Test Pattern (28 page)

But. “Wait,” she says.

“Huh?” Binky looks up for a second, then resumes.

“No, wait.”

“What?”

“I have to ask you something.”

“What?” He shifts gears, biting and licking with increased rapidity. “Zat better?”

“No, no, it’s not that.” She tries to wrest herself away, just for a moment, just until she can ask him. “I need to know—”

“Okay, I love you,” he says, not losing momentum.

Hmm. “You love me? Really?”

“Oh, yes, yes, I love you, I love you,” he murmurs into her belly as he attempts to pull her shorts free of her feet.

“How much do you love me?”

“Oh,
so
much do I love you.” He sits up to unzip his pants.

She takes the opportunity to cross her legs tight. “Why should I believe you?”

“I swear it,” he grunts as he attempts to pry her legs apart. Frustrated, he rears up and cries, “I swear, as Arthur E. Summerfield is my postmaster general, I love you!”

That does give her pause.

“Well,” she says, sure now of her powers, “if you love me, then will you do me just a teensy-weensy favor?”

“Anything. Anything.”

“Introduce me to your cousin?”

“What?”

“Wally. Your cousin Wally.”

“Wally?” Binky looks dazed.

“All I need is a chance,” she wheedles. She pulls him closer and wraps one leg around him. “That’s all I ask.”

“Oh, yes,” he agrees. “Yes.”

“Swear?”

“Yes,
yes,”
he whimpers, and raises his right hand. “I
swear
it.”

Now she can relax and enjoy herself. And so she does.

L
AST WEEK MOM went to the movies in the middle of the week and since then she’s been weirder than ever. The next day she went to a new hairdresser and came home with hair the color of tomato soup. She wears this goopy orange lipstick even when she’s home, and dresses like she thinks she’s in high school. Shorts, fluffy blouses, high heels. I could die when the kids from the court come over to ask if I want to play kickball. They look at her like she’s a freak.

She barely has time now to put TV dinners in the oven, she’s so busy trying on makeup, curling her hair, practicing her stupid routine. She put the record player in the kitchen so she can practice away from Dad. She closes the door but I can still hear that music, that tapping. I hate it I hate it I hate it.

It’s raining, so I can’t escape outside to play No Bears Out Tonight. I go into the living room and sit with Dad. All he does now is watch TV, listen to baseball on the radio, or look at his star maps.

He says he’s going back to work but he has to wait till his boss tells him it’s okay. I don’t know what that boss is waiting for. Dad’s okay now, he’s got all the bandages off and he’s even got a few sprouts of hair pushing through his scalp like onion grass does in April: tough little tufts that boing up before the real grass starts growing again. His hands are bald, too, but they work okay.

Dad and I are watching wrestling on TV, trying to ignore the sounds of Mom practicing, but we can hear her over the rain and the noise from the crowd as Gorgeous George comes into the ring. Dad goes “boo hiss” because he doesn’t like George being so gorgeous with his long curly blond hair and his glamorous satin movie-star cape. I like it. It’s something Mrs. Superman would wear. They even have to spray perfume—Chanel No. 5, the announcer says—into the ring before he’ll wrestle.

I think he’s funny but Dad says, “He’s not a real man. A real man doesn’t do sissy stuff to his hair or wear perfume or dress in ladies’ clothes.”

“He’s just pretending, Dad,” I explain. “All the wrestlers just pretend.” That’s what I like about wrestling, they’re acting like they’re hurting each other but they don’t really do those things, banging heads together, pinching ears and noses. And they do neat flips when they throw each other around.

But Dad thinks it’s real. “Watch. He’s gonna get pulverized. That guy’s gonna make mincemeat outta him.” He points to the other wrestler, a snarly bald-headed guy with gnashing teeth beneath a big curly mustache. His helpers are holding him back from getting to Gorgeous George but George isn’t worried, he’s prancing around like he’s at a ballet or something, fluffing his hair and sweeping his cape.

The crowd roars when Gorgeous George tackles the other guy but over the roar we can hear Mom in the kitchen, tapping away as usual to “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” Dad turns the TV up real loud and yells “Kill him, kill him!” except he’s not yelling at the

TV, he’s yelling toward the kitchen, his eyes popped out, his neck all red.

