Failure To Zigzag. Jane Vandenburgh

Instead, she was thinking about the nature of paranoia, that it, like the color of one’s eyes and the shape of one’s eyebrows and upper lip, might be a gene-linked trait. The Sunday before, she had been standing in the dining room, taking some small pleasure in ironing her gym clothes, in the clean smell of steam and in the physical act of pressing the required creases into the damp and heavy cotton of the white blouse, the blue shorts. The repetitiveness of the motion and its soft sound were making her dreamy. Her face was tipped down, frowning. She was thinking of the Theory of Relativity, having just seen something on the subject on “The Twilight Zone”over at her friend Patsy’s house.

      She could hear her grandmother in the bathroom off the service porch beyond the kitchen, clinking things. Winnie was pretending to be using the toilet, but what she was really doing was working on a painting.

      “Winnie!” Charlotte had called out. “Did you ever think about something like this? That maybe the Russian people are really nice, know what I mean? I mean, the people themselves, and it’s really only the two governments that are enemies?”

      Winnie came shusssshing, screeching but altogether silently, the muscles of her face drawn upward and out, made catlike by her fear and anger. She came on her quiet shoes, cowering through the three long rooms, all the while looking out the windows into the tops of the oaks, as if the dry and rustling leaves could themselves see and hear her. She carried a brush in one hand. In the other she held a sloshing glass jar filled with azure water. “Hush!” Winnie hissed, right into Charlotte’s steamy face. “You are never to say a thing like that again, never even to think it! This is 1960! You never know what they may have invented! Who it is who maybe listening!” Charlotte believed her grandmother was about to slap her. Instead, Winnie sloshed the jar of blue water all over the ironed gym clothes. The color bloomed, the smell rose up. The water wasn’t water at all, but turpentine. Winnie had been working in oils.

      “Your father’s mother was Jewish, did I ever tell you that?” Katrinka was saying. “She was the diminutive red-haired type, the kind who likes to compare shoe sizes at a dinner party, in order to make a point about how large boned other women are. Her husband, on the other hand, was six three, which is where your father got his height. Eleanor Ann was so mentally ill on the subject of being Jewish that she always insisted on belonging to all the country clubs that kept Jews out—Chevy Chase, Oak Knoll, like that. Speaking of acting mental patienty! Jack and Jackie and the rest of the Roman Catholics? I mean really, Charlotte! Fucked by God, really really! Believe me, sweetie, ‘fucked by God’ is one sure way to get yourself locked right up.”

      Charlotte was perfectly silent, looking down at the palms of the upturned hands resting in her lap.

      “I would like to discuss this,” Katrinka said.

      “Discuss what?” Charlotte was suddenly too full to stay awake. Eating made her tired, made her full and sick. She was so exhausted she felt ill. Winnie would make her eat dinner anyway.

      “The issue of paternity,” Katrinka said.

      Charlotte lifted her face. Despite herself, she now was listening. Just the sound of the word caused an ache of longing at the back of her throat, as if someone were squeezing lemons.

      “Well, it wasn’t Joseph, obviously,” Katrinka announced.

      “You mean Joseph Black?” Charlotte asked. This was her father’s name, the name of the man who’d died in the last days of the war when the Indianapolis was sunk by moonlight after having delivered the uranium for the bombs.

      “Honey, we aren’t talking about ourselves, right this very second! We are attempting to discuss the literary history of all this crap. The fact that even in the Bible you don’t get a halo for marrying the mother of your own child. If you see what I mean. Even if she is so completely off her rocker that she walks around with a crucifix pinned to her pregnant belly button, calling herself such mentally ill names as the Virgin Mary and telling people she’s been fucked by God. I mean really. I mean where would I be if Awe-I went around insisting to Maudlin, Moody, and DePalma that I’d been fucked by God?”

      Charlotte’s gaze was sliding away, off toward the gleam that was the pay phone on the back wall of the pharmacy. She was thinking of calling Patsy up. Winnie hated for Charlotte to say she was going to call someone up, but Charlotte could never remember to say “telephone.”

      “All right, then. So who was it really? If we assume she had not actually been fucked by God?” Katrinka asked. She pronounced it awwwctually.

      Charlotte heaved a great sigh. “Oh, Awe-I don’t know, awe-ctually,” she drawled. Since this was not a rational conversation, and Katrinka, as always, was talking largely to herself, Charlotte didn’t see why it was so important that she keep trying to make sense. She was also falling asleep. “A. P. Giannini?” Charlotte yawned. Lionel worshipped A. P. Giannini and had once met him personally. That was in 1932 when the Ainsworths’ First State Bank failed and was bought out by the Bank of America.

      Thinking Charlotte was trying to be witty, Katrinka smiled. “Our father?” she asked. “Which aren’t in heaven?”

      Charlotte suddenly needed to take a short nap. She put her head down and rested the skin of her cheek right on the sticky tabletop. Sleep swam up. It was a yawning cavern, black and noisy as a sea cave, where the waves crashed, sucked at her, pulled her outward toward an ocean filled with bodies. By the third day, the sharks could no longer differentiate between the smell of the flesh of the dead and those who were still living. It was then, on the third day, that the sharkbites stopped, though the sharks did still swim among them, bumping up below the life net, gliding in and around benignly among the pale forest of dangling bodies. Flesh changed: puffed, whitened, became soft, then ulcerated. There beneath the surface of the tabletop the ship still lay, her pipes gushing forth fresh water, the shape of the superstructure, both fore and aft, now strung with bright lights, as if rigged out for Christmas.

      “Charlotte!” Katrinka was suddenly screaming. “Are you swacked? Pie-eyed? Then why in hell’s name are you acting as if you are falling-down drunk?”

      Charlotte opened her eyes to the vision of Katrinka’s face, her auburn hair sticking out from the way she’d been yanking at it. This is my mother, Charlotte thought, slightly shocked, as always.

      “I just hate all this holy stuff, Mom,” Charlotte said. “It just isn’t interesting to me.” She hated even the feel of the thin pages of the Bible, hated the way the paper stuck to the damp of her fingertips, how the reek of ink and gilt and piety seemed to come off on the skin of her hands. She had to close her eyes again against the thought of it: the naked man tortured, dangling, his tongue swollen, his dying mouth given vinegar to drink.

      “Well, Missy Miss, I’ll have you know that half of the gals on Ward G-1 who think they’re the Virgin Mary have actually been fucked by their own fathers. I have this on good authority.”

      “Space Radio?” It just slipped out.

      “Actually, it was Doctor DePalma,” Katrinka sniffed. “He was trying to get me to tell on Lionel and Winnie. He always likes me to tell how I am truly feeling, when it is none of his fucky business.”

      “Mom!” Charlotte shouted suddenly. “Mom! Don’t you really think we could just please talk about something else? Don’t you want to know how I’m doing in school, for instance?”

      “How are you doing in school, dear?” Katrinka asked in her own voice, but by ventriloquy. “Just fine, Mom!” she answered herself, in Charlotte’s own high and slightly breathy voice. “I’m getting all A’s, as usual!”

      “Mother!”

      “Well, really, Charlotte. Why is it that you are so self-conscious? Are Lionel and Winnie being mean to you?”

      “Let’s talk about the cars, okay? All right? If cars are following you around in sets of threes, then maybe they’re just trying