Failure To Zigzag. Jane Vandenburgh
around the chewed-up peanut butter sandwich. Charlotte and her mother had the winning hands: dead, mad, drunk, the mouth of him, and now this: queer. She knew this trick, covering the thought of one worse thing with the image of another, the thing that could be better understood. She saw the shadowy shape of the sunken cruiser that went down in the deepest waters in the world yet lay waiting, waiting, just beneath the water’s surface, the hundreds of pale bodies dangling up above. It was the worst disaster in U.S. naval history and it belonged to her.
She thought of Bob Davidson’s face, the shape of his sullen mouth, the squinted bright blue eyes, the line of his lips that would not open to volunteer. If she got into Marlborough she would, after the end of the term, never see him again. She thought of getting his hard mouth open, not as a kiss but rather as a form of invasion.
Her eyes were wide open staring up. She no longer felt anything at all and was not counting. Patsy’s hair was silver in the light from the street lamp, her skin spotted by the dots of purer illumination falling through the holes in the eyelet. Patsy raised her face to Charlotte, alarmed. She was asking, with her vanished eyebrows up, if it wasn’t yet her turn. Her chin and lips were shining.
Charlotte nodded and they traded places. She wiped the wetness off herself with the edge of the sheet, then let the top of her pajamas fall back down. Patsy had arranged herself back on the pillow with her arms flung up, this way, that way. It was just as the mason had fallen dead among the leaves. Patsy didn’t know these things, couldn’t know these things, as Charlotte saw them, all swimming by in the dark, transparently, as if she too lived with the ghostly men in the ship at the bottom of the ocean, she alone with the eyes to see. It was now and now and now with the dead men lying there and them leaping too, their clothes on fire, going into the burning sea. The fuel oil burned for hours but there was no one there to spot it. No SOS had gone out. This was Katrinka’s whole point, exactly: if God had decided to come back as a little baby, why would he choose to be born in such a lousy Dogpatch shitpile, and why to such a mental patient who hallucinated holy ghosts and was married to a man so old he only did it for his glands?
There were no rules that Charlotte went by. Patsy would get to one hundred but Charlotte would not stop. Her nipples were soft, rosy, lazy, and needed to be chewed in order to stay up. She pressed with one hand on Patsy’s belly right behind the pelvic bone where Patsy liked it. Pressed there, like that, she felt the need to pee.
She would press there, make Patsy cry out and call them, a whole gang of hoods. Charlotte would invite them over. I have a girl here, she’d say, here on the tabletop. She would help them hold her down. Then Patsy would have a real reason to cry out, real boys to confess about. She would cry out but it would not be heard over the sound of the ship’s exploding, the torpedoes hitting one, then two, the engines still going at full ahead, powering down and into the darkened sea. It was their own fault, for failing to zigzag, for being caught in the light of that single moonbeam, seen by the sub five and a half miles away. With luck like that, Charlotte knew, no boy was ever going to marry her.
She would press there to make Patsy say the words she needed to say, speaking them out to be heard in the air. “Do it,” Patsy cried, her face looking tortured, her voice ripping up. “Please, do it to me.” The boys would come and she would be as naked as the men were when they went into the sea. She’d be spread out, exposed, as low down as gravity, lying on the table, waiting, waiting, as the ship waited still, for each and all like Father Bob and the holy ghosts, for the rest of them who felt they had such goodness to dispense, the rest of the pure of heart.
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