Test Pattern

by Marjorie Klein

  Cassie doesn’t say anything, just bends her head over her drawing and colors, hard, until the crayon breaks.

  Lorena busies herself in the kitchen, clanging pots, slamming the Frigidaire, moving her lips as she consoles herself. She tries, doesn’t she? Tries to keep everything the way it’s supposed to be, cooks dinner every night, hasn’t opened a Swanson’s for weeksbut has he noticed? No. Just takes it all for granted. Hasn’t complimented her once since the fried chicken night.

  Bam. Bam. She whomps the biscuit cutter with such fury that it leaves circles in the wooden board beneath. She picks up the circles, slaps them hard onto the pan, whap whap whap, so hard they flatten out like pancakes. Throws the whole pan into the oven with a clatter, glares at the closed oven door.

  Here she is, trying her hardest to be a good wife, a good mother, and what does she get? Pete’s complaints, Cassie’s sullen stares. What’s wrong with expressing herself? What’s wrong with having dreams? Look what happened to Maybelle.

  She wishes Pete would get off his butt and get back to work. He’s better now, isn’t he? He’s not even complaining about how lousy he feels anymore. She doesn’t understand what Pete’s talking about, that his foreman is stalling about getting him back on the job, that he says Pete’s got to be evaluated first, whatever that means. Enough of his moping around. He better make himself useful.

  “I THINK THE lady that got burned all over oughta win,” Cassie says around a mouthful of Cracker Jacks.

  “No, she’s just going to be scarred up but at least she’s got two legs,” Molly says, spinning the plastic top prize from the Cracker Jack box. “That old guy there, he’s only got one leg and they fired him and he’s got nine kids.”

  “Well,” counters Cassie, “she’s burned and hunchbacked, so who’s ever going to marry her?”

  Molly and Cassie are sprawled on the living-room floor watching Strike It Rich. Molly is spending the night because Cassie begged and pleaded until Lorena gave in, so now they are all gathered in the living room debating the quality of degradation each of the contestants has exhibited in order to win money.

  “Look, look, the burned lady got a call on the Heart Line,” Cassie says. Warren Hull, the host, is assisting the woman, whois having a problem getting a good grip on the Heart Line phone. On the other end is a generous benefactor who offers her one hundred dollars cash plus a year’s supply of his product, Slippery Sam’s Salve, guaranteed to soften skin or your money back. The Burned Lady’s scarred face contorts in gratitude as Warren Hull leads the audience in frenetic applause.

  But the one-legged father of nine is still in the game. His pinned-up pants leg swings and sways as he gamely hobbles up on one crutch to relate his woeful tale, but not until his tiny, tidy wife appears with all nine children in tow does the applause match that of the Burned Lady’s.

  “I understand,” Warren Hull oozes as he wraps a protective arm around the wife, “that in addition to raising all these wonderful children, you play the piano at a Steak ‘n Shake several nights a week in order to pay the bills.”

  The tidy wife nods her head shyly, yes, she does do that. “Well,” says Warren Hull as a piano is rolled out onto the stage, “how about a little song for the folks out there in TV land?”

  Tidy Wife sits primly on the edge of the piano bench. After a prayerful pause, she raises her hands, throws her head back, and launches into a rousing rendition of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” her pixie-cropped hair flying as she pounds the keys. Incited by Warren Hull’s question, “Isn’t she great, folks?” the audience’s applause swells and breaks into a roar that subsides only after Tidy Wife has taken several bows.

  Lorena leans forward, envy enveloping her at the reaction evoked by the unilegster’s wife. The Heart Line is ringing off its hook, and before the oldest child finishes relating how he had to quit school to work in the sweatshop, the family has raked in five hundred dollars’ worth of donations.

  Why, thinks Lorena, I could do that.

  Pete has dozed off but she gives his shoulder a shake. “Pete, Pete. Watch this. Look, they’re giving them money. We could go on Strike It Rich, what with your accident and all.” She doesn’t add that it could be her big break as well.

  Pete blinks, stares at the screen, shakes his head. “Are you crazy?” he says. “We have money from my disability payments. We don’t need charity.”

  “It’s not charity,” Lorena protests. “It’s show business. We could be on TV!”

