Test Pattern (21 page)

Dad’s never hit Mom but at dinner tonight he looked at her like he could. She looked right back at him so mean that it gave me goose bumps. For a minute, the way they looked at each other was like on some of my TV shows, where people don’t just get mad, they get mad and then they shoot each other. On test-pattern TV, everybody has a gun.

Dad has a BB gun in the closet. He uses it to shoot tin cans down on the beach. Sometimes he lets me go with him to watch, shows me how to load the BBs and pour them into the chamber, but he never lets me shoot. He’s good. Hits the cans almost every time, knocks them right off the fence.

You can kill people without a gun, like the guy who killed his wife. They said he did it with a knife. On TV shows like
Dragnet,
people are killed by all kinds of stuff—guns, knives, poison. Sometimes they’re drowned or strangled or burned, but shooting seems to be the most popular.

There’s more and more shooting on test-pattern TV lately, more and more blood. I liked it better when there were just fun shows, or weird stuff that made me wonder about things I don’t know about. All this shooting is giving me bad dreams, dreams about Mom and Dad like the one I had last night:

Mom is dancing in nothing but those black panties and stockings and the mailman’s hat, but she’s dancing for Dad. He’s in the bed, pointing his BB gun at her and making her dance, faster, faster, like in a cowboy movie where the bad guy shoots at the feet of the good guy and says, “Dance, you varmint.” I don’t know what a varmint is, but in my dream, that’s what Dad says to Mom: “Dance, you varmint.”

Today I’m watching the test pattern and I see something so spooky I forget how mad I am at Mom. “Hey, Mom,” I yell, “remember the pretty lady that we saw get married last year in that fancy wedding?”

“What fancy wedding?” she calls from the kitchen.

“The one we saw on TV at Delia’s. Remember? She looked like a movie star and he was a senator and you said if you could’ve had a wedding gown when you got married, you’d have wanted one just like hers?”

“Yeah? So?”

“Well, her husband got killed!
Look.
She’s got blood all over.” Mom comes running in from the kitchen. “Now they’re talking about how her husband’s the president,” I say, and then all of a sudden I realize, Boy, am I stupid. It must be a play, like on
Studio One.
President
Eisenhower
is the president.

Mom stares at the TV set and her face gets all red like somebody poured ketchup into it. “Are you watching the test pattern again?”

“It’s just a play about this president who got shot.”

“Nobody got shot. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, scaring me like that with the things you make up.” I scare
her
? What a joke.

M
AYBE IF SHE makes a coffee cake. Isn’t that what Mama Hansen did on the
Mama
show last night when all the Hansen kids were bickering? Made a coffee cake. Its cinnamon fragrance lured them into the cozy kitchen, one by one, until they were all chattering together around the Hansen table, their differences forgotten as they shared the stillwarm cake. Lorena had watched Mama work her magic, and decides to pull the same trick.

Lorena rustles through the pantry shelves looking for ingredients. Flour, got that. Sugar. Eggs? Yep. Pete slammed out of the house this morning without breakfast, so there are enough eggs. Cinnamon, where’s the cinnamon? It won’t be coffee cake without cinnamon. She knocks over the spice rack in her growing frustration.

She’ll make it all better with coffee cake, just like Mama Hansen did. Pete will realize she wants him back when he gets a whiff of her cinnamon kitchen, a taste of her crumbly cake. And Cassie

will not only know the Binky thing is over, maybe, like magic, she’ll never remember it happened.

Lorena wishes it never happened. She tries not to think about it but can’t stop thinking about it, wonders Why hasn’t Binky called? He could’ve called just to say I know it’s over but I just wanted to tell you how much it meant to me. That would have been the gentlemanly thing to do.

She knows he’s out there; he’s made two deliveries since Thursday. She hears the mail spitting through the slot, so she knows he’s on the other side of the door, shoving those letters through. Maybe she should call and say Hey. Just stay in touch, no reason they can’t be friends. No reason she still can’t meet Cousin Wally the talent scout.

She has to meet him. The possibility of that never happening makes her nostrils pop in fear. Somehow she has to
make
it happen. Binky is her last chance, her only chance. Binky … No, stop it, that’s over. But maybe … damn. If only Cassie hadn’t come home when she did …

Lorena doesn’t answer the phone at first, doesn’t hear it actually, is too far inside her head to hear anything. But the phone rings and rings until it jars her out of her reverie and she runs to answer it.

