Test Pattern (15 page)

“Why does Christine Jorgensen in a dress make you sick, when Milton Berle in a dress makes you laugh?”

“Jeezus, what a question.” He heaves himself up from the couch to rummage through the refrigerator. “We outta beer?” he calls from the kitchen.

She hears him clanging milk bottles and cans around in his search. There is beer, but she forgot to refrigerate it and it’s sitting beneath the sink, not his usual Ballantine but Hamm’s.

“I bought some,” she ventures. “I forgot to put it in the Frigidaire.”

“Forgot? What good is warm beer?” he complains. Then, “Where is it?”

“Underneath the sink.”

She hears him open the cabinet, then slam the carton on the counter.

“Hamm’s?” he moans.

“In the land of sky-blue wa-a-ters …” she sings.

“Why Hamm’s?”

“I like the song.”

“I
hate
Hamm’s.” Now he’s in the living room, brandishing a bottle of Hamm’s.

“What’s the difference?” she asks. “It all tastes the same.”

“What do you know? ‘Purity, Body, Flavor.’ The Three Ring Sign.
That’s
why I buy Ballantine. Not for some damn song.”

“You buy other things because of their damn songs.”

He looks puzzled.

“You’ll wonder where the yellow went,” she sings, “when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.”

He’s out the door, bottle in hand. Stands on the porch, staring into the night. Then, “AAArrgh,” he screams, and lets the bottle fly across the court. She hears it pop as it lands, a faint
whhhsht
exploding in the soft May air.

Holy mackerel, what’s he so mad about? The beer? The Commies? Christine Jorgensen? Lately there’s no telling what would light his fuse.

What would Harriet do if Ozzie behaved like that? she asks herself, although she can’t imagine Ozzie ever flinging a beer bottle, especially in front of the neighbors. But if he did, what would Harriet do? Lorena thinks a minute, then decides: She’d probably ask him if he had a bad day.

“Did I have a bad
day?”
Pete explodes, repeating the question. “I’ve had a bad
year,
if you gotta know.”

Lorena stares at him. What’s been wrong with his year?

“My daddy’d never stood for this,” he mutters. “He woulda crushed that little shit ‘fore he opened his mouth one more time.”

“What little … shit?” Lorena winces as she says the word. She can almost feel the ghostly
whap
of the switch her mother wielded when she had said that word decades ago. It had rarely passed her lips since.

“The foreman. My boss,” he adds with a sneer. “Seems I don’t work fast enough for him. Like I can’t outclimb, outweld, outwork anybody with
two
good legs. Anybody’s seen me up there, they know I’m twice as good, twice as fast as any a those twerps that drag ass once they’re outta sight of that little shit.”

“What’d he say to you?”

Pete’s face folds into a childlike pout. “Said … I shouldn’t work up high. Said I wasn’t stable enough up there, what with my leg and all. Said I was a danger up there. A danger!” he shouts, pacing the floor in his uneven gait. “My daddy woulda punched him out if he heard that. Us Palmers been workin’ that shipyard since there was a shipyard. We kept that place alive.”

The Palmers kept the shipyard alive? Lorena is amazed. “How do you mean?” she asks, and is blasted by Pete’s response:
“Because.”

Well, okay. What can she say to that? “Can you transfer to another—”

“No!” He slumps down on the couch. “This is where I’ve always been. This is where I belong.” He shades his eyes with one hand, looks down at the floor. “I shoulda been foreman myself by now.”

Lorena chews at her upper lip with her bottom teeth. She is afraid to say anything more on the subject. So she changes it. “I’m making fried chicken for dinner,” she chirps.

But Pete doesn’t seem to hear. All he says is, “That little shit.”

I
QUIT my dancing lessons. Mom doesn’t know. I limped into class the Thursday after I found out there was a recital and told Miss Fritzi I hurt my leg and wouldn’t be coming anymore. I don’t know if she believed the leg thing. She didn’t look very sorry even though she nodded her head up and down sadly as I was explaining, but I could tell she was trying not to smile. She even gave me money back for the lessons and costume that Mom already paid for.

