Test Pattern (7 page)

She thinks of Binky’s lips. How she tingled when she touched that pink and tender surface, how they felt like the skin that forms over chocolate pudding after it’s cooled. She mentally runs her fingers once again over his Cream of Wheat scar, follows it down his back, lower, lower …

Oops. Pete’s out of the bathroom. He plunks himself on the bed, jarring her. Flicks the light on his side of the bed, tips the tiny pleated lampshade to a rakish angle, examines the frayed toe of one sock with a probing finger before he pulls it on. “My mother darned socks,” he says.

Lorena doesn’t answer. His mother darned socks. His mother scrubbed clothes on a washboard. His mother canned tomatoes and nearly wiped out his family with botulism. Her image shadows Lorena at every domestic turn. Last Sunday she came for dinner and hovered at Lorena’s shoulder while she fixed apple pandowdy for dessert. His mother had a stake in its preparation since it, as well as her biscuit recipe, was handed by her to Lorena with great ceremony after the wedding.

“Slice those apples
thin,
dearie,” his mother had admonished in her Pall Mall-rattled voice. “Pete doesn’t like them thick and chewy, and that crust should be crunchy, you know he’s picky about his crust.”

When Pete’s mother did that, Lorena’s mind transported herselfright out of the kitchen, straight to the hall closet. She saw herself rummage through winter coats and mildewed umbrellas and bowling shoes; saw herself pull out Pete’s mail-order Red Ryder BB gun, load it with pellets, turn with the gun heavy under her armpit. She saw herself point it at her mother-in-law and shoot her right between those bullfrog eyes.

“What’s for lunch?” Pete’s asking. Lorena pops her frilly-capped head out of the covers.

“It’s in the Frigidaire.” Why does he always ask? She’s been packing his lunch bucket the night before for the past twelve years, same thing, never changes: two bologna sandwiches on white, heavy mayo; big dill pickle, bag of chips, piece of fruit, slab of cake, thermos of black coffee left over from breakfast.

He makes the coffee, thick and sludgy, she makes it too weak for him. He’s already down the stairs, calling, “Coupla eggs sunny-side, and gimme some bacon to go with that.” She hears him rummaging around in the cabinets, banging doors, clanging pots. She crawls out from under the covers and stares at the ceiling. Shoves the mound of blankets and sheets away from her. She is not, never was, never will be, chipper in the morning, and she starts her day as she always does: loathing the fact that he is.

She shuffles into the bathroom, pulls her nightgown up around her waist, sits on the cold seat, yawns. She’s up, and to prove it, she looks into the mirror. Yep. Her eyes are open. She must be up.

She digs her arms into the sleeves of the gray flannel robe, shoves pink feet into her slippers, flaps down the stairs to the kitchen. He is jazzed, got that Maxwell House perking, the glass knob on top of the coffeepot jumping with dark brown juice, the smell of it curling under her nostrils just like it does in the TV commercial. He’s tossing Wonder Bread bags out of the bread box, some empty, some holding a fuzzy green heel or two. “Well,” he says. “I guess this means no toast.”

A pair of eggs stares cross-eyed at her from the pan as she shoves the spatula under them, jostling their mucous gaze untilthe yolks run into the whites. He sees what she’s doing. “Hey! I hate that, yellow in the white. And where’s my bacon?”

“We’re out.”

“Jeez.” He’s not so chipper anymore. She feels better now.

THE HOUSE IS empty, like somebody knocked the wind out of it. Cassie’s left for school, Pete’s off to work, and the house suddenly, blissfully, rings with silence. Lorena scrapes the remains of breakfast into the garbage pail that gasps open with a stomp of her fur-slippered foot. It’s eight twenty-five.

A cold gray day. She looks out the kitchen window at a stone-colored bird hopping on the clothesline in the backyard. Beyond that are the back doors of another row of houses. She’s surrounded by houses, rows and rows of wartime housing called Stuart Gardens, an overnight development built for the influx of shipyard workers and servicemen.

For unbroken blocks, identical white frame row houses trimmed in dark green face each other across scraggly squares of grass and weeds called “courts.” The main feature of the court in front of Lorena’s house is a dusty diamond of dirt defined by somebody’s worn-out cushions that serve as bases for kickball or baseball, depending on the season. A sidewalk runs from the street past all the houses, linking them and framing the court in white.

