Test Pattern (24 page)

IT’S TIME FOR
Your Hit Parade,
which I never miss since I got Snooky Lanson’s autograph. I feel like Snooky is my secret pal. Even though he’s gray and black and white on the screen, I know his skin is patchy and pink, he has hair like hay and eyes as blue as stationery. “To Cassie. Best regards, Snooky Lanson,” he wrote on my napkin. I look over at it in its frame and wish again that Mom had had a pen that day instead of a pencil.

Mom and Dad are watching, too. Snooky is singing the number-three song, “Hey There.” Mom says she wonders if that lady in the big hat we saw with him was his wife or his girlfriendand Dad says They all have girlfriends. After that, Mom and Dad don’t say anything. Snooky sings, Mom sings along with him, real soft.

The big dance number for “Sh-Boom” comes on. Mom leans forward in her chair and studies every move the dancers are making like she’s going to take a test on it. When it’s over and the commercial comes on, she goes upstairs, I guess to the bathroom, but she’s still upstairs when the show starts again.

Then, right in the middle of Gisele MacKenzie singing “Little Things Mean a Lot,” I hear on the ceiling above us where Mom and Dad’s bedroom is:
Tappety. Tappety. Tap tap tap.

Then I hear it, that song I’ll never forget about a place I’ll never see: Chattanooga, Tennessee.

“I hate that,” I wail, and put my hands over my ears.

“I thought she quit that dance-routine stuff,” says Dad. He stares at the ceiling, his bottom lip twisting around like he’s really annoyed.

But I’m not just annoyed. I really
hate
it and I can’t tell Dad why, not just because he won’t believe me, but because I’ve been thinking about all the bad things that could happen if he
did
believe me, scary things like I see on the test pattern. And then I think, if those things ever happened, it really would all be my fault for telling. I turn the volume up real loud to make Gisele MacKenzie louder than Mom’s tapping to that awful song but I hear it anyway, Chattanooga choo choo,
tappety tappety
on the ceiling over our heads, reminding me of the mailman and that terrible day that’s stuck in my brain like a scary TV show.

SUMMER BAKES THE morning like a biscuit, warm and buttery with sunshine. Molly straddles her bike on the sidewalk in front of my porch. “Let’s have a picnic in the woods,” she says. I see a crumpled brown paper bag in her bike’s basket. I smell corned beef and pickles.

“I can’t,” I say. “It’s too far.”

“Too far? It’s ten minutes from here. Big fat deal.”

“I can’t ride in the street. I’m not allowed.”

“You’re eleven now. What do they think you are, a big baby?”

Yeah. What do they think I am? I glance behind me at Dad dozing off on the couch, shush Molly with a finger to my lips. “Wait a sec,” I whisper, and go into the kitchen to quick slap together a peanut-butter sandwich and tuck it under my shirt. I holler upstairs, “I’m going out.”

“Where?” Mom peers down at me from the top of the stairs, pink shower cap on her head, towel wrapped around her.

“Out.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Ridemybike,” I mumble.

“Where?”

“Just around.”

“Well,” she says, giving me her frowny face. “Okay. Long as you don’t ride in the street.”

I’M RIDING IN the street. Packed gravel sprays beneath my wheels. I feel Mom’s eyes on my back even though I’m blocks away by now. She’s here. She’s sitting on my shoulder, riding in my basket. She has spies. Their eyes follow me as I pedal fast. They phone her as I pass their houses. They report, “Now she’s riding down Ferguson Avenue. Now she’s turning onto Sixteenth Street. She’s
riding in the street.”

Molly pedals next to me, talking about boys like this is just another day. I can’t talk. I’m too busy looking. Is that Delia’s car in front of us? I just know that’s Delia looking at me through her rearview mirror, hurrying home to call Mom and tell her I’m riding in the street.

“Hey, we’re here, and you’re still alive,” Molly says, smart-alecky. We’re in the woods not far from our house. It’s cool and green with trees all around us that whisper and shush like secretstold in the dark. We drop our bikes, sink down on our butts in the damp grass. I reach in my shirt for my sandwich, now glued to my stomach with sweat and peanut butter. I peel it off, munch it, look around for spies.

“This is great,” says Molly. She clamps her bunny teeth over her sandwich, corned beef on rye with the crusts cut off. “I love summer vacation, sitting around, going to the pool, looking at boys.” She tells me how Harold kissed her in the cloakroom on the last day of school, how she could feel his braces through her lips, how she peeked and saw him peeking and how his eyes looked big and crossed like an owl’s.

