Test Pattern (26 page)

Once she’s a star she’ll still be a good wife and mother. She won’t let fame change her. She’ll stay a regular person, won’t get snooty, even when she makes lots of money. Of course they’ll move to Hollywood or New York, the only places anything happens, can’t keep living in Newport News, nobody in show business lives in Newport News. Stars can
come
from Newport News, like she heard Ava Gardner did. Hey, she and Ava have something in common—maybe they can be friends once she’s famous.

Lorena poses in front of the mirror, waiting for the needle to connect with the record. Once again from the top: And she’s off in a frenzy, loose as a goose, limbs swinging, hips swaying, toes tapping in total timpani with the music swelling from the 45 player. She sings to her image in the dressing-table mirror knocked crooked from the vibration of her energetic pounding.

Got to do something with this hair, she thinks, fluffing it as she gyrates before the mirror. She’s let it go since Maybelle’s funeral. Delia is going to a new person, a male hairdresser downtown, Mr. Ralph, but Delia’s got that wild kind of hair that a chimpanzee could cut and it’d still look good. Lorena watches her hair flop as she taps ferociously, flinging her head from side to side. Oh, Maybelle, she mourns, why’d you go and die on me before I could change this style? She’s tired of her proper “Mama” cut, the mousy color, the limp, lank strands that hang down her neck like fringes from an old bath mat. Well, she’ll just have to make an appointment with Mr. Ralph even though she wonders about men who like to fuss with women’s hair.

Whap.
She hears the mail slot open, the whoosh of mail sliding through, the final slap shut. She looks out her bedroom window, shoves up the sash, waves frantically at the gray figure slinking away.

“Yoo-hoo,” she calls. Mize well do it now as later, just be spontaneous, ask him right this minute, Does he know Wally’s number? “Yoo-hoo,” but Binky is already down the sidewalk, furtively glancing behind him as he scurries off.

Well. Another time. Maybe it’s just as well he didn’t see her with her looking so frizzy and all. She decides to give Mr. Ralph a call.

She’s looking in the phone book when the telephone rings.

“Miz Palmer?” says a vaguely familiar voice.

“Yes?” She gets a feeling of—what do they call it?—dayja voo?

“This is Dwayne, Pete’s foreman. Remember me?”

That’s it. Dayja voo.

“Miz Palmer? You there?”

“I’m here,” she whispers.

“I’m afraid Pete went and set hisself on fire.”

“Far?” That’s how he pronounces it. That’s how she repeats it. “Set himself on far?”

“Yessum. Actually, it’s just his hair he set on far. Rest of him’s okay. ‘Cept for his hands. He used them to beat out the far in his hair.”

Lorena closes her eyes.

“Doctor said he’ll be okay once he heals up,” Dwayne continues. “Might be bald, though.”

“Bald?” Lorena’s eyes pop open. “You mean, no hair?”

“For a while, anyway. Maybe not permanent.”

She tries to picture that: Pete with no hair, his black, curly, Clark Gable hair fried to a frizzle. Bald as a bean.

“Um.” She hesitates, afraid to ask the next question, the question whose answer might determine her sanity. But she does. “Think he’ll be going back to work soon?”

“Well, Miz Palmer.” She can almost see him squirm before he says, “I wouldn’t wanta speckalate on that quite yet.”

“Why
not
?” Lorena asks in a strangled voice.

Silence. Dwayne is clearly groping for words. “I think your hubband’s got some … problems,” he says finally.

Well, thinks Lorena. So do I. So do I.

D
AD HAS A Frankenstein head, all wrapped up in bandages, and big white-mitten Al Jolson hands. I can tell he doesn’t want Mom to visit him in the hospital because he says “Go home” when she taps on his door to come in. But here she is anyway, sitting on the chair next to his bed while he pretends to sleep.

I read my Nancy Drew or play cat’s cradle with a piece of string. I hate hospitals, the way they smell like Lysol and cafeteria food, but I make Mom bring me. I have to keep an eye on Dad, make sure she doesn’t try to hurt him again. First the soup, now this.

Dad won’t say it, but it’s all Mom’s fault. I figured out what happened. He was checking out his welding torch, hadn’t put on his gloves or shield yet, had to adjust the valves. He was thinking about something else, he said, somehow turned it on, and the torch just jumped out of his hand. Before he knew it, he had set his hair on fire.

