Test Pattern

by Marjorie Klein

  “Can Cassie come out to play?” Margaret and Ginny Sue gaze at Lorena with pathetic eyes.

  “She’s at her dancing lesson,” Lorena hisses. She knows what the next question will be.

  “Can we watch TV till she comes home?”

  “There’s. Nothing. On.” How many times will she have to say that before she’s entitled to rip their grubby little throats out?

  “Can we watch when there is?”

  “We’ll have to see,” she says, her effort at control betrayed as she slams the door.

  She trudges back to the sink and crawls back underneath toresume scrubbing. And there’s the doorbell again. She tries to ignore it, but its persistent buzzing penetrates her resolve. She clambers out from under the sink and storms to the door.

  “Go home!” she shrieks as she flings the door open, and immediately slams it shut again.

  It’s Binky. In uniform. Her hands fly up to her hair, then down to the seat of her ripped pedal pushers. She opens the door a crack, peers around its edge. “Binky,” she croaks. “What are you doing here?”

  He’s holding out her mail. “Surprise! I’m your new mailman. I finished my training. I asked for your neighborhood for my route. They let me have it since I’m just out of the service and all. You gonna invite me in?”

  “How did you know where I live?”

  “Phone book. Looked it up. Pete Palmer, right, that’s what you told me?”

  “Oh,” she says from behind the door. She doesn’t want him inside, not the way she looks with her frizzy hair and ripped pants. All that makeup, sitting unused on her dressing table and not on her face. “Well,” she says, reaching her hand around the door for her mail, “thanks for delivering it.”

  “That’s my job. That’s what I do. Rain, sleet, shine, blizzard, hail, whatever, I forget how it goes. You gonna invite me in for a lemonade?”

  “Lemonade?”

  “Nehi? Co-Cola? I don’t care.”

  “Um,” she says, “I’m doing some … cleaning.” That’s smooth, she thinks, mentally beating her head against the wall. She shouldn’t have answered the door, why did she answer the door, she knew what she looked like, why did she answer the door? “I’m not really dressed.”

  “You look fine to me.”

  “Wait a minute,” she says. She shuts the door, drops her mail on the coffee table, runs upstairs. Bangs open a drawer, pulls out shorts and a halter top. Rips off the pedal pushers, changes. Dipsher pinky finger into the rouge pot, smears quick crimson circles onto her cheeks, scrawls Red Flame lips onto her mouth. Runs back downstairs. Opens the door. “I think I’ve got a Coke around somewhere,” she says, panting. He comes in, drops his big leather mailbag by the doorway.

  He does look handsome in his uniform. Snappy, as a matter of fact, those gray pants with the stripe down the side, that braided cap with the visor, so official-looking it just makes you want to stand and salute. His military haircut has grown out and it looks like his brown hair has been combed back with something gooey—Brylcreem, Vitalis—beneath his cap. He has kept his pencil-thin Errol Flynn mustache.

  His lips are still soft and pink. She remembers how they felt when she touched them in the A&P parking lot that day, tender as the plush of the Paramount’s chairs. Her fingers tingle at the memory, setting off a tremor through her body that erupts into a nervous giggle.

  “Something’s different.” He tilts his head quizzically, appraising her. Then, “Your hair,” he says.

  Her hands fly up, fingers stretched over the springy mass of poodle-clipped curls. “It was supposed to … Maybelle said …” she sputters.

  He reaches over and twangs a curl. “You look like, whatsher-name, Mitzi Gaynor.”

  Mitzi Gaynor?

  The movie star? She looks like Mitzi Gaynor the movie star?

  “Well,” she says. “Hardly.” But she is flattered, and she turns just so, looks pertly over her shoulder before she heads toward the kitchen calling “Ice?” in what she hopes is a Mitzi Gaynor voice.

  “Nope,” he calls back. “I like my Cokes warm and fizzy.”

  Please don’t say “Like my women,” she thinks.

  “Like my women,” he says.

  She’s glad he doesn’t want ice because Pete didn’t bother to fill the tray and there’s one lonely cube left. She brings two warm fizzy glasses of Coke into the living room, where Binky sits sprawled out on the sofa as if he’d been there all week. “Here,” he says, patting the cushion next to him. She complies and detours around the undulations of the coffee table to sink into the couch right next to him.

