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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
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      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
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      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
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    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
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  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
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      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
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    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
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    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
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      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022

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
  • About
    • Our Story
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022