CHARLOTTE

By the time Charlotte turned sixteen she understood that nothing interesting was ever going to happen to her in Buffalo. She was resigned to surviving high school surrounded by silly girls and meathead boys. She endured wearing blouses with Peter Pan collars buttoned up to the neck. Her mother dragged her to her salon to have her hair tortured into a pageboy flip.

Hap and Marion made it clear they wouldn’t allow her to go to college too far away, and certainly not to some bohemian art school, so she sent away for catalogs to Cornell, Syracuse, Ithaca, and Skidmore. Marion liked the look of Ithaca; she cooed that the students in the publicity pictures were beautifully dressed.

So Ithaca was out.

Charlotte’s grades weren’t good enough for Cornell.

Syracuse was too big.

That left Skidmore: all girls, in Saratoga Springs.

So what? She was interested in art, not romance. In the meantime she read, drew, and took pictures with the camera she begged Hap and Marion for as a Christmas gift.

And she waited.

Alone in her room, she conducted silent conversations with herself.

“Today. We’re going to experiment with pastels.” “Careful. Mom won’t be happy if you dirty your clothes.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t.”

She was careful to spread sheets of newspaper out on her desk. She always cleaned up after herself, washed her hands, and scrubbed her nails, so there wasn’t a trace left for her mother to complain about.

Her still lifes were pretty good—oranges, and lemons, and eggs, nicely shaded—but it was photography that really intrigued her. Cameras were like clocks, precise and mechanical, with settings for everything. But they were unlike them, too. Time droned on. A camera captured time in ways that a clock never could. She spent hours outdoors photographing ferns unfurling, crocuses pushing through the dirt, raindrops quivering on hosta leaves. For a while she followed her parents around taking close-ups of them eating, drinking, her father talking on the phone, her mother soaking in the tub, wearing a plastic shower cap.

“That,” her mother said, when she caught Charlotte aiming the lens at her from the bathroom door, “is the last straw. We must respect each other’s privacy around here.”

“They don’t understand.”

“They mean well.”

“So what.”

“They love you.”

“The way they love the new table and chairs on the patio. The only difference is the table and chairs are prettier.”

“Whose fault is that?

“Like Mom says, ‘A little lipstick, a hint of blush, and that hair . . . you really should do something with that hair.’”

“And then what?”

“Fear.”

“Of what?”

“That I’ll turn into her.”

Deep inside—in a place so deep Charlotte didn’t even know it was there—there was a hole. She’d stuffed her disappointment into it, day after day, year after year, until she felt as though she had swallowed a stone.