meant something different to them: the war they spoke of was the first one, the war of their own youth. In the house on Vista del Mar, where they never had visitors, conversations seemed to be performed as if by rote, the words chiseled in the air as if written in a play that was never done, one that had to be practiced over and over. “Can’t you ever think of anything new to say?” Charlotte frequently wanted to scream at them. Screaming at Lionel and Winnie, however, wasn’t part of Charlotte’s “role,” as Katrinka called it. Katrinka got words like “role” from the group therapy she was “made” to attend when she was at Camarillo.
Katrinka too repeated herself, always talking about the same damned things. Still, while her concerns remained the same, her version of how various events of their lives had transpired did evolve over time. She liked to tell what she called “my side of the story.” Her side of the story was elaborated with each telling, Charlotte noticed, while Lionel and Winnie’s version simply became more calcified. Katrinka was insane, Charlotte did understand and tried hard to remember. Katrinka had been diagnosed as such and the diagnosis had been frequently confirmed. Still, insane or not, she was easier for Charlotte to talk to than were her grandparents. Crazy as she was, she would never do a thing as mean as dump turpentine all over ironed gym clothes just because a person had said some dumb thing about the Russians after seeing some dumb show on the TV.
“So how’s you-know-who?” Katrinka asked, referring to Winnie. Katrinka knew Charlotte had been thinking about the Ainsworths because being crazy had made her witchy. Charlotte knew what Katrinka meant because having a mother like that, having spent so much time trying to decipher what she was saying, had made Charlotte slightly witchy too.
“She bought a pair of pants.”
“Christ Jesus! Are we going to have to have her committed? What’d he do, burn them?” Lionel had always hated the look of women wearing pants. Once, when Katrinka was at Cal and had been going through a phase of writing for Pelican under the pen-name “Sidney,” she’d come down on the train wearing a jacket shaped like a man’s and a pair of stylish trousers. Lionel had sneaked into her bedroom at night, taken them from her closet, and burned them in the incinerator. Charlotte was herself forbidden from owning any pants aside from the gym shorts, which were required.
“He was the one who helped her pick them out. They got them at Bullock’s Pasadena.”
“What is this all about?” Katrinka demanded. “Have they both finally cracked up completely? I promise you that when they do, sweetie, we’re going to have to send them someplace very Oak Knollish, very Chevy Chase Country Club Without Negroes and/ or Jews. Your grandparents are much too Glendale to tolerate the California-State-Mental-Hospital-at-Camarillo-type institutionalization, awwwwnnnd I do mean really.” Her voice was now low down, confidential.
Charlotte went on. “She thinks the postman tried to see up her skirt when she went down the steps after the mail.”
Katrinka tipped her chin back and nearly laughed. “Now why in the lousy hell would he want to do that?”
Charlotte smiled. “To get a peek at Herbert Hoover?”
Katrinka did then laugh, a short, throaty snort that exploded from behind the press of lips.
Winnie believed the flesh of her knees, when scrunched together with the ring made of a gathering of fingers, held the likeness of Herbert Hoover. She sometimes made Charlotte come look at this sight, just as she’d made Katrinka herself come to witness it when it had been she who was growing up in the house on Vista del Mar. “See?” Winnie had demanded of first one and now the other. Charlotte never saw anything aside from the scrunches of white flesh, but then Charlotte didn’t really know what Herbert Hoover was supposed to look like. Even years later, when she had escaped from that thick time, she still searched any roster of the presidents for the one whose face most resembled Winnie’s pale and dimpled knees.
“How’s Mr. Tweedy?” Katrinka asked. Mr. Tweedy was Lionel’s pet name for himself.
“Fine,” Charlotte said. “The same.”
They both smiled, knowing it was Lionel’s dream to be the same, that every day since the bank failed he had tried to follow the same exemplary routine. He would rise at the same time, shower and shave, eat the same foods for the same meals, chewing with great exactitude, walk the same six miles. He read the same books over and over again, the complete works of Charles Dickens. He read aloud while lying on his back on the davenport. He preferred for Charlotte to listen, but he read out loud whether there was anyone to hear or not. It occurred to Charlotte that her grandfather tried to live the day in the same unvarying way in order to perfect it before he died. Just as he was getting it just the way he liked it, Katrinka would show up—down from the hospital or back from Sugarman’s carnival—and the whole thing would go straight to hell.
“I really do have to go,” Charlotte told her. “She gave me her last silver dollars, though, so let me pay.”
“Oh, gawd!Not her last silver dollars!” Katrinka cried out. Winnie had a huge stash of them, taken in bags from the bank on the day it closed, but she always claimed she had no more left except these last two or three. She had been giving these last two or three to one or the other of them since 1932, saying, “Now, these are my very last silver dollars! Now, I want you to have them on one condition—you are not to tell Lionel! Do you understand me?” She handed them over knotted up in a fancy handkerchief, the bundle tied to look like something that would be carried by a baby hobo.
“These are her very last ones,” Charlotte said. “Really, really.” She smiled at her mother, then bent over her task, that of untying the hard grip of Winnie’s many knots.
“Put that away,” Katrinka said, waving one imperious hand. “I’m the mother around here and this is my treat.” She said this grimly, out of the side of her mouth like a gun moll. She was busy now stacking the coins in a new way: quarters with quarters, dimes with dimes.
“Mom, really!” Charlotte said.
“Really really,” Katrinka retorted, going on then in ventriloquy: “Now, I will be the judge of all this and all that, of who is and is not the mother around here, and of all things Nellie-ish and Tweedyish and all things monetary!” This voice was deep, male, authoritarian. It was Ogamer, Katrinka’s old man character. She hadn’t brought the dummies into the soda fountain that day, but the voices were with her always, except for when she could be persuaded to take her medication.
“All right!” Charlotte said. She did want the dollars, which still looked new. She liked the heft of them and the soft, deep shine that made them seem more valuable than paper dollars. Still, taking money from her mother, who was so poor she sometimes got public assistance, made Charlotte’s skin crawl. Her whole epidermis, including her scalp, seemed to lift, to move. The skin was itself an organ, she knew, the one designed for the specific purpose of differentiation, to keep the self of a person in from the outside world. Was it scientifically possible, she wondered, for a human being to molt like a crab or snake?
“Anyway that Jew bastard Sugarman has given me my job back at his lousy crappy flea circus, so you don’t have to worry about me on the subject of mun-mun.”
“All right!” Charlotte said again, her flesh still crawling. She looked at the underside of either arm, where her skin felt like it was about to break out in hives.
Looking up from this self-appraisal, she noticed her mother’s thin fingers gathering the coins. Katrinka’s money was terrible to look at. It was clotted with some dark gunk into which were stuck the shreds of tobacco that always collected in