  “Well,” she says.

  “Well,” says Binky.

  “So you decided not to go into business with your dad,” she says to make conversation.

  “Bad idea.” He takes a noisy slurp of Coke. “It’s never a good idea to go into business with a relative. Especially when that relative is my dad. Auto parts, that’s not my field anyway, I like cars and all but the parts, well, they’re not the same thing. As the whole car.”

  “Well, I guess.” She’s not even sure what auto parts are. Carburetors. Brakes. Door handles. “Your dad must have been disappointed.”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t actually, you know, ever ask.”

  “Didn’t ask? If you’d go in with him?”

  “Not actually.”

  She looks at her glass. She’s left a big greasy red lipstick smear on the rim. She feels a burp welling beneath her rib cage, a gassy Coke bubble rising, rising until she can’t suppress it and a growly “bor-r-r-rk” escapes, puffing out her cheeks and making her eyes water. “‘Scuse me,” she mumbles, humiliated.

  “BRAAACK,” he responds in kind, a manly belch whose explosion momentarily deflates him until he puffs back up with a contented sigh. “Boy, nothing like a warm Coke to get your innards going.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “I saw your friend Delia the other day, she mention that? Funny, I didn’t remember her right away, but she knew me, came right up, said ‘Hi.’ Then she mentioned your name, and alluva-sudden I got this picture of you two walking down the hall at school dressed in those sailor blouses you used to wear. She was kind of fat then, wasn’t she?”

  “Fat?” She never thought of Delia as fat. She was voluptuous, that was the word Delia used to describe herself after she heard Jerry Lester use it to describe Dagmar on Broadway Open House. Voluptuous. It had a nice, round sound to it. It conjured up images of the Venus de Milo and Mae West. Voluptuous was what Lorena always wanted to be and never was. “Delia’s not fat,” she said in defense of her friend’s poundage.

  “Hey, no, I don’t mean she’s fat now. She’s thinned out, lost that heft. Not my type, but looks pretty okay.”

  Good. Delia’s not his type, so Lorena magnifies Delia’s virtues. “She looks great,” she says, “and she’s real independent, she’s got a real job.”

  “She told me, said she was divorced from that guy she went with in high school, Farley Something, wasn’t that his name? She said she didn’t have kids but you did.”

  “I’ve got a girl, Cassie. She’s almost eleven.”

  “Just one?”

  Lorena doesn’t feel like telling him that they just never got around to having another one, even though Pete wanted a son, not that he didn’t want a daughter, too, but he always pictured himself playing catch with a son, taking him fishing and crabbing, doing all that stuff that girls don’t do.

  But all she says to Binky is, “Just one.”

  “So, where is she?” he asks.

  “She’s at her dancing lesson.”

  “Dancing?”

  “Yeah. Tap. She just started. I think she’s got talent.”

  Binky gives another belch, smaller, more discreet this time. “I used to take accordion lessons.”

  “The accordion?” She can’t picture Binky pushing that serpentine instrument between his big square-fingered hands, playing “Lady of Spain wah-wah-wah-wah …” “I
don’t remember anybody playing the accordion except for Winnie Wachholder, who used to play during assemblies.”

  “I was little when I played. Eight or nine. My mother made me.” He looks crumpled when he says this, as if his mother is standing over him right now. “And then I threw it out my bedroom window into the driveway and my dad drove over it.” He’s distracted by the memory but snaps right back. “So she’s at her dancing lesson now?”

  “Yeah. Her lesson’s on Thursdays. Takes the bus, gets home around four.”

  “She any good?”

  “Not yet. She hates it. But she’s got real talent, that’s what I think. She’s very original, makes up her own steps. She just needs to get the basics down.”

  “But if she hates it …”

  “She just thinks she hates it. She has to give it a chance, develop her talent.” Lorena sighs. “I wish I had had a mother who made me develop my talent.”

  “Talent? What’s your talent?”

  She looks at him, pushes her bottom lip out in a pout. Doesn’t he remember? “I dance,” she says.

  “Dance? What kind of dance? Jitterbug?”