“Miz Palmer?” says an unfamiliar voice. “This is Dwayne, Pete’s foreman. I got some bad news.”

Lorena feels her innards drop through the soles of her feet. “What?” she whispers.

“Seems like Pete fell and broke hisself up a bit.”

“Broke? What broke?”

“Oh, a leg. And a arm. Cracked his head a little, too.”

“Oh God. Oh God. Is he okay?”

“Well, now, I don’t know if okay is the word, seein’ as how he’s pretty smashed up and all. But,” he adds cheerily, “he ain’t dead.”

“Where is he?”

“Ambylance took him over to Buxton Hospital.”

Lorena’s knees feel like they’re held together with raw egg white. She sits down on the floor next to the phone. “What happened?”

“Don’t rightly know, but to tell you the truth, he ain’t been hisself lately. Seems like he’s just plain pissed off at the world—excuse me, ma’am—or somethin’ that’s made him pretty careless. Had to talk to him a bit about that a few times already. But today he was just raving mad when he came to work, so when they told me he tripped and took a dive off the gantry I wadn’t too surprised.”

“Oh God.” She hangs up the phone, puts her head down on her knees. Why would this happen now, just when she was repenting the Binky thing, just when Pete was looking good to her again? Was it because she was thinking about Wally right then? Is this some kind of punishment? Maybe this was a sign, a crossroad, a test.

She feels flooded with sudden saintliness. Yes! That’s it. It’s a test of her good intentions, a test she could pass by sacrificing her own dreams and ambition. She would renounce her talent, abstain from dancing, become the ideal wife and mother. Mama Hansen, the warm, dependable mother of all mothers, would become her model of domesticity.

LORENA’S BROUGHT BISCUITS to Pete in the hospital but he can’t eat them. It scares her the way he looks, flat on his back, head swathed in bandages, left arm in a cast, left leg hanging in a sling from wires attached overhead.

She attempts cheerfulness. “Biscuits!” she chirps as she enters the room, Cassie following fearfully behind. He doesn’t answer. His right eye, the one not covered by a bandage, blinks like an owl’s, slow and wary.

The room is still and hot. A faint breeze hovers around the wide-open window, its sash propped up with a stick, but goes no farther. The sheets on Pete’s bed are damp and rumpled. He lookslike an oversized child in the gray-striped hospital gown tied high up on his neck. Lorena fusses with the sheets, arranges them awkwardly around his raised leg in its cast.

“Better?” she coos.

His good eye narrows, its blue glittering iridescently beneath the lid like an insect hiding from a predator. “Whad do you care?” he says, the words slurring from whatever drug they pumped into him.

She doesn’t know what to say. Now, she figures, is not the time to get defensive, especially with Cassie glaring at her from the end of Pete’s bed, caressing his foot that protrudes from the rumple of sheets.

“Hey, Dad,” Cassie says, “the lookout toe is looking out.”

His mouth twists into an attempted smile. He closes his eye.

“Well,” Lorena says. “Well. Guess I’ll just put these biscuits right over here until you feel like a little snack. Okay?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Well.” She plunks the biscuits in their brown paper bag on the night table. Her hair is plastered to her neck and there’s a faint line of moisture above the painstakingly drawn cupid’s bow of her lips. She has dressed carefully for this visit, light summer print dress, spectator pumps that Delia says look smart. She wants to appear responsible. She wants Pete to trust her again.

Cassie stares at the toes peering out of the cast swinging overhead. “All your toes are okay, right, Dad?”

Pete nods, eye still closed. “Toes’re okay. Rest of me’s not.” He shifts a little, grimaces, gives a painful groan. “Woulda been better if I got killed.”

Cassie’s stricken look is mirrored by Lorena. “No, no,” Lorena protests. “You’ll be home before you know it, good as new. It’ll be like nothing ever happened. I’ll take good care of you.”

LORENA VISITS THE hospital every day, determinedly cheerful, brings baskets filled with biscuits, bologna sandwiches, Little

Debbie Cakes. She even smuggles in some Ballantine as a peace offering.

It’s a long two weeks, being home alone with Cassie. School dwindles down to its last, lazy days and then ends. Cassie leaves the house early and returns late, stays often as not for dinner at Molly’s. Both Cassie and Lorena avoid speaking of the Mailman Incident, although Cassie discovers she can alarm Lorena with the pointed use of certain words: Stamp. Envelope. Mail. Post office. She manages to invoke all of those words in one sentence by polishing off an entire jar of Ovaltine in two days in order to send off for a Captain Midnight Decoder Ring, thereby sending Lorena into a paroxysm of guilt by word association.

