Suzanne’s pulse skips as she says hello, as if her body knows in advance who it will be.
“We need to talk,” Olivia says. “Call me soon to let me know when you’re coming to Chicago. You managed to get here plenty of times to see my husband. Make a way now. It’s important.”
“We don’t talk to telemarketers.” Suzanne is staring at Ben. “Please put us on your don’t-call list.”
“Call me soon or I’ll call back.”
Suzanne hangs up, steadying herself. Her heart feels like it has heavy, beating wings — a large bird trapped in her chest. Her eyes follow the linoleum’s lines of elongated stars, faded from their former silver to a dull gray, to the pantry, to the place where a wined-up Petra started to chip away to reveal the wood that they intended to reveal and refinish someday.
“It pisses me off,” Ben says, “that we still get those calls. I thought you signed up for that registry, that it was illegal for them to keep calling.”
“Shall we order Chinese?” Suzanne asks. Suddenly cooking seems impossibly hard.
Ben nods. “Hey, I wanted to tell you, I think I’m going to make a quick trip down to Charleston. My mother needs some things done around the house, and Charlie’s not going to get them done alone.”
Several ugly sentences form in Suzanne’s mind: Why doesn’t she hire someone? Why do you have to go? When are you ever going to do the things that our house needs done? She closes her eyes, pushing away the person who would say those things aloud, the person she doesn’t want to be.
“When are you going?” she asks.
“I was thinking next week, but I guess that depends on whether you want to go or not.”
“But you’ve been working day and night on the new piece.”
“Exactly. It will be good for me to step away from it, just for a day or two; you said that yourself.”
“Too bad Suzanne can’t go with you,” Petra says as she enters the kitchen. “But I need her to go to the Children’s Hospital in Philly with me.”
Ben glares at her “You’re not honestly considering going through with that, are you?”
Suzanne readies herself, fingers tense around the edge of her seat, for Ben’s lecture on deaf culture and the dangers of rupturing Adele’s social and cultural maturation. She waits for him to interrogate the meaning of a normal life, to emphasize the profundity of the deaf, to expound on the intricacies and beauty of American Sign Language, to argue that a full deaf life is better than a half-assed hearing one.
She asks herself whether she’ll respond out loud: You think of her as a theory and not as a person. Or: Petra is the parent.
But Ben is tired. The parallel lines that run across his forehead groove more deeply than usual, and his face looks heavy.
Petra smiles. “So I need Suzanne next week.”
Petra knows that she doesn’t want to go to Charleston, not as long as she lives. They have talked about it a lot, maybe too much. But even when they discuss it, Charleston is a word Suzanne avoids saying, a name that makes her wince when it is spoken by someone else, particularly if the syllables are pronounced by a native, even by Ben — the first one drawled and the second clipped. For her it is a word that says, You are poor; you are unfit; you do not belong. And she can admit this: it is the city where she lost her baby.
She understands why people love Charleston’s cobblestones and painted houses and marsh grass and salt air, people who view the bay from swinging chairs and admire the water rolling in to smother the vaguely rotten odors that leak from the earth when the tide is low. Charleston has things people want: galleries and festivals and good restaurants and money and ocean access and wraparound porches and flower boxes and the funky haunts made possible by the presence of art students, of white kids with dreadlocks.
People love the Charleston that cleans up its long history in the telling, makes it quaint, wears it as style. If the listener is not the Civil War aficionado the local speaker hopes for, the palmetto trees that saved the American Revolution can be mentioned, or the conversation can settle on the city’s notoriously promiscuous and quite possibly bisexual female pirate. But across the time Suzanne lived there, she never could learn the city’s secret speech codes — what things really meant, whether an invitation to drop by a home was intended or merely mouthed, whether a question about her musical preferences was meant to be answered in four words or forty. But she learned on her first visit one of the harshest codes: in Charleston the well-born make you say aloud things they already know.
“Your mother was Italian, right?” Ben’s mother asked, the I long, the color on her cheeks artificial. And she said Realtor with a tone that made clear she already knew that Suzanne’s mother wasn’t the successful model that the affluent tolerate at their cocktail parties but the kind who scrape by between cash-flow problems, selling starter homes and condominiums that are cheaper to buy than to rent — the kind of places where Suzanne and her mother also lived. Still his mother asked, “So she must have done quite well?”
“And what does your father do?” asked Ben’s sister, Emily, knowing already the most generous thing Suzanne could say was that he no longer worked. “Early retirement?” Emily pressed, cocking her head, her tone pleasant. Suzanne nodded, though everyone in the room knew the words closest to the truth were unemployment and disability payments.
Suzanne searched for sympathy in their eyes, some softening of facial lines or ease in their shoulders — something to suggest that they were, after all, nice people. She looked to Ben, who knew the language, but he was looking to the mantel, at the photo of his father standing in front of the small, fast yacht he had gone down on.
It was his brother who saved her, walking into the room with a surfboard. “Sort of like Ben,” Charlie said. “And sort of like me. You’ve done a wonderful job, Mother, raising a composer and a beach rat, neither of whom has ever worked for money.”
His mother passed Suzanne a plate of benne wafers. “You’re very thin,” she said, and Suzanne couldn’t tell if the sentence was a compensatory compliment or recrimination.
Ben walked toward the picture of his father, rested his fingertips on the mantel in front of it. “Suzanne and her father are very different people,” he said finally, after she had the cookie in hand, napkin underneath to catch the sesame seeds, no longer in need of rescue.
Charlie grinned at her, swiped his streaked hair from his eyes, young person to young person, bonded by similar tastes in popular music and a common enemy.
Ben cases his cello. “Suzanne?”
Suzanne hates that they have so many of their few conversations in front of Petra, but this time it feels like a mercy. “I guess I’ll stay up here. I did tell Petra I’d go to Philly with her, and I should see my dad. Petra will give me an excuse not to stay very long. That is, if you don’t mind going alone.”
He shrugs. “No, that’s fine. Probably easier since it’ll just be a few days.”
“Stay as long as you need to,” she says, wondering if she can use his trip as a way to do what she probably has to do, which is to find out what Alex’s wife wants from her.
When she thinks of her—Alex’s wife—of how angry she could be, of what she might be capable of, Suzanne feels her whole world pulling away like a receding tide sucking sand back into the ocean. Be prepared to lose everything, she tells herself, and wonders how much she has to lose.