Test Pattern Read online

  “Jeez Louise,” Delia mutters. “Some people.” She opens the door of her car, a brand-new lime-green ‘54 Nash Metropolitan that she bought after her divorce was final, and slides in. “Wanna catch the matinee?”

  “Can’t. I should get groceries, long’s I’m parked here.” Lorena waves at the red-and-yellow A&P sign. “Mize well kill two birds, you know.” She watches Delia’s car squeal away through the parking lot and finds herself wishing that she, too, had a car with that nifty continental kit on the back.

  LORENA HEFTS THE grocery bag in one arm as she hurries from the A&P to her car. Her light jacket feels heavy and claustrophobic. She opens it to the weather, craves the brittle edge of wind on her body. The A&P was overheated, had this funny smell of dried beef blood and insecticide that always gives her a headache. The cold fresh air blows up her skirt and down her blouse. She throws her head back and lets the early May wind lift her hair off her face, away from her neck. A few strands stick there like seaweed.

  The line still snakes through the parking lot to the trailer. Kids chase each other through the cars while mothers yell at them. Cassie didn’t want to come along when Lorena invited her, and Lorena was hurt at Cassie’s response: “What do you want to see an old trailer for?” Lorena just doesn’t know what’s gotten intothat girl lately. She even turned down Lorena’s offer to bake gingerbread men together, one of their favorite mommy-daughter things. Now Cassie doesn’t even call her “Mommy” anymore.

  What happened to the downy baby who curled like a shrimp on Lorena’s shoulder, sucking her thumb and twirling strands of Lorena’s hair between her fingers? When did she crawl down from that safe perch to become this scrawny fresh-mouthed ten-year-old who looks and acts more like Pete each day? Cassie’s long green eyes are the only features left that Lorena can claim. The rest—short straight nose, angular chin, sullen pout of a mouth— belong to Pete.

  There had been a time when Lorena felt that Cassie was her own, an extension of all her senses. When Cassie’s infant mouth would close around a spoonful of strained spinach, Lorena could taste the metallic mush. When Cassie dug her toes into the soft sand of the beach, Lorena’s feet tingled for them both. When Cassie wailed on the first day of school, Lorena cried tears for two.

  What happened? When did her sweet Cassie erupt into this wild creature whose green eyes, once so trusting, now scanned her from beneath thick brown lashes as if Lorena were a villain on one of her TV shows? She only knows that Cassie isn’t what Lorena was at ten, that maybe there’s been some twist in time and ten isn’t what it was twenty years ago.

  Remnants of trash skitter across the parking lot—wrapper from a Baby Ruth, that waxy paper they give you with a doughnut. Where did she park? The lot’s so jammed with cars, Lorena can’t think straight, oh, there it is, way on the other side, sky-blue Dodge two-door coupe. Oh, no, she remembers, she forgot to get gas and the gauge is on empty. She’ll have to stop at the Texaco. She trots across the parking lot, the heels of her flats scraping asphalt.

  She’s intent on fishing her keys out of the purse dangling from one elbow. A soldier shambles toward her, thumbs in his front pockets, hands curved toward his crotch, hat tipped over his fore-head. Is that … no, couldn’t be … the same soldier who was yelling at her and Delia when they left the trailer?

  His hair is cut close along the sides, sidewalls, she thinks they call it, and he walks with a loose lope that she recognizes from somewhere, an unhinged walk that belongs to someone she once knew. Does he know her? He must, because he quickens his step and aims in her direction.

  “Hey, Lorena, wait up,” he’s saying. “Remember me? Binky?”

  Binky? Binky Quisenberry?

  He looks different. Maybe it’s the uniform. Or that haircut. Or the skinny little mustache. But the nose over the mustache is the same, broken just enough to give him that tough-guy Marlon Brando look, and his eyes are still the color of rain.

  It is Binky. She hasn’t seen him since high school.

  “Binky? Is that you?” Then, “Was that you, yelling at us outside the trailer?”

  “Aw. If I’da known who it was I was yelling at, I wouldn’ta.” He looks sheepish, gives her a crooked grin. “I watched you walking to the A&P and it dawned on me, why, damn if that ain’t Lorena, so after I got outta the trailer, I decided to hang around.”

