Test Pattern Read online

  “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.

  Cassie worries Lorena these days. When Lorena’s not daydreaming about Binky or mourning the dancing career she never had, she worries about Cassie. She’s changed, gotten sassy, talks about seeing things on the test pattern that aren’t there. And now she’s gone from A’s to F’s in school.

  “Miss Winkle sent home a note,” Lorena announces.

  “Baba-loooo!” Cassie howls, pounding on the edge of the TV table with both hands.

  “What kind of note?” Pete says.

  “Baba-loooo!” Cassie pounds harder.

  “Cassie!” Lorena snaps. “This is important.”

  Cassie slumps down in the chair and stares glumly at her tray. “Miss Winkle says you’re failing arithmetic,” says Lorena. “She says you’re not doing your homework.”

  “Failing?” says Pete.

  “I’m not failing,” Cassie mumbles.

  “She says you’ve gotten F’s on your last two tests. That’s called failing.”

  “Miss Winkle hates me.”

  “Miss Winkle does not hate you.”

  “Well, I hate her.”

  “You haven’t been doing your homework?” Pete asks, his face darkening into a scowl. “What’s the matter with you?” He turns to Lorena. “Why hasn’t she been doing her homework?”

  “Maybe because she’s been watching TV instead,” says Lorena.

  “Well,” growls Pete to Cassie, “no more TV until you’ve finished your homework.” He turns his attention to The Red Buttons Show.

  Lorena falls silent. She doesn’t challenge Pete, especially not now. He’s changed lately, gotten crankier, even snaps at Cassie, something he rarely did before. He and Cassie had always shared a special bond Lorena felt apart from. She even had little fits of hidden jealousy when Pete and Cassie would giggle over some silly secret. It made Lorena feel … well, she didn’t know what she felt, except left out.

  Now a vague guilt prickles the back of Lorena’s neck. She senses that Pete is admonishing her as well as Cassie: What’s wrong with her, not even noticing that Cassie had fallen behind in school? She hasn’t been paying attention. Not to Cassie. Not to her wifely duties. Not to those things that she thought were so important to her just a few short weeks ago, before they got the TV.

  When she’s not settled down in front of the television for an evening of Lucy or Ed Sullivan, Lorena steals TV moments in snippets, sidling in from the kitchen to sneak peeks when Cassie is watching. It doesn’t matter what’s on—Howdy Doody, Captain Video, The Lone Ranger—as long as it’s not obscured by snow, she’ll watch. She is drawn to the light, the sound, the action, the life that suddenly exists in her living room.

  When they got the TV set, something shifted in their lives. Lorena isn’t sure what’s caught her so off balance. Is it the rearrangement of the living room? Is it waiting to go to bed until What’s My Line is over? Is it that every conversation now centers on television—the shows, the stars, the gossip?

  Or is it because sometimes when she watches, she’s sucked breathless by revelation: She could have been on that screen. She could have been the performer, not the audience. And she mourns for who she could have been and what she could have done, f
or she knows she has a gift.

  She’s got flying feet, a flip to her hips, a syncopated rhythm in her bones. When she danced the jitterbug at high school sock hops, her feet barely touched the shiny-slick floor of the gym. John Patrick would sling her like a wet towel over and under andthrough his legs, she was that limp and pliant. Bebop. When she got going the dance floor froze, they all stepped back and stopped mid-twirl to stare and clap in rhythm. Applause, applause—it fed some hunger deep down in her soul.

  Her talent has lain dormant since then, but she was still a hoofer in her heart, a heart that beat to the rhythm of the greats: Eleanor Powell, Ruby Keeler, Vera-Ellen, Ann Miller, Ginger Rogers. When movie musicals were her only inspiration, her dream of dancing surfaced in the secret darkness of the theater, only to sink again when she came home to the obligations of marriage and motherhood.

  But with the coming of TV into her living room, her need to perform gnaws at her on a daily basis. Bare feet tucked beneath her, Hershey bar unwrapped, she folds herself into a corner of the couch and imagines herself on the screen.

