We Do It Together

I was at an art exhibition opening with the cheese cubes and dewey vegetables. It was a graduate student show, I think, and I went alone after class. I was picking at my plate and making uninteresting conversation with people I wanted to be friends with when my phone started vibrating. It was from home, probably my mother asking if I had gone to church that weekend (I hadn’t). I let it vibrate until it gave up, and worked on my cheese cubes and celery. The plates were compostable, conversation disposable. I was still loitering, drifting from crowd to crowd when I got a text from my mom:

It’s Charlie. Call me.

This text about my brother was unusual; my family’s messaging conversations are limited to updates on how much snow they got last night, or that they had finally assembled the Christmas tree. Ordinary, unexciting, yet still familiar. Nothing particularly groundbreaking ever happened to us, and I panicked: My hands shook, my breathing became shallow, the cheese cubes and celery sticks trembled on the waify plate as I imagined all of the ways my youngest brother had died.

I went outside and set down my plate, showering the ground with its contents — I didn’t want anyone watching me as the color drained from my face, the grip on my plate loosened while my mother told me there had been an accident on the way to football practice, come home tonight. I dialed home, picturing the way his fifth grade school photo would look flashing on the 10 o’clock news.

My mother answered. Her voice was light, surprised, as if she wasn’t expecting me to call.

I’m confused. “Mum? Hello?”

“Darling, how are you?” I can hear voices in the background, my younger brothers tackling each other in the kitchen.

“Um… is everything okay? Is Charlie there? What’s happened?”
“What? Everything’s fine…” now my mother is equally confused. “Why…?”

Instant relief, but perhaps slight disappointment — so much emotional energy had just been invested in the past three minutes, yet apparently only in vain.

“I thought something happened, I thought something had happened to Charlie. I got this text from you — ”

My mother laughed. “Oh, Charlie wanted to talk to you. He has a question for you. That’s why he texted.”

Oh.

“Here, he’s right here, you can talk to him.”

Voices became muffled and I heard the rustle and scratch of the phone getting passed between my mother and my 10-year-old brother.

“Hi. It’s Charlie.” His voice has yet to drop, and what remains of his little-boy-lisp clings to his words.

“Hi Charles, what’s your question?”

“Where’s the nail polish?”

***

When Charlie was born, I cried. I was nine, and stood by the island in the kitchen, wailing, as my mom called from the hospital announcing the birth of my fourth brother.

We all knew he was the last; my parents had reached their early forties, and my mother had now been growing humans inside of her for twelve years. She was stretched (in more ways than one) to her limit. Baby number five was my last chance at a sister (and my parents’ chance at a second daughter), and I had convinced myself that it would be a girl. With three brothers already, I felt a like I didn’t quite know what girlhood was — this final child would help guide me through my feminine ways, and I dreamt about our pending special-sister-moments, dressing up in matching outfits, making bracelets, using our easy-bake ovens — doing whatever “girls” do. Each morning I would ask my mother how she felt about the baby — but does it feel like a girl today, mum? And, humoring me, she would reply vaguely, but reassuringly. My angst was obvious, and as a result, I managed to bargain with my parents: by my mother’s third trimester, I was promised a set of ear piercings and a trip to the American Girl Doll store if the baby were a boy.

Yet, for whatever he lacked in girlness, he made up for in looks. When Charlie was born, he was big. A ten-pound summer child, he had lots of hair, dark brown and wispy, and his eyes were blue. Dimples marked his cheeks as he began smiling, and soon his eyelashes grew in, long and thick. He is a pretty boy. As he grew, his hair turned blonde like most of my brothers’ and mine did, and he developed a small freckle beneath his nose and above his upper lip.

He has a name, too. Charles George Daniel Pears, because my parents’ traditional Britishness got the best of them when it came to naming their children, because my mother couldn’t decide between Charlie and George, and because my father likes The Arsenal’s 1970’s Forward, Charlie George. In theory, he would have gone by a hyphenated first name. But, as it goes, the name got shortened to Charlie.