In summer, people pull out metal lawn chairs, set them on their little patches of front lawn, and wave at each other across the court while the kids play ball or catch fireflies. Each house has its own front porch, just big enough to stand beneath when it rains. Each house has a ligustrum bush under the front window. In spring all the bushes bloom with white flowers and the court smells just like honey.

Many houses have a view of the water, the flat gray bay of Hampton Roads which laps at the narrow beach just down the hill from the court. Ships of all sizes—fishing boats, aircraft carriers, freighters—doggedly crisscross the water. Norfolk sprawlson the horizon. Dim forms of distant buildings visible in daylight become a carnival of lights at night. Lorena hasn’t been there for years.

She pulls her robe around her, steps onto the front porch. A gust of wind from the water balloons her robe. She clutches it with one hand while the other shades her eyes from the eastern sun as it brightens the morning sky. She smells the musky odor of brine, of rotting sea life snared in tattered remnants of nets washed up on shore. The fragrance somehow thrills her. She’s drawn to the water, always has been. But now she fears it, too.

Polio. You can catch polio from the water. That’s what she’s heard. She’s warned Cassie to stay away from it, not even to dip a toe. The warm and milky water she splashed over Cassie’s baby body a few short years ago has become as polluted and poisonous as witches’ brew.

Lorena stares at the water from her porch, then from her bedroom window as she gets dressed. She finds herself walking across the court, down the hill, over the patchy grass of the so-called park to the beach. Flat black sandals hanging from two fingers, bare feet sinking into brown-sugar sand, she gazes across the opaque water at Norfolk.

And then she remembers: She had the dream again last night.

IT STARTS WITH light, the dream always does, a pinpoint pulsating faintly against the black. The light expands, kaleidoscopes into fragments across the infinite vision of dream. Brighter than lightning, the dreamlight shatters and multiplies, splinters of a galaxy brilliant against fathomless dark.

Deep in the burrow of sleep, she knows this is a dream, knows she experienced it all before the first time that she dreamed it, knows it wells up from the deep place where dreams are born. It’s an answer without a question, so she welcomes the dream and watches.

The lights drift and settle into a glittering band that stretchesalong the horizon of her vision, a blinding faceted rainbow. She reaches out to embrace it and, when she can’t, realizes that the shimmering vision she is trying to grasp is Norfolk with its myriad of lights.

In her dream, this is what she does:

She stands on the edge of the water, afraid. Her house is behind her, invisible in the darkness, swallowed up by the night. She could turn and walk back, retrace her path over the hard sand of the beach, the coarse grass of the park, the rocky protrusions of the hill. She could go home. But the lights are too compelling.

Inky waves wash over her feet. She walks into the water. It envelops her, soft, soothing, a veil of black silk that caresses her body, and she descends, sinking slowly, drifting downward in a lazy spiral. To her surprise and pleasure, she can breathe underwater. She takes great gulps of—not air, but a strange elixir that revives her and makes her feel alive. The water, once so forbidding, is transparent as glass. Columns of light dance through it like golden ballerinas.

Colorful shapes of mysterious creatures float past her as she drifts. They seem friendly. She reaches out but they escape her touch, pass through her grasp like ghosts. Now and then one seems to be familiar, but who or what it is eludes her. They speak to her in the language of shells, burbling syllables on the edge of comprehension, sounds she understands but can’t articulate herself. The creatures seem to be leading her toward the city’s glow.

In her dream, she remains inert, drifting this way, that way, this way again, venturing neither forward nor back. Norfolk’s phosphorescence dims and fades as she watches. She sees, but never touches, its light.

LORENA TAKES A deep breath of auditorium air, a redolent blend, of sweat and dust and springtime flowers that bloom outside the propped-open windows. It’s still light outside, a rosy twilight thatwashes the ocher walls of the high-school auditorium with pale pink.

“Can you smell it?” she asks Delia, who sits next to her on the hard wooden seats. They are the only occupants of this row. The other competitors for roles in the Community Theater production of
Guys and Dolls
sit in a nervous clot in the front row.

“Smell what?” Delia takes a nostril-dilating sniff.

“Show business.” Lorena closes her eyes. “The excitement. The applause. The blood, the sweat, the tears.”

“Smells like mold to me.”

Lorena pulls her knee up to her chin and rests one shiny black tap shoe on the seat to retie its bow. “I’ve been practicing like you said. I really think I’ve got my routine down. It’s different from when you saw it.”

