Test Pattern (3 page)

I
WATCH THE test pattern while Mom’s in the kitchen, keep the sound low so she can’t hear the hum. The test pattern has changed. Slithery shapes slide in and out of the spokes, sometimes even in color. If I lean real close and listen well, I think I hear music and voices.

Today it’s different. Something else is happening. The test pattern spins, fades to a blur, then runs together like watercolors. All of a sudden there’s this pretty lady with yellow hair who’s wearing a two-piece bathing suit that’s way too small for her. She’s got flowers and butterflies and words that don’t make sense like “groovy” and “kinky” painted all over her skin. And she’s dancing.

I turn up the sound. She’s dancing to music I’ve never heard before, snappy and bouncy. She doesn’t dance regular, just wiggles her arms and butt and giggles a lot. The best part is, it’s in
color.
I didn’t know they did shows in color.

“Mom!” I yell. “Come look at this.”

“Look at what?” she calls from the kitchen.

“It’s a new show, and it’s in color, like the movies.”

She hurries into the living room, gives the TV and me a funny look that makes her eyebrows almost collide. “What are you talking about?”

“Look! Isn’t that a neat dance?” I get up and copy the giggly girl with the teeny bathing suit and the painted stomach, wiggle my butt, wave my arms. “Sock it to me!” I say.

Mom just stares. “Where did you get that from?”

“From the dancer with the dark hair, the one they’re splashing with a bucket of water. She keeps saying ‘Sock it to me.’”

Mom gives me one of her looks. “You telling me you see something besides the test pattern?”

“You bet your bippy.”

“What?” Mom says, then snaps off my show. “And don’t touch it until Dad gets home.”

Sometimes I’d swear I was adopted.

I’M LYING ON my bed with my shoes on. I hate my room. Mom painted it brown. When I complained that I’m the only kid in the world with a brown room, she said, “Doesn’t it remind you of a Hershey bar?” If I wanted a Hershey bar, I’d go get one at Al’s newsstand.

I’m not supposed to go to Al’s. I do, anyway, because he has penny candy and yo-yo’s and comic books. But Mom says stay away from there because he sells dirty magazines.

Well, Dad has dirty magazines in his dresser drawer. I know because I explore sometimes, both Mom and Dad’s dresser drawers, just to see what there is to see. He keeps naked-lady magazines beneath his undershirts. One has this lady on the cover who is wearing a frilly maid’s apron and high heels and nothing else. She looks surprised. Her eyes are wide open and her mouth ismaking a big O. I study it for a while, and make that face in the mirror. I wonder what it would be like to have big titties. I think about that sometimes.

Dad also has rubbers. Those he keeps in the back of his night-table drawer behind some old new paper clippings, one with a picture of him playing baseball in high school, others with obituaries and stuff. I know what rubbers look like because one of the boys in my class brought some called Trojans to school. He filled them with water and threw them at the girls. This, to me, is not romantic.

I know all about rubbers and romance and babies. My best friend Molly told me everything.

I remember exactly where we were. Sitting in the grass in front of my house, blowing dandelion fuzz into the wind last spring. Some guy was scraping paint off our house with this metal thing that made
scrrrt, scrrrt
sounds, and big white flakes fell on the bushes like ashes.

Molly was laughing at me. I had told her doctors give ladies shots when they want to have a baby, and that’s how you got pregnant.

“A shot?” Her Bugs Bunny teeth poked out while she blew away a dandelion head. “Who told you that?”

I shrugged. It’s just … that’s what I thought.

“Didn’t your mother tell you anything?” I shook my head no. “Remember that movie we had in school, where only the girls could go?” Yeah, I remember. “Yeah … well?” she said.

“Well?” I said back. I thought the movie was about menstruation, not babies. I want to have babies. I never want to have menstruation.

“You didn’t make the connection?” She smacked one palm into the side of her round chipmunk face. “I can’t believe you are so stupid.”

“Well?” I asked. “What’s the connection?” So she explained. About the man putting his Thing into the lady. About the seed being planted. About the baby being made.

“He puts
his
Thing inside
her
Thing?” I was stunned. It was too grotesque. “Why would she let him do that?”

Molly laughed again. Sometimes she laughs like a grown-up, a growly kind of laugh, maybe because she’s eleven and has already gotten her period. Molly has titties and wears a training bra. “Because it feels good, stupid!” she said.

