Chapter 17
Charles Won’t Let Me Fall
My graduation outfit is pretty sweet. In addition to the black gown, I’ve got cream and crimson fourragères on my left shoulder and a white tassel on my hat and a gold cord around my neck and a crimson Stole of Gratitude with the IU seal on it. Not bad for an undergrad degree, though it pales next to Professor Smith’s regalia. She is a sea of black velvet bands and royal-blue velvet and pink and white satin and gold cording, and when I see her, I want a doctoral hood so much, I could die.
“Nice outfit!” I say. “Have you seen my parents anywhere?”
“No, not yet,” she says, and we both look around, as if they might be hiding.
I told my parents I’d meet them here at the psych department reception right after the commencement ceremony, but they’re late. They probably got lost. I’m turning my head to look for them when there’s a tap on my shoulder. I turn and find Charles smiling at me.
“Phwar,” he says with the same ridiculous grin I can feel on my own face. He touches the gold cord at my neck. “Get a load of this.”
His regalia don’t make any sense to me. They’re scarlet and black, and there’re a lot of them. The main thing I notice is that he’s had his hair cut, so it’s glittering at his neck, like gold, in the sunny, glass-walled foyer.
“No hat?” I ask, still smiling uncontrollably. I haven’t seen him for three whole days, though he’s been sending me tormenting e-mails.
He holds up a flat, floppy velvety black disc and wrinkles his nose. “I don’t like the hat.”
I scan him, still trying to make sense of his regalia. His gown is open, and he’s—good gravy, he’s wearing a suit!
The ducklings always said it was a mercy to the world that Momma Duck never tried to look good. In his khakis and blue Oxford, even in his baby-puke-colored duffle coat, he’s head-turningly good-looking. In a suit and academic regalia, he is jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly, panty-throbbingly beautiful. He is the golden image of ideal maleness.
“You clean up good,” I tell him when my capacity to produce language returns.
“Not so bad yourself,” he says. “I have a present for you, but I’ve had to send for it from home, and it’s not here yet.”
“You didn’t have to do that!” I say. “What is it?”
“It’s a surprise, ninny.”
I stick out my tongue at him. He hesitates, glances at Professor Smith, and then—wonder of wonders—sticks out his tongue at me.
And just then my parents wander up.
“There you guys are!” I say, and Charles flushes pink. “Mom and Dad, this is Charles. He’s the postdoc in our lab.”
“Nice to meet you, Charles,” says my dad, holding out a hand to shake. They do the whole manly-greeting-manly-men thing, Mom and Dad become Frances and George, and then Mom and Dad greet Professor Smith, who has met them lots of times already.
“I was only waiting to say hi to your folks—I’ve got to get home and get off my feet,” says Professor Smith.
“Oh, hey, can I steal you for a sec?” I say.
I abandon Charles to my parents and follow Professor Smith out of the reception. I give her my stole. She hugs me and we both start to cry and she makes me promise to keep in touch.
“Thank you so much,” I say weepily. And then I say it again. Twice. Because what else is there to say?
She says, “Annie . . . is there something going on between you and Charles? I don’t mean to pry, but there seems to be . . . something going on.”
“Yeah,” I say lightly, and then I sniff. “It seems like we have kind of A Thing, but ya know.” I shrug. “It’s no big deal.”
She nods and searches my face. “Okay,” she says. “None of my business. Keep me posted on your travels, and let me know if I can help in any way. Any way,” she emphasizes.
“I will.” I hug her again and say, “Thank you so much,” again. Then I watch her waddle out of the building, and I sniff hard before going back to the reception and my parents and Charles.
Mom and Dad look at me affectionately when they see I’ve been crying. Dad gives me a giant hug and I say, “That was my first big good-bye,” and I laugh and cry at the same time when Mom hugs me too, and I’m the cheese in the sandwich for the first time in almost four years, when they left here after helping me move into my dorm.
When I let go of Dad and pull my shit together, he says, “We were just telling Charles here that we’re all having dinner together. I was asking if he’d like to join us.”
