Test Pattern (18 page)

“You wanted to impress me?” She is impressed.

“Well, you looked so pretty that day in the parking lot. And I felt like such a goofus when I realized it was you I had yelled at outside the trailer. So I guess I just wanted to make myself look good.”

“Aw.” Lorena feels bad for him now. “You looked good to me anyway.”

“You look good to me now,” he responds, moving his hand slowly up her leg. She is quite astonished at her response, which exceeds the avidity of just a short while ago. This time, whatever

inhibitions she had held in reserve have vanished. As she and Binky complete their acrobatics, she realizes she’s chalked up a personal record.

Three times, she tabulates, I’ve never done it three times in one day—in one
hour
—and then it dawns on her. She grabs at his watch. “Oh my God,” she gasps. “It’s almost four o’clock!”

Flinging her gray flannel robe around her, hastily stuffing bits of lingerie into its pockets, she steers Binky out the back door just as she hears Cassie fumbling with the key to the front-door lock.

Lorena scurries into the living room to greet her. “How was your dancing lesson?” she asks, heart pounding.

“Okay.” Cassie doesn’t look at Lorena.

“Good,” says Lorena. She thrusts her hands deep into the pockets of her robe, clutches the wispy remnants of her three-times-in-one-hour with Binky. She’s relieved when Cassie skips up the stairs to her room without uttering another word.

I’VE DONE IT again, Lorena thinks, stretching to see the hair disaster reflected in her rearview mirror as she drives home from Maybelle’s. She had asked for a double dose of bleach for a more Mitzi look, but now she looks electrified. She hopes Binky doesn’t hate it as much as she does.

She parks, then skulks hurriedly down the sidewalk hoping no one will see her. It’s a long walk from the street, past the court, past all the other houses with their flaking white paint, to her house at the end. She fumbles in her purse for her keys, buried in a disintegrating wad of Kleenex from a sneezing session she endured at Maybelle’s. It’s a wonder Maybelle herself hasn’t dissolved from all those chemicals, she thinks.

After the crisp breeze that swept the outdoors, the living room seems musty, dark even though it’s early afternoon, thick with the burned odor from the Swanson’s she left in the oven too long last night. The window shade, dull ocher in the gloom, is pulled all the way down, its frayed ring dangling far below the sill. Itwas yanked there by Pete before yesterday’s dinner to shut out the distraction of kids playing kickball while he was trying to watch
Treasury Men in Action.

She flips up the living-room shade. Sunshine spatters the orange velvet couch, the Naugahyde chairs, the boomerang-shaped coffee table cluttered with yesterday’s paper. She reaches to pick up a chipped cup half-filled with cold coffee and three drowned Chesterfield butts.

Then she sees the drawings. They are everywhere, outlined with pencil on notebook paper, colored in with Crayolas. She picks up a drawing of a mutated yellow chicken: big pop eyes perched over a beak, impossibly long neck, ridiculous little wings with hands on the end. “Big Bird” it says in Cassie’s crooked printing.

Here’s another, a fat furry creature, bright blue with a cavernous no-lip mouth, holding an armload of what looks like cookies. And here’s a strange green froglike being with a bright red tongue, snuggling up to a yellow-wigged pig-woman whose tarty makeup looks like Delia’s on a heavy date.

Lorena studies the drawings. They are, she must admit, pretty good. She knew Cassie liked to draw, she was always drawing something, Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, what she called her “fashion ladies.” But these drawings, these cartoony people-animals, Lorena’s never seen anything like them.

When did she do all this? These drawings weren’t here when Cassie left for school this morning, before Lorena’s fateful appointment with Maybelle. Maybe she came home sick. Lorena skips up the stairs to Cassie’s room, looks in. The bed is empty. What is going on?

I
CAN’T BELIEVE I was so dumb, leaving my drawings around when I came home from school at lunchtime to watch test-pattern TV. I’d done it a few times before—check to see if Mom’s car is parked, watch my show, eat what’s in my lunch bag, go back to school. She never would have found out if I hadn’t been so late that I ran out without thinking and left the drawings behind.

“What are these?” she says, waving them under my nose as soon as I walk in the door after school.

“Drawings,” I say.

“When did you do them?”

“Today.” I decide to lie just a little. “I felt sick at lunchtime, so I came home. Then I felt better and went back.”

