Test Pattern (20 page)

“Much better,” he sighs. She sees his wet clothes hung to dry over the shower-curtain rod.

She hands him a Welch’s jelly glass half-full of Scotch. Pete doesn’t drink Scotch. He’ll never miss it. “This okay?”

“Perfect.” He takes a noisy gulp. “Aaaah.” He leans back into the couch, wiggles his bare furry toes. Lorena perches on the edge of a chair, one foot tapping nervously.

Max studies Howdy Doody’s embossed face on the jelly glass, thrown into contrast against the amber fluid he swirls in a slow circle. Takes another swig. “Cassie has a wonderful imagination,” he begins.

Lorena nods.

“Sometimes when she describes things she’s made up, it’s almost as if they’re real.” Max squints at Howdy’s face, doesn’tlook at Lorena. “Like those shows she says she sees on the test pattern.”

“Oh, those.” She rolls her eyes.

“You don’t think she really sees them.”

“Do you?” She gives him an incredulous look.

“Remember the things I told you she saw—that Ronald Reagan was the president and that she knew about the new integration law before it happened—those things that made me wonder?”

“Not me. They didn’t make me wonder.” She doesn’t mention wondering whether Cassie’s delusions were related to Lula’s craziness.

Max takes another sip of Scotch. “She told me something that made my hair stand up like a cat with its tail in a socket, something about an artist I met years ago. He was, you might say, strange. Strange-looking, strange acting, such a meshuggener that I never forgot his name. Warhol. Andy Warhol.”

Lorena shrugs. “Never heard of him.”

“Well, Cassie said she saw on her test-pattern show that some woman shot him in the stomach. She remembered his name because of what happened to him: War. Hole. I don’t know where else she would have heard of him. Nobody even knows the guy. I wasn’t impressed with his work, it was mostly ads—shoes and things. But, according to Cassie, he’s famous.
Really
famous. The thing is, Cassie is the only person who seems to know this.”

“Yeah,” Lorena says with a slow nod. “Cassie’s always pretending to know stuff no one else knows. I think she reads too much.”

“Well,” says Max after a contemplative moment. He closes the robe over dough-lump knees. “That’s not what I came here to talk about.” He clears his throat. “Now, we know Cassie does tend to make things up.”

“Um-hmm.”

“This morning I overheard her tell Molly something so … bizarre, that I think you might need to talk to her about it.”

“Bizarre?” Lorena’s mouth feels dry. She could use a swig of Scotch herself.

“I think that might describe it.” Max studies Howdy a bit more. “I won’t trouble you with the details, but Cassie’s tale involved you, your mailman, black stockings, and a tap-dance routine.”

“Ha, ha. That Cassie.” Her grin feels taped on.

“I know. It’s embarrassing for me to tell you about this, but I thought you might want to know. After all, it’s not a story you’d want her to tell the world.”

Lorena’s body goes limp as a noodle. “Nope,” is all she can say.

“Well, you know kids,” Max continues with an uncomfortable chuckle. “They like to impress their friends in funny ways.” He reaches over and pats Lorena on the arm. “Don’t take it like that, now. It’s nothing that a little mother-daughter chat won’t take care of.”

She snaps her head up at the rattle of a key in the lock. The door flies open with a blast of wind and rain and Pete is standing there, a stunned look on his face.

“You’re home early,” Lorena blurts.

Pete is soaked through. He looks like he’s been held underwater. Hair plastered down, work shirt sagging with wetness, pants flapping heavily against his legs. His metal-toed boots squish as he stalks inside and points his finger at Max. “What is
he
doing here?” Then, “Is that my bathrobe?”

Max leaps to his feet, clutches the robe against his bareness. Holds a palm out, pacifying. “Got caught in this rain on my way here. Just wanted to stop by to talk to Lorena about Cassie.” He manages a chuckle. “Looked like you by the time I got here, dripping like a faucet. Lorena let me dry off.”

“Hah!” spats Pete. He slams his lunch bucket against the wall, then lunges at Max, fists clenched and trembling. “Caught you!” he yells as Max backpedals, trips over a chair, then plops ingloriously on his ample bottom. His legs fly into the air, exposingfrayed white underwear which he had modestly left on despite its sogginess.

