/ Fiction /
In her more brutal moments, Maeve would say that the wrong child had survived: when the whiskey set in just as the soft rise of her daughter’s voice hit a particularly feminine note; when the girl undressed in the dark and the candlelight bent in her direction, catching on the hairless opal of her skin.
“Like mulberry silk,” Marie says, fingertips tracing the inner stretch of her arm, the paper-thin skin of her wrist. “Like the belly of a baby.” She smiles, her teeth crooked as the crags of a cliff, her cheeks rutted with scars. “I think you’re beautiful both ways." Her voice is quiet, emptied of its playfulness.
The girl withdraws her arm quickly, knowing as she does that Marie will misread her, that the open moon of this kind woman’s face will darken at her cowardliness. She knows that Marie can’t understand the impossibility of such tenderness existing in the girl’s narrow orbit: you’re beautiful both ways. The girl has only ever known all parts of herself to be wrong.
A notch below useless, you are, Maeve used to mutter as she wrapped coarse scraps of fabric around her daughter’s slight frame, so taut that the girl’s breath came in ragged gasps. Her breasts were small then, nascent, but the modest swell of her chest drew attention to the way certain clothes dipped in tellingly at the waist, belled out at the hips. Her hair was chopped short, cut crude and jagged to offset any glimmer of loveliness that might threaten to surface, and her small stature translated to a scrappy boyishness when her clothes hung long and loose. On days she went out on her own, she pulled a cap low over her brow, tufts of shorn hair poking out at odd angles like the fronds of a cabbage palm, her mother’s words playing in her head. Eyes to the ground, child, the voice would chide. Is binn béal ina thost. A gruff idiom carried over from Ireland: It’s a sweet mouth that’s quiet.
The girl had learned early how to make herself small, how to become a mute and slender presence—in public to avoid any close attention, at home to shrink from her mother's rage. Her life was itself small, a tight ambit that contracted as she grew older, as the truth became harder to conceal. The ruse had been effortless in babyhood, simple enough when she was a small child: passersby had smiled at the blue of her eyes, the peach glow of her cheeks and, seeing the way the child was dressed, commented on what a handsome little fellow she was.
Marie drops her hands into her lap but doesn’t move away, and her nearness without her touch feels to the girl like an urgent, bated breath. Marie can't be much older than she is—twenty at most—but there’s a wholeness to her, an abundance, like she’s already a finished thing. "Charity," she says, and the girl feels an ache in her chest at the sound of her name. She has only ever been Charity within the confines of her own house; it’s a name Maeve often spat at her like an accusation, as if the girl’s existence were itself a charitable act, alms paid begrudgingly and warranting no further goodwill. But in Marie's mouth the word sounds sweet, a kindness rather than a plea.
In the outside world, Charity has always been Charles, named for a dead man—a man who’d gone missing before she was conceived and was found washed up on the river’s edge before she was born. Her half-brother had been named for him first but hadn’t lived long enough to need any name at all; the girl was born a breathing ghost who arrived soon after the sick boy departed, an illegitimate named for the family she’d intruded upon.
Charity didn’t know who her real father was, knew only that the math of her conception presented a snag in the smooth fabric of Maeve’s reputation and that his true identity was as irrelevant as her own. She was a bastard born on the heels of a beloved, dead child, and so she’d stepped into that child’s life—so that Maeve could collect a monthly allowance from the child’s grandmother, so that the shame of Charity’s existence could vanish along with her identity.
When the grandmother was still alive, Maeve would dress Charity in suspenders and pressed trousers for their monthly visits, her lips set in a thin line and her fingertips poised to pinch at the slightest misstep. Not a peep from you, she’d hiss, once Charity was old enough to understand the words, old enough to grasp the general shape of her mother’s deceit. Mercifully, the old woman wanted the child’s company in presence only, seemingly of the belief that children should remain wordless, sexless creatures until their words held weight, until their genders were of procreative use. There were a few times when the woman seemed to sense some wrongness in the child—noting the small hands, the narrow shoulders, the utter unease—but her ambivalence eclipsed her suspicions and she’d simply turn away with a tut of disapproval.
