Test Pattern (6 page)

“Oh, no, not your show again.” Molly rolls her eyes.

“There’s a show on where people sit up on a stage and yell at each other about sex. Then people in the audience get up and yell at the people on stage about sex.”

“Made it up.”

“Did not.”

“Made it up. Nobody talks about stuff like that. Especially on television.”

“Cross my heart, there are shows where people yell about sex. Sex with each other. Sex with their daughter’s boyfriend or their husband’s mother or their neighbor’s kid. Sex sex sex. I’ve seen
lots
of shows like that. They all have leaders who run around in the audience with a microphone so people can yell at the people on the stage.”

“No such thing.”

“Yeah there is. And there’s another kind of show where people just talk and nobody yells, but a
colored
lady is the leader.”

“Now I know you made it up. There’s no colored ladies on TV except for on
Amos
’n
Andy.
”

“Well, there are,” I say because there are, “but what I want toknow is, do people really do those things? You know, have sex with people they’re not married to? Is that allowed?”

Molly scowls at the Sorry board, then moves her man and bumps mine. “Ha!” she says.

“Well?” I need to know.

“I guess,” she says. “Why not?”

I don’t understand any of this.

MR. FINKELSTEIN COMES home while we’re playing Sorry, clunks through the door with a big roll of canvas and a bag from the art supply store. He dumps the bag onto the dining-room table and tubes of paint spill out. “Hello, ladies,” he says in his voice that sounds a little like Groucho, a little like the Great Gildersleeve. “Why are you inside on this gawdjus sunny day?”

“I’m winning,” says Molly.

“Well, that’s a reason,” he says. He starts picking through his artist’s case, throwing rolled-up, squished-out tubes into the empty bag and filling the case up with the fat new tubes he just bought. “They must think I eat paint at Allen’s Art Supply,” he says. “I keep that place in business.”

“Cassie says she sees TV shows that talk about sex,” says Molly. She shakes the dice. It comes up double sixes. I want to disappear without a trace.

Mr. Finkelstein looks at me and his beard seems to bristle. I’m afraid to look at him, but when I do, he’s laughing. “So what channel is this sex show on?” he says.

I don’t say a word.

“She watches shows on the test pattern,” Molly answers for me. “The other day they said ‘penis.’”

“In what context?” asks Mr. Finkelstein. I don’t know what he means.

“Cassie says they said a lady got mad at her husband and she cut his penis off.” Molly says this like she’s telling him she had toast for breakfast.

Mr. Finkelstein’s face scrunches up like he’s in pain. I don’t know what to say, so I say, “I did not!” I can’t believe how much I hate Molly right this very minute.

Mr. Finkelstein recovers and smiles at me. “You certainly do have a vivid imagination,” he tells me. “What else do you see on your shows?”

I’m so embarrassed about the penis thing that I start babbling. “The World Series was on. The Los Angeles Dodgers won the pennant.”

“Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Dodgers,” he says. “And the World Series was over last fall. They didn’t win.”

“No, I’m sure it was the Los Angeles Dodgers,” I say. He gives me a funny look, like I don’t know baseball or anything, which I do, for a girl. “Maybe it’s a different team,” I say so as not to be rude, but I know that I saw what I saw. It was the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Molly folds up the Sorry board, puts it away. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go to Al’s and read comic books.” I put my finger to my lips to shush her up but her dad doesn’t get mad and say “You’re what?” like Mom would do.

I’m so mad at Molly for telling the penis story that I don’t even care whether we go to Al’s or not. All I want to do is get out of their house and disappear from Mr. Finkelstein’s sight.

When I think about the mothers I know and ask myself which one I would pick if I could, I’d choose Mrs. Finkelstein. She’s different from other mothers. She has long, long hair that hangs down to her waist. She wears flowy dresses down to her ankles and goes barefoot inside, even in winter, and she walks smooth, like she’s on wheels. Sometimes I think she’s not home when I’m over at Molly’s, and then she’ll kind of glide down the stairs to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and then glide on back up. I used to think maybe she was sick but Molly says she’s always up in her room writing poetry.

“Poetry?” I say. “You mean, roses are red violets are blue?”

“No,” Molly says, “not like that. She writes books. She’s goingaway this summer to a writers’ colony where all she’ll do is sit in a house in the woods and write all day.” And then she gets this skinny book out of their bookcase which has real books in it and not just magazines, and shows me one of her mother’s poems.

