Failure To Zigzag. Jane Vandenburgh
informed them, no dogs of any kind—and this had caused a crisis in Patsy’s faith. She wasn’t certain she had much interest after all in going to a heaven run by people who’d decided dogs do not have souls.
Patsy had already decided she was not going to confess to having played boys with Charlotte. She would not utter the words, shape them out into the musty air of the dark confessional, then have Father Bob, who sometimes came to dinner, sit there with his eyes interested, knowing, as he looked up after pouring pan drippings over his Yorkshire pudding.
She would have confessed, Patsy supposed, if Charlotte had been a real boy. Doing real things with real boys also was not allowed, but it was at least expected. There was something deeply wrong with this, they both felt, that Patsy could not confess it and be cleansed of the guilt. It was so wrong that they’d made up their own rules about when to stop.
It was that they were girls together, Charlotte knew, though the shape a person’s body took seemed to make so little difference really in what a person thought he or she was capable of. Bodies were bodies. They seemed to want the same sorts of things—to eat, to be allowed to sleep without having their life jackets stolen, to be rescued finally from the middle of the ocean, to see things and hear things once again that made them happy, even if they had to be hallucinated, and when dying, to get it over quickly.
Charlotte was lying under the covers now beneath the white eyelet canopy. Her toes curled in, the joints cracking audibly. Patsy flounced over to the door, opened it, yelled down the hall to Brian to turn the TV off and brush! Then, going back to her vanity table to flick the little light off there, she swayed her bottom from side to side, doing this just as the two of them did when moving down the sidewalk to the bus stop, counting to get their feet in step, making sure the pleats of their skirts swished from side to side in unison. If the hems of their skirts weren’t even, if one wasn’t yet short enough, they’d roll it up higher at the waist. Their little white socks were stuffed in gym bags and their legs gleamed in cinnamon-hued nylons attached to the garter belts they’d taken from Mrs. Johnson’s dresser drawer without asking.
Patsy marched away to the door as they went together to the bus stop, but when she flicked the switch on the vanity lamp and came back toward the bed, Charlotte could see in the light falling through the curtained window that her head was inclined and her expression had become somber. She was, Charlotte saw, practicing being penitent.
The light through the window was cast by the street lamp on the corner of El Tovar. It stood above the gully that had been carved out by the flooding creek, above the little dirt road that Winnie couldn’t get the city of Glendale to pave. On a night like this when there was mist in the air, Charlotte could look out the dining room of Lionel and Winnie’s house and see the haloed glow of this same street lamp through the dark mass of oaks.
Charlotte was lying on her back with her eyes nearly closed. The night was moonless. Out in the center of the lawn, the Johnsons’ dog lifted his head and mooed. Bingo, who was a standard poodle, had never in his life either woofed or barked. His habit of mooing was the reason Patsy sang this song to him: “I can tell by your mooing that you are a cow-dog. You can tell by my mooing that I’m a cow-dog too. We can tell by our mooing, that we are both cow-dogs. I won’t go to heaven .’nless my dog goes there toooooo.”
Bingo now stood on the lawn and lifted his baying head at something wild—deer or pheasant or coyote—off in the hills in the chaparral. “Shaddup!” Patsy told him softly, at the window. “Shaddup, Bingo, ’cause somebody’s trying to sleep.”
One of the rules of playing boys was the pretense of sleeping. Charlotte, with her eyes tightly shut, could hear Patsy coming to the bed, feel her weight on the edge of the mattress. She was now folding back the coverlet, the blankets, the sheet. She lifted the top of Charlotte’s cotton pajamas, moving gently, so as not to awaken her. The sudden air on Charlotte’s skin was chilly; her toes curled again. She was naked now from the waist up, smelling Patsy’s shampoo, feeling the soft brush of her hair as it fell forward. She was exposed to the light, to the air, to the soft touch of Patsy’s breath.
“Think of him,” Patsy commanded. Her breath was hot on first one nipple then the other. This was part of it, pretending it was boys. If it was boys doing it, they wouldn’t really turn out to be queer. “You’re thinking?” Patsy whispered and Charlotte nodded yes, her eyes still closed.
They breathed together now, each in a shallow way, each waiting to see which side she would choose. The counting didn’t start until the first touch, the first sharp heat of lips, of tongue. Then Charlotte had to stand this great feeling all the long way up to one hundred.
They were good at this, better than boys could ever be, as good as boys would be if they would ever bother to learn. Patsy’s mouth was there then on Charlotte’s nipple. She went slowly at first, then bit harder, taking the tip in her teeth and fluttering the end of it. She took the hard part of the nipple and pulled back. That was so Charlotte would be forced to cry out.
Charlotte needed to cry out—it was part of it, the way it was played. Still she could not. She needed to cry out, to protest being brought out of numbness and into feeling, to protest the ridges of Patsy’s two front teeth, which were still scalloped from when they grew in, to complain about the feel of the wires of her braces. She needed to cry out, yet she couldn’t. She was drugged, inert, as heavy as fog and as splayed out, as splayed as the stupid girl in the book, the one being held down by the gang of boys in the storeroom of the theater. They put her on the tabletop and did it while the movie played so her cries could not be heard. This, Charlotte knew, was the girl’s own dumb fault, for failing to zigzag.
She could not cry out, could not be heard—still, she needed to, as saying the name was part of playing it. “Bob,” she said, and she heard the way it was ragged in her throat, the way it told Patsy how deeply she was feeling it: the need, the desiring. “Bob,” she said again, and heard the sound floating up like moaning. It was she who was moaning it, but she wasn’t there. She was high above the canopy of oaks, staring in through the windows at them from under the shadow of Winnie’s bushy eyebrows. “Two girls in bed!” she was shrieking, out of the treetops. “The spectacle!” And Charlotte was just tricking Patsy. “Oh, Awe-I never cared for it,” she would tell Patsy disdainfully. “You were the one who always started it.” She would announce to her grandchildren: “Oh, yes, as girls we did love one another, but there was nothing filthy as there is nowadays!”
If Patsy were a real boy Charlotte would cry out. She would let a real boy hear her wanting it, and she would hear him too. She would do things to him, whatever it was he wanted, and she would listen as his voice broke up, wrecked by the swells of feeling.
She was still counting, the sharp feeling dulling. She’d get to a hundred, then do Patsy’s first side, then Patsy would do Charlotte’s other. Patsy would go last. Going last always went to the one who had the guts to start it.
Patsy’s nipples were different, softer, pinker, smaller. They got silky when they were wet. They smelled like spittish toothpaste. After the last turn they had to stop to keep from really being queer. They’d stop for the night then; soon, they would discontinue. That was so Patsy might receive absolution and remain with the pure of heart.
This, Charlotte decided, was exactly what she hated about Patsy: she still believed there were rules that people went by. She was such an idiot, such a dumb girl, that she believed there was a God who beamed down on them, like the moonlight through the tree limbs, who gave a good goddamn about what people on this earth had decided to do. Patsy still really did believe in the fact of sin, that one might be absolved of it. Like the rest of her family, Charlotte had never gone by that.
Charlotte saw Patsy going off across the wide green lawn in her white communion dress, dressed like she was on her way to a little marriage of her own. She stopped to pat the head of the dumb black dog, who, like Charlotte, wasn’t getting into heaven. He lifted his head toward the hills and mooed at nothing. God, Katrinka always said, had been invented on Avenue B by Maxine Bill and the rest of the Okies and Arkies from Pork Hollow, West Virginie. They needed God to keep track of the sins on their souls because their education was so poor they’d