Charlotte

I was the one who found my mother and Charlie together.

I still couldn’t sleep in Courtland County. Instead, I would go to the living room, lie across our borrowed, bumpy couch, and look through my father’s record collection, imagining myself on the album covers: inside Pink Floyd’s floating prism; bathed in the same blue electric lights as a chubby Donny Hathaway; getting tangled up in the swirling ribbons of color on the front of Bitches Brew.

It was during one of these nights on that couch, staring at the cover of a Labelle record, that I heard the tiniest gasp. I wouldn’t have caught it anywhere outside of the overbearing hush of Courtland County. The gasp was so content, so satisfied it was almost smug. I stood up. I saw a dim gray light coming from under Charlie’s door. I got up and put my hand on the knob and was surprised when it turned easily: his door was usually locked.

Charlie’s room was different at night. The space was filled with a dirty, watery glow, the diffuse glare from the overhead fluorescent light placed on the dimmest setting. I squinted and then I saw them. In the corner farthest from the door, my mother sat cross-legged, Charlie laid out across her knees. I would like to say I didn’t know what they were doing at first. I would like to say I didn’t understand. But I understood instantly. Something in the way she held herself was sickeningly familiar. I’d seen her back curve like that before. Some part of me remembered from when Callie was a baby.

This was the worst part. My mother heard the door open, but she made no move to cover up or turn away. When I could bring myself to look at her face, her chin was slightly raised. Something threatened to break in my throat, something small and muffled, too embarrassed to be a full outcry. At that sound, Charlie lolled his head away from my mother’s chest, his lips coming off her nipple with a pop. Now Charlie, my mother, and my mother’s nipple were all staring at me.

“Mom,” was all I could say. Again and again, “Mom.”

She had the strangest look on her face: proud, then, as she realized my unhappiness, apologetic and frightened. She pushed back her hair with her free hand, made a slight face, and I could see she was a little bit annoyed at being interrupted. She scooped Charlie up and struggled to stand. When she’d managed to get both of them upright, she came to me. “Calm down, Charlotte.” She brushed my arm. “I’m going to ask you to calm down now.”

“No,” I protested. I should have been yelling, but I wasn’t. For my mother, I kept whispering. “I will not calm down.”

“It’s really okay, Charlotte. He needs it.”

She tried to smile. Charlie rested his head on her shoulder and closed his eyes, content to listen to the rise of her voice. “You remember what he sounded like that first night? You remember how badly he cried?”

“Yeah,” I said reluctantly.

“You remember how heartbreaking that was?”

“Yeah.”

“Imagine if we had to go through that every night, Charlotte. Imagine if we all had to get that upset every single night.” She paused.

“Yeah.”

“So you see why I have to do it?”

“Yeah.”

“And you see why we can’t tell anyone about it? Not yet? You’re still uncomfortable. Imagine how everyone else will feel. It will just make everything so hard.”

“Yeah.”

“So, it would be best not to tell anyone else. Not yet, anyway. I want to get Dr. Paulsen used to the idea. And I want to talk to your father about it, too. I should really talk to him first.”

“Yeah.”

“He has a right to know, everyone does, but it’s a sensitive subject.”

“Okay,” I said, to get her to stop. Charlie opened his eyes and raised his hand to her cheek.

I backed toward the door.

“Charlotte,” she said, stopping me, “I was surprised when you walked in on us. I will say that. But I think this could be a good thing. I think it could be good to have a secret with each other.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Charlie plucked drowsily at the front of my mother’s nightshirt, held up his hands, cupped his fingertips together, brought them into a kiss. The sign for more. She gazed down at him. She didn’t even care if I saw what passed between them. She began to unbutton the front of her nightgown again. I turned and opened the door, left before I could see any more.

THERE WAS A squall at the back of my throat when I woke up in the morning, something snarled and contrary, rising up from my stomach. I told myself I was being stupid and that I didn’t care. But I did care. I wanted someone else to know.

I nearly told Callie in the morning, but she was too open and bright, smiling at Charlie and my mother, and I couldn’t do it. I was too scared to tell my father. I thought of Max, but telling him would make it mean something else, would take it away from me and my mother and Charlie and I knew that was wrong. I didn’t think of Adia until I actually saw her.

