Test Pattern

by Marjorie Klein

  When they bring his dinner tray Mom looks at her watch and says to me, “Mize well take you on home now. I’ll come back later.” But I won’t go, I won’t leave her alone with him. I’mscared of the way she stares at Dad, scared at how good she can fake looking sad, her eyes all droopy and her nose runny. It’s like Dragnet where Sergeant Friday says, “Just the facts, ma’am,” and she thinks she can fool him with her sad droopy eyes but he’s too smart. If I could tell Sergeant Friday what I know, he’d arrest her just like that.

  When I told Molly, she looked at me like I was crazy. “Your mom?” she said. “I mean, just because she did sex with the mail guy doesn’t mean she tried to kill your dad. People only do stuff like that in the movies.”

  Well, it happens all the time on test-pattern TV. Like this show I told Molly about, where this really rich guy named J.R. got shot and you thought it was his wife and then you found out it was really her sister because she did sex with J.R., but Molly interrupts with “There you go again, making stuff up. Sex sex sex, like they really talk about that on television. You think about sex too much. I’m sorry I told you about it in the first place.”

  Even if Molly doesn’t believe I see these things, she listens because she likes to hear weird stories. Mr. Finkelstein sometimes listens, too. He never says he doesn’t believe me but at least he doesn’t interrupt like Molly does. Instead, he’ll ask me things like “Tell me again what a ‘slam dunk’ is,” or “What’s that record player you say people wear on their heads?”

  I memorized the beginning of one of my favorite test-pattern shows. It’s about this sixth dimension beyond that which is known to man, the one that’s as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. Each time I watch the show, it sticks with me and gives me the same tingly feeling I get with the test pattern.

  Today, when I’m reciting the show’s beginning to Molly in a spooky voice like the one on TV, Mr. Finkelstein comes into the room. He stops and listens all the way through the part about the dimension of the imagination that’s called the Twilight Zone. When I’m finished, he pets his beard, then says, “That’s very sophisticated language for someone your age.” He looks at me quietly for a minute as if he’s studying me. Then he asks me—no,not asks—tells me, like he really believes me for the very first time: “You didn’t make that up, did you.”

  “No. It’s real. I heard it on my test-pattern show.”

  “I figured you did,” Mr. Finkelstein says. Molly gives me a look, says, “I’m getting some Kool-Aid,” and leaves for the kitchen. Mr. Finkelstein crouches down to where I’m sitting on the floor. “Tell me this,” he says. “What is it you think you’re seeing?”

  I think hard, because lately I’ve been wondering a lot about that. Sometimes, when I watch test-pattern TV, I feel like it’s watching me. I scare myself when I think about what all this could mean, but I tell him anyway. “Maybe, since nobody else sees these things, I’m not seeing anything either. Maybe Mom’s right. Maybe I’m like my aunt Lula.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Crazy.”

  “Crazy?” He shakes his head. “Nope. Don’t think that’s the case,” he says, which makes me feel better. Then he looks real serious and asks, “What else do you think it could be?”

  I shrug. Why not tell him what else I’ve been thinking, especially lately since I’ve been watching that spooky show I was just telling Molly about. “Well—I guess this will sound crazy—but sometimes I think that what I’m seeing hasn’t happened yet.”

  Mr. Finkelstein nods his head like he’s not surprised, but like he’s been wondering about that himself. “Hmm,” he says. “And, let’s say that is what you’re seeing. How do you feel about that?”

  I think for a minute. “Scared,” I finally say. “I don’t think I’d want to know bad things that could happen.”

  “Well, let’s suppose you did see something bad. Is there anything you could do about it?”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. What could I do to change the future, if that’s what I’m seeing? It’s not like I’m Superman, or, even Wonder Woman. I shrug again. “Nothing, I guess.”

  “Mmmm,” he murmurs. “Maybe so, maybe no. And if it’s so, who knows if it’s for better or for worse?” He’s quiet, like he’s listening to some invisible person. Then, his bones crackling like Rice Krispies, he stands back up again. He pets his beard and says, “I guess it’s best to let things be.”

