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