Losing Charlotte

Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay
Losing Charlotte

Losing Charlotte

by Heather Clay

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Overview

Raised on their family's Thoroughbred farm in Kentucky, Charlotte and Knox Bolling grow up steeped in the life cycles of the horses surrounding them. Despite their opposing natures, the connection between these two sisters is unbreakable, even when Charlotte abandons Four Corners Farm in favor of Manhattan. But a single day changes everything for Knox, and in order to confront the ways her sister defines her, she must leave the home she’s always known. A powerful story of love, duty and family, Losing Charlotte reminds us that there are some bonds that cannot be broken.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307593030
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 03/23/2010
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 272
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

About The Author
Heather Clay is a graduate of Middlebury College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker and written for Parenting. She lives in New York City with her husband and their two daughters. This is her first novel.

Read an Excerpt

Knox

The summer that everything happened was the hottest summer Knox could remember. Heat pooled around them all, a soft, wet heat that nobody talked about. It was just what was.

Her students didn’t talk about it, but stumbled out the side doors of the center when it was time for their breaks and stood mutely in twos and threes that didn’t correspond to any friendships or alliances that Knox knew of but seemed the result of an uncharacteristic economy of movement. Stood with whomever they happened to find themselves next to, blinking, kicking occasionally at pieces of gravel, until they were called inside. On the farm, the foals stood the same way in the fields, unless they had shade or water to retreat into, in which case they drew together with their mothers into a mass of shifting rumps and bobbing necks, sometimes lowering themselves onto their sides, one by one, until the ground was piled with shapes that panted so slowly that Knox would fret about death, respiratory failure, pulmonary arrest if she watched too long, and so turn from the kitchen window of her cabin, or walk on.

Dumbstruck. Struck dumb. Knox could describe almost anything this way, on the hot days. The town and the farms that spread around it were quieter now that the July sales were over and the buyers had flown away. The land seemed to buzz like the insects did, with vibration rather than sound. Felt, not heard, its tongue thick in its mouth.

“He calls you Ugly?” Marlene said. Her mouth was half full of sandwich, so calls came out callfz. They were sitting in the lunchroom, watching the students through the large window that faced onto the courtyard of the learning center. Nine more minutes until break was over, according to the wall clock above Marlene’s head.

“Well,” Knox said, eyeing Brad Toffey as he stepped onto a picnic bench and seemed to ponder whether or not to jump off it, then stepped down and sat heavily on the ground, staring into the middle distance, “yeah. But it’s just a nickname. I think it’s funny, actually. He’s always called me that.”

Marlene chewed, her eyes fixed on Knox’s face. Knox looked back at her and smiled, knowing that it would be long seconds before Marlene could swallow her bite and respond, that the delay was killing her. Marlene, forty-six and well into her second marriage, liked nothing more than to discuss Knox’s lack of savvy when it came to “relationships”—or, more accurately, the one relationship she’d ever had. Marlene’s hair was frosted and faded into overlapping patches of white, russet, and dark brown and shook a little as her mouth worked.

“Take your time,” Knox said. “Wouldn’t want you to choke, Mar.”

“Screw you,” Marlene mumbled. A fleck of mayonnaise dropped onto her chin, and she scratched it away with a manicured nail. “I don’t understand it. You’re not ugly. At least, not most of the time.”

“It’s a nickname, Mar. Not important,” Knox said.

“Mmm,” Marlene said, squinting at her. “I guess.”

Knox shifted in her plastic chair, trying to work some feeling back into her legs and lower body. Last night, Ned Bale had proposed to her again, in his way, as they lay on a quilt at the music festival, finally cooled by the dark and the beer they had drunk while they listened to the amped-up Dobros and fiddles. Jerry Douglas was on the stage, plucking the melody for “Wildwood Flower” over a steady line of bass notes, when Ned rolled toward her and said, “We should do it, Ugly. I mean, why not?”

That was how he asked.

Knox had been watching an old man dance on a toting board near their blanket. He was wearing a T-shirt that said badass from skeleton pass and jerking a little mountain clog, keeping his torso rigid and still, his hands limp at his sides, his face impassive, his legs flailing quickly like a marionette’s. His shorts hung so low that Knox could see the exposed jut of his pelvic bone when he kicked his foot back and slapped it with one of his hands in response to a high whoop from the second picker. The woman with him—a wife or daughter, the bloat on her face making it somehow hard to tell which—lolled on her side in the grass beside the board, as still as the man was lively. Knox briefly wondered how far they had come for the music; Skeleton Pass was surely one of the holler towns far to the east. She knew she shouldn’t be wondering anything about anyone’s driving distance—she should only be reacting, plumbing for words, using them or not, moving toward Ned or moving away.

She made herself say: “I love you.” Then she said: “Ned.”