“Yeah?” Delia asks. “How?”

“You’ll see,” Lorena says with a teasing smile. “I’ve added a lot of new steps I’ve seen Cassie do.”

“Cassie? I didn’t know she could dance.”

“Me, either, but I think she’s got my talent. She imitates these steps she sees on TV, steps I’ve never seen before.” Lorena stops herself. She doesn’t want to get into how she catches Cassie dancing in front of the test pattern, how just yesterday she saw her doing some dance that involved her arms arcing over her shoulders, then holding her nose like she was swimming. And another step where she scratched under her arms like a monkey.

“What’s that?” she had asked Cassie, who responded by pointing to the test pattern as she gyrated and sang “Come on baby, do the locomotion.” Startled, Lorena turned the TV off, but then asked a sulking Cassie to show her the steps she just made up.

“I didn’t make them up,” Cassie protested, but showed her anyway. Lorena quickly added them to her routine, a last-minute but, Lorena was certain, impressive addition sure to wow the director of the production of
Guys and Dolls
she was auditioning for tonight—her first step on the road to stardom.

A parade of hopefuls sings and dances across the auditorium stage, few of whom present any competition that Lorena can see. She and Delia suppress their giggles at the chunky ballerina who staggers dizzily offstage after her third pirouette. They sneer openly at the off-key baritone whom Lorena recognizes as her dry cleaner.

“Ne-ext,” calls the director in a nasal whine. “Lorena Palmer,” he reads from a list. He’s wearing dungarees and a little beret and it’s rumored that he once had a bit part in a Hitchcock film—a nonspeaking part, but you could recognize him in the crowd. “Lorena Palmer,” he repeats. “Where aaa-re you?”

“Here, here.” She scrabbles sideways out of the row into the aisle, adjusting her tap pants as she goes. Before she ascends to the stage, she hands a green record to an assistant, who plunks it atop the 45 player.

“Dancer?” asks the director. He sounds bored. From the stage, all Lorena can see of him is the top of his beret, round and red with a little stem coming out of the top like a pumpkin. “You bet,” she says, flashing what she hopes is a dazzling smile before she takes her position. The auditorium looms like a musky cavern before her. She sees Delia—tousled curls bright in the gloom, face turned upward expectantly—give her a thumbs-up. Lorena nods at the assistant, then waits, trembling, as the needle drops onto the record.

WOOO-WOOO-ooo.
Slowly at first, her arms rotate to the relentless rhythm, picking up the pace, churning churning chug-
a-chugga-chug-a-chugga,
now the feet, a subtle tap, then faster, faster, she gets into the groove, she’s moving to the music, she’s bopping with the beat,
yes
this is what it’s all about, and she flings herself into the new moves she learned from Cassie, arms crawling in that swimming motion, a quick, segue into the monkey scratch. She throws the director a saucy wink; his reaction is a bug-eyed stare. She can tell that he’s in awe.

She revs up for her grand finale And … split! down she goes, legs splayed, arms high, big smile. Delia’s enthusiastic if solitary applause echoes through the auditorium.

“Thank you,” says the director in a strangled voice. He hunches over his list. “Next!”

“Thank
you,”
sings Lorena to the top of his beret.

“How’d I do?” she asks Delia as she plops into her seat.

“Um. You were just… spectacular. No, really. Just spectacular.”

A lithe blonde is nervously taking her place onstage. Lorena elbows Delia. “Falsies,” she says. But she’s wrong. As the blonde begins her routine, it is clear that her bounce is authentic, a gentle rise and fall that synchronizes with each perfectly executed leap and twirl. Worse, she has hair that undulates in waves, a golden curtain she uses as a prop, sweeping it before her face, flinging it back dramatically, running her fingers through its shimmering strands in a gesture that seems choreographed.

“She looks like Veronica Lake,” says Delia.

Lorena slumps in her seat, arms folded. “Veronica Lake isn’t a dancer.”

The blonde winds up her routine with a precise pirouette. The director’s beret is tipped back, he gives a little patter of applause. “Thank you,” he says. “Very nice. And you are …” He checks his list, “Miss Ellenson?” She smiles prettily, nods. “Very nice, Miss Ellenson.”

Miss Ellenson is chosen for the cast. Lorena is not. She and Delia slog out of the auditorium accompanied by the plunking notes of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” and the nasal voice of the director assigning the coveted roles.