We Love You, Charlie Freeman: A Novel Read online

  We Love You,

  Charlie Freeman

  A NOVEL BY

  Kaitlyn Greenidge

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2016

  For Ariel

  and Samuel

  and Ariel

  Contents

  Charlotte

  Nymphadora of Spring City, 1929

  Laurel

  Charlotte

  Nymphadora of Spring City, 1929

  Charlotte

  Charlotte

  Charles

  Charlotte

  Callie

  Charlotte

  Nymphadora of Spring City, 1929

  Charlotte

  Charlotte

  Callie

  Nymphadora of Courtland County, 1929

  Charlotte

  Charles

  Charlotte

  Callie

  Epilogue: Charlotte

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Algonquin

  Charlotte

  “This car doesn’t feel like ours,” I said.

  “Well, it is now,” my father replied. “So get used to it.”

  Outside of the car it was dark and hot and early morning August in Dorchester. Through the crack of the window, I could smell every part of the city—every slab of asphalt, every rotting plank of wood siding, every crumbling stucco wall, every scarred and skinny tree—I could smell all of it beginning to sweat.

  I sat back in my seat. I knew I was right. Our old car was a used silver Chevy sedan, a dubious gift from my uncle Lyle, a mechanic. The Chevy’s backseats were balding, the foam cushions peeling with faded stickers from some long discarded coloring book. The Chevy’s body slumped over its axis, slung way too low to the ground, so that when you opened the car’s doors, their bottoms scraped the curb.

  The new car was a 1991 silver Volvo station wagon, next year’s model. The Toneybee Institute paid for it. It had a curt, upturned nose that looked smug and out of place beside the lazing sedans and subservient hatchbacks parked on our block. Being inside the Volvo felt like we were in public. None of us could bring ourselves to speak. We were all too humbled by the leather interiors.

  My mother, in the driver’s seat, adjusted her rearview mirror. My younger sister, Callie, kept playing with the automatic windows until my mother told her to stop. Up in the front seat, my father tugged on his fingers one by one, trying to crack his knuckles, but the cartilage wouldn’t break. I shifted my legs, and the leather skin of the seat stuck to the backs of my thighs, made a slow, painful smack as I leaned forward.

  “They know we’re no good with animals, right?” I moved again and the leather creaked beneath me. “I mean, you told them that?”

  “What are you talking about?” My mother rolled down her window, began to fuss with the driver’s side mirror. “We’re great with animals.”

  “We are not. We’re terrible with pets.”

  “Well, that’s fine because we won’t have a pet.” My mother had been saying this for weeks. “Charlie isn’t a pet.”

  “He’s a research monkey,” my father added.

  “He’s a chimpanzee.” This was Callie.

  “He’s more than a pet,” my mother corrected. “He’s going to be like a brother to you.”

  My father said, “That’s going a bit far, Laurel.”

  “What I’m trying to say,” she began, “is that we just have to treat him like one of us. Like he’s part of our family. We just have to make him feel like he’s one of our own and he’ll do fine.”

  “But all our pets die.”

  “Charlotte.” My mother was scanning the street now.

  “It’s true. That rabbit you bought me when I was five and Callie was born.”

  “He was depressed.” My father turned in his seat. “It was because we kept him under the kitchen counter.” My father had a notebook open in his lap, the pages turned to the start of a geometry lesson plan, but he hadn’t written anything yet. Over his shoulder, I could see where he’d drawn a grove of interlocking pineapples in the sheet’s margins.

  “In our defense,” my mother said, “we had to keep him there. We just didn’t have the space.”

  She tugged at her side mirror again. She frowned, made an appreciative “ah,” and rolled her window back up. She touched a button on the dashboard, and the mirror gave a delicate little shudder and began to angle itself toward her.

  She glanced over at my father, grinned.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  I stuck my head in the space between them. “That rabbit died because he ate his own fur. He choked on it. He died because he choked on himself.”

