Test Pattern (12 page)

Lorena doesn’t answer. She throws open the front door, spies Binky way down the row of houses. “Forgot to mail something,” she mumbles as she scurries past Cassie and teeters down the sidewalk calling “Yoo-hoo.” When he turns around, she slows her trot to a sashay and waves.

“My, my,” he says as she approaches. “Don’t we look nice today.” His eyes roll like marbles up and down her shirtwaisted shape.

“Oh, this old thing. I wasn’t expecting you or I would have answered the door myself.”

“That your kid?” he asks.

She nods. “Cassie.”

“Cute. Looks like you, huh?”

Lorena shrugs. “Some say.” She bats mascara’d eyes, tossespoodle-cut hair, says in what she hopes is a Mitzi Gaynor voice, “I’d ask you in for a Coke, but with Cassie there …”

“Sure, sure.” He ponders that. “When didja say she has her dancing lesson?”

“Thursdays. Gets home at four,” she says, attempting nonchalance.

“Oookay. Thursdays.” He pokes at his temple with a forefinger. “Gotta remember that.” He flashes a crooked grin and contemplates her with rain-gray eyes half-hidden by lowered lashes. “I’ll see you then, then.”

He slings his mail pouch over one shoulder, gives her a little salute before resuming his rounds. She imagines his legs, pictures them firm and furry beneath those clinging gray pants, as they carry him away up the sidewalk. She saunters slowly back toward her house, hopes he’s turned to notice the sway of her skirt, the tap of her high heels.

Cassie looks up from the Monopoly board she and Molly are setting up on the floor as Lorena comes back into the house, kicks off her heels, and plods up the stairs. “What’s going on?” Cassie asks. “Is there a party or something?”

Lorena doesn’t know what to say, so she says nothing, just shuts the door to her room. Stares into the mirror. Turns her face this way and that. Looks pretty good, she decides, good enough for Binky’s approval. All that work wasn’t wasted after all. She reaches for the Pond’s to erase the upswept eyes, the crow’s-wing brows, the gleaming cheeks and lips, but as she dips her fingers into the pearlescent cold-cream pudding, she hesitates. She looks
too
good. She decides to wear her face a little longer. Maybe see if Pete appreciates her efforts.

PETE DROPS HIS lunch bucket on the kitchen counter with a clang, reaches into the Frigidaire, extracts a Ballantine. “What a day,” he complains, flipping off the cap with a bucktoothed bite

from the remover screwed to the wall. “I dunno about the new foreman. Like to snap my head off today. Seems like he’s got it in for me or something.” He tips his head back to suck on the Ballantine, Adam’s apple bobbing beneath plucked-chicken skin.

Lorena plants herself in his line of sight, pouts painted lips, bats licorice eyelashes. She emits a mew of sympathy for Pete’s plight. He finishes his beer, bangs the bottle on the counter next to his lunch bucket, belches. “What’s for dinner?” he asks.

“Meat loaf.” She won’t give up. “Notice anything?” She moves until she’s standing right in front of him.

He allows her a quick glance, then a grimace. “Not your hair again.”

She gives a puff of exasperation. “I haven’t been back to Maybelle since last week.”

“You’re wearing lipstick,” he tries again, impatient now.

“So? I wear lipstick. It’s not like I never wear lipstick.”

He squints. Tips his head. Then, “What’s that stuff on your eyes?”

“Like it?” she asks.

“What is it?”

“It’s eye makeup. Mascara. Eye shadow. Eyeliner.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You didn’t even notice it.”

“You look like Delia. All that paint and stuff. I think you been hanging out with Delia too much.”

“Well, I think Delia looks good,” she says, remembering Delia’s gyrating prance before the sailors, a neon-plumaged parakeet outshining Lorena’s brown wren self. “There’s nothing wrong with accentuating your assets,” she adds, echoing Delia’s advice.

“What?”

“Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Listen. I got problems at work
you
don’t understand. I come home, all’s I ask is dinner on the table, a little peace and quiet, and what do I get? Bozo the Clown.”

Clarabelle, Harpo, now Bozo. She just wanted to look prettyagain. Didn’t he remember? How she looked when he saw her that first time, asked her out, wanted her to marry him? Didn’t he remember?

“I used to be pretty,” she says, pouting. “I was Miss Buckroe Beach 1938.”

