Failure To Zigzag. Jane Vandenburgh
institutionalization, awwwwnnnd I do mean really.” Her voice was now low down, confidential.
Charlotte went on. “She thinks the postman tried to see up her skirt when she went down the steps after the mail.”
Katrinka tipped her chin back and nearly laughed. “Now why in the lousy hell would he want to do that?”
Charlotte smiled. “To get a peek at Herbert Hoover?”
Katrinka did then laugh, a short, throaty snort that exploded from behind the press of lips.
Winnie believed the flesh of her knees, when scrunched together with the ring made of a gathering of fingers, held the likeness of Herbert Hoover. She sometimes made Charlotte come look at this sight, just as she’d made Katrinka herself come to witness it when it had been she who was growing up in the house on Vista del Mar. “See?” Winnie had demanded of first one and now the other. Charlotte never saw anything aside from the scrunches of white flesh, but then Charlotte didn’t really know what Herbert Hoover was supposed to look like. Even years later, when she had escaped from that thick time, she still searched any roster of the presidents for the one whose face most resembled Winnie’s pale and dimpled knees.
“How’s Mr. Tweedy?” Katrinka asked. Mr. Tweedy was Lionel’s pet name for himself.
“Fine,” Charlotte said. “The same.”
They both smiled, knowing it was Lionel’s dream to be the same, that every day since the bank failed he had tried to follow the same exemplary routine. He would rise at the same time, shower and shave, eat the same foods for the same meals, chewing with great exactitude, walk the same six miles. He read the same books over and over again, the complete works of Charles Dickens. He read aloud while lying on his back on the davenport. He preferred for Charlotte to listen, but he read out loud whether there was anyone to hear or not. It occurred to Charlotte that her grandfather tried to live the day in the same unvarying way in order to perfect it before he died. Just as he was getting it just the way he liked it, Katrinka would show up—down from the hospital or back from Sugarman’s carnival—and the whole thing would go straight to hell.
“I really do have to go,” Charlotte told her. “She gave me her last silver dollars, though, so let me pay.”
“Oh, gawd!Not her last silver dollars!” Katrinka cried out. Winnie had a huge stash of them, taken in bags from the bank on the day it closed, but she always claimed she had no more left except these last two or three. She had been giving these last two or three to one or the other of them since 1932, saying, “Now, these are my very last silver dollars! Now, I want you to have them on one condition—you are not to tell Lionel! Do you understand me?” She handed them over knotted up in a fancy handkerchief, the bundle tied to look like something that would be carried by a baby hobo.
“These are her very last ones,” Charlotte said. “Really, really.” She smiled at her mother, then bent over her task, that of untying the hard grip of Winnie’s many knots.
“Put that away,” Katrinka said, waving one imperious hand. “I’m the mother around here and this is my treat.” She said this grimly, out of the side of her mouth like a gun moll. She was busy now stacking the coins in a new way: quarters with quarters, dimes with dimes.
“Mom, really!” Charlotte said.
“Really really,” Katrinka retorted, going on then in ventriloquy: “Now, I will be the judge of all this and all that, of who is and is not the mother around here, and of all things Nellie-ish and Tweedyish and all things monetary!” This voice was deep, male, authoritarian. It was Ogamer, Katrinka’s old man character. She hadn’t brought the dummies into the soda fountain that day, but the voices were with her always, except for when she could be persuaded to take her medication.
“All right!” Charlotte said. She did want the dollars, which still looked new. She liked the heft of them and the soft, deep shine that made them seem more valuable than paper dollars. Still, taking money from her mother, who was so poor she sometimes got public assistance, made Charlotte’s skin crawl. Her whole epidermis, including her scalp, seemed to lift, to move. The skin was itself an organ, she knew, the one designed for the specific purpose of differentiation, to keep the self of a person in from the outside world. Was it scientifically possible, she wondered, for a human being to molt like a crab or snake?
“Anyway that Jew bastard Sugarman has given me my job back at his lousy crappy flea circus, so you don’t have to worry about me on the subject of mun-mun.”
“All right!” Charlotte said again, her flesh still crawling. She looked at the underside of either arm, where her skin felt like it was about to break out in hives.
Looking up from this self-appraisal, she noticed her mother’s thin fingers gathering the coins. Katrinka’s money was terrible to look at. It was clotted with some dark gunk into which were stuck the shreds of tobacco that always collected in the recesses of her pocketbook. Charlotte inclined her head, observing her own hands, which lay poised in her lap with the fingers curled and the palms turned upward. At times like this her hands tended to ache, pulsing in the center. She was always surprised that the act of leave-taking could cause such a physical and specifically martyrish pain.
“Oh, Lord God! Now what have I done?” Katrinka cried out, but Charlotte’s mouth, gasping, gaping open, watering, couldn’t speak to reassure her. She couldn’t speak nor raise her aching hands, nor do anything at all aside from moving her heavy head slowly from side to side. As she cried, Charlotte kept her eyes tightly shut. She did this to try to keep her tears in, to keep her soul in, and to save herself from the sight of these, her gifts: her mother and her mother’s dirty money.
2
Listening in the Dark
Lionel and Winnie did not so much converse as each deliver the same monologue over and over. The major difference between them and Katrinka, Charlotte had decided, was that when they talked to themselves someone else was usually in the room. One of their favorite topics for ranting was what had gone wrong with Katrinka.
According to Winnie it was when Joe, Jr., died that Katrinka had turned, overnight, from a bright and hopeful girl into a paranoid schizophrenic. This was, Winnie claimed, the form of mental illness that had been clinically proven to be caused by the chemical properties of grief. Then too there was the issue of gumption. Katrinka hadn’t one speck of gumption. If she had any gumption whatsoever she would stop all that ventriloquist business this instant! and go out and find herself a decent job. She should have stayed at the phone company. “Charlotte!” Winnie would cry out at this point, always as if she had just thought of it, “I want you to at least consider the phone company. Now, the phone company employs more women than any other company and it is a stable company, having survived the last depression. And when the next depression hits, people will still undoubtedly be so ill-mannered that they will rely upon the telephone, rather than sitting down to write a civilized note or letter.” Winnie despised the phone for the way it would ring out in her house without her giving it permission. She would not answer it. Instead she would scurry to the bathroom off the service porch and hide until the ringing ceased. If, for some reason, she felt she had to answer it, she approached it furiously, as if she was back in the schoolhouse in Power, Montana, confronting the worst of her impudent boys.
Lionel, on the other hand, was of the opinion that the telephone was another of America’s most magnificent inventions, like the cotton gin, the aeroplane, and Luther Burbank’s hybrids. He went to the phone with a Republican optimism, believing it might be some powerful banker—A. P. Giannini? Lionel’s own father?—who was calling him home. He would always pause then with his hand outstretched, realizing it was probably just Katrinka calling to ruin another of his perfect days.
Since the way Katrinka was was not Winnie’s fault! Winnie would thank Charlotte very much to kindly stop looking at her so balefully. Didn’t Charlotte realize that self-pity of just that sniveling sort was the first step on the road to insanity, that with parents like hers she had better be