I’m lying on my back on the ground listening to the buzzing noises in the grass, feeling sleepy, thinking No one’s ever kissed me, not on purpose, unless you count Spin the Bottle where if you got lucky you got to kiss somebody like Harold but no, when it was my turn the bottle spun right at Percy Perkins with a big white pimple on his chin …

Yikes. What time is it? I jump up, brush off the grass, give Molly a nudge. “I gotta go.”

Molly stares at me. “We just got here.”

“My mom’s going to kill me if she finds out I rode this far. Come on.” I pull my bike up and brush off bits of grass.

“Why?” asks Molly, leaning back. “I don’t have to be anywhere.”

“Well, thanks a lot,” I yell as I jump on my bike and pedal away. Up the street that leads from the woods, down Sixteenth Street, up Ferguson Avenue. My neck aches from swiveling back, down, around, looking for spies. Mom is heavy on my handlebars, she weighs down my shoulders, she crouches in my basket. I pedal faster, faster, faster.

A sudden spray of gravel peppers my legs as something big and fast whizzes by me. A car! It’s a car! She was right! I lose control of the handlebars and the bike wobbles and rears up like a horse and I hear a crash and I’m flat on the street. The car travels on in the distance, a tiny green speck that turns the corner and is gone. It didn’t hit me; it didn’t even know that it had sent me off in a spin. I sprawl beneath my bike.

Nothing is broken because I can wiggle my elbow and my knee, although they’re all scruffed and scraped. There is blood. There are pieces of gravel in my skin. I pick them out carefully.

And then I check my bike.

Its shiny blue paint is chipped and scarred. One fender is bashed. Both wheels are bent. Its handlebars reach out like they’re calling for help, and I know that I have killed it. Crying, more for my bike than myself, I limp toward home, dragging my wounded bike with me, hoping I can sneak inside without Mom seeing me.

Oh, no. There she is, outside, all dressed up on her way somewhere.

“What happened to you?” she asks.

“I fell.”

“Are you okay?” She looks worried, leans over and examines my elbow. I grab it back.

“I’m fine,” I lie, standing in front of my bike so she can’t see that it’s all bent up. “I just fell. Why do you make such a big deal out of everything?”

But it is a big deal. I’m all banged up and my bike is dead. If I weren’t scared she’d find out I rode my bike in the street, what I really would want is for Mom to make everything better like she’d do when I was little, to say “poor baby,” to carry me inside, clean me off, and kiss away my hurts. She’d put me in my soft granny gown, give me cocoa in my bunny mug, and read me my favorite part from
The Wizard of Oz
—the part where everybody falls asleep in the field of poppies—until I fell asleep.

But instead she throws her hands up in the air and says, “Okay, okay, so it’s no big deal.” She turns and walks fast up the sidewalk, muttering, “This is all I need when I’m late for Maybelle’s funeral.”

I hold my elbow and watch her go. Sometimes I wish I was still little.

Y
OU KNOW SHE would have hated the way they did her hair—just
hated
it,” Delia says, checking her mascara in the rearview mirror as she edges the Nash into the procession from the Bide-a-Wee Funeral Home to the cemetery. The squat green car bolts as she shifts into second, cutting off the family of the deceased and almost ramming the hearse. Lorena catches a glimpse of Maybelle’s gardenia-smothered coffin, pictures Maybelle’s sturdy little body lying within, tiny hands folded in repose over her bosom.

“Spit curls,” Lorena agrees. “The woman never wore a spit curl in her life and her forehead was just crawling with those things.”

“And that dress—all those frilly ruffles.” Delia shakes her head. “I tell you, orange is not her color. Jeez Louise, if she had known how she would look at her last social appearance, why, I think she’d still be alive today, she’d be so mortified.”

Lorena thinks that if death could be defied by simple mortification, she might live to be a hundred, but all she says is, “She looked like Carmen Miranda, for God’s sake. Give her a couple of bananas and a pineapple and she would have rhumba’d right out of that coffin.” The Nash lurches as Delia downshifts to avoid hitting the hearse as it approaches the cemetery gate.

Multihued heads gather about the gravesite, some freshly permed and colored, others obviously overdue for Maybelle’s services, which, due to her demise, will no longer be available. The faces beneath the hairdos are deeply grieved, for Maybelle was considered The Best Around, and the mourners mourn not only for the sudden and tragic loss of Maybelle but for the future of their coiffures.

