We tried hard to make the Toneybee ours. Callie and I left the apartment every morning, skirting past the portrait of Julia Toneybee-Leroy, giving a joking salute to Daisy’s bones. Downstairs, we scribbled halfhearted graffiti in obscure places, tucked wads of chewing gum under windowsills, made a point of running up and down every hallway as loudly as possible, if only to impress on the still bulk of the institute that we were there.
But that was impossible. There was just too much space. The downstairs rooms were already set aside for official business; the apartment belonged to our mother and Charlie. The front hall was Lester Potter’s domain—he sat in its shabby gloom, only leaving to keep sweaty lookout in the overheated guard box. Every two hours, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., we heard the faint whine of the golf cart he used to patrol the grounds, as he made his truncated orbit from the front hall to the front gate and back again.
The very top floor of the Toneybee Institute was a warren of old rehearsal rooms. Callie and I found the back staircase that led up there. We tried to be quiet the first few mornings, but very quickly gave that up once we figured out nobody cared about the attic.
The doors to the rehearsal rooms were haphazardly shut off, a few pieces of plywood nailed across them. We forced the flimsy planks off and rummaged through the spoils we found behind them: dead and dying instruments; reams of old musical scores; brocade and lace left in piles to rot. Each room had the vinegary odor of old resin, sticky brown on the ragged split ends of limp violin bows. We forced ourselves to stay up there until the backs of our necks were slick with sweat. We found five brass pipes—the mute ends of some dead organ, the metal beginning to spot with age—scattered across the floor of one of the rooms. We screamed into the ends of them until our throats were hoarse. We found a whole orchestra’s percussion section. Callie pried metal slabs off the xylophones and threw them against the wall while I heaved a balding timpani onto its side. When I got it turned over, I tore a slit in the drum skin with the foot of a music stand. I convinced Callie to wiggle through it and lie in the bowl and then I pulled the slit closed and beat on the skin with a nearby mallet until she fell out of the drum’s belly, laughing, bruises on her forearms.
When we were bored and bruised enough, we’d come back downstairs in time for lunch in the staff cafeteria. Dr. Paulsen joined us. Her yellow tongue flicking back and forth, she told us all of Charlie’s sorrows. Max, beside her, looked pained but didn’t interrupt.
For the first year of his life, Charlie was raised by the Toneybee researchers. They tried to teach him sign language. He showed an interest in the beginning. He watched curiously whenever someone began to move their hands. Every two weeks, a different lab assistant fed and bathed and dressed him. “But so many people caring for him,” Dr. Paulsen said, “it got too confusing.” Some put his socks on the wrong feet. Most forgot that he hated bananas and tried to feed them to him. Often, they grew bored when he simpered and cried out to be petted through the night.
“He didn’t like anyone,” Max said.
“Max is being modest,” Dr. Paulsen countered. “Charlie only likes him. He’d do anything for Max. Max can get him to wear overalls, to sign doll. Max even trims his ear hair. He learned the first initial of Max’s name, didn’t he?”
Max nodded. “When he was smaller, he’d lie on my lap and press the letter M into my arms. He was sweet. He used to just grin and grin, he was so happy.”
“But he has a temper,” Dr. Paulsen said. Charlie was prone to shrieking bursts of annoyance. “We could never figure out what would set him off. When he’s very, very mad, he won’t sign to us at all. He balls his hands up into fists and tries to sit on them.”
“You should understand,” Dr. Paulsen continued, “Charlie is used to a lot of attention, but he doesn’t know love. He’s learned a very cruel lesson. And now he thinks that it doesn’t matter how often he kisses someone’s neck or how lovingly he grooms you, or how well he performs or how sweetly he nestles into you. He thinks—and why wouldn’t he when he’s never seen otherwise—he thinks that everyone, every last person, will always leave him.”
The table was quiet as we took this in. Callie swallowed.
“But,” Dr. Paulsen said excitedly. “That’s why you girls are so important.” She glanced at Max. “We’ve been working for so long at the Toneybee Institute, for nearly seventy years, to understand how much a chimp can communicate. And we can’t do our work if one of our own is lonely or in pain.”