So now I just trot myself out to the bus stop on Thursday like I’m leaving for my lesson, only I take the bus to Al’s newsstand and read comic books until it’s time to go home. I can’t give Mom the money Miss Fritzi gave back to me because she’ll know I quit, so I use some of it to pay for Cokes and comics and a couple of big dill pickles Al sells at the counter. The rest I’m saving to buy a training bra.

Mom says I’m silly to want one because I don’t have anything to put in a bra, but I feel stupid wearing an undershirt becausethe boys can tell. Molly has a bra with elastic in the back that snaps when the boys pull it. Even though she pretends to get mad, it makes me feel like she’s a grown-up and I’m still a baby.

I need to talk to Mom about some things but it’s like she’s someplace else. She just stares off over my head, or else she’s fooling with makeup or yakking on the phone with Delia. She’s too busy for me now, not like when I was little. Then she’d play games with me, take me to the beach, let me dress up in her high heels and her hat with the veil. We’d make gingerbread men together. And biscuits, my special biscuits where I’d press my hand on top of the dough, and when they were done baking there would be my handprint, all puffy. The last time we did that, my hand had gotten too big and I mashed them flat. We haven’t done it since.

Sometimes I pretend like Molly’s mom is my mom. Mrs. Finkelstein talks to me like I’m a person. Today she comes downstairs while Molly and I are drawing fashion ladies which we do sometimes, dressing them in fancy styles we copy from magazines. My favorite ladies are the snooty ones in the “Modess … because” ads, even though I don’t get what that means. Because what?

Mrs. Finkelstein leans over my shoulder. She smells like summer, grassy and clean, and really looks, not just pretends to look, at my drawing. “You’re quite talented,” she says.

I don’t know what to say, so I say, “I’m not all that good.” And then I think how bad I am at dancing and I confess, “I’m not really good at anything.”

“Don’t be silly,” she says, smoothing my hair with her long fingers. “Everybody’s good at something. The hard part is knowing just what that something is.”

That makes me feel better. Maybe art is what I’m good at. And because Mrs. Finkelstein seems to like what I do, I guess I show off a little. I draw tiny little bows all over the skirt of the lady. I add lace ruffles on the bottom. I put a veil with dots on her hat. For good measure, I add a butterfly.

“How original,” she says, looking at my drawing when I’m finished. “It’s much more creative than Dior’s designs.” She picks it up, studies it some more. “You know,” she says, “it’s one thing to draw well, but quite another to have the imagination to go with it.”

Oh, Mrs. Finkelstein, I want to say, will you be my mother? But I don’t. I don’t wrap my arms around her neck and give her a hug like I want to, even though I know she’d hug me back because she’s always hugging Molly. I don’t tell her I wish I could go home and get my toothbrush and move into her house. I don’t tell her that lots of times when I come over, I pretend that she’s my mom.

I don’t do any of those things. I just say thank you.

When I come home, I pretend Mom is Mrs. Finkelstein. I can talk to Mrs. Finkelstein about things. Things like training bras. “Mom,” I say, “I think it’s time for me to get a training bra.”

“You don’t need one,” she says.

“But—”

“You don’t need it, and that’s the end of that.”

LATELY THE ONLY time Mom pays attention is if I tell her about something I saw on the test pattern. She gets this worried look on her face and asks me Do I feel okay? which makes me feel like some kind of freak. I don’t understand why nobody else sees what I see, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see it. I think if they really tried, they’d see it, too.

Maybe for them it’s like that puzzle where you have to stare hard at a drawing of a forest before you can see all the hidden animals. And then when you do see them, you wonder why they didn’t just pop out at you in the first place because they were really there all along.

I don’t talk so much about the things I see anymore because Mom and Dad don’t want to hear it. They’re too busy picking at each other about stupid stuff like the biscuits are burned or there’snever any beer in the house or Mom’s spending too much at Maybelle’s. They always fight during dinner, and I always get a stomachache.

One night they were fighting about something and I started crying right at the table, just sat there with my nose and eyes all drippy. They didn’t even notice until I started going huh-huh-huh, like I do sometimes when I cry. Then Dad leaned over and made his silly clown face—that cross-eyed wagging-tongue face that made me laugh when I was little. I didn’t think it was so funny this time, but when he did it again, he looked so goofy that I made the silly face back. We started to giggle and Mom left the room, so Dad and I went to watch TV. He let me snuggle next to him. But later I heard him and Mom fighting again when they thought I was asleep.