  “Well, yeah.” Doesn’t he remember everybody standing around clapping when she was on the dance floor? How good she was? “But tap dance is my specialty. I’m working on my routine. I’m going to try out for one of those amateur-hour shows on TV. You know, Ted Mack, Arthur Godfrey.”

  “I got a cousin does that.”

  “He dances?”

  “Naw. He finds people. For Arthur Godfrey.”

  “He’s a talent scout?” Lorena clutches her hands and flings them to her chest. “For Arthur Godfrey?”

  “My cousin Wally. He’s from Norfolk. Always was kind of … different, you know, showbizzy like. Ran away to Hollywood when he was sixteen but my aunt Edna made him come homeand finish high school. Now he lives in New York, travels all over looking for people to go on Arthur Godfrey. That’s his job.”

  “Oh my God,” says Lorena.

  “Well, he’s not that special,” Binky says, his voice tinged with annoyance. “He’s more weird than special.”

  “Can I meet him?”

  “What?”

  “Can I meet him? Please!”

  Binky shrugs. “Well. I dunno. He’s hardly ever around anymore. I mean, I don’t even know if he’d remember me, it’s been so long—”

  “Listen,” Lorena interrupts. “You track Wally down and meanwhile I’ll perfect my routine so that when you do find him, I’ll be ready.”

  “Sure. Sure thing,” Binky agrees, snaps his wrist to his face, looks bug-eyed at his watch. “Oh boy. I’m late. I gotta get going. First day on the route, got to stay on schedule.”

  Lorena leaps between him and the mailbag as he reaches down to retrieve it. “I would be forever, and I do mean forever, indebted to you if I could meet Wally,” she cries, and grabs his hand.

  “Hey,” he responds with a grin. “My turn,” and he pulls her hand to his lips. “Remember? In the parking lot?” he murmurs, and she feels his lips on her fingertips once again, wet and slick. The tip of his tongue reaches out like a fat pink worm and licks the space between her fingers, zinging her whole body as if he had licked her all over. Her lips part, and before she thinks to stop him, he has planted his face on hers and she can’t remember when she’s felt like this, fusing, melting, surrendering …

  He stops abruptly. Backs away from her, picks up his mail sack without looking. “Don’t move,” he whispers. “I want to remember you just this way.” Before he shuts the door, he adds, “See you tomorrow.”

  Lorena feels paralyzed for long minutes after he’s left. She stares at the pile of mail on the coffee table. Binky kissed her. She hasn’t been kissed by another man for … what? Thirteen years? Unlessshe counts Uncle Rudy, who may he rest in peace used to try when Aunt Lula would have them over for Sunday dinner.

  She feels different now. Sexy. Sensual. Desirable. Does it show? She staggers upstairs to look in the bathroom mirror. Her hair looks electrified. Her ears are sticking out. Her face is smeared from nose to chin with lipstick. She looks as if she just finished a cherry Popsicle.

  But Binky kissed her. And not just a kiss. It was a seal, a promise, a pledge to her future.

  It’s destiny, she whispers to the face in the mirror. It’s written in the stars. Soon you will meet cousin Wally. Soon you will be a star.

  9

  CASSIE

  I REALLY WANT to go back out to the pool, but no, we have to sit here in the dumb coffee shop even though I’ve finished my hamburger and I’m bored bored bored with all their talking. This is supposed to be my special treat, to have lunch and swim at the Chamberlin Hotel, but Mom and Delia act like I’m not even here except when Mom says “Stop that!” if I make the table move with my knees or slurp my straw in the bottom of my glass.

  And then I see him. Snooky Lanson. I know it’s him, I can tell all the way across the coffee shop. It’s not just somebody who looks like him, kind of pale and freckle-y, hair combed high in a pompadour. It’s Snooky Lanson, the TV star. I know his voice. It booms all the way across the room, even though he’s not singing like he does on Your Hit Parade, one of my very very favorite TV shows. He’s sitting at a table with a bunch of ladies in bathing suits covered with frilly robes and men dressed in cabana sets, bathing trunks with matching shirts like the kind Dad took back to Nachman’s after Mom bought him a set.

  I’ve never seen a real live famous person before, not in the same room with me. “Mom!” I say, but she’s so busy yakking with Delia that she’s not paying attention. “Mom, Mom, look!” I pull at the sleeve of her striped beach jacket and she says her usual “Stop that,” until I say the magic words “Snooky Lanson” and she looks at where I’m pointing.