  “Is that true?” Callie strained against her seat belt, trying to catch what we were saying.

  “No.” My mother swatted at me. “Charlotte, get back there, get back in your seat. Put your seat belt on. You’re upsetting your sister.”

  We didn’t even have seat belts in the old car. I ran mine across my chest, clicked the buckle closed.

  I waited.

  Then I said, “Dad’s fish.”

  My mother shot me a warning glance in the rearview mirror.

  “Dad was in charge of the fish and it still died.”

  No one answered me.

  After a while I said, “And it didn’t even die. It just kind of flaked away.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Callie moaned.

  “He had mange.” My father turned again in his seat, trying to catch Callie’s eye. “I’ve told you this before. He already had it when we brought him home from the pet store.”

  But I persisted. “Mom had to take that fish out of the tank and put him in a paper bag and bury him at the park because he was so messed up he would have polluted our toilets. We made a fish too sick for a toilet.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” Callie declared.

  “Charlotte, no talking.” My mother leaned forward and switched on the radio and a too deep voice intoned, “W-I-L-D Boston.” That station was at the top of the list of things that my mother forbade us. “Nothing but booty music,” she’d say, a dismissal that made me and Callie squirm in embarrassment. Now, though, she turned the volume up until the sound buzzed over us, drowning out our words.

  My last piece of evidence I signed to Callie underneath the stutter of a drum machine. The mice, I explained with my hands. We had mice and they died of heart attacks because they mated too much. They fucked—and here I spelled it out because I didn’t know the sign for that yet—they f-u-c-k-e-d to death.

  How did they do that? Callie signed back.

  I shook my head and turned my face to the window.

  We drove past the clapboard double-deckers of our block, the high stoops overlaid with deciduous piles of supermarket circulars and candy bar wrappers and petrified, heat-stiffened leaves. We passed the restaurants my mother hated and banned: the Chinese food spot and the fried chicken spot and the Greek pizza parlor with its burnt-faced pies and the Hilltop Corner Spa, a grocery that sold milk only in cans and reeked of ancient fry oil and greasy mop water. We passed the check cashing spot on the corner.

  By the time we got to the turnpike, we were the only car on the road. Dawn was over, the sun was high, and we were hot. It did not occur to any of us to turn on the air-conditioning; it had never worked in our old car. The Chevy’s vents just shuttered and coughed and panted out something like secondhand smoke. When my father thought to flick the switch in the Volvo, we were all pleasantly surprised by the steady breeze that floated around us, cool and fresh, not a hint of nicotine.

  We were going west, past empty fields and aluminum-sided barns and an alfalfa farm with a swe
et scent that filled the car as we approached, then spoiled into the stink of manure as soon as we passed.

  My mother, at the wheel, only scanned the road ahead, ignored the green.

  Three months before, she and my father had sat us down and informed me and Callie that we were lucky. That we were about to embark on a great adventure. That we might even make scientific history. We had been chosen, over many other families, families with children who weren’t half as smart as we were, who didn’t even know how to sign. We, the Freemans, had been chosen to take part in an experiment and we were going to teach sign language to a chimpanzee.

  “It’s all to see what he can sign back to us,” my mother said. Her voice was not her own. It was usually measured, weighted. But now it swooped high and went giddy, a little breathless, as she explained, “It’s to see what he might say.”

  “They’re going to start calling him Charlie,” she said.

  “They gave him my name?” I was disgusted.

  “Only part of your name.” My mother was excited. “It’s so that he feels comfortable, you know, ‘Charlie’ fits with Callie and Charlotte.”

  “You gave him my name,” I repeated.

  “It’s more like a junior situation,” my father said, and my mother and Callie laughed.

  I did not laugh. And Callie stopped laughing altogether, began to cry, when they told us we would have to move, leave Boston and the block, move to a place that neither of us had heard of. “You’ll love it,” my mother told her, her voice back to measured again.