  “I don’t want to be on TV. I don’t need to beg.” He pauses. “I’m going back to work.”

  “Back to work?” she says. “So soon?” His announcement, which would have brought her pure delight just a few short minutes ago, is now cause for dismay. Until she saw the audience response to the tidy wife’s piano proficiency, it had never occurred to Lorena that the very disability that kept Pete home, driving her crazy, could be her passport to fame and fortune. “Maybe we could go on Strike It Rich first,” she insists.

  “I’m not going on any TV show. I gotta get back to work, that’s all there is to it. I talked to the foreman. He says maybe I can work inside the welding shop. Says I’m not ready to work outside, up high, at least not yet. But he’ll think about letting me come back, long’s I don’t endanger myself again. Not that I’m a danger or anything,” he corrects himself. “I’m good as anybody out there.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Cassie pipes up, then turns to Molly. “He’s the best. He’s not scared of anything.”

  Lorena can’t argue. If Pete won’t go on Strike It Rich, then the sooner he goes back to work, the better. He’s making her nuts at home.

  27

  CASSIE

  IT’S WINDY HERE on the platform. My skirt bells out all around me and I wonder if it could lift me like a parachute and carry me over the shipyard. How would it be to float above all the cranes and derricks and ships in their docks? I bet they’d look tiny as toys from up there, instead of tall as buildings, like they do from here. I’ve never been as high as a cloud.

  From the platform we can look up at the U.S.S. Forrestal. It’s an aircraft carrier, and Dad says when it’s finished it’ll be the biggest warship ever built in the whole United States, over a thousand feet long and two hundred and fifty feet wide. Dad knows all this because he was working on it when he fell, and he shows me just where that happened, points way way up, and then moves his finger down to this big deck sticking out from the side of the ship.

  He says it’s a good thing the deck was there or he would have splatted all over the building dock. “I looked down,” he says.

  “Can’t look down, gotta look straight ahead, not let your mind wander even for a second. Can’t let all the little worries of life get in your way when you’re working for your country.” Dad stands up straighter when he talks about our country, the “U S of A” he calls it. He says he couldn’t serve in the army but what he does is even more important, welding together battleships strong enough to meet the enemy.

  Trouble is, there’s no enemy. At least not one we’re actually fighting with guns and planes and stuff. “Now that there’s no real war going on, they’re building sissy ships,” he says, pointing to a ship in another dock. “Like that one. Ocean liner. Passenger ships, sissy ships, floating hotels for rich people. Have to, I guess, or they’d be laying off people right and left. But what happens when the Commies try to take over? We gonna fight the Reds with that?” he says, waving the ocean liner away like it was a mosquito.

  “Now this here is a ship to make you proud,” he says about the Forrestal. “Jet planes are going to land, right on the ship itself, right there on the flight deck. Four acres, it’s going to be. Do you know how big four acres is?”

  I don’t. I just know it’s so big that even Dad is amazed because he’s looking up at the Forrestal like it landed from outer space. He hasn’t seen it since his accident and, he says, he can hardly recognize it now, it’s changed so much. He says in a voice real soft and low, “It’s l
ike somebody had a party and I wasn’t invited.”

  Dad’s starting back to work next week but today he said he wanted to see the shipyard, just check it out before he went back. I’ve never been here, not inside the yard anyway, so I begged him to take me with him. Mom said, “Good idea,” so here I am.

  It’s a bigger place than I thought it was, just from the times I’ve gone by it on the bus, going downtown. It’s a whole city, a city of steel, stretching around us as far as I can see. Flashes of sunlight bounce off metal like stars thrown from the sky. I smell metal everywhere, feel it in the back of my throat, behind mynose, taste it like I’m swallowing iron and breathing rust. The sound of metal is all around us—banging, whistling, shrieking, clanging—until I wonder if it’s inside or outside my head.

  I’m ready to go home but it’s just the beginning for Dad. He leads me through a passageway where we’re stopped by a guard but it’s somebody Dad knows so he lets us go up some stairs. We climb and climb until we’re on a walkway high up on the For-restal. Down below us are guys in hard hats, working, scurrying around. Dad stops, squints at them. “That guy,” he says, pointing to one of them who’s separate from the others, “is who’s keeping me from my real job.”