  In the TV playing in her mind, she sees herself in satin shorts and tap shoes. She’s taking her bows as the winner on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour. She’s tap-tap-tapping to the top of the applause meter on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. Born to be a star, they shout over the applause. Born to be a star.

  She doesn’t tell this to anyone but Delia. Delia is her best friend, has been since high school. Delia tells her everything. Delia has a lot to tell these days. She’s the only divorced person Lorena knows. It’s a shame, people say about Delia, a shame and a pity but mostly a shame.

  Delia doesn’t care what people say, never did, didn’t care that people knew she was stepping out on that swine of a husband she married the week after she graduated from Newport News High. Stayed married to Farley until he smacked her over the head with a turkey drumstick after she’d asked him to carve the bird last Thanksgiving and she just walked out right then, left him to explain to his whole family watching TV in the living room while they waited for her to serve them. Delia did get custody of the TV.

  Now Delia struts her freshly painted self down to her new jobat the shipyard to type letters for her boss. She’s got a bunch of boyfriends, spends every weekend with a sassy smile on her face. Each day brings a fresh new drama; each night, the promise of lust.

  Lorena tells Delia about her dreams of being on TV, of dancing on Ted Mack, even confesses that she finds herself thinking about Binky. They tell each other everything, what they want and what they miss and what they dream about.

  “Sometimes,” Lorena tells Delia, “I feel like I took a wrong turn somewhere and wound up in somebody else’s life. Maybe there’s another life for me. Not this one, but my real life.”

  She doesn’t know what to say when Delia laughs and says, “Sugar pie, this is real life.”

  When Delia tells Lorena how lucky Lorena is, how she’s got what Delia doesn’t—two people who really love her—Lorena doesn’t tell her that two just isn’t enough. She wants more: Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. She wants the world to love her.

  And she’s going to make it happen. She doesn’t know how, yet. She only knows she will. After Pete leaves for work, she hauls her Photoplays out of the closet and spreads them on the floor like she did when she was young. She leans on one elbow and turns the pages slowly, pictures herself on the cover posed by her pool in Hollywood, imagines herself featured in Hedda Hopper’s column: “Lorena Palmer and Robert Mitchum caught smooching at the Stork Club.”

  Oh, she’ll be such a good star. She’ll faithfully answer her fan mail, she’ll cheerfully sign her autograph. She will make it happen. Yes she will. All she needs is a break.

  Delia is wrong. This isn’t her real life. Her real life is waiting to happen.

  MORE AND MORE these days, Lorena wonders if she married too young. Twenty didn’t seem so young when she was twenty. It even seemed old. Old maid. Such a terrifying label.

  Most of her teachers were old maids. Lorena used to imagine their lives. Up at six, feed the cat, water the African violets. At night, listen to the radio: Fred Allen, Fibber McGee. Put out the cat. Climb into bed. Alone.

  Miss Muncy, her fifth-grade teacher, never married. She wore black every day. No one knew why. Lorena and Delia speculated and decided: a fiancé lost in the Great War. In mourning ever since.

  At twenty, Lorena was unmarried, too. Too picky, her mother said. Old maid. That, she had decided on her birthday, must be her destiny. Then Pete came along.

  She was typing when he came in. She had a job, the job she got the summer she graduated high school with A’s in the only two courses that her mother said mattered—typing and shorthand. Her mother was right. Lorena landed a job at the shipyard typing memos and endless lists of numbers for her boss, who was head of accounting. Her mother nodded in satisfaction when Lorena got the job. “Well,” she had said, “now you can support yourself.”

  The first thing Lorena noticed about Pete was his neck. It was thick and corded and dropped straight from his ears to shoulders that stretched the seams of his work shirt. That was all she saw of him at first—his head with its tumble of black, black curls spilling over his forehead, that neck, those shoulders.

  “This the personnel office?” he asked.

