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 with her own lousy chits.
Katrinka’s version of their disasters, that which she called “my side of the story,” varied from the Ainsworths’ in that it concerned the minute event, the way a person always tended to say a particular thing, or the color of the landlady’s wash that was hung out on a particular Wednesday morning. Her version changed according to the vagaries of her memory, but certain points remained immutable. Katrinka had not, for instance, “cracked up” over the boys on stage crew, so Charlotte wasn’t to go by that. Nor had she been driven insane by singing beer-drinking songs with the Pelican staff when she was away at Cal. Instead, she said, she’d always been the way she was, which was this: non compos mentis.
Or more precisely: Katrinka had, she said, always come unglued periodically, ever since she was small, and usually when Lionel and Winnie were themselves having a breakdown over something, or because of the pressure of public scrutiny, as when she’d gone on Ed Sullivan, or when she was a little short of funds. Being broke, Katrinka said, was the single greatest cause of mental illness, that awwwnnd having decided that you’d been you-know-whated-by-your-own-you-know- who, the specific details of which she and Charlotte most certainly would not go into since it was perfectly obvious to Katrinka that this was not something Charlotte could discuss without Charlotte’s cracking up for good.
One part of the story Charlotte was absolutely not to go by was Winnie’s tale of how Katrinka had suddenly “gone crazy” when Joey died. It had had nothing to do with Joey, with her meeting him, their drinking tee minny martoonies, their having artistic, funny-looking friends, their marrying, or their being just alike! as Winnie loved to exclaim. “Or his dying, if that’s, really really, what you think we ought to accept as what his disappearance is intended to signify by awwwlll the powers that be,” Katrinka would say. The powers that be seemed to include nearly everyone, Charlotte noticed, aside from her mother and herself. Joey’s death was one thing about which Katrinka did not remain convinced. She seemed to believe it for awhile, then the conviction would simply erode away. She always spoke of him with such immediacy it did seem that he had just left the room.
“Well,” Charlotte told her one of the times they were discussing this, “it is always hard to adjust to the loss of someone when there isn’t a body to bury.” She listened to the hushed, adult voice of her own self saying this. Whenever she found herself saying a thing like this it was as if another person, someone resting competent hands on Charlotte’s shoulders, was speaking out from above her head.
Her mother sucked her cheeks in, inhaled deeply, sniffed. “Now, where in the hell did you get that tidy little bit of information?” She squinted at Charlotte suspiciously. “Did your father tell you that?”
“Mother!” Charlotte yelled. “I got it out of a book!”
“Well, he was Freudy-Freudy, and that sounds very psychological to me.”
“It is psychological.” She glared at her mother. “But he happens to be dead, remember?” She was always shocked that Katrinka, who wasn’t stupid, had to act so dumb at times. She did it, Charlotte guessed, in order to be
