Читать книгу Failure To Zigzag - Jane Vandenburgh - Страница 8

3

Wash

According to Katrinka, the trouble was she’d always had a problem with her identity. She pronounced this word with a profound irony, as if everybody knew there was no such thing. Katrinka seemed to think her mental illness was funny, which was why she’d filled in “mental patient” in the space for Mother’s Occupation on Charlotte’s birth certificate before she’d ever even been committed to Camarillo.

Unlike Lionel and Winnie, Katrinka was perfectly happy to talk about what had gone on. Her version, though, was different from theirs; it also evolved over time. It was her humor, the blank wall of it, that made it hard for Charlotte to know what Katrinka meant, really really. She liked to tell Charlotte how bad Lionel and Winnie were, though never really saying exactly what she meant. She liked, too, to talk about Cal, and about living with Joey in their crappy little house in Silverlake, the one that was falling down the hill. Katrinka’s memories were at once vivid, lucid, but also so fragmentary that she could never give evidence in a court of law, Charlotte saw. Katrinka could remember a particular morning from the past as if it were yesterday, but couldn’t remember the month or year in which the morning had occurred, could remember the phone ringing but not what the person on the other end had said.

Katrinka’s memory was shot, she said, because of all the electroshock therapy which had drilled holes in her already half cracked brainbox. “Awwnnd it’s a good thing too, sweetiebaby, when you realize the things I can’t remember are probably at least as godawful lousy as the rest of the shitty crap I have retained.” Who needed, Katrinka wondered, to remember every single day spent lying on one’s twin bed in the back bedroom of Vista del Mar, staring at the ceiling, smoking Lionel’s Luckies that were being parceled out ONE TO THE HOUR and listening to the dual Wraths of Gawd broadcasting bad news from the living room? The voices of the Ainsworths, as Katrinka told her and as Charlotte already knew, did not call sweetly, each to each, but yelled, directed, ordered, boomed, instructed, warned with all the subtlety of a Ouija board: OH I WOULDN’T EVEN THINK THAT IF I WERE YOU! NOW I AM OF THE OPINION OH YOU MAKE ME SO NERVOUS LIONEL THAT CHARLES DICKENS WORKED AT THE AGE OF TWELVE IN A BLACKING FACTORY THE PIP! THE PIP! OH I’M GOING TO RUN OFF AND JOIN THE NAVY! THE NAVY! THE CHURCH OF THE LIGHTED FIRST STATE BANK OF JESUS H. CHRIST! HIS FEET SO CLEAN YOU COULD EAT OFF OF THEM, IMMACULATE! RESURRECTED!

It was the PIP! the PIP! and having the very voice of Winnie echoing in her brainbox—a voice like a headache—and having the cigarettes doled out to her ONE TO THE FUCKING HOUR! that always drove Katrinka a little boi-ing cuckoo! and right smack back to the mental hospital. At Camarillo, at least, she could buy her own lousy smokes at the canteen with her own lousy chits.

Katrinka’s version of their disasters, that which she called “my side of the story,” varied from the Ainsworths’ in that it concerned the minute event, the way a person always tended to say a particular thing, or the color of the landlady’s wash that was hung out on a particular Wednesday morning. Her version changed according to the vagaries of her memory, but certain points remained immutable. Katrinka had not, for instance, “cracked up” over the boys on stage crew, so Charlotte wasn’t to go by that. Nor had she been driven insane by singing beer-drinking songs with the Pelican staff when she was away at Cal. Instead, she said, she’d always been the way she was, which was this: non compos mentis.

Or more precisely: Katrinka had, she said, always come unglued periodically, ever since she was small, and usually when Lionel and Winnie were themselves having a breakdown over something, or because of the pressure of public scrutiny, as when she’d gone on Ed Sullivan, or when she was a little short of funds. Being broke, Katrinka said, was the single greatest cause of mental illness, that awwwnnd having decided that you’d been you-know-whated-by-your-own-you-know- who, the specific details of which she and Charlotte most certainly would not go into since it was perfectly obvious to Katrinka that this was not something Charlotte could discuss without Charlotte’s cracking up for good.

One part of the story Charlotte was absolutely not to go by was Winnie’s tale of how Katrinka had suddenly “gone crazy” when Joey died. It had had nothing to do with Joey, with her meeting him, their drinking tee minny martoonies, their having artistic, funny-looking friends, their marrying, or their being just alike! as Winnie loved to exclaim. “Or his dying, if that’s, really really, what you think we ought to accept as what his disappearance is intended to signify by awwwlll the powers that be,” Katrinka would say. The powers that be seemed to include nearly everyone, Charlotte noticed, aside from her mother and herself. Joey’s death was one thing about which Katrinka did not remain convinced. She seemed to believe it for awhile, then the conviction would simply erode away. She always spoke of him with such immediacy it did seem that he had just left the room.

