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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
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      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
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      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
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      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
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      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
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      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
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      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
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    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
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      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
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    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
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    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025

Julie Marie Wade

Charles in Charge Changes Everything


          The secret wedding was set for June, but I wouldn’t go through with it. Sometimes I tell this story as epiphany at the eleventh hour: how I woke that day, being other, knowing otherwise. But sometimes I think I always knew—that there was never a moment without a halt in my heart, a clench in my throat, a gap between the door and the frame.
           Do you remember the last time you saw him? It was years ago now. It must have been March, just before I had my wisdom teeth removed. No, after. My jaw was sore. I had returned to my parents’ house to recupe. He had taken the bus to visit me there, his car in the shop again, never reliable. My mother remarked about his baggy clothes, the weight he had lost. We took her car to buy him a new sweater, something ribbed with a turtleneck. I thought he looked handsome in burgundy, but he bought the forest green.
           Were your parents fond of him? They thought he was pleasant enough, but they cautioned against getting too serious. I was in grad school, they said. I was going places. Where was he going? Meanwhile, Charlie and I were talking marriage license, rented convertible, honeymoon at the shore.
           Did he have any concerns about your--fidelity? I was going to say sexuality. He remarked once, off the cuff, that he had a tendency to fall in love with women who were fluid. I didn’t ask what he meant. I didn’t think of myself that way, and I still don’t. In the end, I’m much too binary to be on trend. I was an orange posing as an apple.
           Does anything stand out in particular from that night? We went to see a movie at the second-run theater, something strange with Kevin Spacey, K-9 or K-Pax. Then, Charlie wanted to stop at a flower shop, buy my mother a bouquet. It was a nice gesture, but I told him there was nothing he could buy that was half as fine as what she could grow. “She’s a master gardener,” I said. “You can’t win her over that way.” But he insisted. Then, we had a little sex in the car because we were bored and there was nowhere else to go.
           And what about--I remember the car got very quiet afterwards, though, and then I started humming as I was driving, and he asked what I was humming, and I didn’t know. But I kept humming until the words attached themselves to the notes: “Charles in charge of our days and our nights, Charles in charge of our wrongs and our rights.” Once I heard those words, I was embarrassed by them, by the chorus that culminates “I want Charles in charge of me.”
           “It’s from a TV show,” I said to him, blushing. I kept my eyes fixed to the road.
           “Oh, I remember now,” Charlie laughed. “Scott Baio lives in a house with two hot teenage girls he’s supposed to be taking care of.” “There’s a little brother, too.”
           “Yeah, well. That’s just to cover their sitcom asses.”
           Charlie is eleven years my senior, a fact we acknowledge but never discuss. “Yeah, I was just starting college in 1987,” he says, leaning back in his seat with a sigh. “That show came on, and I thought to myself, that Charles is one lucky shit. Did you know the older girl—the hotter one—went on to star in Baywatch?” Now his hand crosses the central console and perches like a bird on my thigh.
           I have never seen Baywatch or many other shows of my time. I was only eight when Charles in Charge first appeared in the TV Guide. My mother let me watch because she recognized Scott Baio from Happy Days. She liked him: wholesome, clean-cut. “That’s the kind of boy you need to find.”
          Half the streetlights on these suburban streets have gone out. Another is sputtering as we pass. Imagine: I was only in first grade, and my mother had already prescribed the type I should like, the type I should be looking for. But flip it the other way: I was only in first grade, and already how I relished looking at them—the blond daughters, Jamie and Sarah. How I kept them all to myself all these years, like two halves of a locket, invisible around my neck.
           “Are you coming?” Charlie asks, impatient. The hydrangeas and snapdragons are spilling over his arm. All these years later, and I can still feel the longing in my child-body for something I was not supposed to have. Jamie. Sarah.
           “Julie!” He shouts my name, taps on the glass. A spell is breaking. Before I can answer, he slams the door.




--
Julie Marie Wade is the author of eight collections of poetry and prose. She teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus. In 2018, her first coauthored collection with Denise Duhamel, The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, will be published by Wild Patience Books, and her novella-in-poems, Same-Sexy Marriage, will be published by A Midsummer Night’s Press. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives on Hollywood Beach.

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  • Home
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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025