Test Pattern (2 page)

He’s worked in the shipyard since he was fifteen, part-time when he was in high school. He grew up here in Newport News, Virginia, wouldn’t leave this place, he was born here just like his daddy. His whole family was Virginians, he bets they go back to Jamestown. That’s the kind of tie he feels to this city, he tells her if she ever talks about moving someplace else. It’s in his skin, his blood, under his nails and behind his ears, the grit and dust, the clang and roar of the shipyard. Even with his bum leg, he can scamper up those gantries like a monkey. It’s just something he’s done, something he’ll always do, work with ships and steel, the music of the metal always singing in his ears.

Lorena grew up here, too. Her father worked in the shipyard. Almost everybody’s father worked in the shipyard. It promised good jobs and steady work as long as there was war. War feeds this town. It makes it grow. With World War II, then with Korea, the shipyard crystallized into a geometry of cranes and gantries and angular ships that shadowed it all. The riverfront became a city of ships and the water grew still and black. And over it all rang a carillon of steel that played the songs of war.

Lorena is sick of it. She feels like she’s in the bottom of a brown paper bag. Sometimes when she goes with Delia to a matinee, she thinks that what she’s watching is what’s outside the bag, it’s notall shipyard and the A&P and running the Hoover under the couch. It should be a Technicolor world, and she should be Doris Day. But then she comes out blinking in the sunlight and leaves it all behind her in the Paramount.

DELLA’S ALREADY IN line when Lorena huffs up out of breath from running across the parking lot. “Where did all these people come from?” she complains, flattening the top of her hair where the wind poufed it out. The line stretches before them and ends at the door of a bright yellow trailer—the very same trailer featured in the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz movie
The Long, Long Trailer
—parked smack in the middle of the A&P parking lot on its tour of the country.

“I told you we had to get here early,” Delia says, tapping at the face of her Bulova. “It’s already nine-thirty.”

“I didn’t think there’d be such a long line.” Lorena stands on tiptoe to peer over the crowd.

“A long, long line to see a long, long trailer,” Delia says, then, realizing she said something worth repeating, repeats it: “Long long line, long long trailer. Get it?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Lorena is more annoyed than amused. She hadn’t expected to wait, had itched with excitement ever since she tore the announcement out of the paper that the trailer was coming. She has seen the movie twice, could see it again and yet again. She just can’t get enough of Lucy, her queen-of-hearts lips, her flapping lashes, her flawless flaming hairdo. Watching Lucy on TV was one thing, but seeing her flamboyance brought to Technicolor life on the big screen almost brought Lorena to tears.

The crowd shuffles patiently across the asphalt lot, disappears by twos and threes into one door of the bright yellow trailer, then stumbles out through the other. Dazzling as gold, irresistible as a magnet, the chrome-encrusted trailer draws Lorena and Delia into its magical field. They pause in the doorway, dizzy with anticipation as the doorbell peals a musical hello.

“Oh my God,” Delia swoons. “Just like in the movie.”

“They stood right here.” Lorena’s voice is hushed, reverent. “Lucy and Desi. Their fingers actually touched this door.” She runs her fingers along the door, then reaches overhead to touch the door frame. “This is where Desi bonked his head. Remember?”

Their entry is blocked by a square woman in a striped dress who has affixed herself to the glass-doored oven in the kitchen. “Looka this, Delbert,” says the woman, squishing her nose against the glass, “you don’t even hafta open it to see in.” But Delbert is mesmerized by the Venetian blind in the window, opens and closes its slats repeatedly until Lorena pushes by to peer into the oven herself.

“Remember when Lucy made dinner while the trailer was moving?” Lorena asks Delia as they jostle their way to the refrigerator. They open the very door that Lucy opened. “And how she made a Caesar salad, and it flew all over the place?” Lorena is in awe, that Lucy was covered in Caesar salad right where she is standing.

There’s a real bathroom with a real shower. Everything matches: yellow drapes, yellow tile, yellow shower curtain. Lorena is overwhelmed. She caresses the pink satin quilt on the same twin bed where Lucy and Desi pecked a chaste kiss. Delia sits on the other bed and sighs, “Wouldn’tcha love to live here?”

“It’s so much better than a house,” agrees Lorena.

“Much fancier.”

“Remember how she wore that organza dress and flowers in her hair when she was moving in?”

“And how they ate by candlelight? And drank Chianti?”