  He’s right. If you could change the future by making things happen, or by stopping them from happening, it might make new things happen and you’d see a whole other future, and then do you get to change that, too? It’s all too complicated. Mr. Finkelstein is so smart. I don’t know why Dad doesn’t like him. That’s one of the things I would change, if I could change things.

  DAD’S HOME AGAIN. His head and hands are still bandaged but not in fat bandages, just thin ones that Mom has to change every day. Dad’s hair is gone but he says maybe it’ll grow back. When he’s got the bandages off, I don’t mind that his head is bald like that. It makes him look like an elf.

  When he first got home, he’d spend a lot of time staring at the model he made of the battleship Missouri that he kept by his bed. The other day I heard this crash and I went running to see what happened and there’s his battleship, all in pieces on the floor. It didn’t look like it fell. It looked like it was thrown. Dad didn’t say anything, just looked at me with big, wet, scary eyes.

  Mom stays away from Dad now. If he’s upstairs, she’s downstairs. If he’s downstairs watching TV, she’s upstairs. She quit practicing her routine because he yelled, “That’s all I need, you’re driving me nuts with that racket!” She has to bring him food, but that’s the only time she sees him except when she has to change his bandages. She doesn’t talk much, and when she does it’s like she’s not really there.

  Now we always have TV dinners. Turkey on Monday, fried chicken Tuesday, roast beef Wednesday, pot pie Thursday, and then start all over again. It’s not so bad because I get to eat dinner while I watch Mr. Peepers and Dinah Shore and I don’t have totalk to Mom. I don’t have anything to say to her. I keep thinking, She tried to kill Dad. She doesn’t know I know. I keep an eye on her all the time to make sure she doesn’t try it again.

  Sometimes she just sits in front of the TV and cries. Not during sad things, but when she’s watching Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts or the June Taylor dancers. She even cries when she sees the dancing Old Gold cigarette packs.

  I wish we could go back to the way it was before, when we were just a regular family and there wasn’t any mailman and Dad wasn’t all wrecked up. I wish I could just close my eyes, click my ruby slippers three times, and say “There’s no place like home.” And when I open my eyes again, everything would be the way it used to be.

  30

  LORENA

  Air cooled READS the sign over the ticket window of the Paramount, each letter dripping with frosty blue icicles. Lorena pushes a quarter and two dimes under the window opening, gets her pink ticket in return, doesn’t even ask the soporific ticket taker what time the show starts. She just wants to escape.

  Escape from heat as smothering as a deadly cloud dropped from the white-hot sky. Escape from meaningless tasks she performs on automatic—matching socks, bleaching sheets, emptying the Hoover’s dust bag. Escape from the accusatory silences of Pete and Cassie.

  It’s Wednesday, the middle of the week. Delia’s at work, so Lorena is alone. It doesn’t matter. She just wants out. Someplace cool, someplace dark, someplace that will take her somewhere else.

  The movies.

  She looks up, reads the marquee: there’s no business likeshow business. She feels electrified, not just because it happens to be a movie she wants to see, but because she is zapped by a premonition that it’s a signal, a sign, a message from above. There it is in black-and-white, placed as if by the hand of God in big plastic letters on the marquee overhead: there’s no business like show business.

/>   She scans the poster at the entrance to see who’s starring. Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Donald O’Connor, Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Gaynor …

  Mitzi Gaynor?

  Lorena’s head spins with revelation. God is telling her something, throwing her this double whammy: There’s No Business Like Show Business and Mitzi Gaynor, too. It’s more than just coincidence that this movie is showing today at the Paramount, at the very moment she’s desperate for some sign. It’s Fate in the guise of Mitzi Gaynor, a validation of all her hopes and dreams.

  She stumbles in exaltation down the aisle of the darkened theater. The show has just started. She takes a deep breath of Air Cooled air and a bite from her Hershey bar. She’s almost alone in the theater except for a couple of fellow loners and a clot of kids at front row center, feet propped up on the rail.

