Failure To Zigzag. Jane Vandenburgh

“When I need their help, I’ll ask for it.”

      Out the window, moving away out into the blaze of sunlight, Charlotte saw a boy with broad shoulders wearing a woolen Pendleton. Hoods wore these shirts over white T-shirts even on hot days. The only hood in honors English was a boy named Bob Davidson, who spent long minutes staring at the side of Charlotte’s face or brazenly right at her chest. He was smart but he didn’t volunteer in class. He stared but never spoke to her. Even when asking her to dance, he just came up to her, took her hand, led her out onto the dance floor. He didn’t dance like other boys. He held her against him, so she was wrapped in the length of his body. His clothes smelled like smoke. Once when a monitor tapped them for dancing like that, Bob Davidson dropped his arms, turned and abruptly left, abandoning her in the middle of the dance floor. He was very handsome, though he had narrowed, suspicious eyes and his skin was slightly wrecked. Charlotte always liked people better after she figured out what was wrong with them.

      “Talk about psychotic! Katrinka was saying. ”Have you ever listened to a psychiatrist for any length of time? Most of them are Zero Sub Minus, I mean really. They all tend to name their children things like Sasha, have you noticed that? Sasha, Sasha, Sasha, or Sasha. Aside from which DePalma has admitted it.”

      “Admitted what?”

      “That I am his most interesting case. Which is why the ones in cars are wasting all their fifty-minute hours watching me, no doubt.”

      “No doubt,” Charlotte repeated automatically, though she was thinking about something else.

      It was impossible to argue that Katrinka was not being watched since she was, as they both knew full well. Winnie sat in the Nash parked in front of the bank across the street, watching them as they did their visiting, and thinking about her money. She was watching Katrinka to make certain she didn’t spend any of her twenty-seven centses on alcoholic beverages, and she was watching Charlotte to be sure she didn’t squander her allowance on anything “wasteful” or “teenaged.” These categories, in Winnie’s view, tended to include such items as chewing gum, tweezers, U-No bars, makeup, safety razors, and 45-rpm records by Bobby Vee.

      Having been raised by grandparents, Charlotte knew better than to waste her money on foolishness. She was saving her money for her college education, as she would have piped up to tell Art Link-letter had she ever been a guest on “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” That was one of Lionel’s favorite shows. Having been raised by grandparents, Charlotte knew all about thrift. She put every single cent that ever came her way into her account at the bank across the street, all of her allowance, also her lunch money, and the extra dime Lionel gave her every morning and ordered her to spend at Nutrition. She saved her money because she never needed it. In spite of being raised by the Ainsworths, she was still her mother’s daughter. If she needed an item, teenaged or otherwise, Charlotte stole it, really really.

      Charlotte was very good at shoplifting, was never caught, never even suspected. She imagined this had to do with the Ainsworths’ good name in Montrose, where Lionel had been the banker, where he still did the marketing and got his hair cut. Charlotte also dressed like a child who was well brought up. She dressed like the sort of girl Nancy Drew’s example encouraged girls to be, the type who did not chew gum or have pierced ears, who didn’t go to the phone and call people up. The Nancy Drew-type girl first called out: “Oh, fawther! I shawn’t be late!” then hopped into her little red roadster and went off to solve a tidy crime. Charlotte, on the other hand, knew she was the type who was liable to have committed it.

      Charlotte shoplifted on Honolulu Avenue, where the Ainsworths were known, where they had their good name. This was also one of Katrinka’s favorite places to do what Lionel and Winnie called her “acting up”: talking to herself out loud, discussing whether or not the Virgin Mary had awe-ctually been fucked by Gawd, singing Johnny Mercer songs, dancing the hula in the Aloha Room with nameless drunken strangers.

      Charlotte knew most of the merchants she stole from. Even if she didn’t actually know them, they knew her, she imagined. She was recognizable as the Ainsworths’ granddaughter because of the kinds of things they made her wear. Though Glendale High was a public school, they made her dress in what looked like a uniform: black and white saddle oxfords, the same kind Katrinka had worn when she went away to Cal; little white socks with tops that folded down; boxy plaid wool skirts that made a person look big as a house so no boy would ever like her; white blouses with the Peter Pan collars. These blouses were made out of a fabric Winnie revered: polyester blend.

      It was Winnie who insisted on the braids. Hair in the eyes was one of the principal causes of nearsightedness and hair in the food was another of the things liable to make Lionel sick to death. The hair was braided wet, braided ferociously, to last the entire week. Winnie parted it in the center with the jab of her knifelike comb, then plaited it so tightly Charlotte felt her scalp might rip. Her hair was so long and thick, the washing was itself a major chore; it fell to Lionel to accomplish these shampoos. Charlotte’s braids were so long they trundled all the way down her back.

      Other kids in Charlotte’s school who had dead parents or other similar tragedies all wore the same sorts of crappy things. Even if they did dress in a more normal, teenaged way, Charlotte could pick them out by their dour, shadowed, defiant faces, or by the scared look that made their eyes jump, as if they expected to be criticized momentarily. Having no parents, she had decided, was like coming to school every day as an immigrant from a foreign country. It seemed to her that Lionel and Winnie lived in a place called Before the War, a country where the language was English, but words were used in a different way. Even the word “war” meant something different to them: the war they spoke of was the first one, the war of their own youth. In the house on Vista del Mar, where they never had visitors, conversations seemed to be performed as if by rote, the words chiseled in the air as if written in a play that was never done, one that had to be practiced over and over. “Can’t you ever think of anything new to say?” Charlotte frequently wanted to scream at them. Screaming at Lionel and Winnie, however, wasn’t part of Charlotte’s “role,” as Katrinka called it. Katrinka got words like “role” from the group therapy she was “made” to attend when she was at Camarillo.

      Katrinka too repeated herself, always talking about the same damned things. Still, while her concerns remained the same, her version of how various events of their lives had transpired did evolve over time. She liked to tell what she called “my side of the story.” Her side of the story was elaborated with each telling, Charlotte noticed, while Lionel and Winnie’s version simply became more calcified. Katrinka was insane, Charlotte did understand and tried hard to remember. Katrinka had been diagnosed as such and the diagnosis had been frequently confirmed. Still, insane or not, she was easier for Charlotte to talk to than were her grandparents. Crazy as she was, she would never do a thing as mean as dump turpentine all over ironed gym clothes just because a person had said some dumb thing about the Russians after seeing some dumb show on the TV.

      “So how’s you-know-who?” Katrinka asked, referring to Winnie. Katrinka knew Charlotte had been thinking about the Ainsworths because being crazy had made her witchy. Charlotte knew what Katrinka meant because having a mother like that, having spent so much time trying to decipher what she was saying, had made Charlotte slightly witchy too.

      “She bought a pair of pants.”

      “Christ Jesus! Are we going to have to have her committed? What’d he do, burn them?” Lionel had always hated the look of women wearing pants. Once, when Katrinka was at Cal and had been going through a phase of writing for Pelican under the pen-name “Sidney,” she’d come down on the train wearing a jacket shaped like a man’s and a pair of stylish trousers. Lionel had sneaked into her bedroom at night, taken them from her closet, and burned them in the incinerator. Charlotte was herself forbidden from owning any pants aside from the gym shorts, which were required.

      “He was the one who helped her pick them out. They got them at Bullock’s Pasadena.”

      “What is this all about?” Katrinka demanded. “Have they both finally cracked up completely? I promise you that when they do, sweetie, we’re going to have to send them someplace very Oak Knollish, very Chevy