* * *
Charity had met Marie walking to one of the odd jobs she worked now that her brother’s inheritance had dwindled to almost nothing. She found work that demanded little interaction and light but meticulous, concentrated labor. She was strong for her size, an attribute cultivated to distract fellow laborers from the delicate line of her jaw, the bow of her lips, the elegant and knotless curve of her throat. By now this public self had crystallized so completely that it felt almost chosen; she’d lived outwardly as a boy for nearly eighteen years, her identity so cleanly bisected that she knew no other way to be. That other people didn’t unbind their bodies at the end of each day, shed their outer selves like a second skin, was a fact she rarely considered.
Marie had somehow understood the situation immediately—recognized both halves of Charity, decoded the secret split of her. “Hey, honey,” Marie had called out from the porch of the old house that first day, her body draped over the railing and her red hair glinting in the sunlight, breasts pushing up from the laced neckline of her dress. Charity always walked on the opposite side of the street when she had to pass that stretch of road: the women who lived in the house often stood out front, yelling obscenities and grabbing the elbows of passing men, cigarette stubs hanging from their open mouths. She’d heard her mother gossip about these women, about the men in town who were known to accept their advances. Of course she knew what happened inside this house, understood it in the flimsy way she understood that rain fell from clouds, that invisible forces tethered her to the earth, that bodies birthed bodies. But the facts of the act mystified her, and it seemed impossibly brazen that this house was designed for such a thing. Heavy curtains hung in the windows, stripes of candlelight visible between the gaps like a glimpse into something forbidden—the glow of a hidden world within.
“You,” Marie had called out again. “Mister, miss, whoever you are. I’ll take you either way.” She’d laughed then, a loud, joyful laugh that stirred something in Charity despite the growing dread in her gut at being found out. She walked faster, but the woman persisted. “Ask for Marie if you come see me, beautiful.” Another sweet bay of laughter. Charity’s temples were slick with sweat and she pressed a hand to her forehead, that last word lodging inside her, pulsing in time with the pound of her footsteps: beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
That afternoon, she’d found herself walking home along Marie’s side of the road. The sound of the woman’s voice was clear in her mind, the words a wild storm beginning to churn, stirring the still landscape inside her. Mister, miss, whoever you are. The revelation stated so simply, benign as a morning greeting.
Charity stopped when she reached the house, allowing herself to stare up at it rather than hurrying past as she always had. The place was large but run-down; the faded green shutters that bracketed the windows hung at odd angles, and there were wide gaps in the porch railing, the missing spindles like pulled teeth.
“You need some company, baby?” a woman out front called to her, and Charity startled at the sound. The woman was older, with silvery brown hair and pale skin etched with lines.
She shook her head. “Is Marie here?” she asked, and then immediately wished she could snatch the words back and swallow them down. Her voice was quiet, but the pitch of it was unmistakable—tender and confoundingly female.
But the older woman just shrugged, waved a hand in the direction of the house. “Inside,” she said, her tone suddenly perfunctory, sapped of its honey. Her attention had already shifted to a man walking along the other side of the road.
Charity nodded, then made her way up the sagging steps of the front porch. She felt wholly separate from herself, sirened to this place as if possessed: the bird-boned fingers of a stranger reaching for the brass knocker on the door, rapping insistently until it swung open and Marie appeared.
Her face was scrubbed clean and she looked younger, her cheeks pink with the raw bloom of acne. Neither woman spoke for a moment and Charity felt a rush of panic at her foolishness, at the absurdity of her coming here. But then Marie’s face cracked open into a smile. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. A few wisps of red hair had slipped free of their pins and they hung in her eyes, which were a murky green flecked with gold. She was a strange-looking woman, her face soft and plump but cratered with scars, her eyes set wide apart, her freckled skin waxy and flour-white.
“Come inside,” Marie said, her eyes searching Charity’s, curious. She hooked a single finger into the belt loop of Charity’s trousers and pulled, the soft tug of a question.
Charity stepped back, her face hot with embarrassment. She knew what men were supposed to come here for; she understood why Marie had beckoned her, what it meant when a person knocked on this door. But her pockets were empty, and any desire she had was nested deep within her, bound so tight that she didn’t dare to imagine its unfurling.
Marie moved her hand away from Charity’s waist and placed it gently on her shoulder. Her smile softened, widened, a door opening. “Come inside,” she said again, but this time with a new warmth, somehow understanding.