“Why can’t you keep raising him?” I asked.
Dr. Paulsen’s eyes shone. “We need a family like yours.” Her tongue darted across her lips. “To make him feel loved.”
“Imagine,” Dr. Paulsen continued, “a chimp who truly felt like he was part of a human family. Who could tease you and love you like a brother—that would be a very interesting chimp indeed. And with a real live family, Charlie can prove not only that chimps can learn sign language, and understand the signs for blue and book and ball, but he can understand something else, too. He can know love,” she finished, the words so earnest they stung.
She likes families, I signed under the table, into Callie’s arm, because she doesn’t have one.
Lunch in the cafeteria became unbearable. Our mother sometimes joined us, but more often she ate with Charlie in the apartment. Our father preferred to read or prepare for classes, rarely eating lunch at all. But Callie and I were popular in the cafeteria. We felt the eyes of the research assistants and the secretaries on us as we moved with our trays, as we sat at our table, as we ate our food. Dr. Paulsen sometimes came to sit with us, but every day Max and a different assistant joined us for lunch. They asked us the same questions over and over again: What were our favorite subjects in school? Did we like to read? What were our favorite books?
Nothing would stop the flood of small talk. Whatever answers we gave, Max and the other assistant would glance at each other as if we had said something important but it was unclear what profound thing we were saying to them. Callie told them once her favorite book was The Phantom Tollbooth, and Max and the assistant with him, a chubby woman named Ronnie, had nodded gravely at this answer. Every question they asked, though, seemed like a buildup to something they would really prefer to know. It was as if they were avoiding a larger question and they always lost their nerves before they would get to it. Back home in Dorchester, we had been proudly obscure and I was beginning to miss it.
“It’s like they want something from us,” I told my mother.
“What do you mean?”
We were at dinner, the one time when we all came back together. Charlie sat at the head of the table. Before she served herself, my mother painstakingly divided the largest cut of meat into bite-sized pieces for him. When she turned her attention to her own plate, every bite of food she raised to her mouth went through Charlie’s fingers first, ground down and kneaded and knuckled and sniffed, thoroughly investigated before Charlie would allow it to pass between her lips.
Charlie raised a handful of smashed macaroni up to my mother’s mouth and I looked away.
“It’s like they’re watching us for something,” I said. “Like they want us to say something different.”
“They’re curious about you because you are in the experiment. This is new for them. They’re just excited.”
“But what do they want from us?”
My mother sighed. I don’t know, Charlotte, she signed. Then she said, “We should talk to Dr. Paulsen about it, you and I.”
“How could that possibly help?”
My mother said, “I’ll talk to her.”
Charlie struck the table with his spoon, and my mother turned to him.
MAX SAID HE would take us to the Toneybee’s lake. My father had been asking him about it, and so he offered to walk us all there—me, Callie, my father, and Charlie.
I stood in my bedroom, pulling at the straps of the previous summer’s bathing suit.
Callie sat on the floor, watching me.
“You never swim anymore, anyway,” she said.
“I might.”
I hadn’t unpacked all my clothes yet and I knelt on the floor, searching through a duffel bag for a T-shirt long enough to reach my knees.
“You won’t.”
I stood up. Leave, I signed.
Callie began shifting through the rest of my moving boxes as if she would discover something new there, as if she didn’t know all of my belongings already. It didn’t matter to her what she wore—bright green overalls and a two-piece bathing suit, with Minnie Mouse’s head on the chest, her little girl stomach pouting over the waistband. She strummed her fingers across her paunch in an upbeat rhythm, unashamed, stopping every so often to reach into her overalls and hitch her bathing suit bottom over the fat on her hips.
“You’re too old for Minnie Mouse,” I told her.
“I don’t care,” she said, but she crossed her arms over the face on her chest.
