“But if they went out in sets of twos, it wouldn’t be so noticeable, if you think about it. Why would they want to be so noticeable, Mom? If they went out in sets of one, you probably wouldn’t notice them at all.”
Katrinka put the cigarette out with a hiss in the puddle that had formed beneath the sweating goblet. “That, sweetie, is just my point,” she said, taking another cigarette out of the pack. “They want me to notice them, obviously. They want me to notice them and to fall in love with them.” She lit the cigarette, then squinted at Charlotte through the smoke. “But,” she exhaled, “I prefer not to get involved.”
Charlotte was frowning hard, moving the straw through the root beer scum. Why was it, she wondered, that good things to eat always turned so quickly to garbage?
“Why are you acting so tragic?” Katrinka asked.
“It just doesn’t make sense.”
“All right then, Charlotte. Forget it. Forget I mentioned it.” She snapped open her pocketbook and began digging out coins, holding each one to the window as if trying to see through it to the light. “And please remind me never to discuss anything with you ever again.”
“Mom!”
“Well, really!” Katrinka was still poised with one eye squeezed shut. “What is it that you want me to tell you? That the psychiatrists of the state of California are following me in cars in sets of threes because they’re trying to drive me crazy? Do you realize, Charlotte, that every other mental patient on Ward G-1 in the state hospital at Camarillo thinks the doctors are conspiring to drive her crazy?”
“But not you, right?” Charlotte asked.
Katrinka tipped her chin up. “I am,” she announced, “much more original than that.” She sucked her cheeks in and pressed her lips together elegantly
Charlotte was frowning hard. “You say the one in the silver T-bird is Dr. Maudlin?” “Maudlin” was what Katrinka called one of the several psychiatrists she’d been made to go see; it wasn’t his real name. Dr. Maudlin was the one with the office on Wilshire Boulevard: if he really was following Katrinka around in his silver T-bird, which Charlotte did not for one instant believe, then there might conceivably be some sort of sound psychiatric reason for it.
“One half, sweetie, thinks the doctors are trying to drive her crazy,” Katrinka was going on, humorously. “Awwwwnnnd the other half thinks she’s the Virgin Mary.”
“But not you?” Charlotte asked again. In spite of herself, in spite of what she knew about her mother, she was holding her breath.
Katrinka smirked. “No one in our family goes in for any of that Jesus-and-Mary sort of crap, really really. All that is for Avenue B sorts of types. Remember the Crustanzos, Charlotte? Big she, little he? Talk about the body and blood.”
Charlotte squinted. She did remember Tony and Sylvia, next door down the hill on Avenue B in Redondo Beach, but she didn’t get the joke.
“Your grandfather may have once attended the Church of the Lighted Window, but it was only to place the muscles of his brain under the bi-homosexual spell of the Congregationalist minister with the finest speaking voice, and not because Lionel believes in G.A.W.D. If your grandfather believed in God, Charlotte, he would go around acting a lot less shitty, believe me. Is he being shitty to you these days?” she asked pointedly.
Charlotte dropped her eyes and automatically stopped listening. Conversations in her family had a way of always being the same. Her grandparents, and her mother too, all spent their days talking out into the same thick time, a time in which an act, particularly that of speaking, was never really done, never completed, but always seemed to hang suspended in the time that was yet to be. Charlotte experienced time differently, still believing in its ability to go forward, to progress. Time was different for her, she felt, because she’d been born after Einstein, who had changed time around. It was after Einstein, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that time had started to expand, to speed up, and the particles of matter had begun to fly from the center out and ever out.
She was going to shake her head when she realized that Katrinka had gone right on, as if she had herself already forgotten the question. “Awwwwnnnd all Winnie believes in is California land values, the Auto Club, and the man in the lousy attic.” “The man in the attic” is what Charlotte’s grandmother called whatever made a house creak and groan as it settled on its foundation. Which is really gravity, Charlotte reminded herself. She loved the reasonable way science had of sculpting cool words, ones that were exact, remote and shapely. It was the vocabulary of science, she found, that had the ability to cup itself around whole great chunks of chaos.
“Now I believe in truth,” Katrinka said, pronouncing it “Awe-I.” She looked up at Charlotte from the piles of coins she had assembled along the edge of the table. Each pile held pennies, nickels, dimes, or quarters, stacked in combinations to make twenty-seven cents. “Or aren’t you interested in the truth these days?”
“Sure,” Charlotte said, “but I have to go.”
“You don’t believe in Space Radio?” Katrinka asked her. Her whole face was lit up, humorous.
“It’s just that I have a French test to study for, and a bunch of other junk that I have to do.” Space Radio was what Katrinka, since Sputnik, was calling her voices. Katrinka liked to call the voices “Space Radio” because she thought it was funnier than the phrase for what they really were: “auditory hallucinations.” And it probably was funnier, Charlotte realized, though she still preferred the latter.
“Go ahead then—be shitty about it.” Katrinka snapped her pocketbook shut and peered down over her piles. “Be just like your grandparents.”
“It isn’t that, Mom! It’s that I really have to go.”
“Go, then, if you really have to.” Katrinka looked out the window, her gray-green eyes no longer interested.
“I guess I can stay ten minutes.”
“Lucky me,” Katrinka said, but she did look back and her smile was small, real, triumphant.
They watched each other appraisingly. Katrinka wouldn’t bring up Space Radio again, Charlotte guessed. Instead, she would pick something else that was equally sickening. “Awwwwnnd it’s a good thing, too, that I’m not the Virgin Mary, when you think of what happened to her poor bastard.” Charlotte looked at her perfectly levelly, saying nothing. Katrinka didn’t need to talk about Space Radio—she was back on religion, which, to Katrinka, was the same damned thing.
Katrinka smirked, then announced: “They tacked her poor bastard up!” She sucked her cheeks in and arched one regal eyebrow.
“Mom?” Charlotte asked. “Mom? Could you do me one small favor and keep your voice down?”
“Why should I?” Katrinka asked. “Have you ever known me to keep my voice down in the past? Then why should I start now? Awwwnnd just why is it that you want me to keep my voice down? Because I’m claiming not to be the Holy Mother of Gawd in the soda fountain of a pharmacy on Honolulu Avenue? Do you want me to think I’m the Virgin Mary, Charlotte? Would that seem more normal to you? That would make us Jewish, you realize? Don’t you think we have quite enough problems with persecution all on our very own without adding all that to it?”
“It’s that people’s feelings get hurt when you make fun of their religion,” Charlotte reminded her.
“Oh, I don’t go by that. All my best friends are either Jewish or Catholic and they’re always the first to agree they’re much too sensitive to criticism. Anyway, sweetieheart, there isn’t a damned soul in this dump aside from you and me, so exactly whose feelings is it that I’m supposed to be hurting? Unless you think we are so very interesting these