I’ve been thinking about what Molly said, but I can’t figure out what would feel so good. When I look at the boys I know like Normie who wipes boogers under his desk, I wonder if I’d want their Things anywhere near my Thing and the answer is yuk,
no.

But Molly may have been telling the truth, because the more I think about it, the more some things begin to make sense. Dirty magazines. Rubbers. Jane Russell.

“WHAT?” MOLLY SAYS when I tell her that somebody said “penis” on television. Her eyes get bigger than the surprised naked lady’s on the cover of the magazine. And then I tell her the best part, where they talked about how this lady got so mad at her husband that she cut off his penis and threw it away.

“Oh my God,” Molly moans, rolling back and forth over her ruffled white bedspread in her pink bedroom. We’re wearing our new matching shorty pajamas because I’m spending the night. I have been saving up all week to tell her this, the news I heard on test-pattern TV.

“Yes!” I yelp, doubled over, holding my stomach. We both hurt from laughing so much. “Cut it off!”

“Penis!” she screams. “They said
penis.”
She sprawls out on the bed, panting, catching her breath. “What show was that?”

“My special show,” I tell her.

“Your special show?” She looks at me. “Oh, no. You just made it up.”

“No! No,
really.
Come on, I’ll show you, there’s all kinds of shows, in color even. They’re on the test pattern.”

“The test pattern?”

We tiptoe downstairs. It’s late, so late that nothing is on regular TV. Her living room is quiet. I can hear the hum of her refrigerator in the kitchen. She flicks on their TV and in a few seconds the tiny round-screened Zenith blooms with the test pattern.

“You have to look at it a minute,” I whisper. I stare at it hard. “Like this.” Molly looks at me, turns back to the screen, and stares like I’m doing. I can see both of us in the web, our faces close as Siamese twins.

“Nothing’s happening,” she says.

“Wait,” I say. “It will.”

We wait. Nothing happens. I don’t know what’s wrong. “Maybe there isn’t anything on tonight,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Molly, and I see her face leave the screen. She stands up. “Let’s get some doughnuts. My dad got some from the bakery today.” We skulk into the night kitchen, rustle open the grease-spotted bakery bag, nab a couple of jelly doughnuts.

“Penis.” Molly giggles around doughnut bites.

I don’t say anything. I only know it’s true.

B
INKY QUISENBERRY. Lorena hadn’t thought about him for years. In high school she would sit high up in the rickety wooden bleachers, shivering in her parka and pleated plaid skirt, and watch him practice as a hard cold autumn sun stretched long shadows on the field. She covered pages of notebook paper with his name, but his only acknowledgment of her existence was a mumbled “hi” in the hallways.

Now she thinks about him all the time, thoughts that transport her from what she is really doing, vacuuming dust from beneath the bed or rinsing out a gutted chicken in the sink or jamming clothespins into cold wet sheets that smack her arms as she hangs them on the line. All those things that were once so important to her, the touchstones of her day, don’t matter anymore. She cooks, she cleans, she goes through the motions, but what really propels her through life these days is what goes on in her head.

What goes on is a movie. She is the star. Her hair is no longer mousy brown, but gilded in golden ringlets. No, no. It’s flamedin russet, undulating in Rita Hayworth waves around her rouged and powdered face, her lust reflected in Binky’s smoky gaze as he grasps her body next to his. She wears white satin pajamas—no, maybe a long red silk dress with a slit up the side. She decides on a lacy negligee with satin mule slippers. Something Rita Hayworth-ish.

Now they’re dancing. She follows him as surely as a shadow, dipping, gliding, twirling, it’s a Fred and Ginger night. They stop suddenly, frozen with passion. He bends her backward. Her shimmering auburn hair skims the mirrored dance floor. Their lips barely graze, and then he swoops her up into a spin, their movements as one.

Now they are lifting champagne glasses in a toast. Their glasses crash to the floor as they embrace. His mustache sweeps a path from her Revlon-glistened lips to her throat. Their bodies press together. Her bosom rises, a bosom held high by that expensive French bra she saw in Nachman’s lingerie department the other day. Since it’s her fantasy, she gives herself a real bosom: lace-encased, with Jane Russell cleavage.

“Mom!”

Huh?

“Delia’s on the phone. Didn’t you hear it?”

Oh, good. She’s been trying to reach Delia to tell her about Binky.