Well, I’ll tell you, I never saw a poem like that. It doesn’t even rhyme. Or even make sense, something about “the wild weird piglet of your passion.”

“What does this mean?” I ask Molly.

She just shrugs. “Oh, she always writes stuff like that. She reads it to Dad after dinner. He really likes this one,” she says, flipping to a poem that starts out “bursting forth from womb a snarl defied O woman woman woman.”

“Yeah?” I say, trying to figure it out.

“She writes a lot about women.”

“Yeah?”

“About how strong we are and stuff.”

“Strong?” I think, Maybe she’s right. I can beat Tommy Taylor in arm wrestling, and I always get picked first in kickball.

“She says I can be anything I want when I grow up. Not just a secretary.”

“Like what?” I say, thinking, Mom was a secretary before I was born. Was that bad?

“Like a doctor. Or a judge.”

“Or a welder in the shipyard?”

“Well, yeah, I guess.” She looks at me funny. “Is that what you want to be?”

“No,” I say, even though it’s something I’ve thought about, how neat it would be to use the welding torch like Dad does, climb high into the sky and make sparks fly like the Fourth of July. “I was just wondering.”

There are lots of things I think about being, but the one thing I don’t want to be is a secretary, just typing up other people’s letters all day. Unless I could be a secretary who uses this really neat typewriter I saw on test-pattern TV the other day. It looked like a typewriter, only it had a TV screen on top, and it didn’tjust type words but pictures. In
color.
If I had one of those typewriters, then I wouldn’t mind being a secretary so much.

But if it’s true like Mrs. Finkelstein says, that if I want, I can be anything, then I can think of a whole bunch of things I would rather be. A welder, maybe. Or a drummer in a band, like Gene Krupa. Or maybe a pilot—or even a space cadet, like Tom Corbett, so I can go to the stars.

I think Mrs. Finkelstein is just dreaming, like Mom dreams about being a famous dancer. There’s no such thing as lady doctors or judges or welders. But what I like about Mrs. Finkelstein is that she thinks about stuff like that, things I never even thought about before.

B
UBBLING AND BOILING in black-and-white, the mushroom cloud fills the screen of the Paramount as a sepulchral Movietone News voice intones facts about the H-bomb test: Firestorms. Radioactive rain. An entire island vaporized.

“Did Binky actually fight in Korea?” Delia whispers to Lorena, reaching over to claw a buttery handful of popcorn.

“He’s got a real scar from World War II,” Lorena says, bypassing the fact that during Korea Binky worked in the commissary at Fort Bragg and never, not even once, crossed the Pacific.

“Well, I’m glad the war’s over,” Delia says around kernels of popcorn that squeak as she chews. “I never understood much what that was all about. North Korea. South Korea. Turn on TV news and what’s on? Korea. Who cares?”

“Well, somebody cares. It’s in the paper a lot.” Lorena feels around the bottom of the popcorn box, fishes up a couple of

unpopped nuggets, tosses them and the box on the floor. “We wouldn’t send soldiers all the way over there if it wasn’t important.” She looks sidelong at Delia’s profile silhouetted in the dark, light from the belching bomb on-screen pinging off her upturned nose and mobile chin. She hopes people don’t think she’s as dense as Delia just because they’re good friends.

“Still and all,” Delia says, “I don’t know what we were doing in a place with all those weird names, Panmunjom, Seoul, whatever. I mean, I thought we were finished after World War II and then what happens? Korea.”

“SHHHH!” says a man with tall fuzzy hair two rows in front.

Lorena thinks about war all through the movie, maybe because it’s
From Here to Eternity.
When she comes out, she picks up the war theme like a dropped stitch.

“Rosalind, the kid down the block, only eighteen, she married this guy before he shipped out,” she says, squinting in the midday sun. “Her mother didn’t want her to marry him but she did anyway, had to, I heard, because the guy was leaving for Korea and she was in the Family Way.”

Delia nods knowingly. “The Family Way. That’ll do it.” They pass their reflections in a storefront window. Delia takes out a comb, fluffs her bangs, checks her teeth.

“Next thing we know, we hear his ship got blown up.” Lorena waits as Delia slathers a fresh coat of Tangee on her full lips in the window’s reflection. “I didn’t go to the funeral but I heard it had flags and drums and all. Shoulda gone, I guess, ‘cause I’ve known Rosalind since she was about Cassie’s age.”