“Yeah. Parked by a waterfall. In the mountains.”

The low rumble of the crowd outside the trailer is punctuated by a hand whapping the window of the bedroom where they sit. “Hey!” yells someone. “Get a move on. There’s people waiting out here.”

“Just hold your horses,” Delia yells back. They take a last, longing look around them before leaving through the trailer’s back door. The line now serpentines the parking lot, weaving in and out between cars.

“What’d you think you were doing? Moving in?” calls the same voice that accompanied the hand whapping on the trailer’s bedroom window, a voice belonging to a peak-hatted soldier. Delia and Lorena sashay off in a huff, barely sparing a glance at the soldier, who continues haranguing them from his place in line. “Where’s your suitcase?” he calls. “Did ya give ‘em a down payment?”

“Jeez Louise,” Delia mutters. “Some people.” She opens the door of her car, a brand-new lime-green ‘54 Nash Metropolitan that she bought after her divorce was final, and slides in. “Wanna catch the matinee?”

“Can’t. I should get groceries, long’s I’m parked here.” Lorena waves at the red-and-yellow A&P sign. “Mize well kill two birds, you know.” She watches Delia’s car squeal away through the parking lot and finds herself wishing that she, too, had a car with that nifty continental kit on the back.

LORENA HEFTS THE grocery bag in one arm as she hurries from the A&P to her car. Her light jacket feels heavy and claustrophobic. She opens it to the weather, craves the brittle edge of wind on her body. The A&P was overheated, had this funny smell of dried beef blood and insecticide that always gives her a headache. The cold fresh air blows up her skirt and down her blouse. She throws her head back and lets the early May wind lift her hair off her face, away from her neck. A few strands stick there like seaweed.

The line still snakes through the parking lot to the trailer. Kids chase each other through the cars while mothers yell at them. Cassie didn’t want to come along when Lorena invited her, and Lorena was hurt at Cassie’s response: “What do you want to see an old trailer for?” Lorena just doesn’t know what’s gotten intothat girl lately. She even turned down Lorena’s offer to bake gingerbread men together, one of their favorite mommy-daughter things. Now Cassie doesn’t even call her “Mommy” anymore.

What happened to the downy baby who curled like a shrimp on Lorena’s shoulder, sucking her thumb and twirling strands of Lorena’s hair between her fingers? When did she crawl down from that safe perch to become this scrawny fresh-mouthed ten-year-old who looks and acts more like Pete each day? Cassie’s long green eyes are the only features left that Lorena can claim. The rest—short straight nose, angular chin, sullen pout of a mouth— belong to Pete.

There had been a time when Lorena felt that Cassie was her own, an extension of all her senses. When Cassie’s infant mouth would close around a spoonful of strained spinach, Lorena could taste the metallic mush. When Cassie dug her toes into the soft sand of the beach, Lorena’s feet tingled for them both. When Cassie wailed on the first day of school, Lorena cried tears for two.

What happened? When did her sweet Cassie erupt into this wild creature whose green eyes, once so trusting, now scanned her from beneath thick brown lashes as if Lorena were a villain on one of her TV shows? She only knows that Cassie isn’t what Lorena was at ten, that maybe there’s been some twist in time and ten isn’t what it was twenty years ago.

Remnants of trash skitter across the parking lot—wrapper from a Baby Ruth, that waxy paper they give you with a doughnut. Where did she park? The lot’s so jammed with cars, Lorena can’t think straight, oh, there it is, way on the other side, sky-blue Dodge two-door coupe. Oh, no, she remembers, she forgot to get gas and the gauge is on empty. She’ll have to stop at the Texaco. She trots across the parking lot, the heels of her flats scraping asphalt.

She’s intent on fishing her keys out of the purse dangling from one elbow. A soldier shambles toward her, thumbs in his front pockets, hands curved toward his crotch, hat tipped over his fore-head. Is that … no, couldn’t be … the same soldier who was yelling at her and Delia when they left the trailer?

His hair is cut close along the sides, sidewalls, she thinks they call it, and he walks with a loose lope that she recognizes from somewhere, an unhinged walk that belongs to someone she once knew. Does he know her? He must, because he quickens his step and aims in her direction.

“Hey, Lorena, wait up,” he’s saying. “Remember me? Binky?”

Binky? Binky Quisenberry?

