I wanted to be a space cadet until I saw this rocket that took off like the others but then it made a big puffy Y in the sky and crashed. That’s when I changed my mind about wanting to travel to the stars.
But these guys that I’m looking at are really up there somewhere, boinging around, looking at the constellations up close. I know Dad would like this because he knows so much about the stars.
“Whazzat?” It’s Dad. His voice is all slurry because he just woke up. He looks at me like he’s not sure I’m really here.
“Look, Dad,” I say, pointing to the guys who are still boinging around. “Spacemen. Just like Tom Corbett, only better, realer.”
“Wha?” He leans on his good elbow, squints at the TV.
“Spacemen, Dad. Up in the stars!”
“Turn that thing off,” he grumbles, flopping back on his pillow. “Wakin’ me up with that damn test pattern, that’s all I need.”
“You never believe anything I say.” I’m so mad. So mad I add, “I bet you wouldn’t believe me if I told you why Mom tried to kill you.”
“You’ve been watching too much TV.”
“But, Dad …”
He gets all red, reaches down, and throws his bedroom slipper at the TV screen. “Turn it off. And get your butt up to bed!”
I snap off the TV and go upstairs. I wish I had Molly’s parents. They listen to her. I even heard Mrs. Finkelstein tell Molly she loved her. When I told Molly nobody ever told me that, she said, Well, you know they love you because that’s what parents do. I said that being loved isn’t the same as feeling loved, but I don’t think she understood.
I get in bed and study the ceiling. It looks like the powdery ground the spaceman’s boot stepped on. If I look real hard, I can even see footprints.
24
LORENA
PETE IS SITTING up, parked under a TV tray in the stifling living room. A fan whines fretfully as it swivels in a corner. Summer explodes in bright sunshine outside, but inside it’s clammy and dark. Pete has refused to go outdoors since a neighbor innocently asked him how he happened to fall. His entertainment is limited to radio, television, and meals, the most recent of which Lorena is placing before him.
“What’s this?” He pokes a finger into the intestinal entanglement slithering over the sides of a soup bowl.
“Chef Boyardee.” Lorena is all smiles as she tucks a paper napkin under his chin.
“Looks like guts.” He rips the napkin away, balls it up. “I like sandwiches for lunch. You know that.” His chin is rumpled in a pout.
Lorena bites her lip, holds her breath. Waits for him to mention chicken noodle soup. He doesn’t, so she ventures, “I thought we’d try something different.” She offers him a hesitant smile.
She doesn’t want to spoil her mood. She just got back from Maybelle’s and her new hairdo has given her a new outlook. The sedate style reflects her desire to emulate the serene maturity of Mama Hansen. Lorena willingly credits Maybelle for her transformation.
“Hon,” Maybelle had said as she snipped away the last wilted spiral of the poodle cut until all that was left was a skull-hugging cap of hair the color of Ovaltine, “I unnerstand how you feel, with your hubby home alla the time now. You gotta get practical. What with emptying pee bottles and all, you don’t wanna have to fuss with your hair.” She flattened Lorena’s bangs in a C-shape that stuck to her forehead, then whipped off the plastic cape, scattering clipped wisps of curls across the green linoleum floor. “Now,” she pronounced, “you look serious.”
Good-bye Mitzi Gaynor. Hello Margaret Truman.
But Pete hasn’t noticed her new hairdo. His focus is on lunch. “I’m dripping with sweat and she’s feeding me spaghetti,” he mutters as he prods the congealed clump of noodles with his fork. “Don’t you have any bologna?” he calls out to Lorena, who is already on the kitchen phone, dialing up Delia to report on her new haircut.
“I threw it out,” she calls back. “It was turning blue. Oh, hi, Delia,” she says into the phone. “It’s the new Me.”
“Blue?” he yells. “Why do we have blue bologna?”
“Wait a sec,” she says to Delia. She puts her hand over the mouthpiece, yells to Pete, “We don’t. I threw it out.” Back to Delia. “It’s real chic, very … serious. You know. Like Mama Hansen.”
“GET. ME. SOME. REAL. FOOD!” Pete bellows.