Charlie is quiet, stubborn, and manipulative. He cries if you look at him the wrong way. He is organized, meticulous, and pays attention to detail. For the past two years for Christmases and birthdays, my parents have gotten him almost the entire Lego Architecture series, and he will sit for hours snapping brick after plastic brick together. Charlie puts away his clean laundry in the proper drawers, puts the cap back on the toothpaste. He can’t stand sharing a room with our twelve-year-old brother, William, because William leaves his clothes all over the floor and never makes his bed, so Charlie moves back and forth between his bed next to William’s and our older brother Thomas’s empty bed across the hall. Charlie gets angry, quickly and easily, but he is also gentle and soft-spoken. He’s a goofy kid, and will play outside by himself for hours, reenacting football plays or some make-believe story.

When he was in first grade, there was a span of a few weeks when he wouldn’t speak in class. My parents were called in for a parent-teacher conference because his teacher would ask him questions, but instead of answering he would stare past without a response. He is a picky eater, too; some nights he won’t touch an entire dinner, other nights he needs half a bottle of ketchup dumped over everything.

***

Last summer was different. I hadn’t been home since that Christmas, and Charlie was wearing nail polish. He had gone to camp, where nail painting was an activity, and he and his friends thought it would be fun to paint their nails, too. He came home with pink polish, and my family was intrigued: Thomas (fratboy stock-trader, 22), Henry (football/lacrosse bro comic relief, 15), William (space cadet poet/math whiz, 12) all argued against it one-way or the other. Their justifications were (mostly) out of love (I don’t want you to get made fun of! But boys don’t wear nail polish! Can everyone is this family just, like, stick to their own gender?!). A week or so later, I was scrolling through Instagram. Charlie’s best friend had posted a series of videos of the two of them dressing up in a pink leotard, tutu, and high heels, taking turns walking and doing somersaults on the floor. Then, I came downstairs one afternoon, and Charlie was partway through a My Little Pony episode.

His gender bending was mild, healthy. I was impressed, proud even, that he and his friends felt comfortable. Experimentation wasn’t an easy endeavor in suburban Minnesota: Minnetonka, 50,000 people 20 minutes from the city, 90 per-cent white, Christian, upper-middle-class, Lulu Lemon, Vineyard Vines, Escalades. Boys are boys, girls are girls. You wear your Northface fleece, and your Uggs, and you take Economics and AP classes and do Deca — aim for the Big 10 or the Ivy League. Yet, here were my little brother and his friends posting videos of themselves in girl’s clothes and getting together to paint their nails while they watched the latest episode of Friendship is Magic. I was jealous of his fearlessness, but also of the freedom to explore that my parents gave him. Because, really, it wasn’t just the culture of our neighborhood; the very nature of our family life perpetuated patriarchy.

Our parents grew up in working and upper-middle class Britain where Anglicanism, Thatcherism, and gender roles held their families together. My father’s family was the definition of patriarchal and sexist: my father, rugby captain and head boy of his high school who studied history at Oxford, was the favored child over his younger sister, who was frowned upon as she worked her way through business school instead of establishing herself between the stove and the cradle. My mother’s family was heavily religious, and with two daughters and my grandfather a policeman, it became protective, suffocating. These ideals and doctrines that my parents’ parents had built their families upon trickled down into my own upbringing. Through weekly church attendance throughout my entire childhood, and the constant nudges from my mother about how I should “pray for my future husband”, dress modestly, and strive for purity, my brothers and I were sent an equally detrimental message about gender expectations­ — what was “right” and what was “wrong.” Experimentation was out of the question.

While for 10-year-old Charlie, it was simply just “a phase,” for me, the daughter, it was a bit more complicated. My boyish tendencies and lack of interest in the opposite gender scared my parents because, after all, I was 20 — I shouldn’t be messing around anymore. It was only a few weeks earlier that I had found myself mid-shower when my mother questioned my sexuality.

I had just returned from a three-week study abroad class in Tanzania, where access to shaving materials was limited, and, to be quite honest, unnecessary. Now back home, my leg and armpit hair was growing in nicely, and my parents responded with nervous laughter as they asked when I was planning on shaving, and my brothers turned up their noses and squealed whenever I reached above my head. With a church family wedding the next day, requests were becoming more desperate. I was mid-shampoo cycle when there was a bang on the glass shower door and it swung open.

