max, and his baby girls, and most of all, in front of his brother Lyle, sneering Lyle, who saw the worst and more, who was proven right after all those years: “That woman is going to ruin you, Charles.”
The night of Thanksgiving, the two of them had sat in silence in the living room, after the girls and Charlie were asleep. They’d sat and she kept her head bent low. She’d never bent her head like that before. He’d studied the bend of Laurel’s head and then that dumb boy Max had burst into the apartment, used his staff key to open the door. He’d forgotten his video camera, he’d come back, and when he saw them, Max’s face flushed with pity, he apologized profusely, he shut the door and turned his own key in their lock, and that had decided it.
Charles said, “I don’t think I can live here anymore.”
And Laurel had kept her head down so that he couldn’t see her cry. She spared him that, in the end, she was kind about that. Her voice was low and strangled, “What do you want to do?”
And now, months later, he knew the answer to that question. He wanted to talk to a crowd about something that he loved. It was a pressing need. He felt it keener than the systematic breakdown of his very body without Laurel. He found, in the months since they split, that he was now embarrassingly earnest. He’d been good at being honest about his feelings before. He wasn’t like Lyle, who once told him he only said “I love you” to Ginny on Christmas, and even then, only every other year. No, Charles always prided himself on his effusiveness with the girls. Speaking his feelings was not the problem. It was that when he did it now, it came out deadly serious. He had always prided himself on his humor. This was a list of what he was: a good husband, a good father, a good teacher, and a funny guy. But lately, he was sick of jokes. He was sick of joviality. He only wanted to talk about things that he loved.
In the teachers’ lounge, he frightened people. A simple “See the game last night?” set him off. He would discourse on the beauty of a spiral throw, on the intensity of a team’s surge. Once he even rhapsodized on the splendor of the Celtics’ colors. He knew, even as he was speaking, that his ardor was horrifying. He saw it on the faces of his listeners, how some would widen their eyes and some would narrow and all would eventually turn away, hoping this would get him to stop talking. It didn’t. He talked even more. He wanted, he desperately needed, to speak about all the things he loved, to remind himself they still existed in the world, that the things he loved were multitudes, that not everything he loved was locked away from him in the Toneybee Institute.
The first bell rang and he watched the shadows of the trees on the back wall again. He supposed, if he had to talk about something he loved, he could talk about that. How much he loved the green and how much the green was like Laurel.
He stood up and began writing on the board. The secret of teaching was to set up an ever more elaborate series of scenes. They liked it. They loved it when they found you still writing on the board. It was like getting a glimpse of an actor in a dressing room, putting on his makeup before the show. It gave the whole endeavor a frisson of excitement.
On the dull, ashy blackboard he drew a honeycomb. The simplest tessellation. Last period was his favorite because, he was ashamed to admit it, his most devoted students were here. He never understood this waxing adoration. Back in Boston, some years, none of them liked him; many years they outright despised him. But then, sometimes, he would get a group of students like these, who laughed at his jokes, who stayed after class, who seemed to love him. At Courtland County High, it was four boys in the last period on Tuesday, who breathlessly christened him their favorite teacher at the beginning of the year. They were all freshmen and all players on the school soccer team, and they seemed to have adopted him, his jokes, and his class as their own personal mascot. There was Nick and Adam and Seth: all awkward bones and muddy knees. Sometimes he caught a smell off of them, the smell of the terrible loneliness of male adolescence, and it made him want to cry. It smelled like tears. He’d smelled the exact same thing on the boys he taught back in Boston, that same strangled melancholy.
The fourth boy in his fan club was Hakim. Hakim was one of the three black boys in the whole freshman class, bused in, like his comrades, from Spring City. Charles asked Charlotte about Hakim at the start of the year, but she’d bristled at his name, turned up her nose. “He’s all right, I guess,” she’d huffed. From that reaction, he’d gathered that Hakim, despite his athletic abilities, wasn’t popular, but as he watched Hakim over the next few months, he realized he guessed wrong. Hakim was very popular, one of the most popular freshman boys, always in the middle of a press of kids. The three other boys deferred to him, sometimes waiting for him to laugh before reacting to a joke. But if Charles ever happened to pass Hakim in the hall, the smell of loneliness came off him so strong, it made his eyes water. Sometimes, when everyone else was supposed to be busy with some quiz, he would catch Hakim watching him shyly, quickly glancing away when he realized he was caught. He never paid the boy the indignity of acknowledging this. He suspected that Hakim had led the charge in popularizing his class and he was grateful for that. But he respectfully kept his distance from him, which, he knew, made Hakim’s heart swell for him more, and which, in turn, made him love Hakim.
There were five girls, too, who always sat in the front row. Megan, Kristen, Jen A., Jen C., and Doreen Harmon. Poor Doreen, saddled with the name of a different time. She didn’t even have the excuse of the girls Charles had come up with, who could say their parents weren’t from this country, didn’t know any better. Doreen’s parents were just lost in time. Or so he imagined.
The greatest impression the girls made on him was “hearty.” Even their acne was well scrubbed. Down
to a girl, the skin on their cheeks was a wind-chapped red and they all wore their hair in scraggly, greasy ponytails, pulled back so tight he could see the knobs of their temples. They wore oversized fleece pullovers zipped up to right beneath their chins, the grubbier the better. They allowed a scrum of dog hair and dust bunnies to nap up their sleeves. This was maybe one of the biggest differences in the students here, besides the obvious one of his old classes being all black and these ones being nearly all white. The girls he taught back in Boston, even the bookworms, would have writhed in mortification if ever caught wearing one of those fleeces. The girls in Boston, it had saddened him to see, wore tighter and tighter clothes each year, growing more swollen, constricting themselves even further in brightly dyed tight denim and greening gold chains. Thank God Charlotte escaped all of that. He hated the Toneybee now, but he was still grateful it let her escape all of that. He didn’t like that Adia girl, of course. He found her obnoxious: he had her first period on Wednesdays and Fridays and she made a point of sitting right up front and passionately doodling in a notebook, making a show of being oblivious to the entire class. But he noted with relief Adia’s combat boots and heavy denim skirts and oversized concert T-shirts. No danger of too-tight jeans and all they brought with them from that one.
He turned from the board to see that everyone had assumed their places. The girls in the front, his boy fan club a few rows behind them, their fellow students sprinkled in between. In the very back were the louts. This never changed. It didn’t matter if you were in Courtland County or Dorchester, Massachusetts, it didn’t matter if it was 1991 or 1971: the back of the class was for the lost and showily rebellious. It would be that way until the end of time.
“We’re gonna do something a bit different today,” he began. “Today we’re going to talk about beauty, truth, and light. I’m not talking about a laser show or whatever you kids are into—”
We Love You, Charlie Freeman Page 23
