Test Pattern (29 page)

I
’VE GOT A secret, Lorena sings to herself as she tears open a TV-dinner box. She does a shuffle-ball change and tears off the end of another Swanson’s, lunges into a double-time step, ends with a flourish as she tears open another box. She throws the trio of pans into the oven and does a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo out the kitchen door. She’s all a-tingle, sizzling with anticipation of the audition Binky had sworn she would get with Wally.

Yesterday, as they sped back in the mail truck after their tryst in the woods, she had reminded him of his promise. “When?” she persisted before climbing down from the truck.

“I dunno,” he replied, adding hastily when her expression hardened, “Soon. I’ll ask my aunt Edna when’s the next time he’ll be in Norfolk.” To seal the deal, she left him lustful, kissed him with all the passion she could summon up, rubbed her body against his gray uniform until he was electrostatically charged. She could see him still quivering in the truck as she strutted down the street with a saucy wave.

Last night at dinner Cassie was even more sullen than usual but Lorena didn’t dwell on that. Her head was filled with fantasies of fame that jostled each other for space like kittens in a basket. She had caught Cassie staring at her over the chicken pot pie, her mouth moving as if there were words inside instead of chicken and peas and carrots. As Cassie chewed and stared, Lorena dismissed it as yet another symptom of puberty, a word which startled her when she heard it on television the other day. She had accidentally turned on
Answers for Americans
instead of
My Little Margie.
Puberty. Of course! That explains everything.

So while last night was merely a typical night with a moody pubescent daughter, tonight will be special, a TV milestone. For the first time ever, the Miss America pageant is going to be telecast. Lorena will be able to watch it as it happens, live on TV. Until now, she’s only seen it in bits and pieces, on Fox Movietone News, in the
Daily Press,
in
Life
and
Look
and
Time.
As she studied the grainy photos of each year’s anointed, she would instinctively change her posture to a more queenly stance and think, That could have been me. I was once Miss Buckroe.

She recalls the sensation of balancing the crown, wobbly yet regal, upon her head, feels once again the satiny slide of the winner’s ribbon weaving over her head and under her arm. Miss America has become Lorena’s own mythology. She knows what it takes to be the chosen one, and—as only the once-chosen may—anticipates surveying and judging tonight’s aspiring contestants with a practiced eye.

The promise of Wally has transformed her mood. Fame beckons. Life will change. Nothing can stop her now. She wants to share her ebullient mood, make tonight a special occasion. Pete’s recovery is almost complete. The first tentative thrusts of fuzz are scattered across his scalp, and Lorena even entertains thoughts of their being sociable again. She plans a festive meal tonight, all three of them gathered around the TV set just like they used to do. As a special treat, she bought flag-studded cupcakes from the A&P to eat during the pageant itself.

“Dinner is served,” Lorena sings as she retrieves the warmed-up trays from the oven. Pete parks himself on the couch and begins scraping the compartments of the aluminum tray with his fork before Lorena sits down. Cassie watches warily, gnaws the crust off the chicken, leaves the rest. Bathed in the glow of the TV, they finish dinner quickly.

“Through?” Lorena asks as the processional music of the Miss America pageant begins. Not waiting for a response, she hurriedly gathers the empty trays, dumps them on the kitchen counter, then settles into her corner of the couch. She doesn’t want to miss a moment.

Pete is restless during the evening-gown portion of the pageant, shoots annoyed glances at Lorena as she provides a running critique on the fashions: “Too frilly.” “Puffy sleeves are out.” “That bow in her hair makes her look like Minnie Mouse.”

Cassie stares at the screen, never acknowledging Lorena’s presence even when she scurries to the kitchen during the commercial, singing, “I have a surpr-i-i-ise for you.” She emerges with three proud and patriotic cupcakes on a plate just as Miss Oklahoma begins a stunningly off-key version of “O mio Babbino caro,” but Pete turns down dessert. Taking his cue, so does Cassie.

“More for me, then.” Lorena removes the flag from her cupcake, waves it, pokes it rakishly into her nest of robin-red hair. “Sure you don’t want it?” she teases Pete, then peels away the cupcake paper and sinks her teeth into the snowy frosting. The cupcake vanishes in three hasty bites. Licking her fingers, Lorena draws closer to the TV as the parade of talent marches on: pianist, juggler, the obligatory baton twirler, a halting recitation of “O Captain, My Captain.”