“Stop!” Lorena screams. She is terrified, not just that Pete will pummel Max, but that Max will defend his presence by revealing Cassie’s story.
“Stop,”
she screams again, as much to Max as to Pete. She wedges herself between them, enabling Max to gather himself, scramble up the stairs, and lock himself in the bathroom.

“I knew it.” Pete throws himself on the couch. Spies the jelly glass, picks it up, sniffs it. “Scotch! My good White Horse scotch! Drinking my liquor! In my bathrobe! With my wife! In my house!” He leaps up off the couch, leaves a large wet oval on the velvet cushion. “I knew you and that… that
Commie
were up to something.” He heads for the stairs but Lorena blocks his way.

“Leave Max alone,” she pleads. “It’s not the way it looks.” She can’t tell him anything more, not without telling him too much, so she stretches Max’s story. “He wanted to talk about Cassie, about those things she says she sees on TV. And he got wet, walking here in the rain, so I told him to dry off and I gave him a robe and some Scotch to get warm.” That part was true, and its truth gives her the righteousness to go on the offense. “And what are you doing home so early? Don’t tell me you did something stupid like quit!”

Pete’s eyes narrow and focus on Lorena for the first time. His rage subsides, slides into contempt. “No. Not yet. I just left. Walked out.” He runs square fingers through his thick black hair, tears off his shirt without bothering with the buttons, stands there with his pants riding low on his hips, bare skin glistening, slick with rain. Lorena gets a flash: Clark Gable.

Why, Pete looks like—like Clark
Gable,
all wet like that. Lorena is confused, flushed with heat. It’s the same feeling that overwhelmed her the first time she met him, when she was working at the shipyard and he walked in—that same dissolving sensation between her belly button and her knees. Only now it’s compounded by this magnificent fury. She’s never seen him like this, never seen so many layers of anger in him before, never seen hisjealousy acted out this way. His moods have never manifested themselves in violence or passion. This is … well,
romantic,
this sudden jealous rage.

“What happened?” She has an urge to touch him, a compulsion she quells like the impulse to touch a coiled snake, sleek, dangerous. He seems to sense this need, turns to face her, slips his hands beneath the waistband of his pants. She can almost feel the tender skin he’s touching with his fingers.

“What do you care?” he says with a sneer. “You don’t have to go to work. You don’t have to climb all over that gantry in the rain, wondering if this time your leg’s going to give out under you and you’ll wind up an inkblot on the cement ten stories below. You don’t have to take abuse from some asshole who has the job you should have had.”

“Well, why don’t you go to his boss—”

“All’s you got to do all day is nothing but sit around, go to the movies with that tarty Delia, sneak around behind my back with that damn Commie.” Having reminded himself of Max, he strides up the stairs two at a time and bangs on the bathroom door. “Come on outta there, you Commie bastard,” he yells, beating a tattoo on the door until Max, fully dressed in his wet clothes, opens it and steps out with as much dignity as he can muster.

“I realize what this looks like,” Max says, “but you’re wrong. I’m not going to stand here and apologize for something I haven’t done.” Sweeping his big hand like a paw to clear his way, he marches down the stairs and out into the rain.

Pete glares at Lorena after he hears the door shut. “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

Scarlett O’Hara. That, Lorena thinks, is who she could be right at this moment, a moment of sudden guilt and sorrowful repentance. Although Pete’s jealousy is aimed in the wrong direction, his wrath has given her pause, made her fearful of the consequences if her true deception is ever discovered.

For if Binky has truly ridden off into the sunset, all she’s got is

Pete. And if he abandons her, too, whatever will she do? She pictures him cocking a Clark Gable eyebrow. “Frankly, my dear,” he will say before turning his back on her forever, “I don’t give a damn.”

She shivers with the drama of it all. Her life has taken such strange twists and turns. It’s just like in the movies.

T
ODAY WHEN I’M playing at Molly’s, Mr. Finkelstein goes out, doesn’t say where, just says For a walk. It starts raining like crazy but he doesn’t come home for a long time until we hear him slam the door and he’s inside, all dripping wet and mad about something. And when Mom calls for me to come home to dinner, he makes me go even though I tell him I don’t want to.

As I’m walking out the door, Mr. Finkelstein looks at me kind of strange and asks, “How do you know what’s real and what’s not?”

“If it’s real, it’s on the outside,” I say, “and if it’s not, it’s in my head.”