There was this family on test pattern TV the other day where the mother was fat and loud and messy and her kids yelled at her and said things that I would get smacked for, but in the end they all listened to each other and it was okay. It was the best show because it was more real than Ozzie and Harriet, whose kids aren’t like any kids I know.

I bet if I lived with the fat lady I could tell her I hated dancing lessons and didn’t want to go anymore and she’d listen to me. The other night, Dad was grumbling about how bad work was and how he should quit, and I came this close to telling him that I had quit. But when I started out, “Hey, Dad, guess what?” he gave me this sad droopy look and I just couldn’t tell him the truth.

Sometimes I don’t even know what the truth is. I used to think that everything on TV was true. Well, not everything. I know some shows are fake and the people are just acting. I don’t even think that wrestling is real, although Dad says it is. But are Ozzie and Harriet and Ricky and David a real family when they’re not on TV? Do they get together in their real house and paint by numbers like they do in the Picture Craft ad? Or are they just pretending?

I don’t even believe anymore that what I see on the news istrue, stuff like the Russians are bad and want to drop the bomb on us. I believed that until I saw on test-pattern TV that the Russians are really our friends, and we’re even sharing a spaceship together. When I told this to Mom, she just rolled her eyes and said, “Would you keep your wild imagination to yourself? You want people to call you a Commie?” Now I don’t know what to believe.

They say the Korean War is over, that we’re in a cold war now, whatever that means. But I see all kinds of hot-war stuff on test-pattern TV, battles in places I’ve never heard of. You can tell the difference between real war and the pretend war you see in the movies. Real war is scarier. In the war stuff I see on the test pattern, people get hurt and killed right in front of you, sometimes in black-and-white, sometimes in color. There was one battle that was all green, bombs exploding and everything. That one looked pretty neat.

Maybe what I see on the test pattern isn’t real either. Maybe it’s all just magic, a trick like a dance I’ve seen this guy do—he’s sort of colored and sort of not—where it looks like he’s going forward when he’s really sliding backward. Mom caught me doing that step while I sang along with him to this funny song that went “Beat it, beat it.” I couldn’t tell if she was mad or not, just had this strange look on her face when I tried to tell her about the guy dancing on the test pattern. She didn’t believe me, so I just let her believe what she wants to believe—that I made up the dance myself.

The worst part is, she wants me to teach her that step. When I see her practicing in front of the mirror, it makes me wonder if I got the wrong mother by mistake.

L
ORENA STARES UP from her bed at the patch of light thrown onto the ceiling from the porch light. You’d think it would have made a permanent imprint by now, night after night, the ragged patch of light that glows just above her head. It always surprises her in the morning that the patch is gone, that the rough-plastered ceiling is clean except for smoky wisps of cobwebs that cling in the corners like leftover dreams.

She can’t sleep, can’t stop thinking about Pete’s reaction when she showed him her costume. It’s keeping her up, stirring her anger, feeding the flame of ambition that’s been smoldering in her gut. There she was, sharing her dream with him, how she wanted to try out for
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,
and all he had to say was “You’re nuts.” Well, she’ll show him, she thinks, and then she remembers what else he said: “You’re as crazy as your aunt Lula.”

Aunt Lula. Now Lula’s on her mind again. And Cassie. Could Cassie be crazy like Lula? Lorena pictures Cassie dancing in frontof the test pattern. Singing along as if there were something there. That step—Lorena had never seen anything like it, backward and forward at the same time. Maybe Cassie had inherited Lorena’s talent, but she also may have gotten Lula’s nuttiness.

That thought makes her spring wide-awake. She looks over at Pete. He’s making preliminary snurfing sounds that will inevitably accelerate until they erupt into a gut-rattling snore. “Pete,” she says, and gives him a nudge.

“Wha?” he mumbles, turns, and settles into a fetal position.

“Cassie watches the test pattern,” she says.

“Rrrmf.”

“She stares at it for hours. I think something might be wrong with her.” She nudges his back between the shoulder blades. They curl forward and he burrows farther into the blankets. “Are you listening?”

“Testpat,” he murmurs. “Cass watches.”