He looks different. Maybe it’s the uniform. Or that haircut. Or the skinny little mustache. But the nose over the mustache is the same, broken just enough to give him that tough-guy Marlon Brando look, and his eyes are still the color of rain.

It
is
Binky. She hasn’t seen him since high school.

“Binky? Is that you?” Then, “Was that you, yelling at us outside the trailer?”

“Aw. If I’da known who it was I was yelling at, I wouldn’ta.” He looks sheepish, gives her a crooked grin. “I watched you walking to the A&P and it dawned on me, why, damn if that ain’t Lorena, so after I got outta the trailer, I decided to hang around.”

Well, she thinks, the saying is true. There’s something about a man in uniform. Seeing Binky in these starched and pressed khakis brings back memories of him in his football uniform, monumental padded shoulders distorting the dark blue jersey with the number “50” appliquéd in yellow across its back.

Now he wears the peaked cap low on his forehead and speaks lazily of the army, how he’s home, this time to stay. She leans against the round fender of her car and shifts the bag of groceries from one hip to the other. She wishes she had worn makeup, combed her hair, something, but who knew she would run into Binky Quisenberry in the A&P parking lot?

“You’re still in uniform,” she says. “Where’ve you been?”

He lights up a Lucky, his big hand curved to protect the Zippo’s flame from the wind. “Been everywhere. Been in the army since WWII. Saw action in the Ardennes. I was there, right in the thickof it, got wounded. Don’t remember how, actually. It was all a blur. I remember ducking, then an explosion. I was in the VA hospital for a while.”

“Wow,” says Lorena, eyes big.

“Hey, you wanna see something?” He pulls his shirt open, shows her something jagged and white and lumpy going over his shoulder and down his back. “Got this. Wounded in action.” Impulsively, she reaches out and runs her finger along it. It feels like cold Cream of Wheat.

“Wow,” she breathes. Her finger tingles as if she had caressed something forbidden and exotic, and she shudders with the danger of it. “Did you get hurt in Korea, too?”

“Korea?” He buttons up his shirt again. “Well, I didn’t exactly see combat in Korea. Actually, I never went to Korea, not that I didn’t want to go but I was stationed at Fort Bragg and don’t think that wasn’t a challenge, working at the PX, keeping track of the stock, not to mention the shoplifting by the enlisted men’s wives, you wouldn’t believe what went on.” He frowns. “It’s not just battle that wins the war, you know, it’s morale, too. That’s part of the war effort, don’t let anybody tell you different.”

“That’s right,” she says. “I bought war bonds.”

“I’m getting discharged this week,” he tells her around the Lucky between his lips. He takes a long drag, pulls it out, crushes it beneath his army boot. “Don’t know what I’ll be doing then. Maybe work for my dad at the auto-parts store although it’s been oh, ‘bout ten years since I worked a regular job, not service-connected, you know.”

Lorena nods, shifts the grocery bag to the other hip, combs her bangs to the side with two fingers of her free hand. As he speaks she watches his lips move beneath his carefully trimmed mustache, neat and thin, an Errol Flynn mustache that shelters smooth pink lips marred only by a fleck of tobacco stuck to the bottom one. Automatic as the miniature crane that grabs a toy in a carnival prize machine, her hand rises, plucks the tobacco from his lip, then lingers on its silken surface.

“Hey,” he says. “Hey, Lorena.” He grabs her hand and keeps it on his lips.

She is leaning against her car, one arm around the grocery bag, the other raised to Binky’s mouth. She can feel his teeth hard behind the soft lips, feels her own lips part and her tongue circle them lightly. What is she doing? She snaps her hand away, shakes it as if something clung to it, something more than just tobacco, more than the softness of pink.

“I’ve gotta go,” she says.

“Where?”

“I’ve gotta get gas,” she says, ignoring his laugh. She flings the car door open, throws the groceries inside. “Gotta run.” She starts the car, grinds the gears as she backs out of the space. She doesn’t want to look at him.

“Hey, Lorena.” Binky follows her, bending his head to talk to her through the window. “Can I see you again?”

She shakes her head no. “I’m married,” she says, and shifts forward into first. The car shrieks, shudders, stops dead.

“Married?”

She nods.

“Who’d ya marry?”

“Pete. Pete Palmer.” She starts the car up again and yells over its sputter, “You don’t know him. He graduated a couple of years before us.”

She can see him in her rearview mirror as she pulls away. He stands at ease, in his uniform. When she gets home, she remembers she forgot to get gas.