I sought her out at lunch. I’d been avoiding her since she insulted me on the first day of school. She sat at the farthest table. She didn’t even have the pretense of a lunch tray in front of her. She was drawing again. When I put down my tray, she didn’t look up. I followed her lead, knowing she was waiting to talk to me. We sat that way for the next twenty-five minutes, me eating, her drawing.

The five-minute warning bell rang. I drank the last of my milk and felt the scratch at the back of my throat again. I had to say something. I reached across the table, put my two hands in front of her face and signed more.

“What was that?” She still wouldn’t look up from the paper.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re somebody who wants a lot of attention.”

I sat back down and waited. Adia drew some more and then she gusted out a loud sigh, as if getting past the heaviest pain in the world. “All right. Just tell me. What was it?”

I signed, I have a monkey for a brother. He talks.

“What’s that?” Adia said.

It was coming out all wrong.

Adia tried and failed to feign disinterest. “What’s that, with your hands?”

“It’s,” I said, “It’s . . .” And then I told her about the Toneybee. Not about my mother. Not yet. Because as I talked, Adia got more and more excited until she cut me off.

“We have to tell Marie.”

MARIE, ADIA’S MOTHER, was a fine-arts professor who taught pottery classes at Courtland County Community College. “The four Cs,” Adia called it, as we walked to her house. It was after school, and Adia had insisted I follow her home. I still hadn’t figured out how to tell her the rest. The rest of it, all of it, sat hard and cold in my neck, and I only wanted it out. Going home, seeing my mother with Charlie wrapped around her, would only make it worse, would make me choke and drown. I was sure of it.

Adia and her mother lived on Courtland County’s tiny, preserved Main Street. Everything downtown was brightly painted and porticoed and kept as close to the early twentieth century as possible. The Breitlings had taken over an old general store. The facade was painted a deep, shining cherry red with white trim, and there were old murals for Coca-Cola and Alka-Seltzer fading on the side of the building.

We entered through a screen door at the back and stepped into a long, narrow, gutted room. A battered countertop with three cast-iron taps stood at the far end. It was an old soda fountain. The rest of the space was taken up by pottery wheels and wire baking racks tottering with blocks of clay. Near the soda fountain was a small, gruff kiln. Everything was powdered with brown and white dust. The floor itself was wooden and deeply scarred and all around us were precariously balanced towers of books and papers and magazines. Crumbling New York Timeses, a tide of New Yorkers, a pile of old Crisis magazines and a slick, sliding deck of Essences and Vogues. There were even a few Final Calls, but it seemed like someone had been using those for an art project: the fronts were nicked with holes where an Xacto knife pruned the typography. There was a stack of NME magazines, almost completely torn apart, as if they had been snatched and delivered to the Breitlings by smugglers.

But the centerpiece of the room was the enormous stereo system: two felted speakers with a complicated rig between them, crowned with a turntable and a cassette deck. And in front of all that sat the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, more beautiful than Adia, legs parted, bent over a running wheel.

She had a gold front tooth and a nose ring. She wore her hair in a complicated wrap, a swath of ragged cotton dyed bloodred. She had Adia’s features, of course, but they were different. Adia was beautiful, but there was something stubborn in the set of her face, as if she dared you to admire her. Her mother wasn’t ashamed of her beauty. She wore it plainly, without apologies, and this made her even more hypnotic than her daughter.

“This is Charlotte,” Adia announced, with the open pride of a cat bringing a bird to its master.

Marie held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. Adia began to talk excitedly at Marie, something about consciousness raising and shelter and the Toneybee, and Marie only lifted her eyebrows, her lips slightly parted to flash her gold tooth at us.

I thought she would send us away or roll her eyes, but it was clear that she took Adia just as seriously as Adia took her. They were equals. She believed every word Adia said, and when I realized this, I felt my stomach tilt with unease.

Marie got up from her seat and moved to the window to light a cigarette.

“You have to tell her where you live,” Adia prodded.

I did, shyly. Marie listened, smoke streaming from her nostrils.

“Well,” she said with an exhale when I finished. “That’s quite a story.” Adia watched me now, made some calculation. I had passed a test and Adia had decided I was one of them.

