Test Pattern (11 page)

“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 sitting. 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.

“What was that all about?” Mom asks.

“He wants me to go on his show,” I say. “He likes the way I curtsy.”

Mom and Delia look at each other. “See what I mean?” my mother says. “She tells the most fantastic stories with such a straight face.”

“Sometimes,” I say, carefully folding the napkin and tucking it into the pocket of my terry robe, “they’re true.”

MOM’S MORE EXCITED about Snooky’s autograph than I am. She won’t let me just paste it into my scrapbook, like I want to do. Oh, no. She has to get a frame for it at Woolworth’s and hang it in the kitchen.

I think she’s sorry she wasn’t the one who went up to Snooky to ask for his autograph. She probably thinks he would have discovered her, like he would have asked her to tap-dance or something. She saw me watching her when she was practicing her routine and instead of getting embarrassed like a normal motherwould, she tried to show me how to do it, saying with each step, “Brush, brush, shuffle-ball change, lunge and pullback.” The loose skin on her arms jiggles all around when she does that.

One night when we were watching TV, Mom got this brilliant idea that she and I could try out to be the dancing Old Gold cigarette packs in the commercial. She would be the big pack and I would be the little pack. Then she got up and tried to follow the steps the Old Gold packs were doing until Dad got mad and told her to sit down, she was blocking his view. She said It’s just a commercial, and then they started fighting and I went up to my room to read Nancy Drew.

But she won’t let go of the dancing Old Gold packs idea, so now she’s making me take dancing lessons. I hate it. I like to dance, but not when I
have
to. I dread Thursdays, getting on the bus with my tap shoes in a shopping bag, climbing the stairs to the dusty studio that smells like feet, tapping while Miss Fritzi plays that tinny old piano and counts “… and a one-and-a- two …” until she loses her temper and squawks “…
together,
ladies, you’re not a herd of cows.” This is not fun.

Mom thinks I have her talent. It’s all my fault for showing her the dance steps I learned from test-pattern TV. The dancing there is different from anything on regular TV. I like the way the painted ladies in bathing suits dance, not just with their feet but with their arms and heads and butts. And there’s a show where a bunch of teenagers do dances with funny names like the twist or the swim or the monkey.

Once I saw this neat guy with tall greasy hair dance the hootchy-cootchy while he sang about somebody being a hound dog. When I told Mom I saw him on Milton Berle’s show, she said she never saw anything like that on Milton Berle, I must have made it up, like I made up the story about the four English guys with long hair on
The Ed Sullivan Show
who sang about wanting to hold my hand. People in the audience screamed and screamed while they were singing, just like they did for the hound-dog guy.

It would be fun to sing and dance and have people scream for you, but it’s not something I’d really want. After I saw something on test-pattern TV about this princess who got killed in an accident because she was so famous that these guys chased her to take her picture, I don’t know why
anybody
would want to be famous.

I AM WEARING the most beautiful dress imaginable. It is silver, made by Mom from Christmas-tree tinsel she found in the back of the hall closet. It moves when I move, brushes my legs like crystal feathers when I walk. Each strand catches the blue rays of the footlights and shimmers like neon. I walk across the auditorium stage and take my place.

I am the star of the fifth-grade play. I am the month of May. I get to wear the dress of lights, the dress that looks like rain.

All the mothers are looking at me. My classmates are in the wings, watching. I hear somebody hiss at me, “You only got the part because your birthday’s in May.” The lights are warm and bright and all the mothers’ faces blend into a pink blur, except one: my own mom, sitting in the front row.

I want to make her proud of me, like she was when I was little. Then it didn’t matter what I did or said because I was so cute. That’s what Mom says—"Wasn’t she cute?"—when she shows people the picture of us taken a few years ago, where we’re dressed alike in our mother-daughter sundresses. You can see Dad’s long shadow on the grass as he held the camera. “Wasn’t she cute?” Mom always asks. I don’t remember being cute. I just remember that day, Mom cuddling me close on her lap, her smell of roses and powder, the soft squishy feel of her cheek on mine. “Wasn’t she cute?” I guess that means she doesn’t think I’m so cute anymore.

I listen nervously for my cue from Dewey Puckett, who is dressed in a big pointy hat and his mother’s bathrobe. He is Father Time. “Mother’s Day!” he spits at me through the space in his teeth. “Memorial Day! What boring holidays. If I had known May would be such a dull month, I would have left it out of the calendar altogether.”

I am supposed to get mad, stomp my foot, and say, “Dull? Never! May is the month of flowers.” Then Tony Fanelli in a green crepe-paper beard will leap from the wings and throw pink paper streamers at me while I say, “And don’t forget May Day.”

“… out of the calendar altogether.” My cue. The air is thick in the auditorium, as heavy as the black velvet curtain I can touch behind me. I smell the ham and collards cooking for lunch in the cafeteria. I look at Dewey, hands on his hips, sneering like the little snot he is, waiting for my line. I stamp my foot and tinsel rainbows flash around my knees.