Jumped.
Welding torches don’t jump. He said it was like it was greased or something. And then he remembered he ate fried chicken for lunch and there were no napkins.

Mom planned it. She never gave Dad anything but bologna sandwiches for lunch before. But this time, she gave him fried chicken. Greasy fried chicken with no napkins.

Mom says that Dwayne, Dad’s foreman, said he thinks maybe Dad does these things to himself, not on purpose but for some reason Dwayne can’t figure out. He thinks Dad’s got problems, whatever that means, and that Dad is a danger to himself. Worse, he says, Dad’s dangerous to the other people he works with, and Dwayne’s going to recommend that Dad should do some other kind of work.

But I know who the dangerous person is. It’s Mom.

THE HOSPITAL ROOM is hot. Dad is sweating big milky drops that slide from underneath his head bandage, down his cheeks and nose. Every now and then Mom reaches over and pulls a Kleenex out of the box to mop his face, but he won’t look at her, just studies the wall like there’s something important written on it. She sits there dab, dab, dabbing at his face until the Kleenex is shredded and then she reaches over, pops another one out, and starts all over again. Nobody talks. All I hear is nurse noise down the hall or long slow farts from the guy on the other side of the curtain.

I don’t know whether to warn Dad now that Mom’s trying to kill him, or wait until he comes home. Maybe this time he’ll believe me. I don’t know what he’ll do if I tell him about Mom and the mailman, but now I feel like I have to tell him because he’ll want to know
why
she wants to kill him. You have to have a reason to want to do something like that.

When they bring his dinner tray Mom looks at her watch and says to me, “Mize well take you on home now. I’ll come back later.” But I won’t go, I won’t leave her alone with him. I’mscared of the way she stares at Dad, scared at how good she can fake looking sad, her eyes all droopy and her nose runny. It’s like
Dragnet
where Sergeant Friday says, “Just the facts, ma’am,” and she thinks she can fool him with her sad droopy eyes but he’s too smart. If I could tell Sergeant Friday what I know, he’d arrest her just like that.

When I told Molly, she looked at me like I was crazy. “Your mom?” she said. “I mean, just because she did sex with the mail guy doesn’t mean she tried to kill your dad. People only do stuff like that in the movies.”

Well, it happens all the time on test-pattern TV. Like this show I told Molly about, where this really rich guy named J.R. got shot and you thought it was his wife and then you found out it was really her sister because she did sex with J.R., but Molly interrupts with “There you go again, making stuff up. Sex sex sex, like they really talk about that on television. You think about sex too much. I’m sorry I told you about it in the first place.”

Even if Molly doesn’t believe I see these things, she listens because she likes to hear weird stories. Mr. Finkelstein sometimes listens, too. He never says he doesn’t believe me but at least he doesn’t interrupt like Molly does. Instead, he’ll ask me things like “Tell me again what a ‘slam dunk’ is,” or “What’s that record player you say people wear on their heads?”

I memorized the beginning of one of my favorite test-pattern shows. It’s about this sixth dimension beyond that which is known to man, the one that’s as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. Each time I watch the show, it sticks with me and gives me the same tingly feeling I get with the test pattern.

Today, when I’m reciting the show’s beginning to Molly in a spooky voice like the one on TV, Mr. Finkelstein comes into the room. He stops and listens all the way through the part about the dimension of the imagination that’s called the Twilight Zone. When I’m finished, he pets his beard, then says, “That’s very sophisticated language for someone your age.” He looks at me quietly for a minute as if he’s studying me. Then he asks me—no,not asks—
tells
me, like he really believes me for the very first time: “You didn’t make that up, did you.”

“No. It’s real. I heard it on my test-pattern show.”

“I figured you did,” Mr. Finkelstein says. Molly gives me a look, says, “I’m getting some Kool-Aid,” and leaves for the kitchen. Mr. Finkelstein crouches down to where I’m sitting on the floor. “Tell me this,” he says. “What is it you think you’re seeing?”

I think hard, because lately I’ve been wondering a lot about that. Sometimes, when I watch test-pattern TV, I feel like it’s watching me. I scare myself when I think about what all this could mean, but I tell him anyway. “Maybe, since nobody else sees these things, I’m not seeing anything either. Maybe Mom’s right. Maybe I’m like my aunt Lula.”

“How’s that?”

“Crazy.”

