Failure To Zigzag. Jane Vandenburgh
Winnie blamed this on the wealthy old woman who owned that land, imagining she had a profound influence with city hall Winnie had been unable herself to amass. The rich neighbor had no need to have the roadbed paved because her house fronted on Montecito, and she probably considered the Ainsworths’ street just a dusty country road.
“What kind of God would give a person a child like that?” Winnie was asking. Charlotte didn’t answer. The question was imponderable, and she was thinking of something else, of how the oak leaves looked like black lace against the silvering of the early morning sky.
“She does this on purpose, you know? She does it just to shame me. She could stop it this instant! if she chose to.” Charlotte weighed this thought: she too liked to believe that Katrinka really could turn it off, that Space Radio was something she’d invented to pay Lionel and Winnie back for what Katrinka called being so lousy crappy shitty. “It is me she blames,” Winnie was saying. “She doesn’t blame him.”
“No one blames you,” Charlotte told her, automatically.
Winnie hissed. She hated to be contradicted. “Of course they do,” she snapped. “Her doctors all blame me and so do you!”
Charlotte turned to look at her grandmother, staring from beneath the shadow of her brow. The two of them had the same bluish eyes, but Charlotte’s right eye was also marked by a colored patch shaped like a pie piece, radiating out from the iris, the color of which was golden in some lights, or turned greenish, changing as Katrinka’s own eye color did. It was this mark, this patch, Charlotte was inclined to believe, that had always allowed her, while not yet thoroughly crazy, to participate in her mother’s point of view. It was as if she was able to witness things at once through her mother’s as well as her very own eyes.
Winnie was right: Charlotte did blame her. She blamed her blackly, thickly, so heatedly that her heart was sometimes hurt by the pain of it, as if her hatred had inflamed the very sac in which the heart muscle needed to beat. Still, as their eyes now caught, locked, and Winnie’s widened, and then as her face began to grow shiny under her granddaughter’s hot look, Charlotte was herself surprised to understand that the fact was so purely obvious that even Winnie could distinguish it.
“I am the one she hates,” Winnie sniffed, as she looked away. She was lifting the sharp angle of her nose somewhat pridefully, her voice beginning now to twist and yank. Charlotte hoped she wouldn’t start crying. Whenever Winnie cried, she ran to the bathroom and began packing up her painting supplies; then she took the car and went off to the Mojave Desert for a few days, leaving Lionel and Charlotte alone to cope without a car. The Ainsworths always bought their cars from American Motors—the Nashes, then Nash Ramblers, then their Rambler American—because of the one feature they did so prize, that the front seats folded all the way down for Winnie’s sleeping bag on her flights from home out into the desert.
“No, she doesn’t,” Charlotte said. “She loves us,” she said. She listened to the distant sound of her own voice saying this: it was breathy, wistful, lifted. “She just has a different way of showing it,” Charlotte went on. “You know? Because of the way she is?”
Winnie snorted contemptuously and turned to finish clearing the breakfast dishes. In spite of his daughter’s being in jail, Lionel had gone for his regular walk, starting out when it was still pitch dark. When he came in, he had to give up the pleasure of sitting awhile in his red leather banker’s chair where he allowed his skin to breathe. Instead he went right on to showering, shaving, then sat down to his regular bowl of mush. As always, he spent nearly an hour over it, stirring milk into the cereal until it was again entirely liquified and it dribbled extravagantly from the flattened silver soupspoon. He could somehow manage to chew mush though it was completely lumpless, completely wet with milk. He made the mush himself every morning: it was part Roman Meal, part Malt O’Meal, part wheat germ. On this morning, as on all others, he stirred, dribbled, and chewed, intent on his pleasure, his mouth and tongue whitening, utterly mindless of the calls from the Montrose police station encouraging him to take Katrinka back up to Camarillo.
As on any other morning, the Ainsworths were discussing that same thick past. This morning, it was another schoolteacher back in Power, how she’d suddenly burst into tears and had clattered from the room when Winnie showed up at school wearing Lionel’s diamond. “Oh, that was Bessie,” Lionel said. “She had such a crush on me!” He smacked and dribbled.
“It wasn’t you!” Winnie cried. “I was the one Bessie loved!” Then Winnie whirled with her cat’s face poised to catch Charlotte gawking and screeched triumphantly: “But there was nothing filthy in it, as there is nowadays, so don’t get your hopes up!”
The second time the police called, it was Charlotte, with heart frozen, who’d gone to answer it. She could hear Ogamer in the background, singing the “Marseillaise.” Katrinka was assaultive, the beleaguered sergeant mentioned. She was verbally abusive. Her voices were keeping all the other drunks up.
“May I help?” Charlotte now asked Winnie at the table, knowing she wouldn’t be allowed to. Lionel could tolerate no one aside from Winnie touching the dishes that touched his food. Charlotte hated helping, hated the utter futility of all housework, the way dusting was never finished and dishes and laundry were done and done only to be done again. This attitude toward housework was pure Katrinka, Charlotte knew, like the patch of greenish eye and the tint of her reddish hair. Attitudes descended. They came down just as actual insanity did. Charlotte thought of insanity as a thing in motion, like the abstract nude in one of Winnie’s artbooks. Winnie was at the top of the steps, Katrinka at the bottom, with the merging ghosts strung between. It was called Madness Descending a Staircase.
“You should stick to the practical side of things,” Winnie was now advising her. “I’d like you to go to work for the phone company or to become a nurse. Or you might do well to major in domestic science. There are so many new and wonderful things to learn about in that field, what with the new drip-dry fabrics that pack so well! You will want to marry someone willing to help you care for your mother. She will be your burden when Lionel and I are gone. Now, you’ll want to marry someone quite different from yourself: not someone artistic, no one high-IQ-and-no-common-sense. If you first get a degree in Home Ec, you can always teach in the high school when your husband dies. I always did despise teaching, the way the children called me ‘mama’ and their eyes clung to my face and their soiled hands smudged the articles of my clothing. I would like you to learn to be more modest in your person, Charlotte, than you show signs of becoming. I want you not to dress in a way that encourages boys to look at you, or to drive past our house. I want you to keep a clean house and to learn to behave normally, do you hear me? Your mother has always surrounded herself with abnormality and she therefore gets no encouragement at all to live in a decent way. Oh, it was terrible, terrible! to live in a small town like Power where everyone knew our business! When I was pregnant with your mother, I could see the curtains in the parlor windows moving as I walked down the street. They were observing the shape of my person, telling one another just what it was that the town banker and the schoolmarm had done!”
Charlotte wasn’t listening. She was staring out the window at the gully where the dirt road crossed the culvert. The dust the Nash kicked up was only now settling back down onto the roadbed. In the first low shaft of direct morning light, it looked, to her, like gold.
Lionel worried about germs in his food and hair in his food. Winnie worried about her own as-yet-undetected cancer of the colon. What Charlotte worried about was ending up crazy. She knew that being crazy was caused either by heredity or environment, though the experts couldn’t say which. Either way seemed to make no difference. It was in her genes, obviously, like the color of the mark on her iris, and there she was in the same dusty house, being raised by the same people who raised her mother and in the same lousy way.
Winnie worried about cancer because her sister Trudy had died of it. Winnie believed cancer was caused by worry, and given the sort of daughter she’d been allotted, she knew there was no one in the world who worried more. The family doctor, Dr. Greenley, a devout Seventh Day Adventist and vegetarian, had advised Winnie to try to calm down the slightest bit. He favored the nutritional approach.
“Just