It was true that she loved him, she thought. And she did appreciate Ned asking the way he had. The impossibly vague it. She considered its imprecision appropriate. How could one better capture the cloudy concept of “making a life together”? It was a fine word. It also allowed her to rationalize, while she kept her breaths shallow and her eyes on the dancing man, that Ned might have been talking about going somewhere for the weekend, or trying the new Indian restaurant on Vine. She’d told Marlene this, at least.

“I’m just talking,” Marlene said, rolling the top of her pretzel bag closed with a clip she kept in her lunch pack. “But I want you to do what’s right for you. You’re getting well past thirty, and this guy’s been hanging around for half your life. What the hell are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know.”

Marlene sighed. “Did he press you to say anything else?”

“He just said I should think about it.” Knox tried, unsuccessfully, to picture something other than Ned’s face just after he said this. He had been rubbing at his glasses with the corner of their picnic blanket, his eyes cast down, when his mouth flashed into a little smile. He had looked apologetic, as if he were telling the glasses to be patient, that in another moment they would be clean.

Knox concentrated on Brad Toffey as he stood and began swinging his arms in wide circles. Round, round, round, faster and faster. She allowed herself to be lulled into imagining that it didn’t matter what she did, really, and wasn’t this the chief beauty of her life? It traveled in concentric circles around her, like orbiting matter, and her job was to stay put, stay fixed, and let that happen. Look at Marlene—did she really care what Knox’s reply to anybody’s proposal might be? She was zipping the pretzel bag into her lunch pack, along with her balled sandwich wrapper and empty Diet Coke can. In thirty seconds she would be smacking a Winston out of the pack she kept in her skirt pocket, offering Knox a cigarette of her own, which Knox would refuse. The information they traded with each other was immaterial compared with the fact that they were simply placed in proximity to each other in the universe and found the proximity pleasant. Marlene’s husband’s colon cancer scare last year could have been a heart murmur; Knox could be holding forth on the fallout of a one-night stand or the progress of a lesbian courtship right now, instead of on Ned Bale’s ongoing . . . pursuit of her. The events she hauled in from the outside like lunch could be real or not real; what was important was the cadence, not the content, of the babble between them. Actually, this wasn’t altogether true—Knox had risen and fallen according to the daily news of Jimmy’s recovery from surgery and felt deliriously buoyant when Marlene told her the tumor was officially benign. She hoarded specific details about Marlene’s life: the hell-raising, punked-out daughter on scholarship at Wake Forest, the cardinal at her kitchen window that Marlene believed was an emissary from her dead Papaw. It was just that Knox sensed she could be whoever she wanted to be, expend as much or as little effort as she chose, and their break time companionship would not oxidize with untruth or neglect. It would simply . . . remain.

“Did Brad take his medication this morning?” Marlene asked. She was peering out the window. Outside, Brad lay on his back in the bleached grass, bicycling his slender legs at the sky.

“He did,” Knox said. “He’s just being Brad, I guess.”

“I don’t know how he moves in this heat.” Marlene looked at her. “You want a cigarette?”

“No thanks, Mar.”

“Well. I guess I’ll call everybody in,” Marlene said, fiddling with the matchbook in her palm. “Unless you want to give me any more gory details.”

Knox did want to. She wanted to tell Marlene about the dancer, how she had seen something magnificent in the way he pounded on the board with his slight feet, their tops corded with tendons and flashing pale, even in the darkness—and in the way he had stood between acts, looking wildly expectant, one hand pressing at the small of his thin back, two fingers of the other hand thrust between his lips. He’d blown a wolf whistle that knifed the air so cleanly, without reverberation, like a child’s scream. She wanted to tell her about driving home with Ned, how they had talked and laughed together about the usual nothings, and how, once he’d parked his truck, Knox had entered his house without asking and taken the toothbrush she always used out of the bathroom cabinet and begun to brush her teeth with it when Ned came into the bathroom and put his arms around her waist and pulled her backward against him, more roughly than he might have on another night; but she didn’t comment, only swallowed the bits of foam and water in her mouth and let him turn her to face him, let him pull her shirt over her head and scratch her breasts with the stubble on his cheeks and chin as he sank lower until his tongue was circling one of her nipples, then the other. How she watched him work from above for a moment, and ran her fingers through his hair, making little tents with it, until Ned pulled her onto her knees and she knelt, facing him, while he unbuttoned her shorts with such concentration that Knox wondered if he might be deliberately avoiding her gaze. How she placed her hands in his hair again and felt the smooth knobs that his skull made behind his ears, and then moved her hands onto the back of his neck and guided his head toward hers, so that they were both closer together and blurred to each other. That had seemed a kindness, to let herself be blurred for Ned, so that he wouldn’t have to watch her watching him.

But there was no way to tell Marlene these things. Knox pushed up from her chair now, said, “I’ll call them in, you just enjoy your smoke,” and leaned out the lunchroom door to yell “Time for class!” into the heat, so loudly that it startled her.

Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and suggestions for further reading that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Heather Clay’s Losing Charlotte, a moving exploration of  the complicated ties between two sisters and the effects of loss on an entire family

1. What does the prologue tell you about the relationship between Charlotte and Knox and the roles they have in the family? What responsibilities does the young Knox assume and why?

2. In considering her life, Knox says, “It traveled in concentric circles around her, like orbiting matter, and her job was to stay fixed and let it happen” [p. 16].  Does this reflect a sense of contentment or does it represent a willful passivity and even smugness?  What aspects of her interactions with Marlene support your view?  In what ways does teaching dyslexic children satisfy Knox’s image of herself and her place in the world?

3. To what extent is Knox’s attitude toward Ned based on her father and the family dynamic she has always known? Why does she find male vulnerability off-putting? Does this explain her antipathy to Charlotte’s choice of a husband and her own reluctance to marry Ned or are there other factors at work?

4. Discuss the conversation between Charlotte and Knox [pp. 25–30]. Is reverting to childhood patterns—“to love and hate each other so nakedly, and so simultaneously”—common between adult siblings? Are the thoughts and feelings of each sister presented fairly or are they seen solely through Knox’s eyes?

5. Why does Bruce’s narrative begin with the flashback to his childhood and his reaction to the disappearance of his friend’s mother [pp. 43–54]? How does it relate to the descriptions of Charlotte’s childhood home? 

6. How would you characterize the relationship between Bruce and Charlotte? What needs does Charlotte fulfill for Bruce? What does Bruce provide for Charlotte? Why does Charlotte create false or at least fanciful images of herself and of Bruce? What do Bruce’s description of their relationship and his confession [pp. 147–148] suggest about his commitment to Charlotte? Do most couples experience “a moment—or many—that would remain forever inexplicable to anyone else but was understood within their universe of two, rendering them bound in a new way” [p. 149]?

7. What do the family’s reactions to Charlotte’s death show about the ways people cope with tragedy [pp. 117–118]?  What do their emotional states, both at the hospital and when they return to Kentucky, reveal about Knox’s understanding of herself, her father, and her mother? What role does Robbie fill for her? 

8. Discuss Bruce’s impressions of Charlotte’s childhood and the conclusions he has drawn about her parents and Knox [pp. 142–143].  Why does he accept  “the synopsis Charlotte had arrived at after years spent in therapy and engaged in the burial of her former self” [p. 143]?  How does this influence his behavior with Knox? 

9. What does the Christmas dinner [pp. 153–161], as well as the conversation the sisters have at the bar [pp. 166–169], show about the beliefs, real or imagined, that shape the way they view each other? Do you think Knox misreads, misremembers, or exaggerates Charlotte’s behavior and its effects on the family? 

10. How do alternating perspectives of Knox and Bruce affect the portrait of Charlotte? What do their descriptions of Charlotte’s behavior and attitudes have in common? Is one perspective more reliable than the other?  Is Bruce more willing than Knox to acknowledge personal hang-ups and biases? In what ways does the time she spends in New York force Knox to explore and come to terms with her mixed feelings about Charlotte [pp. 198–199; 204–207; 214–216]? 

11. What propels the growing intimacy between Bruce and Knox? Contemplating the consequences, Knox thinks, “She couldn’t claim not to have chosen it, or to have been swept into something she wasn’t conscious of, or couldn’t control” [p. 235].  Do you think that Bruce feels the same way?

12. “There were moments in everyone’s life, Knox supposed, that showed you that you weren’t the person you thought.  Maybe these moments taught you something good about yourself, or shamed you” [p. 248]. What has Knox learned about herself by the novel’s end?

13. In an interview Heather Clay said “I had heard of maternal deaths like the one that occurs in Losing Charlotte . . . . And the idea of something so Victorian happening in a modern hospital setting led me to wonder how such an event would affect the modern family” [randomhouse.com]. What historical or literary traditions does Clay draw on?

14. What does Losing Charlotte illustrate about caretaking and parenting? What is the significance of Knox’s view that the sisters had "been forced by birth into mutual territory and yet emerged . . . as if they'd been raised in separate countries” [p. 30]?  To what extent are Mina and Ben responsible for the competitiveness and resentments that exist between Charlotte and Knox? In what ways are Bruce and Knox transformed by the obligations as well as the pleasures of taking care of the twins? How does Knox’s notion of herself as family caretaker evolve throughout the novel?

15. Part of the novel takes place in Kentucky and part in New York City. How does the contrast between the two settings enrich the themes of the novel? How do the depictions of the secondary characters—Marlene and Ned in Kentucky, Bruce’s mother and his friend Jeb Jackman and Charlotte’s ex-boyfriend Stephen in New York, for example—reinforce the sense of place and culture?

16. The rhythms of nature and the breeding cycles on the stud farm are an integral part of the novel [p. 33, for example]. How do these descriptions serve as metaphors for human behavior?


(For a complete list of available reading group guides, and to sign up for the Reading Group Center enewsletter, visit: www.readinggroupcenter.com.)

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