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Charlie Freeman
A N OV E L B Y
Kaitlyn Greenidge
Charlotte
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Next on the card, Callie drew our fathers faceround, 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 meshe knew I was watchingand then she made two
quick marks across the penciled expansesignifiers 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 mothers 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 shed 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 familys 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. Hes part of us, but
I dont even know what he looks like.
She leaned over the sheet again and cupped one hand close to
the paper so that I couldnt see. When she was finished, she sat
up and pulled her hand away. Above each family members 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.
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At the camp, the hope had been that among others who knew our
language, at least, we would find a home. But it didnt work out
that way.
That past summer, Callie and I braided plastic gimp bracelets
that only went around each others wrists. We made yarn Gods
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 Id learned a host of new signsfor 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-spellall the dirty phrases Id 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.