Test Pattern (25 page)

Lessons, Lorena decides as she watches Miss Fritzi scrape the last of the remains into the trash can, are beneath her. Talent like hers deserves freedom of expression without some faded ex- Rockette stifling her originality, trying to turn her into just another amateur who thinks getting some old Community Theater role in
Guys and Dolls
would be hot stuff. When you’re blessed with the makings of stardom, tedious lessons interrupted by a barfing cat are just a waste of time and two bucks. She’s better off practicing by herself.

*
*
*

YES, YES. SHE feels it clicking, each movement fitting into the next like a piece of a puzzle, and a one-and-a-two and… a-chugga-
chugga
-chugga-chugga, arms way up…. and
splat
she’s into her split. Lorena lies motionless after her finale, splayed out on the bedroom floor, sweating, panting, exhausted yet exultant. Practiced all afternoon, fine-tuned her routine so the new steps blend into the old, choreography smooth and precise as any June Taylor number. It’s second nature to her now, she doesn’t have to think about it, her body works like a well-oiled engine, like … a Chattanooga choo choo.

Yes. She’s ready, she’s sure of it now. Ready for her audition with Wally.

She unties her tap shoes, places them side by side in their special place in her closet, then slips on her furry slippers.

Pete looks up from the couch, gives her a wicked glance as she pads down the stairs to the living room. “What a racket,” he complains. “People kill for less than that.”

Cassie looks up sharply from coloring some drawings she’s made of Bart and Sally and their blue-haired mother. “That’s not funny, Dad.”

“Neither is listening to a herd of buffalo upstairs when I’m trying to relax, watch a little TV.” He returns Lorena’s aloof glance with a frown. “I thought things were going to return to normal around here. Guess I was wrong, huh?” No answer. “Still think you’re going on
Talent Scouts
? Still think you’re going to be discovered?” Still no answer. Then, frustrated, “I bet you’ve still got that stupid costume stuck away somewheres.”

Cassie doesn’t say anything, just bends her head over her drawing and colors, hard, until the crayon breaks.

Lorena busies herself in the kitchen, clanging pots, slamming the Frigidaire, moving her lips as she consoles herself. She tries, doesn’t she? Tries to keep everything the way it’s supposed to be, cooks dinner every night, hasn’t opened a Swanson’s for weeksbut has he noticed? No. Just takes it all for granted. Hasn’t complimented her once since the fried chicken night.

Bam. Bam.
She whomps the biscuit cutter with such fury that it leaves circles in the wooden board beneath. She picks up the circles, slaps them hard onto the pan,
whap whap whap,
so hard they flatten out like pancakes. Throws the whole pan into the oven with a clatter, glares at the closed oven door.

Here she is, trying her hardest to be a good wife, a good mother, and what does she get? Pete’s complaints, Cassie’s sullen stares. What’s wrong with expressing herself? What’s wrong with having dreams? Look what happened to Maybelle.

She wishes Pete would get off his butt and get back to work. He’s better now, isn’t he? He’s not even complaining about how lousy he feels anymore. She doesn’t understand what Pete’s talking about, that his foreman is stalling about getting him back on the job, that he says Pete’s got to be evaluated first, whatever that means. Enough of his moping around. He better make himself useful.

“I THINK THE lady that got burned all over oughta win,” Cassie says around a mouthful of Cracker Jacks.

“No, she’s just going to be scarred up but at least she’s got two legs,” Molly says, spinning the plastic top prize from the Cracker Jack box. “That old guy there, he’s only got one leg and they fired him and he’s got nine kids.”

“Well,” counters Cassie, “she’s burned
and
hunchbacked, so who’s ever going to marry her?”

Molly and Cassie are sprawled on the living-room floor watching
Strike It Rich.
Molly is spending the night because Cassie begged and pleaded until Lorena gave in, so now they are all gathered in the living room debating the quality of degradation each of the contestants has exhibited in order to win money.

“Look, look, the burned lady got a call on the Heart Line,” Cassie says. Warren Hull, the host, is assisting the woman, whois having a problem getting a good grip on the Heart Line phone. On the other end is a generous benefactor who offers her one hundred dollars cash plus a year’s supply of his product, Slippery Sam’s Salve, guaranteed to soften skin or your money back. The Burned Lady’s scarred face contorts in gratitude as Warren Hull leads the audience in frenetic applause.