Lorena senses that Delia isn’t really listening because a couple of sailors lounging against the wall of Harley’s Hardware have caught her eye. Delia’s pillowy little body becomes increasingly animated, accelerating into feverish gyration as they pass by the sailors.

Unfazed, Lorena continues: “Turns out she wasn’t in a family way after all. She was just in love. I see her sometimes, sitting onher porch. Sometimes she’ll walk down to the water and stare over at Norfolk. I guess that was the last place she saw him, when she said good-bye. Her husband was a sailor.”

Delia perks up at the word, seems to pay attention. “Yeah?” she says.

Lorena glances over at Delia but Delia’s head is turned around and Lorena knows she’s giving the sailors a wink. “She seems lost now, even walks different,” Lorena persists, “not like that little bounce she used to have. I want to go up to her sometimes, tell her I know how she feels, but I don’t. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a widow.”

Delia has clearly signed off of Lorena’s story, but Lorena continues it silently, asking herself, Was I that much in love with Pete when I married him? I think I was. He was nice-looking, seemed like he knew what he wanted. Seemed like he wanted me. We were happy. I liked being married, being half of a couple.

When Cassie came along, Pete liked playing with her, buying her toys, talking baby talk. But when she got older, he got bored with it all, with the crying and tantrums and stuff kids do. Once when Lorena accused him of treating Cassie like some Cracker Jack toy that broke, his sudden tears of denial startled her. Sometimes he’d do that—cry, and she wouldn’t know why.

Pete was stingy with emotion, but those tears were coming more often these days. When she saw them, Lorena was more stunned than dismayed. She felt oddly powerful, as if Pete had shrunk down to her level. He was weak. She was strong. Now would be the perfect time to give him an ultimatum: She wasn’t just a housewife anymore. No more vacuuming, no more biscuits. She was going to have a career. She had to practice, get her act together, do what she had to do. With or without him, she would dance her way to fame.

And then a nasty nightmare would intrude on that threat: Suppose he said no? Suppose he left? Suppose she had to work? She’d be typing, not tapping. That would be her future: typing, typing, endlessly typing the days away, just as she was doing theday Pete walked into her life. The thought of those days made her fingers wiggle and stretch in involuntary mimicry of the rhythm and movements of typing. She could feel the tapping of her fingers on the keyboard, hear the musical clatter of the keys—
tappity tappity tap tap tap.
Then cold panic would grip her and still her dancing dream, and just for that moment she’d be glad she had Pete.

“Cute, huh?” Delia’s scratchy voice jolts Lorena back. Now that they’re out of range of the sailors, Delia’s walk has decelerated to its normal swing and sway. “Don’tcha love those adorable little sailor hats?”

Lorena, Rosalind still on her mind, says, “Why would you be interested in somebody who could be shipped out any day?”

“Well,” says Delia, pouting, “it’s not like we’re still at war. Didn’t they sign a peace treaty or something?”

“It’s called an armistice,” says Lorena. Honestly, she thinks, Delia can be such a dingbat. “We still got all kinds of problems with everybody, Russia, China, I don’t know who-all else,” she informs her. “Now that Russia’s got the bomb, we got to worry about whether they might try to hit us here, what with the shipyard and all.”

“The shipyard? They’d want to bomb the shipyard?” Delia’s eyes go wide.

“The shipyard. Norfolk, the naval base. Fort Eustis. Fort Monroe. Langley Field. All kinds of places around here they’d like to blow up. Where have you been? Don’t you know we live in a target zone?”

“Jeez Louise! I
work
in the shipyard.”

Lorena rolls her eyes. “Well, it wouldn’t matter if you worked at Chicken in a Bucket if the H-bomb hits. It would scoop out a crater from here to Richmond.” She doesn’t know that, but it sounds terrifying enough to warrant Delia’s horrified gaze.

“Jeez Lo
-uise!”
says Delia.

*   *   *

THE ROOM IS dark except for the first faint glow of early morning that seeps around the edge of the window shade. Lorena tucks her head farther under the covers. She feels herself rise a little as Pete’s weight shifts. Now he’s sitting up. Now he’s up and out, she can tell because the bed feels lighter.

She burrows into the nest she’s made of sheets and blankets, flannel nightgown scrunched high around her waist. She waits until she can hear the bathroom door shut, the flush, the knocking of the pipes as the shower shudders to life. She ducks back under the covers. Warm and dark, musky odor of bodies, sweat, stale sex. She pulls her pillow in after her and curls her body around it.