Lorena puts a hand over her outside ear so she can hear Delia. “Roman Holiday? I’m dying to see it, sure, I can get away. Cassie can watch Pete for a couple of hours. I’m not in prison, for God’s sake. Although"—her voice recedes to a whisper—"it sure feels like it sometimes.”
“Lorena!”
“Be right there, sweetheart,” she warbles. To Delia, “See what I mean? But this, too, shall—”
“Goddammit,” she hears, followed by a crash.
“Callyaback.” She throws the phone back on its hook, runs into the living room.
A wriggling glob of spaghetti is stuck to the wall over the TV. Shards of tomato-speckled bowl are scattered beneath it like blood offerings. Pete’s face is as twisted as a wrung-out rag, his throwing arm, still bandaged from the soup burn, extended in a follow-through. “I said,” he says, his voice low and threatening, “to get me some real food.”
“Look what you did!”
“If you’d get offa the phone with that dingbat and fix me a decent lunch, you wouldn’ta made me do that.”
“I made you?”
“Yeah. You’re making me goddamn nuts.”
“I’m making you nuts? You’re making me nuts.” Lorena flaps her arms up and down like a bird with clipped wings. “I fix you bacon and eggs. You complain the eggs are scrambled not fried. I turn the TV on and you want it off. I turn it off and you want it on. The room’s too hot. Your sponge bath is too cold. Nothing I do makes you happy.” Her voice breaks into a sob. “I even cut my hair for you.”
“Is that what happened to your head?”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought it just got smaller.”
Lorena stares at Pete for a mute moment, then, “Cassie!” she calls upstairs until Cassie’s pale face peers down at them.
“What?”
“I’m going to the movies. Watch your dad until I get back.” Lorena stomps up the steps, turning before she reaches the top. “Oh. And please clean up the mess he made. Because I won’t.”
When Lorena marches downstairs several minutes later, Cassie is on her hands and knees, picking up the pieces while Pete watches, looking contrite. Lorena notes with satisfaction that this
is how Mama Hansen would have handled such a situation, and she smooths down her new brown bangs as she closes the door behind her.
“I LIKE IT. It makes you look like Audrey Hepburn.”
“Yeah?” Lorena turns her head from side to side, studying her reflection in the ladies'-room mirror of the Paramount. “I have to get used to brown again.” She wets the bangs and forces them back into the comma curve over her forehead, but they flip up stiffly, stubborn as a coxcomb. “Pete says it makes me look like I have a little head.”
“Pete. Pete. You’ve turned into a doormat for Pete.” Delia pulls a big brush through her brash tangle of curls, reaches under her sweater to shake her breasts back into their Playtex cones. “Farley treated me like I was his personal slave, always ‘do this, do that’ until one day I said ‘Farley, I was not put on this earth to clip your toenails.’ Stopped that right then and there.”
Lorena gives her lips, worn bare from the continuous ingestion of buttered popcorn during the movie, a quick swipe of lipstick. “Well, what can I do? He needs me, now that he’s on crutches and all. I think when he understands how much I’m trying to make things better, he’ll come around.” Lorena gives her bangs one more futile pressing with the palm of her hand, sighs when they levitate, turns her back on her reflection. “All I want is for things to go back to … well … the way they were before Binky.”
“Really?
” Delia raises a penciled eyebrow.
“Binky was a mistake,” Lorena answers, even though life before Binky seems in retrospect drab and gray, empty pages in her mental scrapbook. “Seems like everything I do is a mistake lately. Spilling hot soup on Pete, losing out to that blonde in the audition, that business with Max in Pete’s bathrobe.”
“You’re like Lucy,” Delia agrees. “Everything you plan goes haywire.”
“Yeah. Except when it happens to Lucy, it’s funny. I don’t feel funny. I feel like a Lucy gone bad.” Lorena lifts her chin, sets her mouth into a line of resolve. “Things will be different from now on. I’m a changed woman.”
“Well,” Delia says, “I got to tell you something. I’m glad to hear that. Because of Cassie.” She hesitates. “I been thinking a lot about Cassie since, you know, the Binky thing. Worrying about her, you know? ‘Cause she’s kinda, like, the kid I’ll never have. So when you told me about Cassie catching you and Binky, I thought, How could Lorena be so—I guess the word is—dumb? To do it in your house. But you seemed so upset about it that I didn’t say anything.”