“Crazy?” He shakes his head. “Nope. Don’t think that’s the case,” he says, which makes me feel better. Then he looks real serious and asks, “What else do you think it could be?”

I shrug. Why not tell him what else I’ve been thinking, especially lately since I’ve been watching that spooky show I was just telling Molly about. “Well—I guess this
will
sound crazy—but sometimes I think that what I’m seeing hasn’t happened yet.”

Mr. Finkelstein nods his head like he’s not surprised, but like he’s been wondering about that himself. “Hmm,” he says. “And, let’s say that
is
what you’re seeing. How do you feel about that?”

I think for a minute. “Scared,” I finally say. “I don’t think I’d want to know bad things that could happen.”

“Well, let’s suppose you did see something bad. Is there anything you could do about it?”

I don’t know what he’s talking about. What could I do to change the future, if that’s what I’m seeing? It’s not like I’m Superman, or, even Wonder Woman. I shrug again. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Mmmm,” he murmurs. “Maybe so, maybe no. And if it’s so, who knows if it’s for better or for worse?” He’s quiet, like he’s listening to some invisible person. Then, his bones crackling like Rice Krispies, he stands back up again. He pets his beard and says, “I guess it’s best to let things be.”

He’s right. If you could change the future by making things happen, or by stopping them from happening, it might make new things happen and you’d see a whole
other
future, and then do you get to change that, too? It’s all too complicated. Mr. Finkelstein is so smart. I don’t know why Dad doesn’t like him. That’s one of the things I would change, if I could change things.

DAD’S HOME AGAIN. His head and hands are still bandaged but not in fat bandages, just thin ones that Mom has to change every day. Dad’s hair is gone but he says maybe it’ll grow back. When he’s got the bandages off, I don’t mind that his head is bald like that. It makes him look like an elf.

When he first got home, he’d spend a lot of time staring at the model he made of the battleship
Missouri
that he kept by his bed. The other day I heard this crash and I went running to see what happened and there’s his battleship, all in pieces on the floor. It didn’t look like it fell. It looked like it was thrown. Dad didn’t say anything, just looked at me with big, wet, scary eyes.

Mom stays away from Dad now. If he’s upstairs, she’s downstairs. If he’s downstairs watching TV, she’s upstairs. She quit practicing her routine because he yelled, “That’s all I need, you’re driving me nuts with that racket!” She has to bring him food, but that’s the only time she sees him except when she has to change his bandages. She doesn’t talk much, and when she does it’s like she’s not really there.

Now we always have TV dinners. Turkey on Monday, fried chicken Tuesday, roast beef Wednesday, pot pie Thursday, and then start all over again. It’s not so bad because I get to eat dinner while I watch Mr.
Peepers
and
Dinah Shore
and I don’t have totalk to Mom. I don’t have anything to say to her. I keep thinking, She tried to kill Dad. She doesn’t know I know. I keep an eye on her all the time to make sure she doesn’t try it again.

Sometimes she just sits in front of the TV and cries. Not during sad things, but when she’s watching
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts
or the June Taylor dancers. She even cries when she sees the dancing Old Gold cigarette packs.

I wish we could go back to the way it was before, when we were just a regular family and there wasn’t any mailman and Dad wasn’t all wrecked up. I wish I could just close my eyes, click my ruby slippers three times, and say “There’s no place like home.” And when I open my eyes again, everything would be the way it used to be.

A
ir cooled READS the sign over the ticket window of the Paramount, each letter dripping with frosty blue icicles. Lorena pushes a quarter and two dimes under the window opening, gets her pink ticket in return, doesn’t even ask the soporific ticket taker what time the show starts. She just wants to escape.

Escape from heat as smothering as a deadly cloud dropped from the white-hot sky. Escape from meaningless tasks she performs on automatic—matching socks, bleaching sheets, emptying the Hoover’s dust bag. Escape from the accusatory silences of Pete and Cassie.

It’s Wednesday, the middle of the week. Delia’s at work, so Lorena is alone. It doesn’t matter. She just wants out. Someplace cool, someplace dark, someplace that will take her somewhere else.

The movies.

She looks up, reads the marquee:
there’s no business likeshow business.
She feels electrified, not just because it happens to be a movie she wants to see, but because she is zapped by a premonition that it’s a signal, a sign, a message from above. There it is in black-and-white, placed as if by the hand of God in big plastic letters on the marquee overhead:
there’s no business like show business.