I feel like everything’s crashing, all the noise, all the yelling, all the music, all the tapping, and I put my hands over my ears and scream “Stop!” I don’t realize it but I’m crying and Dad’s looking at me like he forgot I was there.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He pulls me to him, lets me sniffle into his shirt while he rumples up my hair, soft, like he used to do. Then he turns down the TV. We hear Mom and the music, loud and clear now. He runs his hand over his head and looks sad and droopy. “I gotta get back to work. She’s driving me to the nuthouse. I gotta get outta here.”

That’s how I feel. I gotta get outta here, too.

BECAUSE MOM DOESN’T seem to care anymore, I can go off where I want and she won’t ask where I’m going. Sometimes I dig for treasure on the beach, sometimes I wade into the water up to my knees. The sand squishes between my toes and the water is cool on my legs and I wish I could just keep going, wade out into the lizard-green water until I get to Norfolk. But then I think about Edgar in the iron lung, think about what it must be like to look at the world through a mirror, upside down and backward, and I wonder if you can get polio through your toes.

I wish I was a little kid again when I didn’t worry about things like Mom and Dad, or school, or getting polio, or the H-bomb. On TV, they showed the Bomb blow a whole island into smithereens, just disappear in this gigantic mushroom cloud. I think about the Bomb a lot, especially now that school’s started again. We have air-raid drills where we practice ducking under our desks in case they drop the Bomb. During our practices, I think, Fat lot of good this’ll be if we’re on the playground when the Bomb hits, and then I look up and wonder if any of the old chewing-gum blobs stuck under my desk still have any flavor left.

When I tell Mr. Finkelstein I’m worried about polio and the Bomb, he says there’s no sense in worrying about things you can’t do anything about. He says if you live scared all the time, the world becomes a very small place.

My world is very small. My house, school, the court. I want to do the things I read about or see on television, especially test-pattern TV. I want to meet people who are different from me, find out things that I don’t even know exist. I want to have adventures before I’m a smithereen.

Today my adventure is to ride my bike in the street. I decide to go to the woods where Molly and I had our picnic. That day wasn’t fun because I was scared Mom would find out, but since then I’ve thought about those woods a lot. I need a secret place where I can sit and think about things.

I fix me a peanut-butter sandwich, stash it in my shirt, yell “I’m going out” to Mom but she doesn’t answer. I don’t know where she is. Dad just nods and waves me off because he’s listening to some game on the radio. I run down and jump on my bike. It’s good as new since Mr. Finkelstein unbent it for me after I fell. I hurry to make sure I’m gone in case Mom pops out and asks me where I’m going because then I’d have to lie.

I feel my heart banging around my chest as I pedal slow and easy to the next court over, then I ride the sidewalk till it ends. The curb bumps under my wheels and then I’m riding in the street, pedaling fast and hard past houses with fences and yards. Kids are playing outside and I wonder, What are their families like? Do they fight? Do I want kids myself someday? Maybe some people just shouldn’t have kids.

I think about all kinds of stuff while I’m riding, not worrying, just riding like a normal person. After a while I see the patch of woods behind some of the houses and I turn onto the path Molly and I took that leads into the trees.

The woods are dark and cool. I lay my bike down on the grass. My bike looks happy to be here, happy it’s not riding on a hotsidewalk, happy to be in the shade with buttercups tickling its tires. I sit with my back against a tree, listen to the wind ruffle the leaves over my head, unwrap my sandwich, and take a bite. Peanut butter tastes better in the woods.

Once in a while I hear a car pass in the distance, but mostly what I hear is the scritching of birds in the nest over my head, the wind like somebody humming through a comb, the card-shuffle sound of leaves. It’s easy to pretend I’m someplace far away even though my house is just a few streets over. It even smells different here, like lettuce smells when you stick your face into the vegetable bin at the A&P.

I hear a noise, a crunching in the woods, but when I peek through the trees I can’t see anything, and it’s quiet again. Some ants are parading back and forth and I wonder, Do bugs recognize each other? I lean back and watch leaf shadows shift and change, and I think about how this will be my special place forever.

I’m drifting, almost asleep, when I hear voices way off. Somebody’s in the woods down where the street stops. I don’t want company, so I get on my bike and start to ride down the path until I see what made that crunching sound I heard before. It’s a truck. A mail truck. I get this uh-oh feeling.