Lorena looks stricken. “I thought she was at her dance lesson.” Which reminds her. “I haven’t even practiced my routine once since Pete’s accident. Here I am, putting off my career so I can do what’s right, take care of my family and all.” Her face sags in mournful acceptance.
“Well,” Delia says with a shrug, “it’s all water under the bridge now. Nothing you can do but what you’re doing.”
“Then Cassie goes and accuses me of something just so awful I can barely say the words.” Lorena puts her hand over her mouth in a tragic gesture before she does say the words: “She thinks I tried to kill Pete. The soup thing was an accident, for God’s sake. I heard the mail slap through the slot and—well, it just makes me jump a foot every time that happens. Does she think I burned him on purpose? Where does she get these crazy ideas? I tell you, I’m worried about her.”
“I got to give you credit. You’re doing your best.”
“All’s I want now is to be a good wife.” Lorena gives her mirrored image a last forlorn glance and jerks back, startled. For just a moment, she saw, not herself, but her mother gazing back at her, speaking the words she had heard so often as a girl: “You want a husband? You better learn to be a wife.”
Well, she had learned all the wifely things. How to poke out an eye of a potato with one flick of the knife. How to pluck everylast pinfeather from a just-killed chicken. How to make a bed with hospital corners, tucked so tight that your feet beneath the sheet felt as bound as a Chinese woman’s.
She learned to scrub the ring around a collar. Dust the tops of moldings. Save string, iron around buttons, crochet doilies for chairs. And it worked. She snagged Pete. So then she mastered picking up socks and rolling out biscuits and how to make the best fried chicken in town.
That’s it, Lorena thinks, fluttering her fingers in farewell to Delia as they part ways at the Paramount. Fried chicken! She pictures herself serving it to her family gathered like the Hansens around a real table, not perched at TV trays. In her fantasy, Lorena, wearing a lace-edged apron, smiles prettily as Cassie and Pete beam with forgiveness at the sight of chicken so light and crispy it almost floats above the platter. Inspired, Lorena heads for the A&P.
She sails past the frozen food without a glance, then docks herself in front of the refrigerated glass case of the meat department. She gazes lovingly at a row of butter-colored chickens, their shapely drumsticks symmetrically poised in a June Taylor-like cancan. Admiring their perfect choreography, she hails the butcher like a long-lost friend.
“Long time no see,” he says, drawing a slim curved knife against the sharpener with infinite precision.
“I’m back,” she says brightly. “Can you cut me up a fryer?”
“With the greatest pleasure.” His pallid, lavender-veined hand crawls into the glass case and fondles the contours of each bird in turn. His fingers close over a particularly plump specimen. He separates it from the chorus line in one swoop, then displays it between his palms for Lorena’s inspection.
“Beautiful,” she breathes. With minimal swordplay, the butcher deftly partitions the poultry. Tucking in a couple of extra livers, he snugly wraps all the parts in a crackling sheet of paper. “Come back soon,” he croons as he presents the package to Lorena.
When Lorena gets home Pete is asleep, slumped over in his chair. Cassie is watching the test pattern. Folded on the floor in front of the TV, her chin resting on her knees, she barely looks up. Lorena opens the door, stares blindly ahead, and, blinking, takes in the scene as her eyes become accustomed to the dark.
Pete is snoring softly, his legs splayed apart on the footrest. His casted arm and leg flop heavily to one side and his hair spirals in damp whorls across his forehead. “How long has he been sleeping?” Lorena asks Cassie, who pretends that she doesn’t hear her. “What are you watching?” she persists, not really expecting an answer.
“Nothing you’d like,” Cassie answers, surprising her.
Lorena is wary. “You want to tell me about it?”
“It’s a cartoon.”
“Cartoon,” Lorena repeats. She squints at the screen. Maybe if you look at it a certain way, you can see something besides the black-and-white circle, the geometric cross-hatching of lines, the mysterious numbers and letters of the test pattern. “What kind of cartoon?”
“About a family. The mother has blue hair.”
“Blue? Where do you see blue?”
“Bart is one of the kids,” she says, ignoring Lorena. “I like him the best. His sister’s okay, but he’s funnier.”
