Outside, within the wired glass dome of the porch light next to Lionel’s study door, a fat moth was dying, as the men in the water had died, slowly, over time. Each of the awful sounds the moth made was amplified by the hollow shape of the dome. She heard the thud of the body as it flung itself against the heat—the bumping made the moth sound huge, at least fist-sized. She heard, too, the airy flutter of the dusty wings being ripped apart on the wires. To escape, it needed to fly up past the white and mesmerizing glow of the bulb and out into the cool soft dark, but it never would. This was one of the things she, born to a dead father, had always known: that death, like life, did also exert its own sure pull. She heard the moth fall heavily against the hot glass, heard too the nothing of its waiting.
Charlotte waited too, hoping it was dead at last, but then the thumping started. She wanted it to quit, to die, DIE! to burn up, sizzle, expire! Death she could live with: she had seen the face of it on the brick mason lying on his back on a lawn on Montecito one morning on her way to school. Death she could stand, but not this other—the moth, the man on the cross, the ones in the water, her mother out there in the dark being drawn ever back toward the shock that lit up every cell of her brain. In electroshock all the synapses were caused to shoot off at once. Then there was the rest to fall back into, the velvety darkness, the clean slate.
The mason had lain on a bright green lawn within a swirl of leaves. The sky was low, gray, darkening. The press of clouds enlivened the hues of earth: the fallen leaves were peach-colored, golden, scarlet, russet. She’d stood on the sidewalk and had looked at him: he looked as if he’d been pitched from sleep into a more terrible dream. He had died, they’d thought, of a heart attack but he looked rammed, bashed, his arms flung up and out, his mouth agape. Someone came forward and used the mason’s own dropcloth to cover him. The canvas was smudged with marks of dirty red. Still, the body showed from under it, the feet splayed wide apart, the hollow of each boot, between toe and heel, clotted with whitening clay. It was to hide his shame, Charlotte felt, at being caught dead like that, that they’d covered up his face.
It was torture to think that Katrinka was not safe. She was never safe, not on Ward G-1, where her brain was showered with the waves of sudden light, not here on Vista del Mar sleeping in the other twin in this very same room with Charlotte. Try as they might Charlotte and her mother couldn’t keep one another safe from the other two, those two, the ones calling from room to room.
She pulled the pillow over her head and tried to imagine something her heart might bear. She thought of Bob Davidson, of the smoky smell of his Pendleton, of the way he held her to him on the dance floor. They rocked in one place, as if dazed, stupefied. She was wrapped in the heat of him, in the smell of cigarettes, her face pressed to the scratchiness of the wool. She thought of his thin and cynical lips, of his narrowed eyes, of the way he watched in class but would not volunteer. He was not like Charlotte, who said, always said, who was forever speaking out, just as her mother did, each one talking as if to save her very life. Lionel had already warned her about boys like Bob Davidson, hoods, having pointed out a low rider once from the Nash. “That, Charlotte, is a bean-oh. Now under no circumstances are you ever to associate with a boy of that type.”
“You mean ‘beaner,’” Charlotte corrected him. His right ear though was currently his deafer ear, so Lionel no longer heard anything over the motor’s roar.
She thought of sneaking out her open window, of riding up the fire trail in Bob Davidson’s car, of throwing beer cans from the switchbacks down onto the wooden shakes of her grandparents’ house in a wide and sparkling arc. The colors of the cans—red, silver, golden—would explode out of the night like embers popping out of a brushfire. Whenever there were fires in the hills, whether along their own crest or way over in Bel Air, Lionel sat on the peak of the roof wetting the shakes with the garden hose, just to be sure. She was thinking of Bob Davidson, of his hard thin lips, of what it would take to get inside a mouth like that, of the way his weight might feel lying atop her on the new tuck’n’roll, when she heard the real weight of her grandfather moving along the creaking floorboards past the telephone desk in the central hall. That was the house at dead center. That was where, during the next hundred years or so, the house would finally implode, if she or her mother had not yet set it on fire.
Though his only daughter was lost in the dark, Lionel came along now on his stiff legs, laughing to himself over the feat of Frank Howard. He was chuckling, literally going: “Ho, ho, ho.” Charlotte could see him striding up to Frank Howard, one large fine man approaching another, extending the fingers of his fine, long-boned hand.
Charlotte heard him go into the bathroom, heard the water hitting water through the door, which had not been definitively closed. She thought of the shape of Lionel’s fingers, of those long fingers holding the shape of his large man’s penis, of the weight of his balls dangling in their sacks. She thought of each of her grandparents quite diagnostically, as under the fluoroscope, seeing the pale masses of their various malignancies and the large and throbbing shadows of each of their still quite vital glands.
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