Upstairs, Marie handled Charity’s uneasiness as if it were a breakable thing, something fragile to cup between her palms. She sat far from her on the bed, letting Charity adjust to her proximity the way she might let a skittish cat sniff at her outstretched fingers, and talked to fill the space between them. Marie had survived her own set of tragedies that had brought her to this place: her parents and sister had died of pneumonia when she was young, and she’d gone to live with an aunt who was herself destitute and desperate. They’d shared a single room above a tavern, and at night Marie would retreat to the cool darkness beneath her blanket and press her hands over her ears, trying to drown out the sounds of the men who came upstairs for her aunt. Sometimes she’d be sent out into the hallway, where she’d curl up in front of the door and wait to be let back inside, tracing the imprint of boot soles on the dusty wood floors, touching her ear to the ground to listen to the creaking whine of the floorboards, the shouts of men in the bar below.
When Marie was fourteen, her aunt had moved them into this house and Marie had begun working as well, learning her worth in currency, learning the strange contours of desire. She paid dues to the women of the house who clothed her, fed her, sheltered her, and to her aunt for taking her in and offering her any life at all. Like Charity’s, hers was a life hitched to the wants of other people.
Charity listened to Marie’s stories, rapt as a child, and it was as if the seams of her began to unknit. She loosened into the space, lay back on the soft down of Marie’s bed, closed her eyes to better imagine this version of Marie that hadn’t always shimmered with life. And then she’d told her own story, surprised by the way her voice could fill the room. She rarely ever spoke, close to mute when she was in public, the slivers of communication between her and Maeve infrequent and treacherous. But talking to Marie, she’d felt relief crack open inside her with each revelation, and she’d let the whole truth unspool: tattered and threadbare, a snaking ribbon between them. Marie had known parts of it already, of course—understood the gist if not the specifics, recognized the way Charity branched apart at impossible angles.
“But how did you know?” Charity had asked. She often wondered what people saw when they looked at her, whether they sensed some otherness, some quiet duplicity. Sometimes she’d notice strangers studying her body or peering curiously at her face, as if scanning her for answers. Men at work occasionally snickered when she walked by, muttered things under their breath, unsure what to make of her. But it seemed to Charity that Marie had intuited her whole self right from the start.
Marie smiled. “I just knew there was more to you. You were different,” she said, and leaned in a tiny bit closer. Then, as if registering some flicker of worry on Charity’s face, she added, “Special, I mean. It made me want to know every part of you.”
Charity looked down, heat rising to her cheeks, and it felt like she was somehow holding danger and safety in one hand: the reflexive fear of being found out, the unfamiliar comfort of being known.
* * *
Charity sits at Marie’s dressing table, her stiffly pressed shirt unbuttoned at the neck, her hands folded in her lap. She glances at herself in the mirror, and the image glares out at her, disappointed and hateful. Coward, it murmurs silently. Her hair is matted down, stiff with spit, and the memory of Marie’s hands combing through it is an ache: Marie licking her fingertips, pinching a tendril of Charity’s hair, pressing it into a curl against Charity’s cheek. Then, her tongue against the flat of her hand, licking from her wrist to the tips of her fingers. Running her palm through the hair across Charity’s forehead. Smiling, her crooked teeth already so familiar to Charity, a glimpse into how the details of a person might start to feel like home. Charity has only ever known the intricacies of her mother, the intimate tangle of things that make her who she is—the whistle of her breath when she sleeps, the triangular constellation of birthmarks along her inner arm, the way one blue eye drifts, unmoored, when she drinks too much whiskey—but there is no comfort there. Maeve’s presence has never felt like safety; it has never felt like home.
Marie and Charity had smiled at each other in the mirror then, giggled at Charity’s hair, wet with spit, admired the clean division Marie had created: on one side, the oiled swoop of a man’s haircut; on the other, tight spit curls in a cascade against the curve of her cheek. “See?” Marie had said, as if something had been proven, a debate put to rest.
“But which version of me do you like best?” Charity had asked, turning her head side to side, lighthearted but also desperate for an answer. What if neither version of me is right? she’d wanted to ask. What then?