  I can’t see what the guy looks like, just the top of his hard hat, round and green like a big olive. Dad stares at him. He says, not to me but to the big space between us and the guys so tiny below, “This is where I belong. This is where my daddy and my gran-daddy worked, outside with the wind and rain and sun on their backs. This is all I know.”

  “But, Dad,” I say, worried because he looks so sad, “you know all about the constellations. You know how to catch crabs and how to sail a boat and you can tell me the batting average of every one of the Dodgers. There’s lots that you know.”

  But he’s not listening. I don’t understand why he wants to come back here so bad. All he did before his accident was complain about work, and now all he talks about is going back. Maybe it’s one of those things that seem better than they really are, like the smell of hot dogs from the hotdog stand, or houses that seem cozy when you look into their windows on a cold night. Maybe he just thinks he wants to go back to work.

  Dad doesn’t move, just looks down at the guy in the olive hat for a long minute. Then he turns and shuffles slowly down the walkway. I follow him, but not before I do something I’ve been wanting to do since we climbed up here. I spit over the side. It takes a long time to reach the bottom.

  28

  LORENA

  LORENA TURNS THE record player up loud, sings along with it as she watches herself dance in the bulb-lit mirror of her dressing table. Nobody’s home. Cassie’s at Molly’s and Pete’s at work. His first day back, glory hallelujah. She had fixed him an extra-special lunch: not only his usual bologna sandwiches, but leftover fried chicken she had made especially for last night’s back-to-work celebration dinner. She added a leg and a breast to his lunch box as a surprise.

  She gave him a good-luck peck on the cheek this morning, and was puzzled at his seeming reluctance to go. After all, he claimed he wanted to get back on the job, so what was this, standing stock-still on the porch, not moving until she asked him what was the matter? He had muttered a few things last night, something about if this didn’t work out he’d have to work inside the welding shop instead of outside on the ship itself, but when Lorena had said, Big deal, what’s the difference? he had fallen silent.

  Now he’s gone. Out. Back to work. Back to normal. Lorenarevels in her solitary state. The house is hers again. She can concentrate on reaching her goal. She’s already planned what she’ll do now that she’s perfected her dance routine. She’ll ask Binky—nothing personal, of course—for Wally’s number. That’s all. Very businesslike. Let him know that all her practice has paid off and she’s ready for The Big Time.

  Once she’s a star she’ll still be a good wife and mother. She won’t let fame change her. She’ll stay a regular person, won’t get snooty, even when she makes lots of money. Of course they’ll move to Hollywood or New York, the only places anything happens, can’t keep living in Newport News, nobody in show business lives in Newport News. Stars can come from Newport News, like she heard Ava Gardner did. Hey, she and Ava have something in common—maybe they can be friends once she’s famous.

  Lorena poses in front of the mirror, waiting for the needle to connect with the record. Once again from the top: And she’s off in a frenzy, loose as a goose, limbs swinging, hips swaying, toes tapping in total timpani with the music swelling from the 45 player. She sings to her image in the dressing-table mirror knocked crooked from the vibration of her energetic pounding.

  Got to do something with this hair, she thinks, fluffing it as she gyrates before the mirror. She’s let it go since Maybelle’s funeral. Delia is going to a new person, a male hairdresser downtown, Mr. Ralph, but Delia’s got that wild kind of hair that a chimpanzee could cut and it’d still look good. Lorena watches her hair flop as she taps ferociously, flinging her head from side to side. Oh, Maybelle, she mourns, why’d you go and die on me before I could change this style? She’s tired of her proper “Mama” cut, the mousy color, the limp, lank strands that hang down her neck like fringes from an old bath mat. Well, she’ll just have to make an appointment with Mr. Ralph even though she wonders about men who like to fuss with women’s hair.

  Whap. She hears the mail slot open, the whoosh of mail sliding through, the final slap shut. She looks out her bedroom window, shoves up the sash, waves frantically at the gray figure slinking away.

  “Yoo-hoo,” she calls. Mize well do it now as later, just be spontaneous, ask him right this minute, Does he know Wally’s number? “Yoo-hoo,” but Binky is already down the sidewalk, furtively glancing behind him as he scurries off.