Charles is looking at the three of us like we’re aliens.
“It’s just a cookout at Annie’s, nothing formal,” my mom says, as if too much formality might be what’s holding Charles back from asking if he can bring the coleslaw.
“You’re sure it wouldn’t be inconvenient?” he says, glancing between us uncertainly.
“God no,” I say. “It’s us and Margaret’s family too, including her girlfriend and the girlfriend’s family, so there’ll be a bunch of people.” And then I add hurriedly, “But no pressure. If you’ve got other plans or whatever, don’t worry about it.”
“I’d be very glad to join you,” he says, sounding sincere but not very glad.
“Great!” my dad exclaims. “We’ll meet you there. Come on by just as soon as you like—we’re all biking back to the condo now. Margaret’s there with her family, starting the grill. I brought bikes with us cuz I bet Annie I can beat her in a race—”
“That’s a bet you’ll lose,” Charles says easily.
“I dunno,” I put in. “He’s been spinning.” Then I see the question in Charles’s eyes and hold up a hand. “If you have to ask, you don’t want to know.”
He takes me at my word, nodding solemnly, with just the tiniest wink at me.
“So we’ll see you there just as soon as you like,” finishes my dad.
I win the race, spurred on by the nerdy pleasure of speeding across campus in my academic regalia, but it’s close. Dad chases me the whole way—he’s so close, I almost let him win, but I know he’d know, so I let him lose closely but honorably.
My mom trails behind and shows up at the apartment complex about ten minutes later, not even out of breath.
“It’s such a beautiful evening,” she says. “Why hurry?”
She helps me hang up my regalia, and then we join the party.
When Charles gets to the apartment, we’re in the living room—Mom, Dad, me, Margaret, Reshma, and Reshma’s moms—dancing and singing along to the Symphony of Science’s “Ode to the Brain!” When neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor sings, “We are perfect, we are whole, and we are beautiful,” I actually get tears in my eyes.
“Yay for the brain!” cheers my mom the neurosurgeon when the song ends, and we all hug, all of us. Reshma’s parents are both doctors too, and our families have bonded instantly.
Hashtag: nerdlove.
And then there’s Charles, back in his blue shirt—the windowpane-checked one this time—a bottle of wine in each hand that he brandishes like a pair of nunchucks.
“Booze,” he announces.
“Awesome!” I say. “Come this way!” I lead him back through the hallway to the kitchen, where I try to take the bottles from him to put them in the fridge. He’ll only give me one of them.
“This one’s red,” he says, holding the other one delicately.
I roll my eyes and ask facetiously, “Does it need to breathe?”
“No, but it should be decanted,” he says, suddenly awkward. “I . . . er, I brought a decanter with me, on the assumption you wouldn’t have one.” He gestures to the kitchen table, where a wide-bottomed glass carafe sits. Charles wrinkles his nose, looking abashed, and the bottom corner of his lip tugs downward. He says, “Am I a pretentious wanker?”
I retrieve a corkscrew from the drawer and say, “I think you can only call something pretentious if it’s fake, and if there’s anything I’ve learned about you in the last week”—god, has it really only been one week?—“it’s that you aren’t fake anything. You just legit are.”
“I just legit am a wanker. Thanks, Annie,” he says with a grin, watching his own fingers twiddle with the decanter.
I want his eyes on me instead, so I move into his space and say, “What have you been doing for three days without me?”
His eyes meet mine, and he says, “Thinking of all the ways I haven’t yet made you come.” He looks at me in that way that makes my lips part.
“We could go upstairs,” I say very quietly. I imagine it. I imagine leading him up to my bedroom, closing the door, and letting him do whatever he wants, letting him pull up my dress and use his hands and his mouth, anything he wants, all with my parents and my roommate and her girlfriend and her family in the living room, laughing and talking and playing more YouTube videos, while Charles makes me come, his hand pressed over my mouth to stop me from screaming my pleasure.