“Yeah, yeah. Miss Buckroe. How many times you gonna remind me of that? You’d think it was the highlight of your life.”

Well, she thinks, it was.

LORENA WAS SEVENTEEN that summer, a summer of long, lackadaisical days spent baking in the sun at nearby Buckroe Beach. Facedown on an old frayed blanket redolent of suntan oil, sweat, and mustard from hot dogs bought at the stand, she lay immobile for hours, lulled by the throbbing pulsation of waves and the bubbling music of the merry-go-round calliope.

From the vortex of darkness behind her closed eyes a recurring fantasy would emerge: being tapped for stardom by a Hollywood talent scout. “You are magnificently gorgeous,” exclaimed the phantasmagorical scout of her imagination, “but can you dance?” And she dazzled him on the spot with her Ginger Rogers footwork.

Prone on her blanket, lost in her dream, Lorena was so certain that fame would come to her that her baby-oil-and-iodine-basted body shivered with anticipation.

It was Delia who suggested that Lorena enter the Miss Buckroe contest. Delia would have entered herself, but she had broken her elbow doing a swan dive off the high board trying to impress some guy at the Community Center pool and had to wear a cast for most of the summer. She wouldn’t be able to perform her baton twirling for the talent part of the competition. But, she pointed out, Lorena could tap-dance.

“Miss Buckroe?” Lorena’s round nose wrinkled in dismissal at the suggestion. “They don’t care about talent. Besides,” she sighed in a fit of candor, “I’m too flat-chested for any beauty contest.”

“Socks,” said Delia.

“Socks?”

“Everybody does it. We’ll stuff socks in your bathing suit.”

So, sock-stuffed chest held high on the Fourth of July, Lorena lined up with nine other sweating girls on the flag-draped plywood platform in front of the balloon-dart concession. Although she could tell from the wide grins on the faces of the judges that her tap-dance routine had gone flawlessly, she knew that her appearance in a bathing suit was what really counted.

Clutching her cardboard with the number “3” painted on it, she posed like the others: front toe of her high-heel shoe angled forward, hips tilted one way, head tipped the other. Mayor Gupkie, Councilman Bunting, and the editor of the
Daily Press
made notes, chewed gum, and studied with narrowed eyes the rigid bodies of the contestants.

She felt their gazes scrape over her body like a trio of razor blades, peeling away her white Jantzen from the top of its argyle-plumped bosom to the bottom of its modesty-paneled skirt. She gritted her teeth, froze her smile, and stared way, way up at the Ferris wheel. It turned slowly against a sky blackening with carbuncle clouds, lumpy and rumbling with muted thunder.

She looked down. Behind the three huddling judges was Delia, waving at her with her cast, giving her the okay sign with her good hand, thumb and forefinger joined in a circle. Delia—corkscrew curls escaping from a wide headband, soft round bosom mounding over her bathing suit like generous scoops of ice cream over a cone—Delia, Lorena thought, should be up here, not I. And she felt a sudden rush of love for her friend who was smiling and waving bravely, cheering her on.

Lorena’s frozen smile broke into a grin; her whole face beamed and melted. In that instant the three judges looked at Lorena, her eyes soft with affection, her mouth wide with love, and they knew who would be Miss Buckroe Beach of 1938.

When they called her name and she teetered out from the line of girls with their quivering smiles to slide under the shiny redwinner’s sash, her grin was genuine, a twin to the grin of Delia, who stood on tiptoe to applaud, her cast swinging wildly. And when the crown of paste and glitter was placed upon her head, Lorena felt as though time had stopped and she had been transported to another dimension, a realm of singular adoration where she would reign as queen.

Big bullying clouds eclipsed the sun as Lorena shone in all her royal splendor. It took the cosmic crack of thunder to startle her back to reality. Judges and audience disappeared in a rumbling stampede for shelter as a curtain of rain closed the show. Lorena remained alone on the platform, staring numbly at the suddenly vacant arena where just a moment ago she had been the star.

She felt the crown crumble like a cookie in her hair, now streaming water and sticking to her face. She looked down and thought she was bleeding. The red sash hung limply from one shoulder, the color leaching onto her new white bathing suit, mottling it with pink. The argyle socks bunched into multicolored lumps visible through the soaked-through fabric of the suit. Her golden moment had been reduced to a flash of glory, now just a memory seen through mascara-tarnished tears.

