Test Pattern (31 page)

“Make sure you give it back when you’re done!” says Edna, slapping the counter in her mirth.

Lorena wiggles into her tap pants, buttons up the tuxedo top, ties on her tap shoes, slaps on her top hat. This is it. Her big chance. All those months of pain and practice have come down to this moment. Feet, she says to her beaming reflection in Edna’s bathroom mirror, don’t fail me now.

“I brought my own accompaniment.” She plugs in the record player, plunks the record on the fat spindle. Wally nods warily. Wally is a crab of a man, hard round body perched on a stool, hands clutching his scrawny knees like claws. His tiny black eyes are so close together they almost seem to touch, and they stare, unblinking, at Lorena as—WOO-O-O—she begins her routine.

Chug
-a-chugga
chug
-a-chugga. She’s a little nervous, but the music revitalizes her and she mouths the lyrics along with it. Faster now, arms and legs churning, she starts singing along. Wally sits up attentively, little crab eyes bulging, shiny as buttons, until the last “woo woo” leaves her panting lips.

There’s a change in Wally’s face. It softens, it smiles, and before she finishes the monkey step, laughter beads his tiny eyes with tears that roll down his cheeks. His laugh—more creak than laugh—puzzles her, but his delight impels her to head full throttle into her grand finale until the last “woo woo” leaves her panting lips. Lorena plunges into her split, leaving Wally crumpled in breathless hysterics.

Edna takes a sip of Postum and lifts an unplucked eyebrow at Binky. “Your momma been feeling okay lately?”

*   *   *

“HE LIKED ME. He really liked me.” Lorena squiggles happily in the seat of Binky’s car as the ferry pulls away from the dock.

Binky shakes his head, looks bewildered. “Wally always was strange,” he says, then retracts at Lorena’s angry glance. “I mean he did, he really did like you.”

Lorena leans back, kicks off her heels, closes her eyes. She sees Wally, tight face stretched into a lipless grin, beady eyes shining as he grasped her hand in his. “I’ll be in touch,” he had said, and before he let go, scraped his thumbnail along her wrist in a strangely sensuous motion.

She feels exhausted, exhilarated, and somehow redeemed.
“What
talent?” Pete had said. She’ll show him. She’s on her way to stardom. Behind closed eyes, she pictures herself in her new life: a night on the town with Gene Kelly, an intimate lunch with Lucy. She’s just drifting off into self-satisfied sleep when she feels a hand shuffle her crinolines and land on her leg. She gasps and jerks away. “Rubber bands,” murmurs a voice in her ear.

“What?” Her eyes pop open. It’s Binky.

“Remember? In my truck? That little trick?”

“Oh. That.” She edges away.

He reaches into the pocket of his shirt, pulls out a nest of thick, postal-issue rubber bands. “I picked the stretchiest ones,” he says, sproinging them between his fingers.

“Forget it.” She squints out the window of the car. Sunlight glances off the roofs of cars, paves the bay with diamonds.

Binky’s face falls into a frown. “We had a deal.”

“Well, I didn’t mean
here,”
she says. “Not on the ferry, in your car. Not now.” Or ever, she adds to herself.

“I thought of that.” He reaches into the backseat, pulls out an army blanket. “We can make a tent. Cozy, huh?”

Lorena turns and gives Binky a hard, cold look. How could she have imagined he looked even remotely like Errol Flynn? She musthave been crazy. Without a word, she slides over the seat and out the door, ignoring his plaintive, “But we had a
deal.”

She leans on the railing, lets the wind whip her hair into a wild red froth. As the ferry pulls into Newport News, Lorena feels herself recede. Lit by the glaring sun of noon, the city seems flat and dull, a black-and-white image that pales in the glow of her Technicolor dreams. Soon all this will be part of her past, a history she plans to recount with teary-eyed nostalgia when she’s interviewed on TV.

M
OM LEFT. I don’t know if I’m glad or sad. I feel like a big hole’s been punched where I’m supposed to be feeling something. She tried to hug me good-bye but I didn’t want to hug her back, even though somewhere inside there was my little-kid self saying, “Don’t go, Mommy!” like when she left me at school on my very first day.