“Well,” Charlotte told her one of the times they were discussing this, “it is always hard to adjust to the loss of someone when there isn’t a body to bury.” She listened to the hushed, adult voice of her own self saying this. Whenever she found herself saying a thing like this it was as if another person, someone resting competent hands on Charlotte’s shoulders, was speaking out from above her head.

Her mother sucked her cheeks in, inhaled deeply, sniffed. “Now, where in the hell did you get that tidy little bit of information?” She squinted at Charlotte suspiciously. “Did your father tell you that?”

“Mother!” Charlotte yelled. “I got it out of a book!”

“Well, he was Freudy-Freudy, and that sounds very psychological to me.”

“It is psychological.” She glared at her mother. “But he happens to be dead, remember?” She was always shocked that Katrinka, who wasn’t stupid, had to act so dumb at times. She did it, Charlotte guessed, in order to be more deeply amusing.

“Well, we don’t go by that.”

“What do you mean, we don’t go by that?”

“In our family, we do not go by ‘the psychological,’ as the headache must have mentioned. Just as we do not go by this business of the Virgin Mary’s being flunked by God in the June rush.” Since the episode of the blue canvas notebook, which Charlotte had told her mother (as she did end up telling her nearly everything), this was what Katrinka was calling the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Immaculate Conception had always been one rich source of her jokes, since it tended to offend so many people. Her Immaculate Conception jokes had not gone over well on Ed Sullivan. “Freud, schmoid,” Katrinka then suddenly announced. She tipped her chin up and looked away. She was, Charlotte noticed, talking to somebody else.

“Well, what do we go by then?” Charlotte asked her. She was squinting, meanwhile, examining this thought: that from these four people—Lionel, Winnie, Katrinka, and Charlotte herself—Katrinka imagined that something called a “family” was to be construed. Charlotte didn’t go by that—her mother was the only one to whom she any longer felt spiritually related and then only vaguely, intermittently, resentfully. Her one true parent, she often imagined, was the father she’d never met, the long-dead and vanished hero.

Katrinka smirked, listened, hiked up one eyebrow, for emphasis. “Oh, Awe-I don’t know,” she drawled. “Once a wish? Twice a kiss? Three times comes a letter?”

Katrinka’s memory was so wretched that she seemed to hardly remember the Great Depression, in which Lionel had lost his money, or the Second World War, in which Joey had lost his life. This was the sort of large event that didn’t really concern her. She never read the newspapers, preferring to get her news in other ways.

She couldn’t remember Joey going off to fight the war, couldn’t even remember his enlisting in the navy, yet she was able to recall even the order in which the laundry had been hung out to dry on the line outside her window on that particular Wednesday morning, the morning of the day on which his face was to vanish forever from her sight.

“Charlotte!” Charlotte opened her eyes to the pitch dark. They were there in the back bedroom on Vista del Mar, a place where Katrinka could never sleep.

“I want to discuss this!” Katrinka was saying, her face suddenly rosily illuminated as she puffed on her cigarette. She was sitting on the edge of Charlotte’s bed and was bending over her. “This,” she said, “is what I would like to discuss. It isn’t the facts of our tragic lives which are important, don’t you understand that? But the shape of things you can still see when you close your eyes?”

“Huh?” Charlotte asked. She could still see the shapes in her dreams, police cars and streets all weirdly illuminated, since she was still asleep.

“When you were born and Lionel put you in the shoe drawer? You didn’t suck your thumb or a finger, but you tried to suck your whole damned hand. I can see it. I could always see it, even on the ceiling of Ward G-1! I can hear it, Charlotte, right this very minute, you going oink, oink, oink.”

“You mean when I sleep I sound like a pig?”

“Oh, for christsake, sweetie! Can’t you for once adopt the kinder, cuter interpretation of anything? Exactly why is it that you are so easily criticized? Because of the goddamned Ainsworths? Don’t you really understand just how sick they are?” Charlotte, wide awake now, reflected. It was very difficult for her to remember that people in her family were mentally ill. It was a thing she seemed to need to learn over and over again, their eccentricities being such an intrinsic part of what was normal in their natures.