Later that summer, she relived her crowning moment when she saw
The Wizard of Oz.
Forever after, she identified with the good witch Glinda, who, glitter crown and all, ascended to the heavens in a bubble. In the theater, Lorena wept as she longed to recapture that feeling of enchantment, that magical moment that had eluded her ever since.

LORENA PULLS THE blanket over her head, blocking out the light from Pete’s side of the bed. He’s studying a worn newspaper clipping he keeps in his night-table drawer. He takes it out sometimes when he’s feeling blue, rereads the account of the home run he hit during his junior year of high school, the bases-loaded run that won the league championship. Lucky hit, he once confessed to Lorena. Lucky hit. Never got a hit before, usually warmed thebench, but for some reason the coach put him in that day and pow, he smacked it right into the stands.

Never did that again. But there was the proof he did do it once, right there in the paper,
Palmer drives in winning run.
His picture, too, sliding into home, kinda cute he was, straining, tongue out to one side, legs reaching like a pair of tongs for the plate. He didn’t have to slide, he told Lorena when he first showed her the clipping. It being a home run he coulda just trotted in, but when he heard the crowd’s cheers he got so excited he just slud in there, riding in on a red cloud of dust.

Never got another hit. The next few times he got up to bat he was so nervous he whiffed, swung so hard he spun. The coach had mercy and put him back on the bench. He didn’t even go out for the team his senior year. He could tell his daddy was disappointed he was just a one-shot fluke, but, he told Lorena, “Like my daddy said, You can’t make a living offa baseball anyway. He said anybody can hit a ball, but there’s only a few of us strong enough and brave enough to weld a big ol’ hunka metal into a ship that floats.”

So Pete started hanging out at the shipyard after school, rode up on the elevator behind his daddy like a shadow, not really all that scared, not really, the side of the ship dropping sheer as a cliff beneath them. He’d stand off at a safe distance on the metal grid of the platform, watch his daddy clamp on his face shield, pull on his leather gloves, then hook the torch up to the generator chugging and panting like some prehistoric beast.

His daddy pulled a stick from the bunch of electrodes stuck in the back pocket of his coveralls, clamped it into the torch, and lit it with a striker. Pete knew at the sudden hiss to look away. The blue flame touched steel, exploded into a blinding shower of sparks that filled the sky with a thousand stars too bright for unshielded eyes. Metal joined metal until it all flowed sweet and pure, a river of steel that glittered bright as silver in the sunlight.

The first time his daddy let him use the torch, Pete almost passed out, he confessed to Lorena. His daddy thought it wasfrom the excitement. Pete wasn’t sure himself, but from the moment the helmet was placed on his head and tightened with a twist of a knob, he felt funny. He pulled on the gauntlet gloves and leather bib, flipped the face shield down with a jerk of his head like he saw his daddy do.

Then his daddy fired up the torch. It looked like a green tornado through the black glass window of the face shield. Pete touched the flame to steel. He didn’t know if it was the rush of heavy metal fumes trapped beneath the face shield or the banging, clanging noise of the generator that swelled between his ears, but he felt himself grow giddy, then dizzy, then felt the cold metal grid of the platform pressing into his knees.

“You’ll get used to it, kid,” his daddy had said as he helped him up, and his daddy was right. Once he had the proper training, he did get used to it, but he never felt he came close to his daddy’s talent.

“He was an artist, my daddy was,” Pete would tell Lorena. “He loved what he did. That’s why I know he died happy.”

Lorena didn’t know how anybody who fell ten stories off a platform to land headfirst in a slipway could be said to die happy. Every time Pete retells the story of his daddy’s skill and daring, and then the accident, she says the same thing she said the first time she heard it, shortly after they met: “How do you know he was happy?” And every time she asks that, his answer is the same: stony silence.

She figures Pete’s silence is a manly trait, a stoic acceptance that the possibility of stepping into air off a very high place is real but worth it when your work is noble and true. But Lorena has noticed that Pete’s pride in his job has soured. He’s been coming home from work all crabby, grumping about his new foreman, talking about how the shipyard has changed now that Korea’s over and done with, studying the editorials in the
Daily Press
about how there might be layoffs.

“How we gonna protect ourselves from the Commies,” he wants to know, “if all we build is ocean liners like that S.S.
United

States
? S.S.,” he snorts. “That stands for sissy ships. Sissy ships for fancy people.”