“I’ll get it upstairs,” she says, and when she does, she’s zapped by Delia’s electrified recitation of her Saturday-night date: “You can’t believe what happened, he took me to the Crab Shack first, then we decided to skip the movie, you know this was our third date and for God’s sake all we’d done was neck a little, and I didn’t expect this but well he had gone and bought
rubbers
for God’s sake so after he went to all that trouble what could I do, he’s so good-looking, the girls at work think he looks like Alan Ladd and, to make a long story short, I think I’m in
love.”

Delia’s in love again.

Lorena is thrilled, thrilled to pieces for her, she says, but she’s got her own news. “Guess who that soldier was?”

“What soldier?”

“The one who was yelling at us when we went to see the trailer.”

“Who cares? He was obnoxious.”

“Remember Binky Quisenberry?”

“No! That wasn’t Binky Quisenberry. Binky was cute.”

“He still is.”

“How do you know?”

“He waited for me outside the A&P. He apologized, sorta.”

“How does he look?”

“Like Errol Flynn.”

“No! What did you talk about?”

“Just… stuff. The army. What he’s going to do now.”

“He’s coming back here?”

Uh-oh, Lorena thinks. Delia is on the loose. “Um, yeah. He says.”

“Married?”

Funny. That never came up. “I dunno. I don’t think so.” After all, he had asked to see her again.

“Wow. Binky Quisenberry. Listen. If you see him again, give him my number.”

“What about Alan Ladd?” It’s not fair, Lorena thinks. Why should Delia have Alan Ladd
and
Errol Flynn?

Delia just laughs. “Hey. There’s seven nights in a week.”

When she hangs up, Lorena is envious. Delia’s life seems like an incredible journey with an itinerary based on whim. No matter which golden path she may choose, she’ll still wind up in Oz.

LORENA HURRIEDLY DEALS out dinner, dropping each hot Swanson’s tray with a tinny thunk on TV tables set up in the living room. She doesn’t want to miss the commercial. She settles on the

couch, knees trapped in the skeletal clutch of the table’s metal legs, thighs pressed beneath its flimsy top. The dancing Old Gold cigarette packs tap across the screen of the Magnavox.

She pokes her fork around the aluminum tray, jabs at the thick, wet crust of a flaccid chicken thigh. The fork moves on, scrapes up a wad of mashed potato, inserts it between her lips, then pierces the reptilian hides of peas huddled in their own triangular compartment. Lorena chews absently, staring straight ahead.

On the luminous screen, Lucy is chewing, too. She’s popping candy into her mouth, two hands at once, faster, faster, she can’t stuff the morsels in quickly enough, her mouth balloons with chocolate, her eyes bulge out over candy-crammed cheeks.

“Ooooh, Looocy,” Pete says as the show ends. He sucks on a desiccated chicken bone.

“Ooooh, Ricky,” Cassie responds with a giggle as she mashes potatoes and peas into a paste. Cassie doesn’t like TV dinners. Tonight she had watched mournfully as Lorena yanked three Swanson’s boxes from the tiny freezer of the Frigidaire, then ripped them open to expose beige chicken parts rigid with frost, petrified swirls of gray potatoes, peas green and hard as dimestore beads.

“I want fried chicken,” Cassie had announced. “
Real
fried chicken, not frozen.” Lorena winced as guilt knifed through her gut, for she had once been proud of her fried chicken. Baptized in milk, enrobed in flour, each plump poultry part had been committed to Crisco as if it were an offering, sizzling and turning in the bubbling fat until the skin had turned to gold. Light, crispy, fragrant with spices, Lorena’s chicken had yielded to the bite like the most delicate spun sugar.

But then frozen dinners appeared in the big white freezer of the A&P, Swanson’s facsimile-TV-set cartons piled high next to the Birds Eye chicken pot pies. Lorena succumbed to the allure of opening a box, popping the tray into the oven, eating from it while watching TV, then just throwing it away. Everything she once slaved over was now encased in cardboard and aluminum.

Turkey. Meat loaf. Fried chicken. Why sweat over spattering Crisco when Swanson’s made it so easy?

Pete had glowered suspiciously at the first TV dinner Lorena put before him, but since she accompanied it with her usual homemade biscuits, he was willing to compromise. Dinner was eaten more and more often in front of the TV, and complaints about the food were heard mostly from Cassie.