  Ethel Merman bellows her love for the business of show business in the opening number, and Lorena almost weeps with longing. Ethel Merman should have been her mother, the Five Donahues her family—a singing, dancing, tappety-tapping family who hold hands and take their bows before a curtain sparkling with billions of tiny stars. They have it all: a happy family and fame.

  Lorena gapes in openmouthed envy as, with a wink of an eye and the wrinkle of her upturned nose, Mitzi Gaynor bursts onscreen and whirls into a leg-flashing skirt-flouncing tap-dancing cancan. Lorena can hardly sit still. In her mind, she is Mitzi’s shadow. Her legs and arms twitch as she mentally mimics Mitzi’s moves, shimmies her shoulders, peels off a glove, balances those feathers on top of her head.

  Oh, she could do that, she knows she could do that. It’s a gift as natural as breathing Air Cooled air. Why isn’t that me up there? she agonizes. And then it hits her: Why isn’t that me?

  As if in answer, Marilyn Monroe, in her role as an aspiring singer, says in her breathless baby voice, “This show is my big chance. It’s make or break!” Lorena’s head clears as suddenly as the drain when she extricates a hairball, a gush that flushes all doubt and uncertainty. Of course, she thinks. My big chance—my only chance—is Talent Scouts. That could be me!

  Her future dances before her in CinemaScope. Pinwheels spin and banners fly as the Five Donahues sing and dance down a star-studded stairway in a grand finale that ends with a choral command that they all go on with the show.

  It’s a sign. It’s all a sign. Yes! She must go on with the show.

  When the lights come up and the sparse audience straggles out, Lorena doesn’t move. She stares as the purple curtain, shabby and threadbare in the harsh light, draws majestically to a close across the screen still alive with afterglow.

  The sun is high in the sky, the heat an unrelenting presence when Lorena finally leaves the theater, but she strides down the simmering street as cool as a penguin on ice. The chill air of the theater has left her with a glacial glow that frosts her walk with purpose.

  She’s got to do what she’s got to do.

  SHE WAITS FOR him at the corner. Watches as he makes his rounds at the next court before he heads for hers. A gray blur in the distance, the familiar stride, head down, shuffling through his bag for the next stack of mail. Getting closer. Still doesn’t see her, brim of his hat shading his eyes, the same hat she danced with, none the worse for wear.

  “Hey,” says Lorena, blocking Binky’s path up the sidewalk as he approaches.

  He blinks. Knows it’s her but she can tell he’s disoriented, theway he’s stopped in mid-stride, one dusty black shoe planted firmly on the ground, the other frozen, toe bent, heel lifted, on its way up.

  “It’s me,” she says, knows he knows it’s she, knows she looks good because she planned it that way: white shorts, halter top pulled low, makeup just right—patch of blue over the eyes, heavy on the mascara, frosted tangerine mouth. Tan. She worked on that all week, lying out on the sticky webs of the lounge chair beneath a burning sky. Gradual, a little bit at a time so she wouldn’t peel, slathered on that baby oil and iodine until she looked like she was dipped in caramel.

  And her hair. Mr. Ralph outdid Maybelle. Rhonda Fleming Red, he called it as he happily squished it through her hair—still pretty short, nothing to be done about that until it grew out—but curled and wild and red red red. That, if nothing else, should get Binky’s attention.

  “Wow,” says Binky.

  “It’s been a while,” says Lorena.

  “Yuh.” He shifts his bag forward on his hip, clears his throat. “So. What ya been up to?”

  “Oh, where to begin?” She rolls her eyes prettily to the sky. “So much has happened,” she hurries on as he glances at his watch, “Pete had an accident and was laid up and then he had another, um, accident so he’s still at home and Cassie, well, Cassie …” She pauses. “Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and well, I wanted to talk to you about this—”

  Binky looks acutely uncomfortable by now, no longer glancing but staring pointedly at his watch. “I’ve gotta keep on schedule, you know how it is with the post office.” He backs away but gazes appreciatively at the way her plunging top reveals her sharply delineated tan line, among other things. “But,” he adds, clearly torn, “you look great. Really. Just great.”