  Beside me, now, in the car, Callie huddled over the strap of her seat belt, the band barely saving her from a wholesale collapse into her own lap. She’d propped a piece of construction paper against the back of a book that she held against her knees, the better to sketch a welcome card for Charlie. My mother asked both of us to make cards but I refused. “What’s the point of giving a card to somebody who can’t read?” I’d asked. But Callie took to the assignment happily, steadily producing a greeting card a day for Charlie over the last month.

  For this latest iteration, Callie drew a portrait of our family. First she sketched her own face, then our mother’s. Our father liked to say that Callie and our mother had the same face, heart-shaped, so Callie drew herself and our mother as two loopy valentines. Even though she tried her hardest to be neat, both their heads came out lopsided. Above the crooked lobes of each heart she drew their hair: short spiraling Ss, for their matching Jheri curls.

  The hairstyles were new. Another thing my mother insisted on changing before the move. At Danny’s His and Hers on Massachusetts Avenue, the hairdresser actually gasped at her request for a cut, to which she replied, defensively, “There won’t be anybody who knows how to do black hair where I’m going. This is the easiest solution.”

  My mother had good hair, a term she would never use herself because, she said, it was so hurtful she couldn’t possibly believe in it. But my mother’s hair was undeniably long and thick, a mass of loose curls that Callie and I did not inherit and that she was determined to cut off before we began our new life.

  She tried to talk both of us into joining her, but only Callie took the bait. My mother got her with the promise of hair made so easy and simple, you could run your fingers through it. When it was all over, Callie was left with an outgrowth of stiff, sodden curls that clung in limp clusters to her forehead and the nape of her neck and made the back of her head smell like burning and sugar.

  Next on the card, Callie drew our father’s face—round, with two long Js flying off the sides. These were the arms of his glasses. She drew his mouth wide and open: he was the only family member who she gave a smile with teeth. And then she drew me. I was a perfect oval with an upside-down U for a scowl. She drew my hair extensions, long thin ropes of braids that Callie charted at ninety-degree angles from my head. She drew the crude outlines of a T-shirt. Then she stopped for a minute, her pencil hesitating. She slyly glanced over at me—she knew I was watching—and then she made two quick marks across the penciled expanse—signifiers for my breasts, recently grown and far too large. A pair of bumpy Us drawn right side up, to match the upside down one she had for my mouth.

  “Take them off.”

  Callie replied, under her breath and in a singsong, “Breasts are a natural part of the human body, Charlotte. Breasts are part of human nature.” Another of our mother’s mantras, one she had been saying, obviously for my benefit, for the past year and a half. I was fourteen, Callie was nine, and what was a joke to her was an awkward misfortune for me.

  Callie put her pencil down, the better to sign to me with her hands: Breasts are a part of human development. Stealthily, I reached over and pinched the fat of her thigh until she took up her eraser again and scrubbed the page clean.

  When she’d finished, she reached into the backpack at her feet and pulled out a pack of colored pencils. With thick, grainy streaks of brown she began to color in our family’s skin. She did so in the order of whom she loved the most: our mother, whom she believed to be the smartest person in the world; our father, whom she knew to be the kindest; and, finally, me.

  She stopped the nub of her pencil, wavering.

  What is it? I signed.

  Charlie should be in the picture. She frowned. He’s part of us, but I don’t even know what he looks like.

  She leaned over the sheet again and cupped one hand close to the paper so that I couldn’t see. When she was finished, she sat up and pulled her hand away. Above each family member’s head was now a trail of three circles, each individual string of thought bubbles leading up to a single swollen cloud with Charlie in its middle. She made the cloud too oblong, she messed it up, so she had to draw Charlie lying down on his stomach. She drew ears that stuck out, a wide, closed-mouth grin; thick monkey lips pressed together, a low-hanging gut, four paws. She gave him a curling tail. Above all of this, in her best longhand, Callie wrote: We Love You, Charlie Freeman.