“Dull?” I say. “Never!” Mom gives me a big grin. I glance toward the wings at Tony Fanelli, who is standing there like a blob. “May is the month of my birthday!” I say all wrong because I’m thinking about Tony and how I just know he’s not going to leap when he’s supposed to. What’s my next line? Something about flowers. “And don’t forget to bring me flowers,” I say, but Miss Winkle, crouching offstage like a toad, croaks in her Froggy the Gremlin whisper, “No, no! It’s ‘Don’t forget
May Day.
’” I hear a giggle, then another, and then the whole audience is tee-heeing.

I glare at the sea of pink faces opening like clam shells to laugh at me. “Don’t forget my birthday,” I say, wrong again, but it startles Tony Fanelli enough to leap and throw pink streamers at me. One streamer doesn’t unroll. It bonks me on the nose and makes me so mad I do a Whitey Ford windup and pitch it back hard into Tony’s butt. Now the audience laughs even more.

Mom’s frozen grin is the last thing I see before I stomp offstage. I want to vanish, me and my beautiful dress of rain, just disappear into a tinsel puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West. I swear I’ll never do that again. I swear this is the last time I’llever get up on a stage in front of people and make a fool of myself.

Mom doesn’t say too much on the ride home. She doesn’t even get mad when I braid strips of the tinsel on my costume while we drive. And tonight when we’re watching TV, for the first time all week Mom doesn’t bring up the Old Gold dance thing.

T
ODAY LORENA FEELS—well, perky. She washes her hair, sets the frizz in pincurls, and it does indeed look like a poodle. Spends an hour with her new makeup, lines her eyes in a fairly successful upswoop beneath brows that hover black as crows’ wings, rouges her cheeks into perfect circles.

She has a hard time choosing the right dress. The shirtwaist with the cinch belt, or the princess dress with the low-cut neckline? She decides on the shirtwaist with her patent-leather high-heel shoes, polished up with a little Vaseline so she can see her blurry reflection in their toes.

Lorena is vacuuming. It’s a little awkward in heels, but if the housewife in the Hoover commercial can do it, so can she. Not a one of those models in ads is doing housework in a robe or raggy clothes. You sure don’t see Betty Furness wearing torn pedal pushers when she flings open the door of the Westinghouse, no sirree. She looks like she’s Cinderella on her way to the ball—blond hairin an updo, gold hoop earrings—instead of demonstrating how crispy the cabbage stayed in the Humidrawer.

Lorena is vacuuming, shoving the Hoover back and forth over the same spot on the rug. It’s three-thirty. About this time yesterday, Binky delivered the mail. She assumes he’ll deliver it the same time today. Oh! she’ll exclaim when he rings the doorbell. You caught me vacuuming. What a
surprise.

Three forty-five. She’s worn a path in the rug, sucked it limp with the Hoover. Where is Binky? Cassie is outside playing and could walk in any second. All Lorena wants is a few minutes alone with Binky, let him see she doesn’t always look dowdy in torn pedal pushers, that she usually looks, well, perky.

Four o’clock. Where is he? She gives up vacuuming, starts dusting, whaps the feather duster over the shelf of knickknacks, over the ceramic Hummel boy tooting his horn, the snow-globe souvenir from their honeymoon at Virginia Beach, the sepia-toned photograph of Pete’s mother in its dimestore frame, the wooden Dutch shoe planted with a plastic tulip.
Whap, whap.
The knickknacks haven’t been so free of dust in months.

Now what? Her heels hurt. She slumps down on the sofa and stares glumly at the vacant screen of the TV. Nothing on to watch right now, just the test pattern, and then she starts thinking of Cassie, wonders why she has fixated on the test pattern, decides she’s just devised those stories to torment Lorena. And then the doorbell rings. She leaps to her feet, minces precariously to the door.

It’s Cassie. And Molly.

“Can we have something to drink, we’re dying.” Cassie brushes by Lorena and heads for the kitchen, followed by Molly, who adds, “And something crunchy to eat, I need crunch.” They are both damp and dirty from the kickball game going on in the court, and exude a faint aroma of banana Popsicle.

“Didn’t you get something from the ice-cream man?” Lorena asks, annoyed that the doorbell signaled this invasion rather thana visit from Binky. “I gave you a nickel for a Popsicle. Isn’t that enough?”

Cassie emerges from the kitchen with a package of strawberry Kool-Aid. “Can I make this?”

“Make it,” Lorena sighs.

“How come you’re so dressed up?” Cassie asks, suddenly noticing. “You going somewhere?”

“Yeah,” Lorena says. “Upstairs.”

She strips off the dress, throws the shoes in the closet, goes into the bathroom. As she sits contemplating the tile, she hears the doorbell ring. She leans forward, opens the door a crack to catch what’s being said, finishes up quickly, and throws open the door.

“Who is it, Cassie?” she calls in her most melodious voice. She hears the slam of the front door.

“Nobody,” Cassie yells upstairs. “Just the mailman.”

Lorena scrambles back into her dress and heels, skitters down the stairs. Cassie stares at her, a Kool-Aid stain giving her frowning mouth a clown’s grin. “Where you going now?” she asks.

“Damn,” Lorena mutters.

“You said I couldn’t say that. How come you can?”