Failure To Zigzag. Jane Vandenburgh
bubbles or a single, bouncing ponytail. The point was not to be knockdown beautiful, which tended to stir things up, but rather to be cute. Moms of girls looked like Doris Day, their grandmothers like Mamie Eisenhower. A very stylish woman from the country club might try to look like a grayer, more Republican Jackie Kennedy, as long as she didn’t look “Eastern.” Looking “Eastern,” sounding “Eastern,” or sending your children east to go to school, they felt, all showed you thought you were better than everybody else. In Glendale, in 1962, it was better to be the same.
There were no Negroes living in Glendale then, by unwritten covenant. If anyone was Jewish in Charlotte’s school, the fact was never mentioned. Even the hoods, like Bob Davidson, weren’t real greasers since they weren’t Mexican. Mexicans lived in their own neighborhoods and went to their own schools, and for the kids at Glendale High, were the stuff of lore. Mexican girls had deadly beehives, hairdos that were ratted up, hairsprayed, never taken down to be washed, used to hide razor blades for girl fights and for the breeding of black widow spiders. Spit curls were stuck to the cheeks of Mexican girls with little X’s of Scotch tape, X’s inexplicably left there after the curls were already good and stuck.
The cute, sweet, nice girls of Glendale High didn’t swear. They didn’t swear, scream, fight, or have pierced ears. They learned to dance at cotillion and learned their pleasant manners at charm school, where they also learned that manners, once learned, might also occasionally be ignored. They didn’t get pregnant or have girl fights, which were fought by different rules than the fights of boys. The fingernails of Mexican girls illustrated this: they were long, sharp, and as red as if they’d already been dipped in blood. Charlotte knew all about girl fights, this being the way she fought the enemies in her dreams.
Boys’ fights were different, were fought more simply, as men fought wars: to crush, to annihilate. In girl fights the impulse was less singular. Girls fought a fight to humiliate, to make the other ugly, to rip the blouse away, to tear off a bra and expose the other publicly. They fought with boys surrounding them and watching, fought so these boys would laugh and cheer.
“We could iron it,” Patsy was saying. “Or we could use that stuff Negroes use, that junk like a perm that reverses the process?” They were trying to figure out how to make Charlotte’s hair fall straight. Because it was braided wet it fell down her back in a curtain of waves when they let it down. When brushed out Charlotte’s hair, like Katrinka’s, turned wild, electric. Patsy’s parents were out and they were babysitting Brian. He was in the den down the hall watching TV. They were in the bedroom with the door locked, drinking rum and coke.
“But it would stink up the house,” Patsy went on. “It always stunk up the house when Mom used to give me a Toni. We’re not supposed to stink up the house when my parents are out.” She had cotton balls stuffed between her toes, a trick, like the use of orange sticks for cuticles, they’d gotten out of charm school. “Why don’t we just cut it?” Patsy asked. “I mean, what could they really do to you if you came home with it trimmed?”
“Throw me out of the house.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I mean really.” It seemed to Charlotte they’d thrown out Katrinka for less, for winking across the Thanksgiving dinner table, for humming Johnny Mercer tunes meaningfully and in Lionel and Winnie’s direction, for commenting that the rectal way both Pat Nixon and Winnie each held her lips illustrated a trait of personality called being “anal retentive.” It was from Charlotte’s father that Katrinka had learned these Freudian sorts of insults. Penis envy, she might have the elegant voice of her dummy Nellie Platter pronounce, diagnosing down from on high as Winnie, standing in a bloody apron with fists tightly clenched and the tuck firmly taken in both of her buttocks, was going on and on about how the still-raw Thanksgiving turkey proved she ought to have been born a man! “Or,” Charlotte added, “they might send me straight to Camarillo.”
“We coulda least bleach some streaks in it,” Patsy was going on, “so you’d look kinda like a surfer, except the peroxide would probably stink up the house. We could wet it and put it up on orange juice cans?” She looked over, lifting her scanty eyebrows, “except then you’d have to sleep like that.”
“Sure bet,” Charlotte said. Patsy dropped syllables out of words and further contracted most contractions. It sounded cute, her saying pro’bly, prac’ly, ’zackly, din’t, woun’t, coun’t, and shoun’t. Charlotte would have liked to talk like this, dumb for boys, but if she had Winnie would have pro’bly smacked her.
“Wann’nother rum’n’Co’Cola?” Patsy asked. She was drunk too, so in addition to the teenage accent she’d started to sound like Mrs. Johnson, who came from Butler, Georgia. People often turned into their parents when they were drunk, Charlotte had observed. Katrinka, drunk or sober, did Lionel and Winnie perfectly, but when drunk she seemed sometimes to be possessed by them.
Katrinka too had other ancestors rattling around in her dummies’ trunk, where one of the psychiatrists had once suggested she try to keep the voices confined. The voice of one was like a monster’s —this was Big Mother, Charlotte believed, Winnie’s mother, who called out gutterally, going KATH-er-ine! KATH-er-rine! as if from the grave. Or it may have been Big Dad, Winnie’s stepfather, or Winnie drunk herself, doing her own parents. It might have been Winnie drunk, except that Winnie didn’t drink. She didn’t drink even though her teetotalling Seventh Day Adventist doctor had ordered her to sip a small glass of sherry medicinally one-half hour before bedtime. She was to sip it, Dr. Greenley said, and she was to try to calm down. Charlotte had heard Winnie in the front bedroom at bedtime, trying to calm down. She was sipping, weeping. She was singing one of her favorite George Gobel tunes. “Life is just a bowl of sherries!” she sang. It was from Winnie, obviously, that Katrinka had inherited the feeling that she had the right to change the words to songs without regard to copyright.
“Know what?” Patsy was saying. “I think we should call him up. It might make a whole lot of difference if he knew how much you love him.”
“Oh, Awe-I don’t know about that,” Charlotte drawled. She was drunk herself, so she was taking on aspects of Katrinka.
“We coulda least try,” Patsy said. “Coun’t hurt.” She licked her lips and rubbed the tip of her nose with the back of her hand. What would it be like, Charlotte wondered, to be someone else, to be a person like Patsy who was just a person, just a simple, sweet, smart girl who didn’t feel the need, as Charlotte did, to be herself and everybody else besides, who didn’t have to be the judge of everything sitting high up in the oaks watching all the day’s proceedings and with no small measure of disdain?
“It couldn’t?” Charlotte corrected. She was veering off now schoolmarmishly, off now toward the Winnieisms to correct for the Katrinkas. She enunciated this next carefully, as if crossing a trout stream in Montana on slippery rocks. “Oh, I sin-cere-ly doubt that.”
“Well, waddaya wanna do then?” Patsy asked, looking up from her toes, which were shining, dazzling. “Wanna play boys?”
“No,” Charlotte immediately snapped. But they always said that—it was the way it was played.
“You mean really, Char?” Patsy asked. “You think we shoun’t anymore?”
“No,” Charlotte said, and she was humiliated to hear her voice coming apart, becoming husky, ragged, as voices did when they became overladen with desire. It was the desire of others Charlotte preferred to think about—she hated to be reminded of her own. She preferred her perch high in trees, looking in through the dusty diamond-paned windows at all the pitiful souls, all twisting, dangling, made limp, weak, by the tightening of themselves all along the core of their oblique and archaic desires. Charlotte was made so sad by the needs of people that she sometimes felt she might weep.
“No,” she said again. “Just as long as we, you know, stop the way we said we would when you do the confession.”
Patsy had to go to confession before she was confirmed at Saint Nicholas Parish at the end of the school year. Patsy and her younger brother had both undertaken the instruction.