Читать книгу Failure To Zigzag - Jane Vandenburgh - Страница 9
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Playing Boys
Back in the days before stage crew and Cal, when Katrinka was more normal than she turned out later to be, she’d had one good friend that Lionel and Winnie very much approved of. It was this friend who grew up to be the Mildred Younger who placed the name of Richard Nixon in nomination for the Presidency of the United States at the 1960 Republican Convention! Whenever Lionel and Winnie started to get going about Mildred Younger! about Pat and Richard Nixon of Whittier, California! Katrinka would wink at Charlotte, arch an eyebrow, and tell her: “very high up! Oh, Very! How very, very la-di-da fitz!”
Now Charlotte had a friend like that, a nice friend from a normal, happy family. Winnie said the words “normal” and “happy” in a way that was utterly grief-stricken—upon saying “happy,” her voice broke the word into two desolate pieces. Patsy Johnson’s parents were good Republicans, members of the Oak Knoll Country Club, recent converts to the Episcopal religion, exactly the sort of people Lionel and Winnie very much admired. Mr. Johnson drove Patsy and Charlotte to the dances at the YWCA where they often spent their time in the bathroom waiting for somebody good to show up.
“Well, at least someone asked you to dance,” Charlotte told Patsy, one afternoon in the bathroom at the Y
“Sorry, Char, but Williman Grottman is not a someone,” Patsy said. “Williman Grottman is a mollusk who slimed in here from the sewer.”
Charlotte thought this over. Williman Grottman, who was in their honors science class, was the worst boy in their grade, the worst, probably, in all of Glendale High. He had once told Charlotte that the spelling of his name came from a typographical error at the county recorder’s office that no one in his family ever felt he had the right to fix. Charlotte knew she ought to be kind to him, to be kind, distant, aloof, slightly patronizing, but she couldn’t be. When she saw him coming toward her she raced to the bathroom, terrified of having to tell him no, that she wouldn’t be able to dance with him. She might have even wanted to dance with him, since he was so smart in science, but she couldn’t allow herself that. She couldn’t dance with Williman, or even say the word no to him, without being pulled down by her pity into the welter of their mutual and ghastly woe. Patsy, on the other hand, felt nothing at brushing him off. Shining a person on didn’t faze Patsy in the slightest, while the act of rejecting someone else made Charlotte feel as if she herself were almost physically maimed.
“Face it,” Patsy was saying. “No one good’s coming. We might as well call up my dad and go home and kill ourselves.” Charlotte was sleeping over at Patsy’s house so they were going home together. Charlotte lifted her eyes to Patsy’s in the mirror—each was slicking on more Icy Peach lipstick by Maybelline. What did Patsy have to kill herself over, Charlotte wondered. She had so much normalcy it made Charlotte sick—the two nice parents, the freckled little brother with taxicab door ears, the big house with symmetrical landscaping, the big black dog standing on his porch, drooling into his pools of spit. Patsy’s abnormality was completely normal, Charlotte knew. It was a matter of common and minor wretchedness: menstrual cramps, braces, the few insignificant pimples. “It’s just a face you’re going through,” Charlotte had mentioned more than once.
Patsy played competitive complaining in part, Charlotte knew, to guard herself against an envy of her good fortune. Katrinka called competitive complaining the game of “Compete-O.” Vying for who was the most Poor and Pitiful Pearl Among Women was a favorite pastime on Ward G-1, one in which Katrinka refused to participate. She would not participate—still, whenever Charlotte complained about Lionel and Winnie, Katrinka would smile and say, “Oh, I know, sweetie! We win! You and I have it worse than all of the Christians, most of the Jews, and even some of the Negroes! Gervaise, c’est moi! and all that. Our lives, as your father used to say, were written by Zola, which is more interesting anyway than the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy, don’t you think? who were written by Charles Dickens.”