But the one-legged father of nine is still in the game. His pinned-up pants leg swings and sways as he gamely hobbles up on one crutch to relate his woeful tale, but not until his tiny, tidy wife appears with all nine children in tow does the applause match that of the Burned Lady’s.

“I understand,” Warren Hull oozes as he wraps a protective arm around the wife, “that in addition to raising all these wonderful children, you play the piano at a Steak ‘n Shake several nights a week in order to pay the bills.”

The tidy wife nods her head shyly, yes, she does do that. “Well,” says Warren Hull as a piano is rolled out onto the stage, “how about a little song for the folks out there in TV land?”

Tidy Wife sits primly on the edge of the piano bench. After a prayerful pause, she raises her hands, throws her head back, and launches into a rousing rendition of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” her pixie-cropped hair flying as she pounds the keys. Incited by Warren Hull’s question, “Isn’t she great, folks?” the audience’s applause swells and breaks into a roar that subsides only after Tidy Wife has taken several bows.

Lorena leans forward, envy enveloping her at the reaction evoked by the unilegster’s wife. The Heart Line is ringing off its hook, and before the oldest child finishes relating how he had to quit school to work in the sweatshop, the family has raked in five hundred dollars’ worth of donations.

Why, thinks Lorena, I could do that.

Pete has dozed off but she gives his shoulder a shake. “Pete, Pete. Watch this. Look, they’re giving them
money.
We could go on
Strike It Rich,
what with your accident and all.” She doesn’t add that it could be her big break as well.

Pete blinks, stares at the screen, shakes his head. “Are you crazy?” he says. “We have money from my disability payments. We don’t need charity.”

“It’s not charity,” Lorena protests. “It’s show business. We could be on TV!”

“I don’t want to be on TV. I don’t need to beg.” He pauses. “I’m going back to work.”

“Back to work?” she says. “So soon?” His announcement, which would have brought her pure delight just a few short minutes ago, is now cause for dismay. Until she saw the audience response to the tidy wife’s piano proficiency, it had never occurred to Lorena that the very disability that kept Pete home, driving her crazy, could be her passport to fame and fortune. “Maybe we could go on
Strike It Rich
first,” she insists.

“I’m not going on any TV show. I gotta get back to work, that’s all there is to it. I talked to the foreman. He says maybe I can work inside the welding shop. Says I’m not ready to work outside, up high, at least not yet. But he’ll think about letting me come back, long’s I don’t endanger myself again. Not that I’m a danger or anything,” he corrects himself. “I’m good as anybody out there.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Cassie pipes up, then turns to Molly. “He’s the best. He’s not scared of anything.”

Lorena can’t argue. If Pete won’t go on
Strike It Rich,
then the sooner he goes back to work, the better. He’s making her nuts at home.

I
T’S WINDY HERE on the platform. My skirt bells out all around me and I wonder if it could lift me like a parachute and carry me over the shipyard. How would it be to float above all the cranes and derricks and ships in their docks? I bet they’d look tiny as toys from up there, instead of tall as buildings, like they do from here. I’ve never been as high as a cloud.

From the platform we can look up at the U.S.S.
Forrestal.
It’s an aircraft carrier, and Dad says when it’s finished it’ll be the biggest warship ever built in the whole United States, over a thousand feet long and two hundred and fifty feet wide. Dad knows all this because he was working on it when he fell, and he shows me just where that happened, points way way up, and then moves his finger down to this big deck sticking out from the side of the ship.

He says it’s a good thing the deck was there or he would have splatted all over the building dock. “I looked down,” he says.

“Can’t look down, gotta look straight ahead, not let your mind wander even for a second. Can’t let all the little worries of life get in your way when you’re working for your country.” Dad stands up straighter when he talks about our country, the “U S of A” he calls it. He says he couldn’t serve in the army but what he does is even more important, welding together battleships strong enough to meet the enemy.