Another time when Katrinka was staying overnight at Vista del Mar, she woke Charlotte up to ask her: “Why is it so important to you that I remember things? Just why is it that I must remember? When everything that ever happened to us is just too damned crappy lousy! All right! Tell me what it is that I’m supposed to remember and I’ll try to remember it. I’ll try to remember it, if that will make you feel better.”

Charlotte, still asleep, told her groggily, “Mom,” she said, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“THEM!” she said. “The lies.” She made a slight gasping sound, as if she were struggling for breath. From out of the dark her face suddenly showed in the glowing, then again dimmed. “Can’t you really understand it? How unreasonable memory is, how it cloys, blinds my eyes, makes the ink of old letters swim and dance and all that crap, each with its own ghastly shadow? It is never possible to remember the one single thing, sweetie. Memories adhere, come along together. You do know what I’m talking about. And why should we remember these things, the things too terrible to be borne? Who needs to remember lying on the bed in Ward G-1, listening to thirty other mental patients all talking to themselves? Believe me, sweetie, listening in the dark to mental patients talking out loud is one sure way to drive yourself crazy.” Really? Charlotte thought, smirking.

Katrinka couldn’t remember Joey’s going off to war. She did remember that it was a Wednesday morning when the phone had rung. She had been baking a chocolate cake, one out of Irma Rombauer. Through the front room window Katrinka could see the landlady hanging out her white wash. Katrinka reported this, then suddenly went lurching off in another direction.

If, Katrinka said, Charlotte was in such a need of memories, she ought to stick to the concrete. She should concentrate on nouns—on persons, places, and the look of things. Her father, Katrinka went on, had been very big on the look of things, on everything Frank Lloyd Wrightish, all that was Japanesy. There was the look, the feel of Joey’s hair to think about—it was so dark it was nearly black, and was coarse, curly, wiry to the touch. There was the wide expanse of his tanned and freckled back, and the space between his two front teeth. Joey had been as gat-tothed as the Wyf of Bathe, Katrinka wanted Charlotte to remember. She instructed Charlotte to remember this as if it were something Charlotte knew for herself, rather than something she was being informed of by her mother. And it did sometimes seem that the two of them had exactly the same life to lead, with Katrinka going blithely on ahead, and Charlotte coming along the same path, head down, picking up the shards and pieces.

Charlotte should concentrate on the look of things, Katrinka was repeating, thinking her daughter hadn’t really been paying attention, on the gap between the two front teeth! Awwwnnd she should tend to the way things were always funny. Hadn’t she ever noticed that when Winnie hopped into the Nash to run off and join the navy that she always drove into the desert, in exactly the wrong direction?

As she watched the orange tip of the cigarette swoop down to her mother’s lips, glow brightly, then darken as it was lifted away, Charlotte suddenly thought: My mother’s life is like a poem in which all small things are bejeweled by meaning. She would never have mentioned this aloud, however, because she knew Katrinka would have been insulted by it. Katrinka hated poetry. She hated it, she said, for the way it bleated of things better left to quietude.

The landlady had hung out the wash. She pronounced it warsh, because—like Maxine Bill on Avenue B—this landlady was an Okie or an Arkie. She had hung it out that day to make a whole great big hell of a goddamned point of how white her whites were when Katrinka’s weren’t. The washline was strung between the two houses. Katrinka and Joey had the Willys then. It was parked over the slope down at the curb. Their house was on the downhill side facing west toward Hollywood. The lights of Sunset Boulevard lit up the underside of the clouds at night. The landlady, who did her warsh with a regularity that could only be described as mentally ill, had the big house in front. Theirs behind was a real dump, falling down off its crumbling foundation. Joey’d been so low, he was painting the kitchen in three shades of blue to make a deep point about his depressive nature. Katrinka sniffed. She had never understood what people hoped to get out of what they called “depression.” She had herself never spent a depressed day in her life and therefore she didn’t go by it.

Joey was cracking up over having to work for his father, over having to hear the beat-beat-beat of the tom-toms at the office, too, over Joe, Sr.’s, paying their Charg-O-Matics at the Jolly Boys Bottle Shop and at the tobacconist’s when why shouldn’t he, when it was he who drove them both to drink? Joey was blue, too, over Eleanor Ann, over her talking about them in the third person at the Blacks’ dinner parties, parties Joey and Katrinka were made to go to since they were good for his architectural career. Eleanor Ann liked to quote herself, telling what she’d said that day at her bridge club: “Why, my dears, this is too exquisite! Their Bohemian phase! The poor, dear, dumb things! Their house, if I may say so, is a perfect hovel! With our Joey being AIA!”

