We Love You, Charlie Freeman

by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Frustrated by the limitations of cross-race communication in her predominantly white town, a young African-American girl teaches herself to sign. Years later, Laurel uproots her husband and daughters from their downwardly-mobile, over-educated and underpaid life in the South End of Boston for Cortland County, Massachusetts.

The Freemans are to take part in an experiment: they've been hired by a private research institute to teach sign language to a chimpanzee. Told primarily from the point of view of Laurel's elder daughter, Charlotte, the novel shifts in time from the early 1990s to the founding of the Institute in the 1930s to the present day. With language both beautiful and accessible, Greenidge examines that time in each person's life when we realize the things we thought were normal may be anything but.

Release date: March 8, 2016

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

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 sweet 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 else,” 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.

My mother parked right beside the steps, careful to make sure the Volvo lined up with them perfectly.

Callie was the first one out of the car. She bounded up the stairs, straight to the brass doors with their yellowing Plexiglas panes. She cupped her hands against the windows, trying to see past the film until my mother caught up with her and pulled on her shoulder.

After a few minutes, through the cloudy glass we could see a heavy form coming toward us. The whole brass doorframe buzzed, and then the form behind the glass grew larger and darker. It leaned on the handle and held the door open. It was the guard, a squat man with the whitest, thinnest skin I had ever seen. So thin that you could see the purple and red veins of his balding skull. He had a regular white dress shirt on, with two gold epaulets Velcroed to the shoulders and a clear plastic badge clipped above his heart, with a ragged paper insert with the laser-printed epitaph SECURITY.

As we shuffled through the door, he held out his hand. “Lester Potter.” He tapped the badge on the front of his shirt. Then, “Dr. Paulsen will be down in a minute.”

When we were all through the door, he strode to a small desk in the lobby, sat down, and opened his newspaper, at which point we apparently became invisible to him.

It was hard to make out the size of the lobby. Everything was covered in dark wood and velvet, which gave the room a gravitas it maybe didn’t deserve. The whole back wall was a grimy pink marble slab with roman numerals and Latin epigrams carved into its face. It was too murky to see anything more specific than that. The Toneybee kept the lights banked low: weak wattage bulbs made weaker by all the green glass lampshades. On either side of the room were heavy leather double doors, studded with brass. All that marble gave off a cold, dank sweat that hung in the air and clung to our skin and chilled us. Lester, in his chair, had buttoned a cardigan over his makeshift uniform. A modern standing metal lamp, the kind with many arms, the kind you would find in a teenager’s bedroom, stood beside his desk.

Callie wore a pair of jelly sandals, and the thick, plastic soles sank deep into the heavy carpet, leaving bite marks in the pile. I brushed my hand against one of the heavy oak walls, felt the grain of wood scratch against my neon fingernail polish, and shivered.

It was clear that none of us belonged there. And Lester Potter did not belong there, either—his makeshift uniform even shabbier and suspect, as he propped his elbows on his little desk and strained to read the newsprint in the glare of the lamp. None of us belonged there and we were all nervously ignoring the fact.

My father walked the length of the room, Callie trailing after him. He wandered around, pushing on some of the doors. Lester Potter lowered his newspaper to watch but said nothing. My father settled in the center of the room, where a statue of a man stood, stocky and messy haired, BEETHOVEN carved into the base. My father glanced at Lester Potter and then, with a studied casualness, leaned against the statue, crossing his ankles. Callie reached for his hand.

Lester Potter still watched my father. He was leaning over his desk now as if he was waiting for something to happen. But he said nothing. My mother opened her purse and began searching its contents for an imaginary stick of gum. My cheeks burned and I focused on the brightest thing in the room—the white crown of Lester Potter’s head, the veins of his scalp glowing through the gloom.

It felt like a full ten minutes before we heard the shush shush shush of rubber soles on carpet.

“Hello, hello,” a woman’s voice stuttered. “I’m sorry to be late.”

My mother was already smiling eagerly. “Dr. Paulsen.”

Dr. Marietta Paulsen was the Toneybee Institute’s research director. It was she who had conceived of the whole experiment, had handpicked us to lead it. She came at us with a nervous skip.

I’d already decided, months ago, when I’d first heard her name, that I would not allow myself to like Dr. Paulsen. I saw now that she was much older than my mother, but she wore her hair like a little girl’s, cut close to her chin, fine bangs held back with two rose tortoiseshell barrettes. She had tiny pale eyes, set close together at the center of her face. They flickered back and forth in a way that made me feel both sorry for her and uneasy for myself. She was very tall. I noted, with a rush of satisfaction, that she had a wide, flat, obvious backside. She probably ties that cardigan around her waist to try and hide it, I told myself. She wore a gray wool skirt and an ivory-colored blouse, thick black stockings and bright green clogs and on her hands, a pair of blue latex gloves.

“I hope the drive was all right. Laurel, Charles, you’ve been here before, but still, it’s easy to get lost.” As she spoke, Dr. Paulsen peeled off her gloves, balled them up, and stuffed them into her blouse’s breast pocket, a rubber boutonniere.

She hesitated for a moment as if she was deciding something. Then she reached out and grasped my mother’s shoulders, pulled her into an awkward half embrace. “It’s so good to see you, Laurel,” she said into the top of my mother’s hair. “I can’t tell you how excited everyone here is. We really can’t wait to get started.”

My mother, pressed under the crook of Dr. Paulsen’s arm, tried not to look startled. She lightly patted Dr. Paulsen’s back. “We’re all excited, too.”

Dr. Paulsen let my mother go and turned to the rest of us. She rounded her shoulders forward and lowered her chin so that she could meet my father’s eye. “Good to see you again, Charles.” She shook his hand briskly. For Callie, who held my father’s hand, Dr. Paulsen put her hands on her knees and squatted, looked full into Callie’s face. “Lovely to meet you.”

She stood up and turned to me.

“And you, too, Charlotte.” Her eyes flicked briefly over my T-shirt, the one I had worn despite my mother telling me it was too tight. To Dr. Paulsen’s credit, she only frowned her disapproval for an instant before she met my eyes and smiled. She held out her hand.

When she parted her lips to grin, behind her white, white teeth, I caught a glimpse of her tongue. It was the yellowiest, craggiest, driest tongue I’d ever seen. It surely did not belong in that mouth, in her, and I shot a look to my mother, who widened her eyes, who gave one quick shake of her head that told me to ignore it. I turned to Dr. Paulsen and smiled very widely back at her.

Dr. Paulsen turned to Lester Potter, nodded a thanks to him, and then led us through the double leather doors to the hallway beyond. The hallway smelled like furniture polish and rotting brocade and underneath that something else, something warm and dark and rude. Wild animals.

“This is the west wing.” Dr. Paulsen walked ahead of us. “Your apartment’s here, on the second floor.”

“Where are the chimps?” Callie asked.

“They live in the east wing,” Dr. Paulsen said. “But we’ll skip that for now. It would be too overwhelming to visit today.”

All along the hallways were offices and labs and conference rooms, and Dr. Paulsen made a show of stepping into each one. The rooms had high, arched ceilings and gilt windowpanes that clashed with the wheelie chairs and gray-faced conference tables. One large room was a working lab with banks of counters and sinks and refrigerat. . .