Maybe it was that fake kiss she gave me, smacking those candy-apple lips at the air when she touched my cheek to hers. Maybe it was because her hair matched her shoes and her perfume smelled like the ladies’ room at the Paramount. Maybe it was because she said, “Just wait, you’ll see me on TV and you can tell all your friends, ‘That’s my mom!’” All I know is I couldn’t wait for her to go, and next thing I knew she
was
gone, her high heels tapping down the sidewalk.
Tappety tappety. Tap tap tap.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of a dream—the same dream I keep having, the one where Mom’s coming home—and think I hear that tapping. But it’s only the chinaberry tree tappingwitchy fingers at my window. And I lie awake, wondering just what it is that I really feel inside.

DAD AND I are outside lying on the lawn chair, comparing feet even though we’re wearing shoes. It’s chilly out. The stars are crisp and clear over our heads and the leaves are turning on the maple tree. My saddle shoe comes up to where the laces start on Dad’s work boot. His hair’s growing in good now. It looks like teddy-bear fur, and he smooths it down as he talks about how he’s going back to work, soon as his boss gives him the word.

“My daddy worked in the shipyard,” he says. I nod. I know that. “I always worked in the shipyard, too.” I know. “It’s all I ever wanted to do. Except"—he smiles a little—"once upon a time, I thought I could play in the big leagues.” I didn’t know that.

“You played baseball, Dad?” And then I remember the newspaper clipping in his night-table drawer. “Were you a star?”

“Yeah,” he says, laughing with his voice but not his face. “A shooting star.”

“What happened?”

“I hit a home run. It won the game, but it was just an accident.”

“Home runs aren’t accidents, Dad. You musta been good.”

He shakes his head and says, almost to himself, “I’m not much good at anything.”

“Sure you are, Dad,” I say, and then I remember what Mrs. Finkelstein said: “Everybody’s good at something. The hard part is knowing just what that something is.”

When I say that to Dad, he gives me a look. “Where’d you get that?”

He doesn’t even get mad when he hears the word “Finkelstein.” “Well,” he says finally, “if my something’s not the shipyard, I don’t know what it is.”

“Maybe it’s not the shipyard that’s the problem, Dad. Maybe it’s what you
do
there.”

“I do what my daddy did.”

“But your daddy got killed doing that. And,” I say, shivering in the chill, “I’m scared you will, too.”

He doesn’t say anything, just looks up and seems to study the stars. Then he says, “Yeah. Me, too. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.”

WE HAD DINNER at Delia’s tonight. She’s been extra nice since Mom left, inviting us over, taking me shopping for school. At first Dad didn’t want to have anything to do with her, but the more we see Delia, the friendlier he gets. Tonight Delia made real fried chicken, not as good as Mom’s but not bad either. I brought the biscuits. I’ve gotten better at making them. They don’t look like hockey pucks anymore.

Dad’s been different. Quiet—not the kind of quiet he was when Mom was here, that creepy kind of quiet like when the Lone Ranger and Tonto are clopping along the canyon and the bad guys are around the bend—but a thinking kind of quiet. We watch a lot of TV together. When he goes outside to look across the water at Norfolk, I know to leave him alone.

Tonight when we got home from Delia’s, he asked me how I knew to take the BBs out of his gun. I knew he’d never believe me about the newsman on test-pattern TV, so I just told him that their fighting all the time scared me and I didn’t want a loaded gun around. He didn’t say anything for a minute, then reached out and hugged me hard against his chest. “It’s been real sad for you, hasn’t it?” he said, and I nodded yes. Then he kissed me on top of my head and for a minute it felt just like it used to before everything started getting weird.

The other day he got a whole bunch of things together—old photographs of Mom and him, some letters, a bow tie with yellow dots Mom gave him for Christmas—mashed them into a grocery bag, stomped it flat with his foot, and threw it in the garbage can. When he went inside to watch TV, I fished out a couple of thephotographs that weren’t scrunched too bad and put them in my secret treasure box under my bed.

Mom’s called a few times from New York. She says some guy named Wally is going to make her a star. Dad doesn’t talk to her but I feel like I should, since she’s my mother and all. Like Mr. Finkelstein says, you only get one mother in this lifetime, and she’s mine.

So I listen and act like I believe her when she says she’ll be back to see me soon. The truth is I don’t care about her dancing thing, don’t care that she’s not with the mailman anymore, don’t care if she’ll be famous when she goes on
Talent Scouts.
All I know is that she’s with that Wally guy now, and I don’t even want to know what it is they’re doing.

