Test Pattern (17 page)

Despite sun which sizzles like melted butter on the bed, Lorena shivers beneath Binky, awaiting his caress. He leans over her and slides his gaze over her prone body. “Can you get that thing off yourself?” he says, and plucks at her bra. “Those, too,” he adds, tugging at her Lollipops.

She complies, yanks the bra around so the hook is in the front, rolls the panties down into a pretzel at her feet. She leans back and shyly covers herself with her hands. She’s never been naked in front of another man. She’s hardly been naked with Pete.

“Take your shoes off,” she murmurs, and she hears two thunks as they hit the floor. Then Binky surrounds her, a storm cloud of gray, all buttons and flaps and stripes in a blur of uniform, lips, tongue, fingertips slipping into places she had forgotten she had and she hears the
rrrrrp
of a zipper and feels the molten explosion inside and then Binky is flopped over on his back and sweating like a pig.

“Wow,” says Binky.

“Wow yourself,” she sighs as the throbbing ebbs like the tide going out. He’s finished? She was just starting.

“No, I mean, Wow, it’s late.” Binky squints at his watch. “I skipped lunch to make up the time, but I’m really going to be off schedule.”

“What time is it?” Lorena jumps up, starts pulling on her clothes. “Cassie gets home on the four o’clock bus.”

“It’s four o’clock.” He wrestles the black oxfords onto his black-socked feet, gives her a quick peck good-bye, and hollers ashe pounds down the stairs, “Next Thursday, okay?” She hears the door slam and, minutes later, open again.

“Mom?” Cassie calls. “I’m home.”

THAT NIGHT LORENA lies in bed staring at the light patch on the ceiling as if awaiting some sign. She can’t sleep. Something momentous has occurred, a shift in her consciousness more profound than the change she felt on her wedding night when she lay awake marveling that she was no longer a virgin, an event she had dreaded as well as anticipated. And when it was over and done with before she knew what was happening, she wondered why she had spent so many years fantasizing about such an insignificant moment.

But by sleeping with another man, she had crossed a boundary more daring than that of exchanging a maiden’s innocence for marital experience. Why, she thought, this is like a
movie.
Illicit. Daring. Lustful. Well, maybe not that lustful, but it was probably because she had been so nervous, being an extramarital virgin and all. Next time she’d be better.

She did feel guilty. Oh, yes, she was ridden with guilt, but it was all mixed up with the excitement of being desired and admired, of being wanted. Being the object of such passion instilled a passion within her that overrode the pangs of regret she felt when she looked upon the faces of Pete and Cassie. She was wanted. She was wanton. She just couldn’t help herself.

And if the side effect of this marital detour could mean fame and fortune, wouldn’t the guilt be worth it? Once she was rich and famous, she knew she would be happy. She’d have everything she ever wanted and never worry about anything again. Not money. Not looks. Not love.

Because when you’re famous, it means you’ve got it all.

D
AD AND I are comparing feet. We always do that on the first warm night, lying barefoot side by side in the lawn chair that tips back so we can look at the stars. Dad and I have the same feet. The second toe is longer than the rest, longer even than our big toes. Dad calls it our “Lookout Toe.” He says it sticks out like that so it can check around and see if there’s danger ahead for the other toes.

Dad had a close call this morning when he went to put up the TV antenna. We get too much snow with just the rabbit ears, so he bought a big outside antenna and carried it up to the roof. Next thing I know I heard this big thump and Dad yelling
shit
and then another bunch of thumps and other words I can’t say, and then I saw his feet dangling outside my window. He climbed down the chinaberry tree to the ground. It’s lucky he caught himself on the gutter before he fell or he would have broken something for sure.

The air is soft, sprinkled with firefly light, buzzing with summersounds. Crickets crackle in the soft dark, radio voices leak into the night—Fibber McGee, a ball game. I hear the kids playing, Margaret’s voice way way off, “Ally-ally-in-free.” We watch the lights of Norfolk over the water. We look in people’s windows across the court. The Powells’ and the MacDougals’ windows are dark except for the silvery squares of their TVs. There’s nothing on now we want to watch, so we sit outside between
Topper
and
Our Miss Brooks.