She frowns while she studies the drawings. “They’re not bad,” she says, and before I can even say thanks, she asks, “Did you copy them from something?”

“Off a TV show.” I’m trapped.

“What TV show?”

“This puppet show. Cookie Monster. Miss Piggy.”

“What puppet show?”

I can tell she knows what I’m going to say because her eyebrows collide and her mouth gets her puppet-mouth look, like it’s on hinges. “A show on the test pattern,” I mumble.

She covers her eyes with both hands and gives a dramatic sigh. “Oh Lordy. Lula lives.”

“Aunt Lula’s still alive?”

Mom just shakes her head and looks at me. “Lula made things up, too,” she says. “Maybe Dad’s right. Maybe making things up is just in your blood.”

Well, they’re both wrong. Aunt Lula’s dead and there’s nothing in my blood. The things that I see I could never make up.

BECAUSE OF THE drawings and the test-pattern thing, Mom’s got all these rules now, like doing homework before TV, saying yes and no ma’am—stupid rules she just made up because she says Mama Hansen on the
Mama
show has rules, Mom’s own mom had rules, and when you have rules everybody behaves like they’re supposed to.

Her dumbest rule is that I can’t ride my bike in the street. She had promised that when I turned eleven she’d let me ride everywhere like everybody else, but then she went back on her promise after she had this argument with Dad the other night during
Truth or Consequences.
Because of the no-TV-before-homework rule, I was doing boring multiplication problems at the dining-room table while they watched TV, but I could hear the whole fight.

“Would you tell the truth if they asked you something you didn’t want anybody to know?” Mom asked Dad.

“It’s a stupid show,” Dad said.

“Well, suppose you could win a million dollars and get famous if you told something really embarrassing.”

“All you can win on this stupid show is a toaster or something.

It would take a lot more than a toaster to make me tell something I’d be sorry for afterward. Especially if I had to do
that.”

I wanted to see what That was because I could hear the TV audience laughing, so I peeked around the corner. Some guy in a clown outfit was riding a big tricycle down the middle of a street while all the cars honked at him. That must have been his consequence for not telling the truth before the buzzer went off. I wouldn’t do that for a toaster either.

“What would be the worst truth you could tell?” Mom asked.

Dad looked like he was going to say something but then he didn’t, just stared at the TV set.

“Suppose they said they would stick bamboo under your fingernails like the Japs did in the war. Would you tell?” Mom asked.

“I got nothing to tell,” Dad said. “Anything anybody wants to know about me, they already know it.”

Mom watched, one finger tapping her chin, as the clown guy got off his tricycle and ran to the side of the road. Then she said, “Truth or consequences: Have you ever, you know, been with anybody else?”

“Whaddaya mean,
been
with?”

“You know. Been to
bed
with.”

“Who are you, Bob Barker?” Dad asked, then turned and looked hard at Mom. “Why? Have you?”

“Of course not,” Mom huffed. She looked away and crossed her arms and made a prissy face. “Besides, I asked you first.”

“Boy,” Dad said, moving away from her on the couch, “sometimes I think it was you got hit by that truck and knocked cuckoo, not Lula.”

Mom got this aha look and asked, “Why are you changing the subject, talking about Lula?”

“You’re crazy,” he said, waving her off. “It’s just that this guy in the clown outfit riding the tricycle reminded me that Lula got hit by a truck when she was riding her bike. Your mother saidthat that’s when Lula started acting peculiar. So,” he added with a snort, “what’s
your
excuse?”

Mom made a little tent with her fingers and pressed them against her lips. “Omigod. I forgot she got hit on her bicycle. But she must’ve been crazy before that, crazy enough to ride a bicycle when she was old as thirty-three. Who rides a bicycle when they’re thirty-three?”

“Don’t matter how old you are if you land on your head.”

“You think maybe that’s why she was so weird, seeing things and all?”

“I’d say it contributed.”

TODAY WHEN I ask Mom if I can ride my bike to the roller rink with some of the kids from the court, she says no.

“You
promised
,” I say, and she says, “Don’t whine.” But I want to know why she broke her promise and she says, “Because you can get hit by a truck.” Then I remember last night and how they were talking about truth and other people and Aunt Lula on her bike, and I say, “That is so unfair!”

“What’s unfair?”