Pete snoozes, slumped down in his chair, gathering his energy for the swimsuit competition. The cupcake has proven too much of a temptation for Cassie, who surreptitiously pinches pieces from it and reduces it to a sticky heap of crumbs. She gazes, bored, at the screen.

Lorena’s never-flagging attention climbs several notches whenthe spotlight zeroes in on the next contestant, Miss Ohio. Her talent, genial host John Daly announces, is tap dancing. Miss Ohio poses perkily in the spotlight, one arm up, hip cocked. Her shiny tap shoes start their
rat-a-tat-tat.
Taut shapely arms begin a churning rotation. And—WOO WOO-O-O—the first notes of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” accompany Lorena’s high-pitched wail: “That’s
my
routine!”

Cassie’s hands fly to her ears.
“Turn it off,”
she shrieks, but Lorena is transfixed by the choreographic nightmare unfolding before her on twenty-one inches of screen. WOO-WOO-O-O. Miss Ohio’s arms rotate faster, faster, moving in rhythmic circles from shoulder to hip and back again, WOO-WOO-O-O, neat feet tapping in complicated counterpoint to her chugging arms, WOO-WOO-O-O in a forlorn chorus harmonizing with Lorena’s wail and Cassie’s cry.

“Shut up!” Pete shouts into the cacophony, but not until Miss Ohio’s number is over and the patter of applause for her efforts dies down does his demand get results. Cassie shuts up but her eyes narrow with revenge. She turns to Lorena, whose dismay over Miss Ohio’s dance selection evolves to slow comprehension, then fear.

“I’m telling,” Cassie announces.

“Telling what?” Pete’s blank look Ping-Pongs between Cassie and Lorena.

Lorena stares at Cassie, willing her mute.

“I’m telling. I wasn’t going to tell but I saw you with him again yesterday.”

“Him?” Pete’s gaze fixes on Lorena. “Who’s ‘him'?”

Cassie answers for her. “The mail guy.”

“Mail guy?” Pete looks as if she said Man in the Moon.

“That’s why she keeps trying to kill you.”

“Kill
him?” Lorena’s mouth goes slack with shock. “I never tried to kill him.”

“Yes you did! You made Dad so mad he fell off the ship.” Cassie’s words slosh around in a sea of tears. “You burned him

with soup and you gave him greasy chicken so he’d set his hair on fire. You want to kill him so you can do sex with the mail guy.”

“Sex?” Pete asks. “Mail guy?”

Lorena glares at Cassie. “Those were
accidents.”

“What mail guy?”

“Yeah, right, accidents.” Cassie sniffs wetly. “Nobody has that many accidents.” She turns to Pete. “Right, Dad? And then she blamed them all on you.”

“What mail guy, dammit?”

“The mailman who comes to our house, the one she does that stupid dance for without any clothes on,” Cassie volunteers.

“Dance?” Pete’s neck is very red.

“I did so have clothes on,” Lorena protests.

“And yesterday in the woods I saw your butt. Your shorts were off.”

“What?” Levitated by rage, Pete jumps up, loses his balance, and plops back into his chair.

“What were you doing in the woods?” Lorena yells at Cassie.

Cassie folds her arms, looks away, defiant. “Riding my bike.”

“What were
you
doing in the woods?” Pete barks at Lorena.

“Riding your bike?” Lorena asks, waving Pete off. “You rode your bike in the street?”

“Who gives a good goddamn?”
Pete bellows. “I wanna know just who is this mail guy?”

“Nobody,” Lorena mumbles.

“Oh, no. He’s somebody, and I’m gonna find out.” Pete rushes to the closet, burrows through coats and umbrellas, emerges with the BB gun gripped under his armpit. “Tell me who that sonuvabitch is so I can shoot his pecker off.”

Cassie throws her hands over her mouth. Her eyes widen more in astonishment than fear. “It’s true! It’s not a bad dream!”

Lorena grabs at the gun. They grapple for it in a lurching dance around the coffee table accompanied by Cassie’s screams and the ensemble chorus of Miss America contestants warbling “God

Bless America” from the TV screen. Having the advantage of fancy footwork, Lorena trips Pete, sends him soaring over the coffee table and onto the floor. His sweat-slicked hand loses its grip on the BB gun.

Lorena snatches it away, holds it in both hands like a fishing rod. What now? She’s never held the BB gun before, only imagined herself doing so, and now that she feels its heft between her palms, she’s stupefied.

“Whattaya gonna do now?” Pete taunts her. “Shoot me? For a mailman?”

