Charles

“At lunch, he spoke insolently to his father, spilled his baby sister’s milk, and remarked that his teacher said we were not to take the name of the Lord in vain.”

Laurie returns from the first day of kindergarten and begins to behave badly at home. He seems only to care for himself and has no regard for the other members of his family. While this is the first the reader sees of Laurie’s impudence, his parents’ nonreaction suggests it’s not a new development.

“Laurie thought. ‘It was Charles,’ he said. ‘He was fresh. The teacher spanked him and made him stand in the corner. He was awfully fresh.’”

In this introduction of Charles, Laurie goes through the trouble to think of a way to keep the attention focused on him without any of the blame. This creation of Charles is the beginning of Laurie’s descent into weeks of lying to and deceiving his parents. This passage also introduces some of Laurie’s ambiguity; though his mother asks him twice what exactly Charles did to earn this punishment, Laurie only repeats that he was “fresh.”

“‘Look down,’ Laurie said. ‘Look at my thumb. Gee, you’re dumb.’ He began to laugh insanely.”

Laurie’s insolence towards his father continues and manifests as childish tricks and insults. Laurie pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable behavior with people of authority. This disregard for rules and decorum is central to Charles’s character, which is why it has become central to Laurie’s as well.

“On Saturday I remarked to my husband, ‘Do you think kindergarten is too unsettling for Laurie? All this toughness, and bad grammar, and this Charles boy sounds like such a bad influence.’”

After the first week of kindergarten, Laurie’s mother becomes concerned that Laurie is struggling at school and that Charles’s influence on their son will derail his development. She expresses this concern to her husband, who tells her not to worry and that Laurie will meet many like Charles in his life and he should learn to deal with it on his own.

“‘Charles had to stay after school today,’ I told my husband. ‘Everyone stayed with him.’”

This piece of foreshadowing becomes clear once the story comes to a close. Charles gets in trouble and has to stay after school, and all the children stay to watch him. However, this is just a tale that Laurie tells his parents to hide the fact that he was in fact the one who got in trouble and had to stay after school.

“‘He’s bigger than me,’ Laurie said. ‘And he doesn’t have any rubbers and he doesn’t even wear a jacket.’”

This is the only description that Laurie gives his parents about Charles. He doesn’t mention anything else specific and avoids further questioning on the topic. Likewise, he doesn’t answer his father’s question about Charles’s last name, just as he ignored his mother’s earlier questions about Charles’s specific misdeeds. Laurie isn’t keen on answering too many questions about Charles, possibly because he does not want to shed light on his deception. The narrative is ambiguous about Laurie’s ambiguity.

“Monday night was the first Parent-Teachers meeting, and only the fact that the baby had a cold kept me from going; I wanted passionately to meet Charles’s mother.”

Laurie’s mother can’t attend the first P.T.A. meeting because the baby is sick, but she doesn’t mention the regret of not being able to attend based on anything to do with Laurie. Instead, she is sad that she won’t be able to meet Charles’s mother. It seems that Charles and his mother have become more important than Laurie’s own experiences at school.

“With the third week of kindergarten Charles was an institution in our family; the baby was being a Charles when she cried all afternoon; Laurie did a Charles when he filled his wagon full of mud and pulled it through the kitchen; even my husband, when he caught his elbow in the telephone cord and pulled telephone, ashtray, and a bowl of flowers off the table, said, after the first minute, ‘Looks like Charles.’”

Charles’s misbehavior at school seems to be having a lasting effect on Laurie and his family. They all refer to bad behavior using Charles’s name now, and it seems like Charles is getting more attention than Laurie ever imagined he would.

“During the third and fourth weeks it looked like a reformation in Charles; Laurie reported grimly at lunch on Thursday of the third week, ‘Charles was so good today the teacher gave him an apple.’”

Laurie switches gears and takes a couple of weeks off of bad behavior. Instead, he becomes the teacher’s helper and does good deeds, relaying all of this information to his parents, replacing his name with that of Charles. This shift in “Charles’s” behavior is among the narrative's many details that Jackson leaves unexplained and therefore ominous. What is clear, though, is Laurie’s displeasure with the “reformation,” and Charles soon readopts his perversity.

“‘Ask her what happened to Charles,’ my husband said. ‘I’d like to know.’”

Again, Laurie’s parents are more concerned with Charles and his mother than they are with Laurie’s adjustment to kindergarten life. They spend more time talking about Charles and what kind of mother he must have than anything else. Their fixation is ironic; in reality, the narrator’s husband is asking “what happened to Laurie.”

“My husband came to the door with me that evening as I set out of the P.T.A. meeting. ‘Invite her over for a cup of tea after the meeting,’ he said. ‘I want to get a look at her.’”

Laurie’s parents fully indulge the assumption that mothers are solely responsible for their children’s bad behaviors. So, they want to get a good look at Charles’s mother, who must somehow be just as outrageous as Charles. This really sets up the subversion at the end of the story.

“At the meeting I sat restlessly, scanning each comfortable matronly face, trying to determine which one hid the secret of Charles. None of them looked to me haggard enough. No one stood up in the meeting and apologized for the way her son had been acting. No one mentioned Charles.”

Laurie’s mother sits in the P.T.A. meeting, again focused not on Laurie but on looking for the run-down woman who must be Charles’s mother. This bias and high-horse attitude are why the end of the story packs such a powerful punch.

“‘We had a little trouble adjusting, the first week or so,’ she said primly, ‘but now he’s a fine little helper. With occasional lapses, of course.’”

Finally, Laurie’s teacher brings the focus back to Laurie. This is the last bit of foreshadowing in the story. The teacher’s phrase “little helper” conspicuously echoes Laurie’s description of Charles during Charles’s “reformation.”