At the Breitlings, it was never quiet. Their two great passions were rhetoric and music. Adia and her mother were rhythm heads. My father loved music, too, but the Breitlings were different. They were not collectors and they were not merely fans. Their passion for music was both religious and profane: they revered and craved it at the same time. Their stereo was on from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m., when Marie’s wheel did its final revolution of the night, and she gave the poor, overworked motor of the turntable a break.

When it was just me and Adia, she chose the records. If Marie was there, she was the one in charge, constantly changing discs to keep up with the unending mix in her head. Nina Simone and Sly and the Family Stone—the only records she and my father shared, besides Labelle. Marie even allowed rap music, a fact that astonished me. My parents hated rap and I thought that hatred was shared by anyone over thirty. The only thing Marie banned was any white singers. White composers were fine, she said. She loved classical music. Bartók was her favorite. But, she confided with a laugh and a shrug, she couldn’t stand the sound of white people singing.

“Except for Joni Mitchell,” Adia said.

I snorted.

“What’s so funny?”

But I could never explain it to her.

It was exhausting to be with the Breitlings. Black people could love Joni Mitchell but still claim to hate white singers. It was one of an elaborate set of rules that Marie imparted to Adia, who parroted them back to me as if I had not been in the room at the same time she heard them. It was a long list, the work of many years’ worth of debate.

We’d had our own version of these rules back home in Dorchester, but they had been rules of what you weren’t supposed to do in public, what you weren’t supposed to do around white people. Laugh too loudly, show anger, dress raggedy, show any sign of disorder or chaos. Fit perfectly—without strain—into space.

The Breitlings’ list was different. According to them, these were the things black people did not do: eat mayonnaise; drink milk; listen to Elvis Presley; watch Westerns or Dynasty; read Time magazine; appreciate Jack London; know the lyrics to Kenny Rogers’s songs; suffer fools; enjoy the cold or any kind of winter. Here were the things black people did do: learn to speak French and adore Paris; instinctively understand and appreciate anyone from a small island or a hot place; spank their children; obsessively read science fiction and watch Star Trek episodes; prefer sweet foods to salty.

The debate over whether or not black people were natural swimmers was a very old one between the two of them, an argument that was full of in-jokes and constructed of rhythms I could not follow.

Living in all-white Courtland County, Marie gave her daughter these specifications so that Adia could spot a real black person as soon as they came along, avoid all the mirages. That’s what I thought it was at first and it put me on the defensive because surely, in this analogy, I—in my tennis shoes and wannabe white-girl bangs—would be the mirage. And who would ever want to think of themselves as not really water but actually a trick of the desert?

As I got to know them better, I realized the rules were for Adia herself as much as they were for the world around her. Marie nursed Adia on a bitter pabulum of omnipresent, always-lurking oppression. To ready her daughter for the assault on her rights that Marie was sure was coming, she had given Adia a very simple list of instructions on how to be black. All Adia had to do was follow them and her whole self would be secure. It was intoxicating. I wanted them to tell me their rules forever.

And yet they never could give me the straightforward answer of how they got stranded in the blizzard of whiteness that was Courtland County. Sometimes they called Adia’s father a jazz musician, sometimes a physicist, sometimes a planetary scholar, sometimes a poet.

What was clear was that Marie came to Courtland County with the man who himself had been lured there as an affirmative action hire at Courtland County Community College, in whatever was his true discipline. “But this place was too much for him,” Marie would say, smoke streaming from her nostrils. “He had to go back down south.”

They claimed he sent periodic interplanetary dispatches—whether this was a metaphor or something they believed had truly happened was always unclear. He also sent money, which covered the rent for the Main Street storefront, and the records and the magazines.

For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t follow him down south. I think they stayed because, by the time I met them, they had comfortably settled into the roles of professional angry black women and the idea of living anywhere else was unimaginable.

Marie took on the burden of talking about race for Courtland County. And for her part of the deal, she got this one scrap of land where she could dictate all the rules. The troubling thing, of course, which Adia and Marie never mentioned, was the lack of actual fellow black people. The black people in Spring City didn’t count. Marie and Adia only mentioned them when decrying the segregation that caused that town’s existence.

