Failure To Zigzag. Jane Vandenburgh
event, the way a person always tended to say a particular thing, or the color of the landlady’s wash that was hung out on a particular Wednesday morning. Her version changed according to the vagaries of her memory, but certain points remained immutable. Katrinka had not, for instance, “cracked up” over the boys on stage crew, so Charlotte wasn’t to go by that. Nor had she been driven insane by singing beer-drinking songs with the Pelican staff when she was away at Cal. Instead, she said, she’d always been the way she was, which was this: non compos mentis.
Or more precisely: Katrinka had, she said, always come unglued periodically, ever since she was small, and usually when Lionel and Winnie were themselves having a breakdown over something, or because of the pressure of public scrutiny, as when she’d gone on Ed Sullivan, or when she was a little short of funds. Being broke, Katrinka said, was the single greatest cause of mental illness, that awwwnnd having decided that you’d been you-know-whated-by-your-own-you-know- who, the specific details of which she and Charlotte most certainly would not go into since it was perfectly obvious to Katrinka that this was not something Charlotte could discuss without Charlotte’s cracking up for good.
One part of the story Charlotte was absolutely not to go by was Winnie’s tale of how Katrinka had suddenly “gone crazy” when Joey died. It had had nothing to do with Joey, with her meeting him, their drinking tee minny martoonies, their having artistic, funny-looking friends, their marrying, or their being just alike! as Winnie loved to exclaim. “Or his dying, if that’s, really really, what you think we ought to accept as what his disappearance is intended to signify by awwwlll the powers that be,” Katrinka would say. The powers that be seemed to include nearly everyone, Charlotte noticed, aside from her mother and herself. Joey’s death was one thing about which Katrinka did not remain convinced. She seemed to believe it for awhile, then the conviction would simply erode away. She always spoke of him with such immediacy it did seem that he had just left the room.
“Well,” Charlotte told her one of the times they were discussing this, “it is always hard to adjust to the loss of someone when there isn’t a body to bury.” She listened to the hushed, adult voice of her own self saying this. Whenever she found herself saying a thing like this it was as if another person, someone resting competent hands on Charlotte’s shoulders, was speaking out from above her head.
Her mother sucked her cheeks in, inhaled deeply, sniffed. “Now, where in the hell did you get that tidy little bit of information?” She squinted at Charlotte suspiciously. “Did your father tell you that?”
“Mother!” Charlotte yelled. “I got it out of a book!”
“Well, he was Freudy-Freudy, and that sounds very psychological to me.”
“It is psychological.” She glared at her mother. “But he happens to be dead, remember?” She was always shocked that Katrinka, who wasn’t stupid, had to act so dumb at times. She did it, Charlotte guessed, in order to be more deeply amusing.
“Well, we don’t go by that.”
“What do you mean, we don’t go by that?”
“In our family, we do not go by ‘the psychological,’ as the headache must have mentioned. Just as we do not go by this business of the Virgin Mary’s being flunked by God in the June rush.” Since the episode of the blue canvas notebook, which Charlotte had told her mother (as she did end up telling her nearly everything), this was what Katrinka was calling the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Immaculate Conception had always been one rich source of her jokes, since it tended to offend so many people. Her Immaculate Conception jokes had not gone over well on Ed Sullivan. “Freud, schmoid,” Katrinka then suddenly announced. She tipped her chin up and looked away. She was, Charlotte noticed, talking to somebody else.
“Well, what do we go by then?” Charlotte asked her. She was squinting, meanwhile, examining this thought: that from these four people—Lionel, Winnie, Katrinka, and Charlotte herself—Katrinka imagined that something called a “family” was to be construed. Charlotte didn’t go by that—her mother was the only one to whom she any longer felt spiritually related and then only vaguely, intermittently, resentfully. Her one true parent, she often imagined, was the father she’d never met, the long-dead and vanished hero.
Katrinka smirked, listened, hiked up one eyebrow, for emphasis. “Oh, Awe-I don’t know,” she drawled. “Once a wish? Twice a kiss? Three times comes a letter?”
Katrinka’s memory was so wretched that she seemed to hardly remember the Great Depression, in which Lionel had lost his money, or the Second World War, in which Joey had lost his life. This was the sort of large event that didn’t really concern her. She never read the newspapers, preferring to get her news in other ways.
She couldn’t remember Joey going off to fight the war, couldn’t even remember his enlisting in the navy, yet she was able to recall even the order in which the laundry had been hung out to dry on the line outside her window on that particular Wednesday morning, the morning of the day on which his face was to vanish forever from her sight.
“Charlotte!” Charlotte opened her eyes to the pitch dark. They were there in the back bedroom on Vista del Mar, a place where Katrinka could never sleep.
“I want to discuss this!” Katrinka was saying, her face suddenly rosily illuminated as she puffed on her cigarette. She was sitting on the edge of Charlotte’s bed and was bending over her. “This,” she said, “is what I would like to discuss. It isn’t the facts of our tragic lives which are important, don’t you understand that? But the shape of things you can still see when you close your eyes?”
“Huh?” Charlotte asked. She could still see the shapes in her dreams, police cars and streets all weirdly illuminated, since she was still asleep.
“When you were born and Lionel put you in the shoe drawer? You didn’t suck your thumb or a finger, but you tried to suck your whole damned hand. I can see it. I could always see it, even on the ceiling of Ward G-1! I can hear it, Charlotte, right this very minute, you going oink, oink, oink.”
“You mean when I sleep I sound like a pig?”
“Oh, for christsake, sweetie! Can’t you for once adopt the kinder, cuter interpretation of anything? Exactly why is it that you are so easily criticized? Because of the goddamned Ainsworths? Don’t you really understand just how sick they are?” Charlotte, wide awake now, reflected. It was very difficult for her to remember that people in her family were mentally ill. It was a thing she seemed to need to learn over and over again, their eccentricities being such an intrinsic part of what was normal in their natures.
Another time when Katrinka was staying overnight at Vista del Mar, she woke Charlotte up to ask her: “Why is it so important to you that I remember things? Just why is it that I must remember? When everything that ever happened to us is just too damned crappy lousy! All right! Tell me what it is that I’m supposed to remember and I’ll try to remember it. I’ll try to remember it, if that will make you feel better.”
Charlotte, still asleep, told her groggily, “Mom,” she said, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“THEM!” she said. “The lies.” She made a slight gasping sound, as if she were struggling for breath. From out of the dark her face suddenly showed in the glowing, then again dimmed. “Can’t you really understand it? How unreasonable memory is, how it cloys, blinds my eyes, makes the ink of old letters swim and dance and all that crap, each with its own ghastly shadow? It is never possible to remember the one single thing, sweetie. Memories adhere, come along together. You do know what I’m talking about. And why should we remember these things, the things too terrible to be borne? Who needs to remember lying on the bed in Ward G-1, listening to thirty other mental patients all talking to themselves? Believe me, sweetie, listening in the dark to mental patients talking out loud is one sure way to drive yourself crazy.” Really? Charlotte thought, smirking.
Katrinka couldn’t remember Joey’s going off to war. She did remember that it was a Wednesday morning