Lorena is no exception, and she is beset with anxiety. What will she do without Maybelle? Maybelle was the Freud of beauticians, her pink plastic chair a couch for sharing secrets and spinning dreams. Each experiment with color and style that Maybelle encouraged was a reflection of Lorena’s inner life. Her hair would never be so deeply understood.

And Maybelle was an inspiration. She was independent, bold, opinionated. Lorena pictures Maybelle, chunky arms crossed over her partridge bosom as she admonished in a voice as sharp as the tips of her scissors: “Get outta the kitchen, you dumbbells, y’all got better things to do in life. I got my byooty parler, I got my own business, what do I need a man to tell me what to do?”

She had dreams of her own, Maybelle did. She shared them with Lorena as she snipped and curled and colored. She planned to move to a bigger, newer place, a place with mirrors all around and chairs that not only spun but went up and down. She’d hire somebody else to help her. Maybe she’d even have a Coke machine. Yes, Maybelle had dreams.

But Maybelle never dreamed that all her dreams would vanish on her day off, a sunny Monday in July. How could she know that she would cross paths with a pickup truck loaded with chickens on the way to market just as she was headed to Nachman’s Big Summer Sale? How could she guess fate would decree that she would pull into the intersection of Jefferson and Mercury atexactly ten thirty-seven, the very moment that the farmer driving the chicken truck lost his brakes? Who could predict that her life would end in a bloody flurry of feathers and exploded chicken parts?

And who can say that an equally dismal destiny doesn’t await Lorena herself, cutting short
her
dreams? Lorena gasps audibly at the thought.

Dreams can disappear—poof, just like that. Where do those dreams go? Are they floating out there with no place to land—songs not sung, dances not danced, all those dreams that will never come true?

She sobs with such despair as Maybelle’s casket is lowered into its grave that the family suspends their grieving to stare at her. Delia, supporting Lorena as they weave between tombstones back to the Nash, says, “After that last haircut, I didn’t even think you liked her that much.”

But it is not so much for Maybelle that Lorena weeps. It is for herself. For lost dreams, repressed ambitions, for time rolling on without her. For her depressing past, her dismal present, and the possibility, like Maybelle, of a future slapped down by the hand of fate. For sad things that happen. For promises never kept.

For talent, forever undiscovered.

“NONONONO
NO!”
MISS FRITZI is holding her head, ululating her disapproval of the elbow-swinging, hip-twisting variation on the Double Time Step Lorena is attempting. “What are you doing?”

Lorena stops, puts her hands on her hips, and regards Miss Fritzi with a weary air. Maybe it’s not such a good idea, taking these private lessons to perfect her routine. Apparently Miss Fritzi is stuck in those Rockette numbers and doesn’t appreciate innovation.

From the beginning, Miss Fritzi wanted her to change her routine from “Chattanooga Choo Choo” to something, she said,"fresher,” maybe something from a movie like
Singing in the Rain.
Well, fine for Miss Fritzi, but Lorena’s been working too long and hard on “Chattanooga” and besides, she’s made it her own, what with all the tricky new steps she had learned from watching Cassie.

“Where’d you get
that
from?” Miss Fritzi had chirped in alarm the first time Lorena attempted the looking-like-you’re-going-forward-when-you’re-going-backward step.

“My kid made it up,” Lorena said.

“Figures,” said Miss Fritzi, rolling her eyes in obvious recollection of Cassie’s brief but memorable bout of dance lessons.

Now, three lessons later, Lorena feels that her routine is eroding, rather than improving, under Miss Fritzi’s tutelage. She blames Delia, who had suggested that if she were serious about her career, she needed not just practice but private lessons.

So on Tuesday mornings Lorena dons baggy shorts and an old blouse, stuffs her tap shoes into a paper bag, and drives down to Miss Fritzi’s studio, where it’s just she and Miss Fritzi and Miss Fritzi’s cat, a habitual barfer who blithely and regularly disgorges the remains of recently devoured mice onto the piano.

“Naughty Puff, naughty Puff, bad bad kitty,” twitters Miss Fritzi as familiar hacking noises emanate from the dusty spinet in the corner. She abruptly interrupts Lorena’s lesson to mop up the bony stewlike mess, leaving Lorena to wonder, Why am I spending two dollars for this? Clearly Miss Fritzi does not appreciate her unique talent, her ability to improvise, her primitive energy.