Katrinka, when bragging about all of their misfortunes, was generally humorous, but sometimes, inexplicably, she became angry. This was usually when she imagined that Charlotte was accusing her of being a lousy mother, though her being a lousy mother was a point beyond contention, having been proved for all time when Charlotte and Katrinka were living with Sweeney on Avenue B. “All right, then!” she’d cry. “What do you want me to do about them? Shall I call the police and have them arrested? Do you want me to take them to court and have them declared legally dangerous, incompetent and cracked-up-nuts, as they’ve done over and over again to me? Who would there be to raise you then? Unless you think you’re so high up in the smartypants aspect of things, these days, that you can raise your own self, Missy Miss! Is that what you think?” Charlotte stared at her levelly, thinking, Iƒ I had the money, if I had the car keys, never mind that she didn’t know how to drive.
“Can you see the two of them locked up in Camarillo?” Katrinka would go on. “Which is what would happen to them if people found out how bad they are. The two of them bent over, toiling in the mental patient lettuce fields? Being given electroshock therapy, Charlotte? Your grandfather without his feet up? Having to earn his own fucky chits for cigarettes? The Ainsworths! Being driven steadily more and more crazy by being forced to listen to the conga-bonga rhythms of jigaboos? Is that what you want?” Yes, Charlotte would think grimly, Camarillo would serve them both damned right.
Charlotte watched Patsy in the mirror—she was brushing on mascara from the small black slab that had been moistened with spit. Patsy might try out for the most pitiful prize, but she could never win it: she was smart, cute, nice. No one could ever win it if Charlotte was in the competition, so great was the luck of her cards. She had aces nobody even knew about. She had a royal flush: drunk, mad, dead, queer. She had this:
“Know what my grandmother told me?” Charlotte said.
“What?” Patsy’s face was elongated, her cheeks stretched hollow by the opening of her mouth, as she brushed the blackness onto her lashes, her eyes rigidly held wide open. She had tiny golden freckles dusted over her cheeks and forehead.
“I shouldn’t even tell you this,” Charlotte said. “It’s too sick.” She waited, closing her eyes, imagining the best card she held, the lights of the sunken ship. She studied it for a moment, and then used it to cover over the next one, the whitening mouth of her grandfather as it moved around the chewed-up peanut butter sandwich. “She said they still sometimes have relations because it’s good for one of his glands.”
“Oh, my God,” Patsy said. Charlotte opened her eyes and saw herself in the mirror, her brows lifted up, asking what she should find in this. Patsy had stopped brushing. Her eyes were blue, clear. “I think,” she said, “that I am about to throw up.”
They were back then at Patsy’s that night, working on their personal appearance. Charlotte was reading a diet in a magazine and Patsy was painting her toenails. Each had already washed her face with Phisohex, then with Noxzema. They had plucked one another’s eyebrows though Patsy’s were so pale they were nearly vanished from her face, and the loss of even one or two hairs from Charlotte’s own was probably going to cause Winnie to fly off into a giant hell of a tizzy, a real doozy, a fit which would be magnificent to see if watching from some safe place, high in the oaks, say, or from the other side of a plate glass window.
It was the look, the thought, of her own hair that always filled Charlotte with hopelessness. The braids went trundling down her back like her grandparents’ twin sentinels. They made her feel like a refugee, as if she were another Annelli Verdonner. Annelli, like Williman, was another Charlotte felt she ought to be particularly kind to but could never quite bring herself to be. Like Charlotte’s, Annelli’s braids were obviously constructed by someone else—hers were white blonde, skinny, pinned up with ribbons in bun-shaped twists at the sides of her head above her translucent ears. They made her look years younger than anyone in their grade. The fact of braids, Charlotte had decided, had the effect of making a girl look old-fashioned, too well tended, too often handled. The country from which Annelli Verdonner had come had been taken over by the Russians at the end of the Second World War and had disappeared from the map of the world.