She took a prism paperweight out of a box, held it up to her left eye, and pointed it at my bedroom window. She made sure to flash the light from the glass in my face, tracking me around the room, annoying me until Max and Charlie joined us.
Charlie wanted to touch everything: my books, the clothes in the duffel bag, the ragged cardboard flaps on the moving boxes. He stretched his hand out at the flash from the prism in Callie’s hand. Callie shook the light at him until he opened his mouth wide and a dry, husking sound came out.
“What’s that?” I asked, alarmed he would start crying.
Max said proudly, “He’s laughing.”
I had a bunch of old cutouts from National Geographic pinned to the wall—maps of the world. While I sifted through a pile of oversized sweatshirts, Max walked Charlie to each map. He took him past the Americas, Antarctica, Asia. He stopped in front of each and signed its title to Charlie.
“He can’t understand countries,” Callie told him.
“I know,” Max replied. “But it’s good for him to understand that there’s a word for everything.”
When Max got to Africa, he opened his palm wide, spread his fingers over an imaginary hump, and then clamped them shut into a fist.
Callie gasped. I began laughing.
“What is it?” Max said.
“Max,” I sputtered.
“What is it?”
“What was that?”
“What do you mean?” He started to make the sign again. “It’s Africa.”
“No!” Callie shrieked, eyes sliding from me to Max, unsure whether to laugh or to be afraid. “Don’t do that!”
“Who told you that’s Africa?” I said.
“The last ASL tutor here.”
Callie decided to laugh.
“It’s not?” Max hesitated. “She was wrong?”
“No, it’s not.” I said primly.
“Africa is this.” Callie curled her fist into the sign for the letter A, circled her face, and touched her thumb to her nose, flattening the tip.
“Aw, Callie,” Max stuttered, and he began to turn red. “Don’t do that. Please don’t do that.”
“Why?” She kept her hand to her face.
“Because it’s racist.” He looked up at both of us now.
I laughed harder. “It is not.”
“It is. Look, you’re touching your own nose for Africa. You’re pointing to your own nose and you’re making it flat . . .” Here he hiccoughed, glanced once again to the ground, then up and rushed through the rest, forcing himself to meet my eye. “And some people, a long time ago, used to believe that all Africans had, you know, a flat nose and that it was inferior.”
Callie pressed her thumb down hard and wheezed out, “A flat nose is inferior.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Max groaned. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, your sign is wrong,” I crowed, triumphant. “This”—I copied his first gesture, making the hump—“means something dirty.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It doesn’t mean ‘Africa,’ ” I said. “It means . . .” I lost my will for a moment. But then I looked at Max, his eyes wide and skeptical, and I gained it back again. “It means ‘tits,’ ” I said, and had the satisfaction of seeing him finally look away.
Callie gasped. “Charlotte!”
Max was even redder now, but he was not going to admit defeat. Instead he said, carefully, to the floor, “Who told you that?”
“They showed us at camp last summer.” No one had actually shown me. A couple of older boys had pointed at my swelling T-shirt and made the sign and I figured it out from there.
Max shook his head. “Well. I guess we both have a lot to learn.”
“How do you not know that?” Callie began to laugh again.
Max turned his face to Charlie. He was going to overlook us.
“It’s not his fault,” I told Callie, loud enough so he could hear. “Don’t be mean. Max only knows white-people sign language.”
Max stiffened but didn’t respond. He wouldn’t play with us. He was just going to let my insult hang out in the air, till the juice dripped out if it, till it dried out and curled in and broke up into dust.
“Girls,” my father called from the hallway, “Max, are we ready to go?”
Max rubbed Charlie’s back. “We’re ready,” he answered, and stalked out of the room.
Callie stood up to follow. Before she left the room, she turned and gave me a cool once over.
“Your bathing suit is stretching funny.” She signed Africa at my chest, across the boobs.
Callie and I followed my father, Max, and Charlie down our back wooden staircase, into the big baroque hallway. We went through a last set of heavy double doors and then we were outside. Across a balding lawn, there was a short run with barbed-wire fencing strung along its sides. The fencing scrambled down to a pond with a small island in the middle and a motorboat lying belly up in some weeds on the shore. There was a deep gauge in the soil, hardened into stiff mud, from dragging the boat back and forth.