Marie’s loud protestations about the lack of black history celebrations in town had resulted in a sheepish and hastily thrown together assembly each year at the public library, where all the white children and Adia sang praises to peanuts and open-heart surgery and air-conditioning underneath a store-printed banner that read THE WONDERS OF BLACK INNOVATION. Even the high school, in a misguided but genuine attempt to appease Marie, put on a turgid adaptation of The Wiz the previous year, which Adia, with her profound gift for contrarian gestures, refused to take part in. Without her, the cast was all white and deadly earnest. Marie attended every performance anyway, a good sport, and cheerfully lacerated the poor cast members after each show for their inveterate cluelessness.

“You children can’t help it, of course,” she told them, and they accepted her criticism with a comforting humility.

Courtland County bowed to Marie’s demands because the people there, like well-meaning decent and caring people anywhere, were loath to think of themselves as racists but also loathe to think of race at all.

Among the three of us it was different. Marie and Adia liked to quiz me about all the signs I knew.

In their front room one afternoon, the two of us helping Marie as she mixed glazes, Adia said, “Show me the sign for bougie, Charlotte. I bet you know that one.”

“There isn’t one.”

“You’re telling me there aren’t any black deaf people?”

“Of course there are,” I said. “We’ve got our own signing. Black Deaf Sign Language.”

“Marie,” Adia called happily. “Listen to this. Tell her, Charlotte.”

Marie was just as amused as Adia. They did not find the idea sad or isolating or frightening. They were delighted.

“There has to be a sign for bougie,” Adia insisted. “There just has to be. You know we like to come up with ways to call each other out.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what black people do. We like to call each other out. We don’t suffer fools.”

“Show us deaf Ebonics,” Marie said.

“Show us country signing,” Adia said.

“Show us how we do,” Marie said.

“Show us ghetto signs,” Adia said, and Marie abruptly stopped laughing.

“That’s enough,” she said sternly. “That’s offensive. That’s what they would want you to say.”

“They who?” I asked.

I had failed them again.

“White people.” Adia rolled her eyes. “Duh.”

“That’s enough,” Marie said again, then sat at her wheel and began working. We’d been dismissed for being too rowdy.

In her room, Adia threw herself across the mess of blankets she used for a bed—“Mattresses are colonialist,” she’d pronounced when I’d first seen it—and buried her head under a bundle of sheets.

“Sometimes Marie just can’t take a joke,” she muttered.

I slid down beside her. “Duh,” I said.

Adia only grunted.

She put her head on my knee.

“It’s just . . . there can be so much more, you know?”

I could feel the bell of her voice vibrate against my shins. I reached out and took her hand in mine and began to spell the alphabet. She didn’t move. After a few seconds, “What are you doing?”

“It’s all your letters. So you can sign any word you want.”

I held my breath. But Adia only allowed, “That’s true,” and I felt her hand ease into mine.

Adia’s skin was much softer than I thought it would be. She liked to use her hands to gouge and sketch and scratch so it was a surprise that her fingers were pneumatic and smooth. In the warm dark of Adia’s room, we began to practice the alphabet. I crooked her fingers, made them swoop through the air. She sat up on one elbow so she could see my hands move. We went through it once, twice, but she kept tripping on some letters and she finally threw her arm over her eyes in mock despair, “Oh, lawd te day, I’m blind.”

“Yes, yes, lawd,” Adia continued. “Lawdy, lawd. I’se is deaf, dumb, and blind.”

Then she laughed. To keep the joke going, I took her hand in mine again. “This is how the blind learn to sign.” I finger-spelled the start of her name into the soft flesh at her shoulder.

“Like Helen Keller?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like Helen Keller.”

I moved my hand to the hollow in the middle of her chest, pressed it to the skin there. The joke wavered, it threatened to break and become serious. Adia held her breath, whether to stop laughing or not, I didn’t know. I started to move my fingers to make her name again: the hard fist for a. When I pressed my little finger, held up at attention for the letter i against her chest, Adia squirmed.

“That tickles.”

“Sorry.”

But I kept my hand on her chest for a few seconds more, until Adia shrugged, rolled a little bit away from me, and said “Good night,” pretending to sleep while still pressed against me, while I slipped my hand down farther, still spelling all the way, while in the last little bit of afternoon light I watched her form beside me, felt her breath rise and fall. I focused—as I spelled into her skin, into wet—on the curve of her skull, the two perfect hollows at its base.

I WENT TO Adia’s every day after that, for the push of her skin and for revolution. Adia talked to me about change and uprising and power till she made herself hoarse, and then she lay beneath me and went quiet while I spelled into her a different kind of speech, a truer one, I thought.