  Too generous, too sweet, so openhearted and earnest it stung. I curled my lip, turned away, watched the trees rush by instead.

  We were still the only car on the road and my mother was driving fast. Me and Callie had only been this far from the city once before, the previous summer, when our parents sent us to a black, deaf overnight camp in the backwoods of Maryland. They said it was to improve our signing, but I think it was to make sure we would find friends. In Dorchester, our constant signing, our bookish ways and bans from fast-food restaurants and booty music, assured that me and Callie were unpopular on the block. At the camp, the hope had been that among others who knew our language, at least, we would find a home. But it didn’t work out that way.

  That past summer, Callie and I braided plastic gimp bracelets that only went around each other’s wrists. We made yarn God’s Eyes that were never exchanged with anybody else, that followed us home to gaze sullenly from the kitchen window over the sink. It was quickly discovered that we could hear and did not have deaf parents. The other campers were black like us, but they were truly deaf and suspicious of our reasons for being there. Except for a few spates of teasing, they left the two of us alone.

  At that camp I’d learned a host of new signs—for boobs, for shut up, and for suck it. But the most dangerous thing that camp had taught me was the awful lesson of country living: out there, in the open, in the quiet, all the emptiness pressed itself up against you, pawed at the very center of your heart, convinced you to make friends with loneliness.

  I leaned my head against the window. Through the glass, I heard a steady whine, wind sliding over the car. I secreted my fingers into my lap and began to finger-spell—all the dirty phrases I’d learned the summer before, all the rough words that had been thrown my way, spelled out on the tops of my thighs, protection from that low whistle of wind moving all around us.

  I fell asleep to the blur of a thousand trees. When I woke up, the radio was still on, but only every third word came through. The rest was static.

  “Turn it to something els
e,” I called, but up front, my mother shook her head.

  “There is nothing else.”

  Everything outside the car was a belligerent green. Just below my window a thin streak of stone skimmed along, the same height as the highway posts. As we drove, the gray crept up through the undergrowth until it revealed itself to be a thick, granite wall the height of our car. Then in one abrupt swoop it towered over us, the very top edged with a trail of glittering sunlight—the reflection of hundreds of shards of glass, scattered razor side up in the cement.

  “Is this it?” my father asked.

  My mother switched off the radio. “This is it.”

  The wall broke apart for two iron gates, opened just wide enough for a car to pass through. A brass plaque was bolted into the stone: THE TONEYBEE INSTITUTE FOR APE RESEARCH, ESTABLISHED 1929. Below that, in smaller script: VISITORS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. Just beyond all this, we could see the start of a long gravel driveway and a narrow kiosk with white plastic siding swirled to look like wood grain. A security post, but it was empty.

  My mother rolled down her window and honked the horn twice. We could hear the sound echo off the trees around us.

  “Warm welcome,” my father said.

  “The guard, what’s his name again? He must be up at the institute.” My mother leaned over the steering wheel and carefully nosed the car through the gates, trying not to scrape the Volvo.

  The Toneybee Institute’s main drive ran between two tidy rows of white elms, behind which, on both sides, was the murk of a darker, fatter forest. The drive was long but sputtered out abruptly, right at the base of the institute’s steps.

  The whole brick front of the building reared up at us out of all that green. “Oh, it’s a mansion,” Callie said, but it didn’t seem that way to me. It seemed like some cardboard false front a bunch of schoolchildren put together out of refrigerator boxes and painted up to look like their idea of grand.

  The main building was brick and squat, flanked by two towers, with wings beyond. Stuck all across the front of the building was a stone orchestra made up of cement angels with asphalt violins and trumpets, chubby, stony mouths frozen wide in song. My mother had told us that before the Toneybee was a research institute, it had been a music conservatory. Huge curling flourishes hung over the windowsills and building corners. There were flood lamps tucked up underneath the armpits of the building’s stony cherubim. Crowded underneath the decorations was a bank of brass doors with a shallow flight of steps.