“The chimps like to swim?” my father asked.
“No, they hate water,” Max explained. “It’s terrible getting them into the boat, but they love it once they’re across and on the island.”
I walked over to the boat. The shoreline was just patches of brittle grass, blistered with dirt. The water shined bright from far away, but up close it was a dull brown. And the current was off. It didn’t ebb back and forth like a normal pond—it churned in little circles.
I pointed. “Why’s it doing that?”
“That’s the pump,” Max said. “It’s a man-made pond. Miss Toneybee-Leroy had it put in a long time ago, back in the fifties I think.”
I spread out my towel. Even on the driest piece of grass, the mud bled fast through the terry cloth, stained the front of my T-shirt brown.
Callie ignored the mud. She surged into the water until it came up to her knees. My father followed. Max stood beside my towel for a little while, watching them. Charlie clung to his neck, a wary look on his face. Callie suddenly turned in the water, rushed toward my father, and with one heavy push swooped a wave of water at him, laughing. Charlie flinched.
“He’s nervous,” I said.
Max glanced down at him. “We could walk him around a bit to distract him.”
“All right.”
Charlie wouldn’t let Max stand him on the ground, so he rode on his hip instead. We started walking toward the woods.
“You know, Charlotte,” Max began. “I really am sorry.”
“For what?”
“Just . . . everything. The way we’ve started, I guess.”
“You shouldn’t be sorry. I’m the jerk.”
We were on a lesser used footpath, the trees and bushes overgrown, and Max held back some branches so that I could pass.
“See?” I said. “You can’t even deny it. So don’t say you’re sorry.”
He laughed.
“I don’t think you’re a jerk.”
“You’re just being polite.”
Charlie began to fidget, reaching for the leaves we passed. “Do you like it here?” Max began again.
“You always ask us that.”
“Everyone here just wants you and Callie to feel comfortable.”
“Well, I’m comfortable.”
“I’ve known you long enough to know that’s a lie.”
“You wouldn’t want to hear the truth.”
“Yes, I would.”
“It would make Dr. Paulsen cry.”
Max smiled and I smiled back.
“She would cry,” I continued. “She’d choke on the chalk in her pocket.”
Max laughed again. “Nothing gets past you.”
Despite myself, I flushed at the compliment.
“I think I can handle it, though.”
“Fine.” I stopped on the path. “You want to know what I think? I’ve never seen so many white people in one place in my life.” I scanned his face for his reaction. I wanted him to wince, but he didn’t. Instead he nodded.
“I suppose that’s strange.”
“It is.” I waited some more.
“Well, we’re all happy you’re here, you know.”
“You all just stare at us. At me and Callie. It’s weird sometimes. And everyone asks too many questions.”
Again, he nodded. I had confirmed something for him.
“I hope you don’t think I’m one of the ones who ask too many questions.”
“You’re the worst of all.”
He laughed and turned to walk back to the pond.
I followed. As I walked behind them, Charlie shifted on Max’s hip. Dr. Paulsen had warned us not to hold his gaze for long, that he would take this as a threat, so I only met his eyes for only a moment and then focused on watching Max’s back, the shift of his shirt as he carried Charlie up the hill. But Charlie kept angling his head to catch my eye, and when he did, he would grin when I turned away, taking pleasure in his dominance.
Max murmured something low to Charlie, something that sounded like “calm down.” Then he called to me, “You don’t have to play with him if you don’t want to.”
But I was stubborn. Charlie sought my gaze and every time, despite my annoyance, I submitted, I lowered my eyes and then looked back up at him. I didn’t like the patterns of this game, but I wouldn’t break them. I kept going, to Charlie’s squirming delight—a grudging act of kindness, not given willingly, not given happily, certainly not given with love, only defiance. You don’t know me, I signed to the space between Max’s shoulders. I can be good. I can be better.