“How dare you be impertinent to me?” Winnie cried out. “Speaking to me of vegeburgers! Are you trying to be funny at my expense? That’s one of your mother’s tricks, you realize? Lionel, will you speak to her? Will you remind Charlotte that she is to attempt to act normally? Will you also remind her that I am not a well woman?”
“Your grandmother is not a well woman,” Lionel said.
Charlotte lowered her face, biting hard at her lips and cheeks, trying to hide what probably showed anyway, that she did think there was something deeply funny in it, not only in the very sound of the word “vegeburgers” but in the way Lionel did so sternly intone on cue: “Your grandmother is not a well woman!”
“Look at her!” Winnie cried out. “She’s beginning to look more like her mother with every passing day!” Winnie hated to be reminded not to worry. She needed to worry. She imbued the act of worrying with the power of prayer. It was only her worrying about a thing ahead of time that kept it from happening. The trouble with Katrinka was that she was always working herself up into some new and unforeseeable calamity. Now, how, when Winnie was a girl at Saint Helen’s Academy, was she ever supposed to have imagined herself old and unwell? And with the burden of a child to raise, and the daughter, too, still to care for, a daughter who would not take her medication, would not get better, who was not only alcoholic but schizophrenic and who was bound and determined to act up in the most public way imaginable, in roadshows and on network television, before Ed Sullivan’s home audience of millions!
But it was Charlotte Winnie was really worried about these days, because she was showing the same signs: the poor posture, the smirking and other facial antics, and the boys! Why, boys were calling on the phone, then falling silent when Winnie answered. It was at just this age, when Katrinka had grown her bosoms, that she had begun to show the interest in boys. They should have sent her away right then to boarding school as Winnie’s own mother and stepfather had done. If Lionel and Winnie had, she might not have ever started smoking and become so very involved in stage crew!
Boys were driving by the house now with their windows rolled down, their radios blaring, all in their souped-up cars! Why, they were going by to race up the fire trails, to park, to neck, to drink beer and to throw down their trash! This was all for Charlotte’s benefit. Teenagers, Winnie had observed, were like animals when it came to sex: they were drawn to it wheresoever they could smell it.
When Winnie had said “bosoms,” Charlotte had mentally gone off somewhere else, so by the time the words “smell it” came along, she was nowhere at all around. She was, by then, in the laboratory, observing very clinically within the pink and neatly boxed shape of her grandmother’s large intestine the whitish mass of an inoperable malignancy. Charlotte saw it vividly, as if in a kind of technicolored X-ray, with the parts all lit up, moving and pulsing in just the way the bones of her own living feet had been demonstrated to her to be, once when she’d wiggled her toes to check the fit under the shoe-store’s fluoroscope.
With Winnie now dying, and now finally dead, Charlotte could lift her face at last, imagining how it would be to ride with boys in cars. Her long hair was loose and flying. The air was perfumed with vinyl from the brand-new tuck’n’roll, fragrant too with sage and the stink of distant skunk, and of boys’ sweat and hair goop and of lint and the other things they kept buried deep in their woolen pockets. Their breath was hot and sweet, heavy with the taste of beer. She had a book now, a paperback, called The Amboy Dukes. It was about boys in gangs. It had rape in it.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that kind of junk with me, Winnie,” she told her grandmother, automatically. She said this out loud, to make a joke of all of it. “Nobody ever calls me up anyway, you know. And even if somebody did call me up it wouldn’t be anybody to ask me out to ride on fire trails, but would just be some dumb crud a year or two younger than me with arms about this big around calling me up to tell me I’m flat as a board.” She was holding up a zero, the circle made of one forefinger, one thumb, intended to demonstrate the circumference of this crud-type boy’s upper arm, when Winnie let out a banshee shriek.
“Younger than me!” Winnie screamed. “Crud!” she asked, turning toward Lionel, with her face contorted. “Flat as a board!” Wasn’t this just the type of talk Katrinka had so frequently resorted to after stage crew, the type of talk Winnie had no intention of tolerating? Why just last week Charlotte had allowed another child in the high school to write on her blue canvas binder: “Flunk now—avoid the June rush!” “Flunk!” Winnie was screaming blindly, out toward the treetops, “as everyone knows full well is just one more way of saying that other word, the one her mother has always been so fond of, the one which is the most vile word in the entire English language!”
“You mean fuck,” Charlotte enunciated mentally.
Why boarding school was the only place for girls like this, girls with bosoms! who spoke in such a slovenly way! who by their scent alone could draw boys up and onto the fire trails!
“Driving by in sets of threes?” Charlotte asked her mother, talking to Katrinka who was not there, via Space Radio, via E.S.P. Charlotte closed her eyes, concentrated, saw Katrinka there in the mists. Katrinka smiled and tipped her chin up, whispering back: “Threes,” she agreed. She inhaled deeply on her cigarette.
It was to the Marlborough School in Los Angeles that the daughters of many important people went, Winnie was saying. Why, Walt Disney had himself sent his daughter Diane there! Charlotte, opening her eyes, saw that her grandfather was intrigued. He was not eating just then, still he smacked his lips and moved his mouth around, as if practicing for the next day’s mush. Yes, indeedy! he was saying. Why, Walt and Diane Disney—Oh, to shake such a fine man’s hand! Why, Walt and Lionel might take long walks together up Big Tujunga Canyon, remarking on the depth of the water table, on the state of the Auto Club, on Annette Funicello. He chuckled to himself, congratulating Walt on Disneyland. Why, Lionel and Walt might sit together on the Marlborough School Board of Trustees!
He was of the opinion that Charlotte might attend the Marlborough School but he saw no need for her to go there as a boarder. The school was just downtown, a short ride on the freeway, just the way he and Charlotte always drove when they went off to take Winnie’s paintings to the framemaker. He would drive her, then pick her up. He moved his lips around the deliciousness of it: he was busy adding bumping into Walt to the sum of his perfect day.
Charlotte and Winnie watched him, each from under the shadow of her brow. Each was silenced by the sight of her own doomed future flying toward her through the Nash’s windshield. Winnie wanted this teenagedness gone from her house, not brought back home every night by freeway—she wanted it stuck off and away in boarding school where it rightfully belonged! Charlotte, on the other hand, knew that Lionel, with his rapidly dimming vision, could no longer safely drive the car.
By acting up so publicly, Katrinka had always made certain there was never anything hidden about her mental illness. It was Charlotte’s father, the war hero, who was not to be discussed, though he seemed to have died in such a normal, though drastic, way. Lionel wouldn’t speak his name, nor suffer himself to hear it.
Lionel liked to sit like the sphinx in his red leather banker’s chair at certain prescribed times throughout the day, with an arm on either armrest and his mouth shaped into a hard circle, breathing slowly in, then slowly out. If, as he sat cooling down after his six-mile walk, the name was casually mentioned, he would rise angrily and stride stiff-legged down the hall to the back of the house, with the sweaty shapes of upper legs, twin buttocks, and lower back all left there, clinging, shining and indignant, to mark the wreckage of the day.
It was Winnie who told Charlotte privately what there was to tell, that the Indianapolis was Joe, Jr.’s, first assignment, that the ship went down in the deepest waters in the world, that because