“He’s not just a mailman. He understands me.” She waves the gun around for emphasis. “He appreciates my talent.”

“What
talent?”

Something snaps, something burrowed so deep in her brain that what she does next shocks but doesn’t stop her: She points the gun at Pete’s forehead. Sees his eyes go big and round. Sees the dent where barrel meets skin. Cold metal bites into her flesh as she wraps her finger around the trigger and pulls it.

Click.

It sounds puny, that hollow sound, as unexpected as a hiccup from a bear. Stunned by what she almost did, Lorena’s face goes as blank as the unfired shot. She barely reacts when Pete knocks the rifle out of her hand. He grabs it, opens it, looks down its chamber for BBs.

“Empty!” he crows. Then, as if it just occurred to him, “You woulda shot me.” He plunks down on the couch, clutching the rifle. “You woulda shot me,” he says softly. “Right between the eyes.”

Lorena doesn’t know what to say. Yes. She would have shot him. Right between the eyes. She looks at his forehead, sees the faint indentation of an O where she had pressed the barrel of the gun. Zero. She shudders at the image of what might have been: Pete on the floor, BBs embedded inside his bald head. Blood drenching the Naugahyde chair. Cassie screaming. Police. Sirens.

Jail. Detectives grilling her in a smoky back room, just like they do on
Dragnet.

“You calling the police, Dad?” Cassie peers around the corner from the safety of the hallway.

“Police?” Lorena is stunned. “What for? He’s not
dead.”

Pete is very much alive. He leaps up, jabs a finger in her face. “Who is it?” he yells. “What’s his name? You better tell me who it is you’d shoot me for.”

Lorena hesitates, just for a second, then lets it spill out, why not? Why not bare herself to the bone after all that Pete has done? It’ll serve him right. “Binky,” she says in a burst of truth. “Binky, Binky,
Binky
.”

A shadow of disbelief crosses Pete’s face. “What kind of dumb-ass name is Binky?”

Lorena shrugs. She never gave Binky’s name much thought. In high school, it seemed such a manly name: Binky the football player. Binky of the padded shoulders. Binky of the strutting walk, the slow gray gaze, the shifting grin. “Binky” she used to write all over her notebooks, and never once thought it was dumb-ass.

“What’s his last name?”

“Never you mind,” she says. The combination—Binky plus Quisenberry—suddenly strikes her as the wrong name for the hero of what she sees as a tragic romance of movie-epic proportions. Binky is her hero, she wants to believe that’s so. He’s her savior from a life as dull as dog food.

She must have gone crazy, almost shooting Pete like that. Not Lula-crazy, where it’s built into your brain, but regular crazy, where somebody else makes it happen.

Pete. It’s Pete who makes her crazy. “
What
talent?” he had said, like she was a big nothing. Because of Pete she has no life, no one has discovered her, she’s doomed to biscuits forever. Who wouldn’t have been driven loony from that?

“It’s all your fault,” she tells him. “You made me go bananas.

If you hadn’t made me so crazy—not just today, but crazy for a long time, what with your moping around and not ever paying attention to my talent—”

“Here we go again.”

“I
dance,”
Lorena reminds him, “but do you care? When you’ve got talent and somebody squashes it like a bug, well, you start looking in other places for appreciation.”

“Yeah, I just bet Binky the mailman appreciates your talent.” Pete peers down the barrel of the BB gun. “If there’da been BBs in there"—he marvels, still dazed—"I’d be dead as roadkill.” He shakes his head, sticks his finger down the barrel. “It’s like God or somethin’ emptied it for me.”

“It wasn’t God,” Cassie confesses. “It was me.”

“You?” Pete looks at Cassie as if she had just materialized. “What were you doing messing with my gun?”

Cassie hesitates. “I knew something bad was going to happen.”

“You knew? How’d you know something like that?”

Cassie starts to say something, presses her lips together. After a moment, she whispers, “I just knew, that’s all.”

I
T’S TRUE. IT wasn’t a bad dream. And I’m not crazy, either. Now I know for sure what I saw on test-pattern TV. It was the future.

And then I changed it.

I don’t understand any of this. But it doesn’t matter. I changed the future: Mom didn’t kill Dad, and that’s all that matters.

The BBs are still in my sock, way up in the back of my closet. Dad didn’t ask for them back. He didn’t even make me tell him how I knew Mom would shoot him, didn’t say much at all. Just flopped down on the couch when Mom went up to bed, then lay there and stared up at nothing.