  Well, she thinks, the saying is true. There’s something about a man in uniform. Seeing Binky in these starched and pressed khakis brings back memories of him in his football uniform, monumental padded shoulders distorting the dark blue jersey with the number “50” appliquéd in yellow across its back.

  Now he wears the peaked cap low on his forehead and speaks lazily of the army, how he’s home, this time to stay. She leans against the round fender of her car and shifts the bag of groceries from one hip to the other. She wishes she had worn makeup, combed her hair, something, but who knew she would run into Binky Quisenberry in the A&P parking lot?

  “You’re still in uniform,” she says. “Where’ve you been?”

  He lights up a Lucky, his big hand curved to protect the Zippo’s flame from the wind. “Been everywhere. Been in the army since WWII. Saw action in the Ardennes. I was there, right in the thickof it, got wounded. Don’t remember how, actually. It was all a blur. I remember ducking, then an explosion. I was in the VA hospital for a while.”

  “Wow,” says Lorena, eyes big.

  “Hey, you wanna see something?” He pulls his shirt open, shows her something jagged and white and lumpy going over his shoulder and down his back. “Got this. Wounded in action.” Impulsively, she reaches out and runs her finger along it. It feels like cold Cream of Wheat.

  “Wow,” she breathes. Her finger tingles as if she had caressed something forbidden and exotic, and she shudders with the danger of it. “Did you get hurt in Korea, too?”

  “Korea?” He buttons up his shirt again. “Well, I didn’t exactly see combat in Korea. Actually, I never went to Korea, not that I didn’t want to go but I was stationed at Fort Bragg and don’t think that wasn’t a challenge, working at the PX, keeping track of the stock, not to mention the shoplifting by the enlisted men’s wives, you wouldn’t believe what went on.” He frowns. “It’s not just battle that wins the war, you know, it’s morale, too. That’s part of the war effort, don’t let anybody tell you different.”

  “That’s right,” she says. “I bought war bonds.”

  “I’m getting discharged this week,” he tells her around the Lucky between his lips. He takes a long drag, pulls it out, crushes it beneath his army boot. “Don’t know what I’ll be doing then. Maybe work for my dad at the auto-parts store although it’s been oh, ‘bout ten years since I worked a regular job, not service-connected, you know.”

  Lorena nods, shifts the grocery bag to the other hip, combs her bangs to the side with two fingers of her free hand. As he speaks she watches his lips move beneath his carefully trimmed mustache, neat and thin, an Errol Flynn mustache that shelters smooth pink lips marred only by a fleck of tobacco stuck to the bottom one. Automatic as the miniature crane that grabs a toy in a carnival prize machine, her hand rises, plucks the tobacco from his lip, then lingers on its silken surface.

  “Hey,” he says. “Hey, Lorena.” He grabs her hand and keeps it on his lips.

  She is leaning against her car, one arm around the grocery bag, the other raised to Binky’s mouth. She can feel his teeth hard behind the soft lips, feels her own lips part and her tongue circle them lightly. What is she doing? She snaps her hand away, shakes it as if something clung to it, something more than just tobacco, more than the softness of pink.

  “I’ve gotta go,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “I’ve gotta get gas,” she says, ignoring his laugh. She flings the car door open, throws the groceries inside. “Gotta run.” She starts the car, grinds the gears as she backs out of the space. She doesn’t want to look at him.

  “Hey, Lorena.” Binky follows her,
bending his head to talk to her through the window. “Can I see you again?”

  She shakes her head no. “I’m married,” she says, and shifts forward into first. The car shrieks, shudders, stops dead.

  “Married?”

  She nods.

  “Who’d ya marry?”

  “Pete. Pete Palmer.” She starts the car up again and yells over its sputter, “You don’t know him. He graduated a couple of years before us.”

  She can see him in her rearview mirror as she pulls away. He stands at ease, in his uniform. When she gets home, she remembers she forgot to get gas.

  3

  CASSIE

  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 do
n’t say anything. I only know it’s true.

  4

  LORENA

  BINKY 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.