Tonight while Dad and I are outside, I hear the phone ring and it’s Mom calling to remind me to watch
Talent Scouts
at eight-thirty because she’s going to be a contestant. When I tell Dad, he says he never wants to see that show again in his entire life, that if I want to watch, go ahead, but he’s staying outside until it’s over. I decide to watch, not just because Mom wants me to, but because I can’t believe Arthur Godfrey would have somebody like Mom on his show.

I go inside and turn on the TV. Arthur Godfrey introduces the first act, a juggler who’s great, and a singer who’s sort of good, and next thing I know, he’s saying, “So let’s have a big hand for this little lady: a bright new comedy dancer—Miss Lorena Palmer!”

The curtain goes up and there she is posing in the spotlight, wearing those stupid red tap pants and a top hat on her Mr. Ralph curls. And then I hear it: WOOO-WOOO-O-O, like an arrow through my head. WOOO-WOOO-O-O.

I put my hands over my ears but my eyes can’t stop watching. I can’t believe this is happening. I must be dreaming.

But it’s not a dream.

It’s a nightmare.

L
ORENA’S COSTUME ITCHES. The satin tap pants are caught in the crack of her butt. She extricates them with a flip of her thumb, scrunches the top hat more firmly atop her springy red curls. She can hear the studio audience applauding for the previous contestant on the other side of the curtain. The heavy velvet muffles the sound, reduces it to the staccato of a rainstorm.

“Don’t be nervous, now,” whispers the
Talent Scouts
assistant, a motherly gray-haired woman who just a few moments ago retouched Lorena’s makeup, pressing on a new layer of powder with a gigantic puff.

But Lorena isn’t nervous. She feels electrified, toes and fingers tingling with anticipation. Her time has come, ticking closer and closer to fame as she awaits her cue. Her gaze rises to the heaven of rafters that crisscross the backstage area, to the multiple curtains rigged to rise and fall on command, to the complexity oflights overhead awaiting the flick of a switch. Suspended in this moment between two worlds, she knows she is truly blessed.

The curtain shudders and begins to rise. She hears her name spoken in the sleepy voice of Arthur Godfrey himself. She is prepared, poised in position, as the curtain ascends and disappears into the rafters. Momentarily blinded by a galaxy of lights, she recovers and instinctively turns toward the TV camera with a pert hip flip. The first note wails—WOOO-WOOO-O-O-O—and infuses her with energy. Bathed in the golden beam of the spotlight, she slides easily into the familiar routine, arms rotating
chugga-
chugga-chugga-chugga, feet accelerating into a blur of smacking, cracking, tapping rhythm.

She feels the studio audience breathing like a great silent beast. The spotlight gilds her pale legs as, arms flailing, she tappety-taps across the stage. Propelled by the clackety-clack-of-the-railroad-track rhythm, she gains speed and momentum. She beams a red-lipped grin after a particularly inventive twirl punctuated by a big wink.

She hears a ripple of—what? Applause? Giggles? After a hip-twisting series of moves she learned from Cassie, Lorena revs up for her finale, letting go with an abandon she’s never before experienced, legs loose as a puppet’s, head swinging gaily as the applause becomes a roar. Her top hat flies off as
whomp
she lands in a crotch-bruising split. Arms way up. Now
big
smile.

The studio audience goes berserk, clapping, whistling, hooting with laughter. Arthur Godfrey applauds from the wings looking happily bemused, a living Howdy Doody. Lorena struggles to her feet and throws kisses like candy to her wildly adoring fans. Their love washes over her in escalating waves. Somehow, she always knew it would be this way.

It’s like a dream. Not just any dream, but
her
dream. Now she understands its meaning—the dazzling lights, the black-glass sea, the babbling creatures in the darkness. They are the fans beyond the footlights, sensed more than seen. She hears their voices rise, not in speech but in laughter, hears their hands beat together in a frenzy of adoration. She needs no vocabulary to interpret that sound, for applause is the language of fame.

I
T’S WORSE THAN a nightmare. Nightmares are scary, but they don’t make you want to throw up. That’s how I feel now watching Mom on TV, like the Dinty Moore stew Dad fixed for dinner has changed its mind and is going up instead of down. The feeling started as soon as I heard that first WOOO, and just gets worse as I watch.

And then I see Dad in the doorway. He’s come inside to see. His face is gray in the light from the screen, and his lips look sewn together. He’s staring at the TV screen as if it were John Cameron Swayze announcing the end of the world instead of Mom dancing in those silly shorts that show off her Jell-O butt.