Trouble is, there’s no enemy. At least not one we’re actually fighting with guns and planes and stuff. “Now that there’s no real war going on, they’re building sissy ships,” he says, pointing to a ship in another dock. “Like that one. Ocean liner. Passenger ships, sissy ships, floating hotels for rich people. Have to, I guess, or they’d be laying off people right and left. But what happens when the Commies try to take over? We gonna fight the Reds with that?” he says, waving the ocean liner away like it was a mosquito.

“Now this here is a ship to make you proud,” he says about the
Forrestal.
“Jet planes are going to land, right on the ship itself, right there on the flight deck. Four acres, it’s going to be. Do you know how big four acres is?”

I don’t. I just know it’s so big that even Dad is amazed because he’s looking up at the
Forrestal
like it landed from outer space. He hasn’t seen it since his accident and, he says, he can hardly recognize it now, it’s changed so much. He says in a voice real soft and low, “It’s like somebody had a party and I wasn’t invited.”

Dad’s starting back to work next week but today he said he wanted to see the shipyard, just check it out before he went back. I’ve never been here, not inside the yard anyway, so I begged him to take me with him. Mom said, “Good idea,” so here I am.

It’s a bigger place than I thought it was, just from the times I’ve gone by it on the bus, going downtown. It’s a whole city, a city of steel, stretching around us as far as I can see. Flashes of sunlight bounce off metal like stars thrown from the sky. I smell metal everywhere, feel it in the back of my throat, behind mynose, taste it like I’m swallowing iron and breathing rust. The sound of metal is all around us—banging, whistling, shrieking, clanging—until I wonder if it’s inside or outside my head.

I’m ready to go home but it’s just the beginning for Dad. He leads me through a passageway where we’re stopped by a guard but it’s somebody Dad knows so he lets us go up some stairs. We climb and climb until we’re on a walkway high up on the
For-restal.
Down below us are guys in hard hats, working, scurrying around. Dad stops, squints at them. “That guy,” he says, pointing to one of them who’s separate from the others, “is who’s keeping me from my real job.”

I can’t see what the guy looks like, just the top of his hard hat, round and green like a big olive. Dad stares at him. He says, not to me but to the big space between us and the guys so tiny below, “This is where I belong. This is where my daddy and my gran-daddy worked, outside with the wind and rain and sun on their backs. This is all I know.”

“But, Dad,” I say, worried because he looks so sad, “you know all about the constellations. You know how to catch crabs and how to sail a boat and you can tell me the batting average of every one of the Dodgers. There’s lots that you know.”

But he’s not listening. I don’t understand why he wants to come back here so bad. All he did before his accident was complain about work, and now all he talks about is going back. Maybe it’s one of those things that seem better than they really are, like the smell of hot dogs from the hotdog stand, or houses that seem cozy when you look into their windows on a cold night. Maybe he just
thinks
he wants to go back to work.

Dad doesn’t move, just looks down at the guy in the olive hat for a long minute. Then he turns and shuffles slowly down the walkway. I follow him, but not before I do something I’ve been wanting to do since we climbed up here. I spit over the side. It takes a long time to reach the bottom.

L
ORENA TURNS THE record player up loud, sings along with it as she watches herself dance in the bulb-lit mirror of her dressing table. Nobody’s home. Cassie’s at Molly’s and Pete’s at work. His first day back, glory hallelujah. She had fixed him an extra-special lunch: not only his usual bologna sandwiches, but leftover fried chicken she had made especially for last night’s back-to-work celebration dinner. She added a leg and a breast to his lunch box as a surprise.

She gave him a good-luck peck on the cheek this morning, and was puzzled at his seeming reluctance to go. After all, he claimed he wanted to get back on the job, so what was this, standing stock-still on the porch, not moving until she asked him what was the matter? He had muttered a few things last night, something about if this didn’t work out he’d have to work inside the welding shop instead of outside on the ship itself, but when Lorena had said, Big deal, what’s the difference? he had fallen silent.

Now he’s gone. Out. Back to work. Back to normal. Lorenarevels in her solitary state. The house is hers again. She can concentrate on reaching her goal. She’s already planned what she’ll do now that she’s perfected her dance routine. She’ll ask Binky—nothing personal, of course—for Wally’s number. That’s all. Very businesslike. Let him know that all her practice has paid off and she’s ready for The Big Time.