I like snuggling with Dad, burrowing into his soft cotton shirt, sniffing his smoky smell. The webbing of the chair makes patterns of cold on our backs but he feels warm by my side. Tonight he’s in a good mood and it’s like it used to be when we’d sit out here until I fell asleep listening to him tell stories about when he was little.

“Mornings I’d lie in bed under the quilt my grandma made from my grandpa’s old shirts, shirts he wore out from working on ships,” he says. “I’d lie there and smell the biscuits and bacon my mother was fixing for breakfast.”

Even though I’ve heard this story before, I like hearing it again. I close my eyes and see a little-boy Dad, like in the picture I have when he was six. It was taken at Virginia Beach, and he’s wearing a funny striped bathing suit that covers him all the way up to his neck, all the way down to his knees. His face is scrunched up in the sun and his hair is wet against his forehead.

“And while I was lying so warm under the quilt, I could hear the sound of the shipyard,” he says. I peek up at him and his eyes are closed, too. “That sound followed me around all day. To school, to the playground—it was like my heartbeat.”

“I hear it, too,” I say.

“You can’t hear it the way I do,” he says. “I hear it from the inside out.”

He tells me how I was named after that grandma who made the quilt, his grandma Cassandra. How she taught him to catch crabs in Chesapeake Bay, how they scrabbled around in the trap when he hauled it, dripping water and seaweed, onto the dock.

How he learned to grab them just right so they don’t pinch, then drop them into a pot of boiling water.

“My grandma taught me the names of all the constellations when I was so little I could hardly read,” he says, his eyes still closed. “I coulda been a sailor. I could steer by the stars, that’s how much I know about them.”

“Would you ever want to go to the stars, Dad?”

“Naw,” he says. “They’re up too high. All’s I want to do is look at them.” He opens his eyes and points to the sky just over the horizon above the water. “Look over there. See that big ‘W'? That’s the constellation that’s named after you: Cassie-opeia.” He tells me I have to share it with the other person it’s named after, Queen Cassiopeia, who was sent into the sky because she bragged about her beautiful daughter.

I look but all I see is black sky and a whole bunch of scattered stars. “Where’s the ‘W'?” I ask.

“Just follow the dots of stars,” Dad says, but I still can’t see the queen. I squint, trying to follow where his finger is pointing, but she’s lost somewhere in the glitter. I stare and stare and all of a sudden there she is, stretched out across the sky.

“I see her, I see her!” I say to Dad. “She just popped out like magic.”

“There’s nothing magic about it,” he says. “She’s been there all along.”

I tell Dad what this man on test-pattern TV said about stars. That there are stars way beyond the stars we can see. That they all began with one big bang. That all those stars could be suns to other worlds. And that one day our sun will get so big that it will swallow up the earth.

“Where did you hear that?” he asks.

“On test-pattern TV.”

He gives me a look. “Aren’t you getting a little old to be making stuff up?”

“I’m not making it up. I’m telling the truth.”

“Remember Pookie?”

Oh, no, Pookie again. They never let me forget Pookie. “I was little then,” I say. “I
know
I made Pookie up.”

He’s quiet a minute. Then he says, “What else do you see?”

I don’t feel like telling him. I know he won’t believe me.

“Nothing,” I say.

He looks off across the water and doesn’t talk anymore. I lie next to him, not touching now, and look up at Cassie-opeia. I think about what the man said on test-pattern TV. “Billions and billions of stars,” he said. Billions and billions of stars.

O
N THURSDAY, BINKY arrives with a box in his bag. Purple-wrapped, pink-bowed, the box is from Naughty but Nice, a shop Lorena has passed but never had the nerve to enter. She peels back the purple tissue paper and stares at the little black wisps, transparent as smoke, that lie within. She lifts the bra, amazed at its lightness, its laciness, its complete lack of function.

She has never seen panties like these. Why, she could see right through them. And what was this? A garter belt? He wants her to wear stockings? These stockings? Black lace, the seams accentuated with little hearts? She never knew there was such a thing. And, he adds before she takes the box into the bathroom to try everything on, put on your high heels.

How does she look? She studies herself in the mirror. She’s never dressed in lingerie like this. Does she look like a movie star? Like Mitzi Gaynor? All she can see of herself in the medicine chest mirror is to the bottom of the bra. She jumps to get a better view but can’t jump high enough, so she steps on the toilet lid and stretches herself over the sink to look in the mirror.