  Well. Another time. Maybe it’s just as well he didn’t see her with her looking so frizzy and all. She decides to give Mr. Ralph a call.

  She’s looking in the phone book when the telephone rings.

  “Miz Palmer?” says a vaguely familiar voice.

  “Yes?” She gets a feeling of—what do they call it?—dayja voo?

  “This is Dwayne, Pete’s foreman. Remember me?”

  That’s it. Dayja voo.

  “Miz Palmer? You there?”

  “I’m here,” she whispers.

  “I’m afraid Pete went and set hisself on fire.”

  “Far?” That’s how he pronounces it. That’s how she repeats it. “Set himself on far?”

  “Yessum. Actually, it’s just his hair he set on far. Rest of him’s okay. ‘Cept for his hands. He used them to beat out the far in his hair.”

  Lorena closes her eyes.

  “Doctor said he’ll be okay once he heals up,” Dwayne continues. “Might be bald, though.”

  “Bald?” Lorena’s eyes pop open. “You mean, no hair?”

  “For a while, anyway. Maybe not permanent.”

  She tries to picture that: Pete with no hair, his black, curly, Clark Gable hair fried to a frizzle. Bald as a bean.

  “Um.” She hesitates, afraid to ask the next question, the question whose answer might determine her sanity. But she does. “Think he’ll be going back to work soon?”

  “Well, Miz Palmer.” She can almost see him squirm before he says, “I wouldn’t wanta speckalate on that quite yet.”

  “Why not?” Lorena asks in a strangled voice.

  Silence. Dwayne is clearly groping for words. “I think your hubband’s got some … problems,” he says finally.

  Well, thinks Lorena. So do I. So do I.

  29

  CASSIE

  DAD HAS A Frankenstein head, all wrapped up in bandages, and big white-mitten Al Jolson hands. I can tell he doesn’t want Mom to visit him in the hospital because he says “Go home” when she taps on his door to come in. But here she is anyway, sitting on the chair next to his bed while he pretends to sleep.

  I read my Nancy Drew or play cat’s cradle with a piece of string. I hate hospital
s, the way they smell like Lysol and cafeteria food, but I make Mom bring me. I have to keep an eye on Dad, make sure she doesn’t try to hurt him again. First the soup, now this.

  Dad won’t say it, but it’s all Mom’s fault. I figured out what happened. He was checking out his welding torch, hadn’t put on his gloves or shield yet, had to adjust the valves. He was thinking about something else, he said, somehow turned it on, and the torch just jumped out of his hand. Before he knew it, he had set his hair on fire.

  Jumped. Welding torches don’t jump. He said it was like it was greased or something. And then he remembered he ate fried chicken for lunch and there were no napkins.

  Mom planned it. She never gave Dad anything but bologna sandwiches for lunch before. But this time, she gave him fried chicken. Greasy fried chicken with no napkins.

  Mom says that Dwayne, Dad’s foreman, said he thinks maybe Dad does these things to himself, not on purpose but for some reason Dwayne can’t figure out. He thinks Dad’s got problems, whatever that means, and that Dad is a danger to himself. Worse, he says, Dad’s dangerous to the other people he works with, and Dwayne’s going to recommend that Dad should do some other kind of work.

  But I know who the dangerous person is. It’s Mom.

  THE HOSPITAL ROOM is hot. Dad is sweating big milky drops that slide from underneath his head bandage, down his cheeks and nose. Every now and then Mom reaches over and pulls a Kleenex out of the box to mop his face, but he won’t look at her, just studies the wall like there’s something important written on it. She sits there dab, dab, dabbing at his face until the Kleenex is shredded and then she reaches over, pops another one out, and starts all over again. Nobody talks. All I hear is nurse noise down the hall or long slow farts from the guy on the other side of the curtain.

  I don’t know whether to warn Dad now that Mom’s trying to kill him, or wait until he comes home. Maybe this time he’ll believe me. I don’t know what he’ll do if I tell him about Mom and the mailman, but now I feel like I have to tell him because he’ll want to know why she wants to kill him. You have to have a reason to want to do something like that.