“Where are the shows you see on the test pattern?”

“Outside.”

“Like my paintings?”

I have to think about that. “No,” I decide. “Your paintings and start inside your head and then you bring them out. The shows I see are already there.”

And then he nods. He knows what I mean.

Molly doesn’t pay much attention when her dad and I talk. She still doesn’t believe I see shows on the test pattern but she did pay attention this morning when I told her about Mom and the mailman. I had to tell somebody. It was like this great big balloon blowing up inside of me, and I felt like I was going to explode if I couldn’t talk about it.

Molly said that they were probably doing sex. I told her about the dancing part, that maybe Mom really was just showing the mailman her routine because she’s always practicing like she’s going to go on TV or something. But Molly said I was crazy, of course they were doing sex if she was wearing those see-through pants and no top.

I don’t even want to think about it. But I do, I think about what it would have been like to actually see them do It. I don’t even know how that works, him inside her, all that. Maybe they haven’t done It yet, maybe it’ll never happen. Maybe she really was dancing.

MOM AND DAD don’t say one word at dinner, don’t even look at each other. Mom scoops out this pie thing she made, all pasty with leftover Spam lumps in it, and plops it on Dad’s plate. He hardly eats it, just moves it around with his fork. The biscuits are flat and hard as checkers.

Mom is crying in the bathroom after dinner and Dad is outside looking at the stars. When he comes in after I’ve gone to bed, they argue in their bedroom where they think I can’t hear but I do, lying in my bed, pretending to be asleep. At first I think they’re fighting because of the mailman but that’s not it. They’re arguing about Mr. Finkelstein.

What is there to fight about? I like Mr. Finkelstein. Sometimes he plays Monopoly and Sorry with Molly and me. He always loses, maybe because he’s so busy talking. He tells stories about artists that died a long time ago like Vango who was poor and nobody appreciated him so he cut off his ear and now he’s dead and doesn’t even know he’s famous.

Mr. Finkelstein listens to my stories, too, the ones I see on test-pattern TV. He’s the only person who believes me even though when I tried to turn on my show for him the other day, it was like when I tried to show Molly. He couldn’t see anything either.

But he doesn’t think I make it all up like Mom and Dad do. Mr. Finkelstein asks me questions and wants to know what I think about things. Nobody else really cares what I think. Sometimes when I tell him stuff, he purses up his very red lips, smooths down his beard with his thumb, nods his head, and goes, “Hmmmm,” like he understands.

He wants to know more about that famous artist that got shot but not killed, Andy Warhol. What do his paintings look like? he wants to know. I tell him about the paintings they showed on test-pattern TV, grocery-store things like Campbell’s soup and Brillo. And what does
he
look like? asks Mr. Finkelstein. I said he’s funny-looking, real white skin and glasses. Mr. Finkelstein nods his head and says, “So he’s really famous, eh? Who would have guessed it?”

And he doesn’t say I made it up when I tell him about the polio vaccination that you can eat. He says, “Well, I read about this new vaccine that was just developed, but it’s a shot, not a snack.”

“No, no,” I say. “They put it on a sugar cube, and you just suck on it.”

He gives me a look, pets his beard, and smiles. “Whatever you say,” he says, but I’m not sure he believes me about that.

I don’t care whether it’s a shot or a sugar cube. I just want that vaccination so I don’t wind up like Edgar, who lives over in thenext court. He got polio and he’s in an iron lung that breathes for him. All day long, he just lies there in this big metal tube. When Mom and I go to visit him all I can see is his little shriveled monkey face in the mirror overhead.

“See what happens when you swim in the water?” Mom says when we leave. “Now Edgar will always have to look at the world upside down and backward.”

That’s how I feel, like the world has turned upside down and backward. Mom and the mailman, Dad and work, the stuff on test-pattern TV—all whirling around me like the cyclone that picked up Dorothy’s house and took her to Oz. In the end she woke up and everything was the way it used to be. I wish that would happen to me.

WITH MOM AND Dad fighting like they are, it’s scary to be around them. It makes me think about this show I just saw on the test pattern, a courtroom show where this colored guy killed his wife and another man only he says he didn’t do it. She was a white lady so I don’t know if they were really married or not because I don’t think that’s allowed, but the lawyers said that sometimes he would beat her up so that meant he killed her.