  He was lost. Had hardly been up here since he first started working the shipyard, oh, ‘bout ten years ago. Had to fill out papers. First day on the new job, he explained as she left her desk to point the way down the hallway. When he got hurt, they moved him to an office job, just temporary, till he could work up high again. He slipped, that’s all, just turned around and the platform wasn’t there. Lucky he’d turned off the welding torch.

  She noticed he walked with a slight limp, his right shoulder a little lower than his left. He was clearly a powerful man and his rolling walk intensified, rather than diminished, that effect, like asteamroller with legs. He peered at her with steel-blue eyes like ingots set above cheekbones hammered into planes by wind high up on the gantry.

  “I’ll be working that ship,” Pete said, pointing out the grime-coated window at a battleship in dry dock for repair, stretching up high as a skyscraper. Pearl Harbor had been bombed, the country was at war and needed that battleship quick. “I can’t climb yet, but soon’s this leg straightens out I’ll be welding up there again.” She smiled up at him. She felt small, dainty. All around them rang the song of the shipyard, the rhythmic clanging so much a part of her life that it was theme music for her dreams.

  When he asked for her number she gave it to him. And when he called and her mother asked who was he, what did he do, how did she meet him, Lorena described him but left out the limp. Maybe her mother wouldn’t notice it when he came to pick her up.

  “What happened to your leg?” her mother asked Pete when he walked into the house. She never was one for amenities. He was dressed up in his Sunday best, white shirt, brown pants, bow tie. Hair parted in the middle, greased with Vitalis, combed so the curls were flattened into shining waves.

  “Broke it,” said Pete. “Fell off a gantry.”

  “Will it keep you out of the army?” her mother asked.

  Pete’s face grew dark. He ran a hand over the top of his head, remembered the grease, looked at his hand. Wiped it on his pants. “That’s what they tell me,” he said.

  “Good,” said her mother. “No sense in getting killed.”

  THEY WERE MARRIED six months later. Lorena quit her job. Pete wanted her home. Wanted bacon and eggs for breakfast. His lunch bucket packed the night before. His Sunday shirt ironed. Dinner on the table at seven. He wanted biscuits.

  At first it was exhilarating, being married. A married woman. Not an Old Maid. She had her own home, her own husband.

  Their tiny first apartment was close enough to the shipyard so she could hear the noontime whistle. Now he’s opening his lunch bucket, she’d say to herself when she heard the whistle’s wail, now he’s biting into the bo
logna sandwich she put in the icebox last night, now he’s swigging coffee still hot from his thermos. Somehow that knowledge made her proud. She was a wife.

  She became pregnant before their first anniversary. Not surprising, considering the time they spent in bed—every night and all weekend. But she liked that. She liked the feel of his muscular bulk rising above her, the way his black curls tightened up with sweat, the knowing that it was her lips, her breasts, her thighs, that brought him to this, this ecstatic falling away, this loss of control. It was sweet, the power she had.

  As she swelled with baby, the days took on meaning, the waiting gave substance to her life. She was busy now growing a life, and that gave her own life focus. Dusting, baking, feeding bed-sheets through the wringer of the washing machine—the motions of housekeeping became golden rituals, homage to hearth and home, the coming of new life.

  “Your belly button’s popped out,” Pete noted one day as she stood at the sink brushing her teeth.

  She looked down. There it was, her belly button, inside out. It looked like a dwarf’s thumb, hitchhiking.

  “Will it go back?” he asked. He seemed worried.

  She mashed it in. It collapsed softly but sprang back. “I guess,” she said. “After the baby’s out.”

  “It better,” he said.

  After that, it was hard to feel pretty. The belly-button bump showed through the thin cotton of her maternity tops. She grew bigger and bigger and began to waddle, could never get comfortable at night, thrashed wildly, half-awake, dreaming of triplets.

  “Ow! Stop flopping,” he complained after she bopped him on the nose during a particularly frenzied night. “You’re such a whale.”

  Well, she was a whale, she thought, lying on her back, herstomach rising pale and immense above the rest of her, crowned by that popped-out navel. She stared up at it in self-pity until her view fuzzed over with tears that trickled into her ears. “I’m fat,” she bawled. He didn’t disagree.