She jumps each time she hears the door slot slap open, spew mail on the floor, then snap shut again. She pictures Binky on the other side. She runs to the window to catch him but he’s too quick, gone by the time she hears the mail come through. She knows Cassie hears it, too, so she tries to be nonchalant. Thumbs through the mail, leafs through
The Saturday Evening Post,
studies each page while Cassie studies her.

Lorena senses that Cassie is up at night watching the test pattern, but there are more important things to worry about now. So what if Cassie’s like Lula? Lula never hurt anybody, lived a normal life, just had those little spells. Maybe people laughed at her, but it didn’t bother Lula. She and Rudy were happy, married a long time, one died right after the other, couldn’t live without each other. Goes to show, you can be crazy and happy, too.

Now Pete is home. He hobbles on crutches and delicately lowers himself onto the couch Lorena has made up into a bed in the living room. This is where he’ll stay until he’s able to get up the stairs. They can start all over, like nothing ever happened. She’ll nurse him, she will, and he’ll be his old self again. No. Not his old self. He’ll be better. She’ll make him better. Then she will be better, too.

To help him pass the time when there’s nothing on TV, Lorenabuys Pete a Revell hobby kit of the battleship
Missouri.
When she hands him the box, he sneers—"I build
real
ships, not models"— and the box sits by his bed for days. Well, there’s $1.98 down the drain, Lorena thinks, until one morning she comes downstairs to find Pete painfully gluing tiny turrets and minuscule guns to the gray plastic hull of the model.

Pete concentrates, squinting as his good hand ekes a teardrop of glue from the tube onto the base of a delicate cannon or anchor, then, steadied by fingers that peek out from the cast on his injured arm, plants it precisely in place. The once-benign-looking ship grows into a prickly porcupine bristling with weapons aimed at an imaginary foe. When the battleship is complete, Pete places it next to his bed, where the light from the elephant lamp illuminates it like a hard-won trophy.

MMMM MMM GOOD. Mmmm mmm good. That’s what Campbell’s soup is, mmmm mmm good. Lorena hums to herself as she prepares Pete’s lunch: chicken noodle soup. She heard it makes sick people well. She turns the key on the can opener. The Campbell Kids rotate slowly; the metal lid detaches jaggedly from the red-and-white can. She pours the golden goop into the white enamel pot, adds a can of water, ignites the gas flame with a
whup,
watches the pale noodles chase each other as she stirs the bubbly boiling soup.

She sets the tray up proper: flowered dish for the biscuits, paper napkin, big spoon, bottle of Nehi orange. She ladles piping-hot soup into a big bowl, then carefully balances the tray as she glides into the living room. “Mmmm mmm good,” she sings as she sets the tray on the TV table next to Pete’s bed.

“What’s that?” He makes a face.

“Lunch.”

“I know. But what’s
that?”

“Chicken soup.”

“Soup? It must be a hundred degrees in here. Are you crazy?”

She isn’t going to let him get to her. She pushes her mouth up into a simper. “Oh, come on. I’ll feed you.”

“I can feed myself.” He grabs at the bowl.

“No, no, it’s easier if I do it.” She perches on the side of his bed, cradles the steaming soup bowl in one hand beneath his chin, scoops out a spoonful. “Yummy yummy for the tummy,” she says, holding it to his mouth. Pete presses his lips together like a stubborn kid.

“Oh, come on,” she snaps as the soup dribbles from the spoon down his chin. She mops at it with the napkin, tries again, forces a smile. “Open wide.”

He gives in, opens wide. “AAAA! HOT!” he yowls, spraying her with a mouthful of noodles.

“Now look what you did.” She dabs at her dress with the napkin, plucks a squirming noodle from the sheet. Count to ten. Start again. “I’ll blow on it first.” She dips the spoon back into the bowl, daintily puffs on its surface.

“I don’t want any—” he begins, edging away from her.

SLAP. The mail slot opens and
kshwssss
regurgitates an avalanche of letters before smacking shut. Startled by the sound and a sudden vision of Binky on the other side of the door, Lorena leaps from her chair, catapulting the bowl of soup from her hands.