Failure To Zigzag. Jane Vandenburgh

       4

      Playing Boys

      Back in the days before stage crew and Cal, when Katrinka was more normal than she turned out later to be, she’d had one good friend that Lionel and Winnie very much approved of. It was this friend who grew up to be the Mildred Younger who placed the name of Richard Nixon in nomination for the Presidency of the United States at the 1960 Republican Convention! Whenever Lionel and Winnie started to get going about Mildred Younger! about Pat and Richard Nixon of Whittier, California! Katrinka would wink at Charlotte, arch an eyebrow, and tell her: “very high up! Oh, Very! How very, very la-di-da fitz!”

      Now Charlotte had a friend like that, a nice friend from a normal, happy family. Winnie said the words “normal” and “happy” in a way that was utterly grief-stricken—upon saying “happy,” her voice broke the word into two desolate pieces. Patsy Johnson’s parents were good Republicans, members of the Oak Knoll Country Club, recent converts to the Episcopal religion, exactly the sort of people Lionel and Winnie very much admired. Mr. Johnson drove Patsy and Charlotte to the dances at the YWCA where they often spent their time in the bathroom waiting for somebody good to show up.

      “Well, at least someone asked you to dance,” Charlotte told Patsy, one afternoon in the bathroom at the Y

      “Sorry, Char, but Williman Grottman is not a someone,” Patsy said. “Williman Grottman is a mollusk who slimed in here from the sewer.”

      Charlotte thought this over. Williman Grottman, who was in their honors science class, was the worst boy in their grade, the worst, probably, in all of Glendale High. He had once told Charlotte that the spelling of his name came from a typographical error at the county recorder’s office that no one in his family ever felt he had the right to fix. Charlotte knew she ought to be kind to him, to be kind, distant, aloof, slightly patronizing, but she couldn’t be. When she saw him coming toward her she raced to the bathroom, terrified of having to tell him no, that she wouldn’t be able to dance with him. She might have even wanted to dance with him, since he was so smart in science, but she couldn’t allow herself that. She couldn’t dance with Williman, or even say the word no to him, without being pulled down by her pity into the welter of their mutual and ghastly woe. Patsy, on the other hand, felt nothing at brushing him off. Shining a person on didn’t faze Patsy in the slightest, while the act of rejecting someone else made Charlotte feel as if she herself were almost physically maimed.

      “Face it,” Patsy was saying. “No one good’s coming. We might as well call up my dad and go home and kill ourselves.” Charlotte was sleeping over at Patsy’s house so they were going home together. Charlotte lifted her eyes to Patsy’s in the mirror—each was slicking on more Icy Peach lipstick by Maybelline. What did Patsy have to kill herself over, Charlotte wondered. She had so much normalcy it made Charlotte sick—the two nice parents, the freckled little brother with taxicab door ears, the big house with symmetrical landscaping, the big black dog standing on his porch, drooling into his pools of spit. Patsy’s abnormality was completely normal, Charlotte knew. It was a matter of common and minor wretchedness: menstrual cramps, braces, the few insignificant pimples. “It’s just a face you’re going through,” Charlotte had mentioned more than once.

      Patsy played competitive complaining in part, Charlotte knew, to guard herself against an envy of her good fortune. Katrinka called competitive complaining the game of “Compete-O.” Vying for who was the most Poor and Pitiful Pearl Among Women was a favorite pastime on Ward G-1, one in which Katrinka refused to participate. She would not participate—still, whenever Charlotte complained about Lionel and Winnie, Katrinka would smile and say, “Oh, I know, sweetie! We win! You and I have it worse than all of the Christians, most of the Jews, and even some of the Negroes! Gervaise, c’est moi! and all that. Our lives, as your father used to say, were written by Zola, which is more interesting anyway than the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy, don’t you think? who were written by Charles Dickens.”

      Katrinka, when bragging about all of their misfortunes, was generally humorous, but sometimes, inexplicably, she became angry. This was usually when she imagined that Charlotte was accusing her of being a lousy mother, though her being a lousy mother was a point beyond contention, having been proved for all time when Charlotte and Katrinka were living with Sweeney on Avenue B. “All right, then!” she’d cry. “What do you want me to do about them? Shall I call the police and have them arrested? Do you want me to take them to court and have them declared legally dangerous, incompetent and cracked-up-nuts, as they’ve done over and over again to me? Who would there be to raise you then? Unless you think you’re so high up in the smartypants aspect of things, these days, that you can raise your own self, Missy Miss! Is that what you think?” Charlotte stared at her levelly, thinking, Iƒ I had the money, if I had the car keys, never mind that she didn’t know how to drive.

      “Can you see the two of them locked up in Camarillo?” Katrinka would go on. “Which is what would happen to them if people found out how bad they are. The two of them bent over, toiling in the mental patient lettuce fields? Being given electroshock therapy, Charlotte? Your grandfather without his feet up? Having to earn his own fucky chits for cigarettes? The Ainsworths! Being driven steadily more and more crazy by being forced to listen to the conga-bonga rhythms of jigaboos? Is that what you want?” Yes, Charlotte would think grimly, Camarillo would serve them both damned right.

      Charlotte watched Patsy in the mirror—she was brushing on mascara from the small black slab that had been moistened with spit. Patsy might try out for the most pitiful prize, but she could never win it: she was smart, cute, nice. No one could ever win it if Charlotte was in the competition, so great was the luck of her cards. She had aces nobody even knew about. She had a royal flush: drunk, mad, dead, queer. She had this:

      “Know what my grandmother told me?” Charlotte said.

      “What?” Patsy’s face was elongated, her cheeks stretched hollow by the opening of her mouth, as she brushed the blackness onto her lashes, her eyes rigidly held wide open. She had tiny golden freckles dusted over her cheeks and forehead.

      “I shouldn’t even tell you this,” Charlotte said. “It’s too sick.” She waited, closing her eyes, imagining the best card she held, the lights of the sunken ship. She studied it for a moment, and then used it to cover over the next one, the whitening mouth of her grandfather as it moved around the chewed-up peanut butter sandwich. “She said they still sometimes have relations because it’s good for one of his glands.”

      “Oh, my God,” Patsy said. Charlotte opened her eyes and saw herself in the mirror, her brows lifted up, asking what she should find in this. Patsy had stopped brushing. Her eyes were blue, clear. “I think,” she said, “that I am about to throw up.”

      They were back then at Patsy’s that night, working on their personal appearance. Charlotte was reading a diet in a magazine and Patsy was painting her toenails. Each had already washed her face with Phisohex, then with Noxzema. They had plucked one another’s eyebrows though Patsy’s were so pale they were nearly vanished from her face, and the loss of even one or two hairs from Charlotte’s own was probably going to cause Winnie to fly off into a giant hell of a tizzy, a real doozy, a fit which would be magnificent to see if watching from some safe place, high in the oaks, say, or from the other side of a plate glass window.

      It was the look, the thought, of her own hair that always filled Charlotte with hopelessness. The braids went trundling down her back like her grandparents’ twin sentinels. They made her feel like a refugee, as if she were another Annelli Verdonner. Annelli, like Williman, was another Charlotte felt she ought to be particularly kind to but could never quite bring herself to be. Like Charlotte’s, Annelli’s braids were obviously constructed by someone else—hers were white blonde, skinny, pinned up with ribbons in bun-shaped twists at the sides of her head above her translucent ears. They made her look years younger than anyone in their grade. The fact of braids, Charlotte had decided, had the effect of making a girl look old-fashioned, too well tended, too often handled. The country from which Annelli