The more regular girls at Glendale High wore flips or pixies, bubbles or a single, bouncing ponytail. The point was not to be knockdown beautiful, which tended to stir things up, but rather to be cute. Moms of girls looked like Doris Day, their grandmothers like Mamie Eisenhower. A very stylish woman from the country club might try to look like a grayer, more Republican Jackie Kennedy, as long as she didn’t look “Eastern.” Looking “Eastern,” sounding “Eastern,” or sending your children east to go to school, they felt, all showed you thought you were better than everybody else. In Glendale, in 1962, it was better to be the same.
There were no Negroes living in Glendale then, by unwritten covenant. If anyone was Jewish in Charlotte’s school, the fact was never mentioned. Even the hoods, like Bob Davidson, weren’t real greasers since they weren’t Mexican. Mexicans lived in their own neighborhoods and went to their own schools, and for the kids at Glendale High, were the stuff of lore. Mexican girls had deadly beehives, hairdos that were ratted up, hairsprayed, never taken down to be washed, used to hide razor blades for girl fights and for the breeding of black widow spiders. Spit curls were stuck to the cheeks of Mexican girls with little X’s of Scotch tape, X’s inexplicably left there after the curls were already good and stuck.
The cute, sweet, nice girls of Glendale High didn’t swear. They didn’t swear, scream, fight, or have pierced ears. They learned to dance at cotillion and learned their pleasant manners at charm school, where they also learned that manners, once learned, might also occasionally be ignored. They didn’t get pregnant or have girl fights, which were fought by different rules than the fights of boys. The fingernails of Mexican girls illustrated this: they were long, sharp, and as red as if they’d already been dipped in blood. Charlotte knew all about girl fights, this being the way she fought the enemies in her dreams.
Boys’ fights were different, were fought more simply, as men fought wars: to crush, to annihilate. In girl fights the impulse was less singular. Girls fought a fight to humiliate, to make the other ugly, to rip the blouse away, to tear off a bra and expose the other publicly. They fought with boys surrounding them and watching, fought so these boys would laugh and cheer.
“We could iron it,” Patsy was saying. “Or we could use that stuff Negroes use, that junk like a perm that reverses the process?” They were trying to figure out how to make Charlotte’s hair fall straight. Because it was braided wet it fell down her back in a curtain of waves when they let it down. When brushed out Charlotte’s hair, like Katrinka’s, turned wild, electric. Patsy’s parents were out and they were babysitting Brian. He was in the den down the hall watching TV. They were in the bedroom with the door locked, drinking rum and coke.
“But it would stink up the house,” Patsy went on. “It always stunk up the house when Mom used to give me a Toni. We’re not supposed to stink up the house when my parents are out.” She had cotton balls stuffed between her toes, a trick, like the use of orange sticks for cuticles, they’d gotten out of charm school. “Why don’t we just cut it?” Patsy asked. “I mean, what could they really do to you if you came home with it trimmed?”
“Throw me out of the house.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I mean really.” It seemed to Charlotte they’d thrown out Katrinka for less, for winking across the Thanksgiving dinner table, for humming Johnny Mercer tunes meaningfully and in Lionel and Winnie’s direction, for commenting that the rectal way both Pat Nixon and Winnie each held her lips illustrated a trait of personality called being “anal retentive.” It was from Charlotte’s father that Katrinka had learned these Freudian sorts of insults. Penis envy, she might have the elegant voice of her dummy Nellie Platter pronounce, diagnosing down from on high as Winnie, standing in a bloody apron with fists tightly clenched and the tuck firmly taken in both of her buttocks, was going on and on about how the still-raw Thanksgiving turkey proved she ought to have been born a man! “Or,” Charlotte added, “they might send me straight to Camarillo.”
“We coulda least bleach some streaks in it,” Patsy was going on, “so you’d look kinda like a surfer, except the peroxide would probably stink up the house. We could wet it and put it up on orange juice cans?” She looked over, lifting her scanty eyebrows, “except then you’d have to sleep like that.”