“Both versions of you are perfect,” Marie had said, and then the women had fallen silent, as if waiting for something—a force to draw them together, an interruption to pull them apart—and Charity could feel her fingers tingling with a new need: to reach for Marie, to feel the soft weight of her. How easy it would be, she thought, to close the space between them.
And then finally, mercifully, Marie’s fingers grazed the skin of Charity’s wrist, laddered up her arm. Marie’s voice, throaty in Charity’s ear, praising every part of her. “I think you’re beautiful both ways.” Her touch like an exquisite heat, a brand left on Charity’s skin: beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. But then, Charity’s body pulling traitorously away. Ripping the delicate threads that had begun braiding between them. Leaving Marie holding on alone.
“I’m sorry,” Charity whispers now, willing Marie to reach for her again. There is no way to explain herself, except to say that such bold kindness is foreign to her, that being cared for feels like its own transgression: a gift she doesn’t deserve, a mutinous and misguided belief in her worth.
“Don’t apologize,” Marie says. “I think I’ve misunderstood.” She smiles limply and stands, crosses to the door. “I should probably get back to work though.” Her hand is on the knob, a gentle request, and her words are polite but charged: Charity has not been paying her for her time. They’ve spent nearly every afternoon together since they met, afternoons when Marie was supposed to be working, when the other women likely assumed she was working—that Charity was a patron like any other. She arrived each day as Charles, trailed Marie up the stairs with the bowed head of a man nervous to be seen here, sheepish about the implications of his visit.
Charity nods but doesn’t move from the bench, waiting for the right words to come to her, words that will pull Marie back. She digs into her pockets; it’s Friday, payday, and though Maeve will demand the money the moment she arrives home, Charity pulls it out and lays it on the dressing table. The amount is measly, surely not enough to cover their string of long afternoons, but she knows no other way to say what she means.
Marie stares at the crumpled bills for a moment, then turns the knob and clicks the door open. “You should keep your money,” she says, her voice flat. Charity can hear the din of voices downstairs, a flutter of laughter.
Charity pushes the bills further onto the table, unable to look up at Marie. “I didn’t mean to waste your time.” The words feel like bile in her throat, so far from what she wants to say.
Marie reaches for the money on the table. “I can’t keep this,” she says, holding it out to Charity. “I’ve done nothing for you.” Her eyes are a lightless, leaden green, and Charity can feel her slipping away: the space between them slackening, a spell breaking. Soon Marie will be more knowable to the nameless men who filter in and out of her room—men who know the rhythm of her body rather than just the rhythm of her voice. Men who are only men, who feel the truth of who they are solid and whole inside them. Who have not been halved down the middle and pulled in two directions until barely anything is left.
Charity stands and grabs her coat and hat from the foot of the bed. She buttons the top of her loosened shirt, reassembling the pieces of herself into someone who makes sense: a small man who shrinks from view, face shadowed by a cap pulled low. She slips into her coat and tugs the cap down over her ears, her fingers grazing the stiff whorl of spit curls plastered to her right cheek. She presses the palm of her hand to them for a moment, traces a curl with the tip of her finger, maps where Marie’s wet fingers had brushed against her skin. Marie watches, her expression unreadable.
“Thank you,” Charity says, and the words feel full, laden, but also entirely inadequate. She touches a finger to her tongue and presses it to the stiff curl, as if sealing it against her skin. She takes her hat off, holds it in one hand, uses the other to slick down the hair across her forehead. “I like them both too,” she says. “Both sides.” And then, finally, a choice. A blind step forward: she tosses the hat back onto the bed. It lands softly near Marie’s pillow, and Marie lets out a surprised sound almost like a laugh. The women look over at the bed, the blank expanse of it, an open landscape.
“Charity,” Marie says, and a warmth has returned to her voice, a teasing lilt. “You can’t leave without your hat.”
The women stare at each other for a moment, and the moment stretches out between them, bending with possibility. A dividing or a binding.
And then the corner of Marie’s mouth quirks upward, not a smile exactly, but a silent proposal: stay.
Charity nods, pulls off her coat, and Marie crosses to her. A tentative hand outstretched, that hint of a smile, the glint of her lovely, crooked teeth, so perfect in their strangeness: an invitation to something like home.