My mother thrust a pink plastic Costco-brand razor towards me. “Darling, here you go, nice and new. We’re leaving in half an hour.”

I stared at her, through the spray of the water. “Oh, it’s okay. I’m good, thanks.”

She insisted, and I insisted otherwise. My mother was smiling, nervously now. She was baffled at my behavior, as she watched her sweet daughter morph into this hairy mystery. Reluctantly, I took the razor, and she shut the door, but only for a few moments before flinging it wide open again.

“You’re not a lesbian, are you?”

***

It was the way she said it, the incredulous way she said lesbian as though she were asking me if I considered myself to be part radish. It was this reaction that I received from my own mother about my dubious sexuality that made me grieve — and empathize — for Charlie. Not that his recent behavior necessarily dictated his sexual orientation for the rest of his life, but just considering the prospects that if he did realize that that was how he identified, I grieved for what he would lose in himself as expectations grew more daunting. I grieved for what would be repressed as the demands of the Church that my mother so forcefully involved us in and the demands of our parents became even more confusing. I was frightened for him, because I didn’t want him to feel the same fear of rejection and need for secrecy that I felt.

***

I never really talked with him about it. It was more of an unspoken understanding that I showed for him, letting him be while our other brothers managed the heckling. One day in August, a few weeks before I began my sophomore year of college, Charlie asked me to repaint his nails. I took my collection of polish that I had accumulated over the years and let him choose what he wanted. There were some patches of pink on his nails left over from the previous coat, and so I grabbed the remover, too.

“Why do you like painting your nails, Charlie?” we were seated at the kitchen table together, his hand in my hand, as I scrubbed the pink away from his nails.

Charlie stared at my fingers working on his, thinking. “I don’t know. My friends do it. We do it together…we like doing it together.”

He looked back up at me, and I told him to choose a new color. He chose all of them: green, pink, blue, orange, yellow, all with a top coat of clear sparkly varnish.

“Hold still, I don’t wanna get any on the table, okay?” I told him as I began to repaint, and he watched carefully. “How’s My Little Pony? What do you and Carson like about it?”

Charlie let out a giggle and stared out the kitchen window onto the worn-down grass of the backyard. “I don’t know…” his voice was smaller, and he was putting on one of his voices that sounded like Kermit the frog. “We just like it I guess.”

“Okay, that’s okay!” I was overcompensating now, my voice higher pitched, afraid I had made him uncomfortable, unsure. “It’s okay, Charlie.”

He ended up with orange varnish on his gray T-shirt anyway.

***

And that was that. He didn’t know why he liked doing what he was doing during those summer months, and he didn’t need to know. But when I went home for Christmas this year, the nail polish was gone. My Little Pony episodes no longer flickered in the background, and the girl’s clothes sat in a pile on the basement floor. During those two weeks at home in December, The Boys had found a new routine: at some point during the day (they rarely missed a day), all four of them would strip down to basketball shorts and sneakers and head to the bench press and treadmill in the basement. An hour later, they would plod back into the kitchen, flushed and sweaty, feet heavy on their tired legs. Hauling the Costco-sized protein powder bag on to the counter, Thomas would fill the blender with milk and the cream-colored dust, and then redistribute the liquid protein between four cups. Now down to their boxer shorts, my brothers would take their shakes to the upstairs bathroom where the steam shower had been running, and, eyelids heavy, sit together among the fog of steam on the damp tile.

What had begun as the older boys’ regimen during the summer was now a fraternal ritual for all of them, including Charlie. It was something they did together. And from the couch, or from the kitchen, I would watch this communion, this togetherness. I watched as Charlie came up from the basement behind the assembly line of sweaty young men. I watched Charlie punch and tackle Henry while they waited for the blender to finish, and the way they all raced each other up the stairs to the bathroom. I watched Charlie move on, change. I watched him meld and mesh with the older boys, with nothing left to be teased or taunted. Again, he belonged. And I was glad that he belonged. It was just that now he belonged with someone else.