  “Wait,” she says, a tiny note of panic in her voice at his hasty retreat. Not that she expected him to fall panting at her feet, at least not out here in public, but she didn’t expect the look of fear

  that shared the loose-lipped look of lust on his face. “It’s not what you think.”

  “I’m not thinking anything,” he says, shaking his head nervously. “It just all got too complicated.”

  “You mean Cassie?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You think I meant for that to happen?”

  “Well, no. But it did.”

  She has no argument for that. She needs to make her point and make it fast before he gets to the Hutchinsons’ house, which he is rapidly approaching, albeit backward. “All I want is to ask you if I can meet your cousin.”

  “Cousin?” He looks perplexed.

  “Your cousin Wally you told me about.”

  “Wally?”

  “The talent scout? For Arthur Godfrey?”

  Binky’s blank look melds into comprehension. “Oh. Him.”

  “Yeah. Remember? Remember you told me he’s always looking for new talent?”

  Binky looks blank again. “Talent?”

  “Well,” she says, exasperated, “I dance!”

  Binky’s mouth opens but nothing emerges.

  Lorena clenches her fists, resists the urge to reach over and give him a whack on the head. It’s one thing for Binky to reject her sexually. It’s another to reject her talent.

  “Uh, I only saw you dance once.” He’s at the Hutchinsons’ door, looking not at Lorena but down at the bundle of mail he’s fumbling through. He feeds several letters, a Saturday Evening Post and a Colliers through the mail slot, shredding the edges of the magazines as he rams them in.

  Lorena watches from the sidewalk, then follows him as he hurries to the next door. She wants to forget that particular dance, but of course she hasn’t, he hasn’t, it won’t go away. But, she realizes with a little jolt, of course, that is the only time he’s actually seen her dance. So even though the consequences of thatdance were so horrendous that the memory makes her wince, she still has to know: “What did you think?”

  “About what?” He shuffles busily through his mailbag now, scattering letters and magazines at random, avoiding her eyes.

  “About the dance,” she persists, scooting after him. “The dance itself, not … you know. After.”

  He whirls, almost knocking her down with the mailbag. “You wanta know what I thought?” he rasps with sudden fervor, his eyes hooded and dark with remembered lust. “I thought about your tits. About how they were bouncing and jiggling all around. About how I wanted to squeeze ‘em. And about how I would throw you down on the bed until those stupid shoes were waving at the ceiling while I …”

  This wasn’t what she exp
ected to hear.

  But it does make her think.

  Now that she’s got his attention, she decides to grab it and run. She undulates her hips in their short white shorts, leans forward so the halter top reveals even more, lowers her eyelids, and pushes her lips out in a Marilyn Monroe pout. “I didn’t realize,” she says breathlessly, “my dancing had such an effect on you.”

  He gawks at her, stupefied. “Well, that. And also you were buck naked.”

  “I was not,” she huffs. “I still had my panties on. And my stockings. And my shoes.” Which reminds her. “That dance I did—you know, to ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo'?—that was my routine.”

  “Routine?”

  “I’ve perfected it. It’s better now.”

  “Better?”

  “Well, you didn’t get to see the whole thing because … you know.” She doesn’t want to mention, even think about Cassie’s role in any of this. She’s excised that part, mentally lifted it out of the scenario. She’s thought about it too much already and it’s gotten her nowhere. It’s time to move on. “The rest of the routineis very difficult to perform, lots of complicated footwork before I get to the grand finale.”

  “Grand finale?”

  “I do a split.”

  Overcome with enthusiasm, she demonstrates, tappety tappety tap tap tap, spin and a tap, spin and a tap, then, whooom, arms up, she collapses on the sidewalk with her legs splayed forward and back beneath her. “Ta-da-a-a-a!”

  Binky takes several steps backward, looks around furtively. “Get up,” he pleads, and she does, struggling to her feet and dusting off the seat of her shorts.

  “Well, you get the idea,” she says. “So what do you think?”

  Binky is backing off again. “Uh. Very athletic.” He hoists his bag meaningfully. “I gotta get going.”