“That just because Aunt Lula got hit by a truck, you broke your promise.”

“How did you know about Lula and the truck? Were you snooping instead of doing your homework?”

“You were talking loud.”

“You were snooping.” She makes her frowny face. “I’m not going to argue with you. No bike riding in the street. And that’s final.”

I hate her. But I love my bike. It’s blue, a Schwinn, and it has a bell that has rusted a little but still dings. I fling my leg over its saddle, boy-style, and feel as if I could fly. I speed away from home with the wind flipping my hair in my face, all the houses and trees rushing by in a blur. I don’t ride in the street because

I’m afraid she’ll find out, but I do ride down to the beach, down the steep hill, a no-hands kamikaze run that makes me scream “Banzai!” like in war movies.

When I get down to the water, I sit in the damp crunchy sand and look over at Norfolk and wonder about stuff: Are Siamese twins always Siamese? How high would you have to go up in the sky before you couldn’t see people anymore? When would be the best time to tell Mom that I quit dancing class?

When I get home, Mom gives me the third degree, hands on her hips. “Well? Where did you go? Tell me the truth, now.”

“I went down to the beach.” I feel good because it
is
the truth. It’s not like that sneaky feeling I have when I come home after I’ve faked going to dancing. I don’t know how much longer I can keep that up. All I know is I can’t keep pretending, riding the bus and hiding out at Al’s newsstand.

I’m okay at lying a little. I just can’t keep lying big.

L
ORENA IS DRESSING for Binky. She knows how he wants her to look by now after weeks of Thursday love: hot, hasty, clock-watching love. On Thursdays she waits, tense and edgy, for Cassie to leave for her dancing lesson. When she hears the door slam, Lorena whips into action.

She’s become more adept at makeup. Swivels out her flat-topped tube of Red Flame. Draws on semisymmetrical cupid’s-bow lips. Blots them, folds them in until all that’s left is a thin slash of red, then out they pop, bright and shiny as a cinnamon heart. She smiles. She does like the way she looks.

She knows by now to greet Binky in her lingerie. She enjoys the ritual, sliding black stockings over freshly shaved legs, centering the seams exactly from heel to thigh. Bending over to shimmy her breasts into the lacy cups of the bra. Turning to admire the contrast of taut black panties arching above the smooth white cheeks of her butt. She loves the transformation these simple acts create. They make her feel like a showgirl.

She hears the doorbell, peeks out the window for a verifying glimpse of gray hat, opens the door just enough to let him in. She poses, flaunting the bits of black beneath her flannel robe, which she then lets fall in a heap at her feet.

Binky drops his mailbag with a thunk. He grabs both cheeks of Lorena’s thinly clad bottom, pulls her to him, and gives her a long, breath-sucking kiss. He leans back to admire her. His gaze meanders leisurely over her lace-clad bosom, her skimpy see-through panties, her garter-clamped black stockings. It stops with an almost audible screech at her shoes.

“What are
those
?” he croaks, backpedaling. Instead of high heels, she’s wearing a pair of big-bowed, shiny black tap shoes.

“Surprise!” She gives him a sly smile. With a hip-slinging pirouette and a crook of her finger, she clickety-clacks up the stairs. “Well?” she says, looking down at him. “You coming?”

“Uh. Yeah.” He follows her, slowly undoing his tie. He looks worried.

“Now you just lie down and relax,” Lorena purrs. She unbuttons Binky’s shirt, unties his thick-soled oxfords, slides his double-pleated postman’s pants over his black nylon socks. She places the hat at the foot of the bed. Stripped down to his Jockey shorts and socks, he props himself stiffly against the pillow on Lorena’s side of the bed and watches her over the tops of his toes.

She carefully slides a lime-green record over the fat spindle of the 45 player by her bed. The record drops, the plastic arm reaches over, and the speaker wails the first note--WooWoo--of Chattanooga Choo Choo.

“Ooooo,” sighs Lorena with a provocative wiggle. Her right foot goes into palsy, tap-tap-tapping against the wood floor. Her left foot follows and she is into her routine, arms flailing, feet tapping, torso contorting in a thigh-jiggling frenzy. Binky looks dazed.

She mouths the lyrics, reaches for Binky’s cap, pops it on her head, anchors it with a perky pat. Tapping nonstop, she twistsher arms behind her back and unhooks her bra.