Charles takes one step toward me—
“They’re about to put the burgers on the grill,” says my dad, poking his head around the corner and into the kitchen. “You guys wanna place your orders?”
His eyes dart from me to Charles to me again.
“Yup,” I say, turning to smile at my dad. “We’ll be out in a minute.”
“Okeydokey,” he says with a cheerful wave. He leaves us alone again.
“Better not, after all,” I say with a sigh.
“Do you think they know?”
“Thirty seconds ago I would have said no, but even my dad could probably tell what was going on when he walked in.”
Charles nods and then wrinkles his nose to ask, “Do you think they mind?”
“Nah,” I say, thwapping him on the arm. “They like you.”
They do like him. Late in the evening, Mom, Dad, Charles, and I split the bottle of red wine between us. Margaret’s and Reshma’s families have gone home, and Margaret and Reshma themselves have gone out to Diva’s. So it’s just the four of us and this bottle of wine—which it took Charles about three hours to pour into the carafe while I complained, “See, this is why I drink wine out of a box.“
Anyway, once we’re all sitting around the kitchen table, Dad says playfully, “Thanks for letting us come to your party, Annie Bee. Does this mean you’ve forgiven us?”
“What’s this?” Charles asks me.
“Oh, nothing, my parents just totally lied to me.” I explain, “They said the way to choose a college was to look at the faculty and their research and choose someone I wanted to work with. Well, I wanted to work with Professor Smith—I saw these Web videos of her giving talks about neural plasticity, and I was so into it. It wasn’t until I actually got here and talked to other students that I realized that’s how you choose a grad school. Nobody chooses their undergrad that way!”
“We got our punishment for it,” my dad says, “when you came all the way out here to Bloomington and we hardly saw you for four years.”
“Do Americans usually stay close to home for university?”
“I don’t know,” I say, wondering. “I got accepted to a bunch of places nearer to home, but I really wanted to work with Dr. Smith. Mom and Dad had me totally brainwashed. And it worked out great because I’ve been in her lab almost the whole time.”
“And the lab is better for it,” Charles says, lifting his glass at me.
“So, Charles,” my dad asks him in an “are your intentions honorable?” voice, “what brought you to Indiana?”
“The same thing that brought Annie, it seems,” Charles answers. “Diana’s collaboration with the School of Medicine allows me to do psychophys research with trauma patients most psych labs don’t have the facilities to study. It was a great fit.”
“Tell us a little about what you do,” Dad says. Of course.
But then Charles starts talking about things I never knew about.
Now, he’s in the third year of his residency, so he splits his time more or less evenly between whatever medical stuff he does and his work in our lab. Which I already knew. But I realize only now that I really know nothing about what he does when he’s not reading my papers, writing his own, running subjects, running analyses, and organizing time sheets for us ducklings. When I’ve considered it at all, I’ve generally imagined him in a white coat, in a little room, feeling people’s glands and writing prescriptions. That’s kind of what doctors do when they’re not surgeons. That’s kind of what my dad does. And my mom is a surgeon.
But Charles is . . . like . . . a therapist.
I stare at him, slack-jawed, as he tells Dad about his clinical training in outpatient trauma therapy, and there isn’t any medicine involved at all, it sounds like to me. Dad nods and asks questions in a foreign language—I catch somatic, but the rest is gibberish—and Charles answers like he’s being interviewed for a job.
I turn to look at Mom, but she’s looking at Charles, her chin in her hand. She blinks slowly, the way she does when she’s half-asleep.
“Was it hard, moving so far from home?” she says suddenly, interrupting Dad. “We missed Annie terribly, and she’s been only a thousand miles away. I can’t imagine if she moved all the way to California or to Europe. Your parents must miss you.”
“My mother comes to visit periodically,” Charles says.
“That’s nice.” Mom blinks. “How ’bout your dad? You got a dad?”
“I do,” Charles says gently. “He doesn’t come to visit.”