The wash was white and that had meaning. There was wind that day and that had meaning. On the morning he left, he’d had no socks that matched. He’d gone off to die in a white dress shirt worn under his suit coat, with only the collar and cuffs and button placard pressed. Why was Charlotte looking at her like that, glaringly, accusingly? Charlotte should have married him herself, obviously, if she was so goddamned great at ironing that she was about to win the Nobel Prize in it, or he should have married Gervaise, Katrinka supposed, since he’d decided their lives were straight out of Zola. Better he should have been rich enough to have hired his own damned laundress!

When the phone rang, she’d gone to answer it—she did remember that. The washline was strung downhill between the two houses. She’d mixed the cake by hand, one hundred strokes, then she’d poured the batter into a greased and floured pan. She took the dirty mixing bowl out and put it into the landlady’s Okie-and-Arkie trash. This was one of the last recipes Katrinka would ever attempt to follow—she hated to be bossed around by anyone, and that included Irma.

The phone rang. She went to answer it. There were rules to follow, Winnie told her, rules concerning tissue paper and the proper packing of shoes. Katrinka watched as the pieces of white laundry all lifted on the line together. The sky was white and the white clothes were lifting into it. Was Charlotte listening? It was this she was to remember: they were all being tugged, Katrinka knew, all drifting up, all being wrenched upward toward all that was not black but was whitey-white instead. The wind had lifted the line, then it subsided. That had had meaning. Every whack and whack of the wooden spoon too had meaning, and each snap and lick and ripple of the laundry, all the pieces hooked and fighting the line like fish.

Did Charlotte realize that her father had been an excellent sailor? That he’d spent every summer of his life sailing from the Blacks’ house at the beach in his own ritzy-fitz little skiff?

Charlotte shook her head—no, she hadn’t known that. About herself, her parents, there was still everything to learn. The very nature of their lives was mysterious, the events dramatic, the names of places and objects—Cal, Silverlake, Pelican, skiff with centerboard, Tinian, Leyte—of almost luminous interest to her. The words were thinglike, became objects to be picked up, weighed, turned over, as an artifact might be. The secrets in her family, she felt, lay just beneath the surface of these words, as huge and well-lit as the shape of the ship the men of the Indianapolis had all been prompted to hallucinate together. That was on the third day, after the shark attacks had stopped, when the men began to commit suicide, encouraging others to do it too, to slip their life jackets off, to dive back down to it. Madness, Charlotte understood, was something that could be held separate or it might be offered up to be shared. She knew this because Katrinka had always seemed perfectly willing to share hers with her.

Charlotte just wanted to get the facts straight. She felt like Jack Webb on “Dragnet,” going “Just the facts, Mom.” She imagined herself to be an interviewer, like Brenda Starr, Reporter. Their past seemed at times like something the two of them were conspiring to invent together, Katrinka with the small snippets of precise memory, Charlotte with the larger picture. Charlotte’s job, she felt, was to stand at her mother’s side as Katrinka put down the phone and stood staring out at the landlady’s wash, and to take her by the elbow. Who was on the phone, Mom? Charlotte was to whisper, though at that point she had not yet been born. Was it the War Department? Just tell me the simple words, all right? Just say what they said. Did they say he got a medal? She wanted that, a weighty tangible thing that would stand for him. She wanted it to be worth a great deal of money.

Katrinka did not remember anything at all about all that. She remembered wash, shoes, tissue paper, shoe drawer. She had held the phone out and away. She did not weep, never again would weep, even when the child she’d borne was taken from her arms. Not crying was a point of pride with her. She tipped her chin up so when she swallowed the movement down either side of her long neck was visible. She stared out at the laundry hanging on the line and Charlotte, looking into the pitch dark, could see it too. “Frankly, sweetie,” her mother was saying from the next bed, “I don’t know what it is that you want me to tell you. Can’t you see that? Can’t you really see that nothing that I can say is going to do you any good?”

Charlotte was growing, was now nearly her mother’s height. She would, one day, pass her. The thought of it, of standing next to her at the window, of taking her mother’s elbow and looking directly into her gray-green eyes, made her heart hurt, grow huge with awe and pity.

Her mother’s life was a poem, an aggregate, in which all the small jeweled things had to be chipped out and examined for worth, for meaning. There had been no body to bury, so Katrinka couldn’t remember it, could never get it right. Still, all these years later she could recite the order of the wash, see its white snap and ripple. The wash did mean, she’d tell you, and what it meant was this:

undies undies diaper BRA!