“Sure bet,” Charlotte said. Patsy dropped syllables out of words and further contracted most contractions. It sounded cute, her saying pro’bly, prac’ly, ’zackly, din’t, woun’t, coun’t, and shoun’t. Charlotte would have liked to talk like this, dumb for boys, but if she had Winnie would have pro’bly smacked her.
“Wann’nother rum’n’Co’Cola?” Patsy asked. She was drunk too, so in addition to the teenage accent she’d started to sound like Mrs. Johnson, who came from Butler, Georgia. People often turned into their parents when they were drunk, Charlotte had observed. Katrinka, drunk or sober, did Lionel and Winnie perfectly, but when drunk she seemed sometimes to be possessed by them.
Katrinka too had other ancestors rattling around in her dummies’ trunk, where one of the psychiatrists had once suggested she try to keep the voices confined. The voice of one was like a monster’s —this was Big Mother, Charlotte believed, Winnie’s mother, who called out gutterally, going KATH-er-ine! KATH-er-rine! as if from the grave. Or it may have been Big Dad, Winnie’s stepfather, or Winnie drunk herself, doing her own parents. It might have been Winnie drunk, except that Winnie didn’t drink. She didn’t drink even though her teetotalling Seventh Day Adventist doctor had ordered her to sip a small glass of sherry medicinally one-half hour before bedtime. She was to sip it, Dr. Greenley said, and she was to try to calm down. Charlotte had heard Winnie in the front bedroom at bedtime, trying to calm down. She was sipping, weeping. She was singing one of her favorite George Gobel tunes. “Life is just a bowl of sherries!” she sang. It was from Winnie, obviously, that Katrinka had inherited the feeling that she had the right to change the words to songs without regard to copyright.
“Know what?” Patsy was saying. “I think we should call him up. It might make a whole lot of difference if he knew how much you love him.”
“Oh, Awe-I don’t know about that,” Charlotte drawled. She was drunk herself, so she was taking on aspects of Katrinka.
“We coulda least try,” Patsy said. “Coun’t hurt.” She licked her lips and rubbed the tip of her nose with the back of her hand. What would it be like, Charlotte wondered, to be someone else, to be a person like Patsy who was just a person, just a simple, sweet, smart girl who didn’t feel the need, as Charlotte did, to be herself and everybody else besides, who didn’t have to be the judge of everything sitting high up in the oaks watching all the day’s proceedings and with no small measure of disdain?
“It couldn’t?” Charlotte corrected. She was veering off now schoolmarmishly, off now toward the Winnieisms to correct for the Katrinkas. She enunciated this next carefully, as if crossing a trout stream in Montana on slippery rocks. “Oh, I sin-cere-ly doubt that.”
“Well, waddaya wanna do then?” Patsy asked, looking up from her toes, which were shining, dazzling. “Wanna play boys?”
“No,” Charlotte immediately snapped. But they always said that—it was the way it was played.
“You mean really, Char?” Patsy asked. “You think we shoun’t anymore?”
“No,” Charlotte said, and she was humiliated to hear her voice coming apart, becoming husky, ragged, as voices did when they became overladen with desire. It was the desire of others Charlotte preferred to think about—she hated to be reminded of her own. She preferred her perch high in trees, looking in through the dusty diamond-paned windows at all the pitiful souls, all twisting, dangling, made limp, weak, by the tightening of themselves all along the core of their oblique and archaic desires. Charlotte was made so sad by the needs of people that she sometimes felt she might weep.
“No,” she said again. “Just as long as we, you know, stop the way we said we would when you do the confession.”
Patsy had to go to confession before she was confirmed at Saint Nicholas Parish at the end of the school year. Patsy and her younger brother had both undertaken the instruction. It was from their catechism class that Patsy had learned there were no drool-mouths in heaven—no cute angel puppies, Father Bob had 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 never learned to count past ten.
Charlotte was drunk so faces swam on by like fish in cloudy water. The dead were here now, here now—Laddie Bill and the brick mason—now here, now here, then not. Lionel’s face came forth through the water, the interior of his mouth whitening 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.