“What happened?” she hears Binky call as she crashes to the floor, taking the toothbrush holder with her. “I just tripped, it’s nothing,” she sings, wiggling her elbow to test it before languidly limping out.

Binky sits naked on the bed. His uniform is folded neatly over the chair. His mailman’s cap sits at attention on top of his clothes, looking official. “You okay?” he asks.

She nods. Her elbow hurts. She’s okay, but more important, does she
look
okay?

She must, for Binky pounces. He springs off the bed and, balancing on his sturdy legs, pulls her into his grip. She gasps as he crushes her against his body. She is Lana Turner; he is Robert Mitchum. He is Bogey; she is Bacall. She is … in pain.

“Aaaaa-a-a!” she wails, grabbing at her elbow.

“What’s wrong?” He leaps back as if she were a leper.

“I hurt my elbow,” she confesses. “In the bathroom.”

“Bad?”

“I don’t think it’s broken.”

“Good,” he says, relieved. “Just relax. I’ll help you forget it.” And then he does, and does again, and they thrash about until the sheets are tied in knots. She revels in the power of wispy bras of black lace, of barely-there panties Binky slides down with his teeth, of sexy stockings that make her legs look so good wrapped around Binky’s neck. “Ooooh,” she hears herself moan, “Oooh, Wally.”

“Wally?”

“I meant Binky.”

“You said Wally.” He backs off, pulls the sheet over himself.

She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know how Wally popped up just at this moment, just when she was having such a good time with Binky. “I had been thinking about him, you know, being a talent scout and all.”

“Now? You think about him now? Are you bored or something?”

“No!” And she means it. “That was the most …
incredible
sex I’ve ever had. I guess I was thinking about the things I like the most in this world and one is you and the other is dancing. And somehow they all got mixed up and came out ‘Wally.’”

“The most incredible sex you’ve ever had?” he asks, preening. “Really?”

“Oh, yes,” she breathes, and lays hands on his still-tender parts. “The very best.” And then it happens again, and this time it truly
is
the most incredible sex she’s ever had.

As Binky slides into a doze, Lorena traces a finger around his ear, along his neck, then follows the path of the scar that wanders over his shoulder and down his back. “Do you remember the explosion?” she asks, lazily grazing the scar’s lumpy Cream of Wheat surface with the tip of one curved fingernail.

“What explosion?” he murmurs.

“In the war. When you got the scar.”

“Wasn’t an explosion.”

“Was it a bullet?”

“Nah.”

“A bayonet?”

“Nah.”

“Well, what was it?”

“Barbed wire.”

“Barbed wire?” She examines the scar closely. “How?”

“Crawled under it.”

“Escaping the enemy?”

He chuckles. “Y’might say so.”

“The Germans?” She shakes his shoulder. “Come on. Tell me.”

“No Germans. Belgians.”

“We were fighting the Belgians?” Lorena’s forehead wrinkles in puzzlement.

“Well, I was. Two of them, anyway.”

“I don’t get it.”

Binky raises himself onto an elbow, eyes twinkling with mischievous memory. “I was escaping back
into
camp. Had this Belgian girl, had her in a haystack, and then her brothers took after me like they woulda killed me.” He shakes his head. “They would have, too, if I hadn’t gotten under that wire first.”

Lorena backs away from him. “You told me you were wounded. In battle. The Ardennes.”

“Well, it was near the Ardennes. And it was kinda a battle.” He gets an aw-shucks look on his face. “I never really
saw
battle,” he confesses. “But I
heard
it.”

Lorena moves to the other side of the bed. “You lied to me.”

He gives her a lopsided grin that both infuriates and charms her. “Naw. I didn’t really lie. Just … stretched the truth.”

“That’s lying.”

“Naw it’s not. Lying is when you swear you’re telling the truth. Did I swear? I did not.”

Lorena doesn’t answer. Binky continues.

“If you just mention something, that don’t mean it’s necessarily true, it just means you’re mentioning it. But if you
swear
on something like God or your mother or like that, then that means it’s really true.” He looks contrite, gazes at her from beneath sorrowful eyebrows. “If I lied, it was only because I wanted to impress you.”