I jump in. “I bet it was weird moving to Indiana. I only moved from the East Coast, and it felt like I was in another universe. There were times when I’d go to Starbucks instead of Soma, just because it looked a lot like the Starbucks at home.”
Dad follows my lead. “You did that, Anniebear? You shoulda said something, so your mom and dad could have mailed you some New York.”
We talk for another half hour, until Dad notices Mom’s slow blinking and drags her off to bed—well, to the futon in the living room—with a “Nice to meet you, Charles,” and a kiss on the cheek for me.
Which leaves Charles and me at the kitchen table, alone together in the middle of the night.
“I’m afraid I’ve outstayed my welcome,” he says quietly, with a soft smile. “They are really nice people, Annie.”
“I know. Kiss me.”
He does. And then he murmurs, his lips at my temple, “Wednesday night . . . was . . . beyond words. Incredible. Astonishing. The most erotic thing I have ever experienced in my life.” He holds my face in his hands, his eyes on mine. He says in a voice so quiet, I have to listen hard to hear, “I’m not exaggerating, Annie. You wanted me to lose control, and I did. I’ve never known anything like it.”
I grin. “So we can do it again sometime?”
He makes a sound, half laugh, half punched-in-the-gut. “Yeah, we can do it again.”
I kiss him and smile. “Then I’ll see you Monday.”
And I send him home.
My parents leave Monday afternoon. I have brunch with them at the Uptown that morning, and for the first time they bring up the subject I’ve been waiting for.
“Charles is nice,” my mom says over her eggs.
“He thinks you’re nice too,” I answer.
“Do you think he might come visit you in Boston?”
“What? No, I don’t know. Why would he?”
“Oh. I thought you were . . . That you and he were . . .”
“Well, we kind of are, but it’s not, like . . . I mean, we like each other. We have A Thing. We’re kind of exploring The Thing while we’ve got the chance. But that’s all.”
“Oh,” my mom says in the high little voice she uses when she’s trying not to give me advice.
“Honey,” Dad preempts. “She’s a grown woman.” He’s been teaching her to hold back on the advice, and she’s gotten good at not actually saying the things . . . but not at acting like she doesn’t have a thing to say. Dad says, “Anniebellie, you should do whatever makes you happy as long as you’re safe. Are you . . . safe?”
I snort with laughter. “Of course!”
“I’m sorry,” Mom says. “I just remember how terrible I was at all the . . . social . . . things . . . when I was your age, and I get this feeling like I’m walking around under a tightrope, waiting with a net in case you fall.”
“I won’t fall—I’m not even on a tightrope. I’m totally on the ground.” I check myself. “Well, maybe a balance beam. But I’m safe. Charles won’t let me fall.”
“He’s so much older than you,” my mother continues.
“Four years is hardly anything. It only seems like more because he’s already done with school and I’m not.”
“No, you’re not done with school,” my mother says seriously.
“Frannie, honey, let her be.”
“But what if—”
“What if what? What if she doesn’t become a doctor?” he says placidly.
“I’m definitely gonna be a doctor—” I try to interject, but it’s really not about that.
My dad continues, “She’d still be our Annabelle and she’d still be our favorite person in the world and we’d still trust her to make the right choice for herself and her life. Isn’t that right?”
I kiss him on the cheek and say, “Thanks, Dad. You guys are my favorite people in the world too.”
He takes my hand and gets tears in his eyes. “Well, that sure is good to hear.”
“How did we end up with a kid this great?” Mom asks.
“We earned her,” Dad says with a sniff, and he returns to his eggs Benedict. “With every diaper and every dance lesson and every broken bone.”
“I only broke three bones, and they were all in my feet!” I protest.
“Only three,” my mother says, rolling her eyes.
We’ve already loaded up their rented car with about half my stuff, which they’ll be storing for me for the next couple of months, so when we bike back from breakfast, all I have to do is wave them off from my front steps after lots of hugging and good-byes.
As soon as they’re gone, I get my bag, I get on my bike, and I ride to Charles’s.