Always, after, Adia kept still. Her mouth closed, her eyes muted, she was finally, briefly, smoothed over.

I lived in this lull, when it was just our breath, just our two bodies sliding very slowly away from each other. I thought it meant that we had broken into something new. Something that existed outside of the Toneybee Institute and Courtland County and what black people could and could not do. When we pressed together, when we moved our fingers against each other, we spelled past doing to simply, unquestionably being. We fell out of time.

I told myself the gibberish that I spelled into Adia’s body had become a language that we shared between us. That maybe I was being too cautious. That maybe I could open my mouth and speak and name what passed between us for what it was—love.

I was wrong about that one.

Adia spoke about what we did only once. One afternoon, all slick and warm, the bare trees scratching on her window, the faraway hiss of her mother’s kiln downstairs, Adia rolled her head off of its resting place on my knee and propped herself up on one elbow.

“Black people don’t know how to love,” she said.

I snorted, “C’mon, Adia. Another rule? Black people can’t love? That’s pretty messed up.”

“No.” Adia stuck her swollen lower lip out, made a show of pouting at my derision. “We can do it. We just don’t know how.”

Marie had recently been reading Neruda’s love poems and so that meant Adia was reading them, too.

“Marie says our ancestors were the greatest lovers,” Adia continued, unembarrassed.

I thought of Marie, her golden tooth flashing from behind her stout lips as she pronounced the word lovers with relish. I flushed.

“In Africa, we were kings and queens.” Adia was warming to her subject, to the sound of her own voice. She stretched, and I watched all the smooth round muscles of her back contract underneath her brown skin. I wanted to reach out and kiss them, each one, but I knew she would shrink from me now, would be annoyed at any interruption. I sucked my teeth instead, rolled my eyes.

“Kings and queens,” I murmured.

“Yes.” Adia, impatient now. “Marie says the men loved the women fully and wholly and the women accepted their love. Like a tribute. You know, Cleopatra on the Nile and all that. In Africa, it was the man’s job to offer love and the woman’s job to accept it. But all that’s ruined now. Marie told me.” Adia sighed.

Her skin was still damp, her bare arms flexing. “But we’re getting it back,” I said shyly.

She snapped up as if I’d pinched her.

“You and I will have to learn,” Adia told me. “Marie says so. We’ll have to find kings.” I thought maybe this was another kind of flirtation. Adia looked slyly at me through her lashes. Then she said, “We don’t want to go queer like white girls do.”

I reached for her to make her stop. I began again to finger-spell against her skin, to find our way into that other existence, but while my fingers worked I made sure to kiss Adia hard, to bite her on the lips and tongue until they swelled, so that when we were finished the quiet would keep and she could not talk us back into history.

THAT NIGHT WHEN I went back home to the Toneybee, my own lips were bruised and smarting. I ate dinner and I brushed my teeth and I lay in bed and I thought about what Adia told me. After a while, I got up and went to Charlie’s room.

In the dimness, I didn’t see him at first. But then, in the farthest corner, I saw some rustling in a mess of blankets. Charlie sat up. I moved toward him. He tilted his head and scratched underneath his arm. He sniffed loudly. I could smell him and I realized with a start that he could smell me, too. I watched his nostrils grow wide. I heard his stomach rumble, heard him make a tiny swallow at the back of his throat. He yawned, blinked languorously.

I held up my hand and signed to Charlie the one thing I knew for certain.

I love Adia Breitling. I like girls.

Charlie blinked again, more quickly. And then he raised his hand and signed it back to me, his fingers swift and nimble: I like girls, I like girls, I like girls.

The game played by younger siblings everywhere. I repeat what you say until you cannot take it anymore, until you are enraged by your own echo. He’d done it to me before and it had made me furious.

But now, as I watched him reflect my love for Adia, I felt only the overwhelming need to touch him. But I knew the moment I reached out for him, he would bristle. So I sat, grateful, watching his fingers mirror mine until he stopped.

He yawned and scratched his cheek and blinked again, and then he pushed himself up onto his haunches and away from me. He made a point of turning his back, busying himself with his nest of blankets, until he threw himself on the floor with a groan and covered his eyes with his hands, ready for sleep.

I stood up, careful not to step on his blankets and closed his door behind me.