“Oh.” Lorena doesn’t know what else to say.
“YOU KNOW I hate fruit in my Jell-O.” Cassie spits a grape into the growing pile of fruit cocktail she’s discarded into her dish. “Especially grapes. It’s like eating eyeballs.”
Dinner, silently served and eaten in front of the TV, is over in a fraction of the time it took for Lorena to prepare and fry the chicken; roll out, cut, and bake the biscuits; mash the potatoes, snap the beans, make the Jell-O.
“The Honeymooners” sketch is on The Jackie Gleason Show.
Lorena focuses on Ralph and Alice’s final clinch as Ralph concedes, as he does every week after being forgiven by Alice for screwing up, “Baby, you’re the greatest.”
Just once, Lorena thinks, I’d like to hear that: “Baby, you’re the greatest.” Ralph Kramden’s bus driver’s uniform reminds her of Binky’s postman’s uniform. She shoots a furtive glance over at Pete, but he is concentrating on the TV, which bathes him in blue-gray splashes of light. The shade is up and the window, raised to allow a feeble breeze to wander over the windowsill, frames a raucous game of kick-the-can taking place in the limpid twilight of the court outside. For once, Pete isn’t complaining about the noise.
“Oh, yuk. I hate cherries.” Cassie noisily spits a bright red chunk into her dish. “Why can’t you make just plain old strawberry Jell-O without all this stuff in it?”
“Because I like it that way.” Pete’s voice, gruff yet hesitant, startles both Cassie and Lorena. They swivel their heads away from the clinching Kramdens to stare at Pete. He jacks himself up with his good arm and looks over at Cassie. “You don’t like the Jell-O, don’t eat it. I’m tired of your moaning and groaning.”
Cassie’s eyes grow big with tears. “But—”
“Go outside and play,” he interrupts, even though it’s getting dark. She leaves the dish on the floor where she was sitting, jumps up, and bangs the screen door behind her as she runs outside, wiping her eyes on the sleeves of her shirt.
Lorena doesn’t know what’s coming next, so she clutches her empty Jell-O dish in her lap and waits, stiffly poised. She stares at the TV screen, now alive with singing gas-station attendants.
Pete clears his throat, once, twice. “Pretty good chicken,” he says.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Nice beans.”
She nods.
“Biscuits. Big and puffy.”
She waits.
That’s it. It was a painful apology, but there it was. All her efforts, all her suffering, all her sacrifice had succeeded. They had made up.
That done, they turn their attention to Your Show of Shows. Pete snorts, his version of a laugh, as Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca as the Hickenloopers entangle themselves once again in domestic confusion. Lorena forces a lethargic grin, more in reaction to Pete’s new good humor than because she finds the skit funny, for she sees herself and Pete in the loopily mismatched Hickenloopers.
What is the matter with her? Isn’t this cozy hearthside scene—she and Pete and the TV set—exactly what she says she wants? Shouldn’t she be celebrating? Why does she feel that this sweet domestic confection she worked so hard to create is as hollow as the hole in a doughnut?
A sudden swirl of dancers spins onto the screen, kicking high in a lavish production number. Their energy pops Lorena out of her seat as if she’s been zapped by lightning. The throbbing rhythm pulsates through her veins, awakens her from her stupor. Like Frankenstein’s monster, she comes to life. Ten fingers tappety-tap on the cushions of the sofa. Ten toes test the confines of her shoes. The compulsion is beyond her control, writhing like an incubus whose only escape is through her fingers and toes.
She’s gotta dance. Gotta dance. Gotta dance!
25
CASSIE
THE THING I like about Bart Simpson is that he’s real even though he’s a cartoon, which you don’t see much on regular TV. Mostly there are goody-goody puppets like Rootie Kazootie or Gala Poochie Pup or Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. What makes Bart real is that he’s always in trouble. What’s not real is his family seems to be normal.
Sometimes Mom and Dad act nearly normal and talk to each other like regular people. Dad even said he was sorry he got mad about the Jell-O thing the other night. I can’t remember when he’s ever said he was sorry to me. And Mom’s cooking again, real food, not TV food. It’s almost like nothing ever happened, as if the past couple of months were just a bad dream.
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