  “Don’t point,” she says, smacking my hand down, but she’s craning her neck to see for herself. “He looks older in person,” she says to Delia, who has unstuck her bottom from the plastic seat of our booth and is half standing for a better view.

  “Snooky Lanson?” asks Delia. “Isn’t he on My Hit Parade?”

  “YOUR Hit Parade,” I say, and roll my eyes around. Most times I really like Delia, a lot. She’s funny and nice and treats me like a real person, not just a kid, but sometimes she can be such a dumb Dora, as Dad would say.

  “You know the show,” Mom says to her. “The one where they sing and dance to the top hits of the week. And at the end they sing that song.” And then she sings it in her Minnie Mouse voice: “So long for a while, that’s all the songs for a while …” I would like to die. Just crawl under this table and die.

  “Mom! Stop that.” I cover my face with my hands. “He can hear you.”

  She laughs. “No, he can’t. He’s too busy talking.” I look over at his table. He’s laughing, his big TV teeth open wide, his little squinty eyes almost shut. Every time he says something, the lady next to him in the floppy straw hat laughs and squeezes his knee.

  “I want to get his autograph,” I say.

  “Don’t bother the man,” says Mom.

  “I want to!”

  “Well …” She starts pawing through her beach bag. “Do you have something for him to write on?”

  I think fast. My napkin. It’s not really dirty, just a very faint chocolate smudge, he’ll never notice. “I need a pen,” I say, smoothing out the creases in the napkin. I’m nervous he mightleave before I can even ask. “Hurry, hurry. Don’t you have something to write with?”

  “Just hold your horses,” Mom says. She sticks her arm in the bag all the way to her shoulder and scrabbles around until she comes up with this short yellow pencil stub, like the ones she and Delia use to write down their canasta scores. “Here.”

  “That’s all you’ve got? How can I ask Snooky Lanson to write his name with something so stubby?”

  “That’s it, kiddo,” she says. “Take it or leave it.”

  I take it and the napkin and walk slowly over to the table where Snooky is si
tting. The closer I get, the slower I walk. Nobody looks at me, they just keep talking and laughing until I’m standing close enough to touch him. It’s strange to see him up close. He has very pink skin, peeling in patches from the sun, and orangy- yellow hair that sticks up funny. I always think of him in black- and-white, and here he is in color. His shirt is all bright with palm trees, flamingos, sailboats. His hamburger has just one bite out of it. He’s holding a french fry, waving it around while he talks.

  When he looks at me, I am afraid because his eyes are so pale, blue and pale and blank as the stationary Delia gave me for Christmas to write thank-you notes on. I want to write on his eyes: “Dear Mr. Lanson, How are you, I am fine. Thank you very much for signing my napkin. I am sorry about the pencil. Thank you very much. Yours truly, Cassandra Palmer.”

  That way I wouldn’t have to talk. But I open my mouth and out comes a squeak. “Could I have your autograph?” The straw-hat lady next to him bends down to me and says with her juicy pink lips, “Isn’t she sweet?” I don’t feel sweet. I feel dopey. The napkin has gotten all wrinkled and sweaty, and I don’t even want to think about the pencil.

  But I hand them both to him anyway. He smiles his wide Snooky smile and doesn’t seem to notice the stubby pencil or the dinky napkin. “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Cassie,” I mumble. And then he writes. The napkin tears alittle as the pencil digs in, but when he hands it back it’s still in one piece and below where it’s printed “Chamberlin Hotel” in swirly blue letters, he’s scribbled “To Cassie, best regards, Snooky Lanson.”

  I don’t know what to say. Thank you doesn’t seem to be enough. “I will treasure this,” sounds goofy. So I curtsy. I haven’t done that since kindergarten, but I remember how. I dip low over one bended knee and stick the other leg way in back of me, and say the only French words I know: “Mercy bocoo.”

  The straw-hat lady applauds, and Snooky and his friends all laugh. Then he leans over and gives me a kiss on my cheek. I can feel his stubbly whiskers, white, almost invisible against his pink and scabby cheeks. And then I turn and run back to my mother and Delia, who are sitting with their eyes and mouths round and surprised.