I get off my bike, sneak it behind trees and bushes to where the truck is. Then I hear the voices clearer and I see a head of tomato-soup hair and there she is: Mom, bending over, her bare white butt like a fat mushroom in the forest, pulling her shorts on while this guy tries to grab them away from her. They giggle and I know before I even see his face that it’s the same mailman I saw in Mom’s bedroom.

The first thing I want to do is run out and tell them I hate them, but then she’ll know I rode my bike in the street. I crouch behind a bush trying to make up my mind and before I know it they’ve climbed up into the truck. It backs up and bumps hard over the ground and they’re gone.

I stay in the woods for a long time. I don’t care if I never gohome. I think a lot about what Mr. Finkelstein said, about the world becoming a very small place, and I think I know exactly what he meant.

THE HOUSE IS silent, frozen in the black ice of night. I can’t sleep. All I can think about is Mom’s mushroom butt and the mailman in the woods, about her dancing for him in the bedroom, and I wonder if this time I should tell Dad. Then I think about what might happen if I do, bad things like I see on TV, all those guns, all that blood, and I can’t think anymore.

The stairs creak as I tiptoe down into the blackness. I click on the TV.

Test pattern.

I wait, toes and fingers tingling. The bull’s-eye shifts and changes, begins its spin, faster, faster until it dissolves like Kool-Aid powder in water. And then a picture appears, black-and-white. A man behind a desk. Crew cut. Bow tie. Prissy little mouth.

Hey, it’s the same guy who reports the news on Channel Four. What’s he doing on test-pattern TV?

“A Newport News shipyard worker home on disability was shot and killed last night,” he says. “Pete Palmer, a welder, was killed by a blast from his BB gun as he and his wife, Lorena Palmer, struggled over it during a domestic dispute.”

What?

“The BBs penetrated Palmer’s skull right between the eyes. The scene was witnessed by their eleven-year-old daughter, Cassie, who is now being cared for by friends of the family. Lorena Palmer was taken into custody. She has pled not guilty by reason of insanity.”

My eyes are stuck to the TV screen. The newsman fades and fades until nothing is left but the test pattern. “Liar!” I yell at the TV. “Liar, liar!”

I run upstairs and open the door to Mom and Dad’s room and there they are, asleep like always, Dad snoring, Mom curled up on the edge of the mattress. She picks her head up, mumbles, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Bad dream.” Even if I told them what I had seen, they would never believe me. I shut their door and go to my room. Climb into bed. Pull the covers over my head and scrunch into a ball.

I don’t know what to do. None of this makes sense. Maybe this
is
a bad dream.

What if it’s not? What if I’m as crazy as Lula?

Or, even scarier: What if it’s true? What if the things I see on test-pattern TV haven’t happened yet, but will?

And if that’s so—what can I do to change it?

I’VE NEVER TOUCHED Dad’s BB gun before. I unsnarl it from the tangle of coats and umbrellas in the closet. It’s heavier than I thought it would be. I need two hands just to lift it. Dad makes it look so light on those mornings when he swings it up on his shoulder, squinches up one eye, and takes aim at the cans he shoots off the fence at the beach.

He’s never let me hold it because I’m a girl, but I’ve watched him load and unload it, so I know what to do: snap the little metal piece back, hold the cold steel barrel in my hands so the gun is upside down. I hear the BBs rattle like hailstones, and before I can catch them, out they spill. They bounce, they roll, they tumble over the floor and under the couch, they catch the light, they shine and spin like tiny planets orbiting the coffee table. Shh-shh, I whisper. I fall to my knees, spread my arms to capture them, to silence their clatter in the cold still darkness.

Shh-shh. I listen for the sound of creaking upstairs, the sound of Mom and Dad getting out of bed. Nothing. The BBs have stopped bouncing. I feel around the floor to gather them up, myhands gritty from pretzel crumbs and dried-up bits from old TV dinners. I stuff the BBs into the pockets of my pajamas. Heavy with the weight of metal, the bottoms creep down my butt.

I tuck Dad’s gun back into the closet, hide it under Mom’s beaver coat. Its furry whipped-cream softness folds around the cold barrel of the gun, now just an empty tube filled with air. But my pockets are full of danger.

Before I get back into bed, I pour the BBs into an old sock, hide it way up in my closet. When I close my eyes, I still see them shine, round and smooth, silver as the moon.