Test Pattern

by Marjorie Klein

  And then she remembers: She had the dream again last night.

  IT STARTS WITH light, the dream always does, a pinpoint pulsating faintly against the black. The light expands, kaleidoscopes into fragments across the infinite vision of dream. Brighter than lightning, the dreamlight shatters and multiplies, splinters of a galaxy brilliant against fathomless dark.

  Deep in the burrow of sleep, she knows this is a dream, knows she experienced it all before the first time that she dreamed it, knows it wells up from the deep place where dreams are born. It’s an answer without a question, so she welcomes the dream and watches.

  The lights drift and settle into a glittering band that stretchesalong the horizon of her vision, a blinding faceted rainbow. She reaches out to embrace it and, when she can’t, realizes that the shimmering vision she is trying to grasp is Norfolk with its myriad of lights.

  In her dream, this is what she does:

  She stands on the edge of the water, afraid. Her house is behind her, invisible in the darkness, swallowed up by the night. She could turn and walk back, retrace her path over the hard sand of the beach, the coarse grass of the park, the rocky protrusions of the hill. She could go home. But the lights are too compelling.

  Inky waves wash over her feet. She walks into the water. It envelops her, soft, soothing, a veil of black silk that caresses her body, and she descends, sinking slowly, drifting downward in a lazy spiral. To her surprise and pleasure, she can breathe underwater. She takes great gulps of—not air, but a strange elixir that revives her and makes her feel alive. The water, once so forbidding, is transparent as glass. Columns of light dance through it like golden ballerinas.

  Colorful shapes of mysterious creatures float past her as she drifts. They seem friendly. She reaches out but they escape her touch, pass through her grasp like ghosts. Now and then one seems to be familiar, but who or what it is eludes her. They speak to her in the language of shells, burbling syllables on the edge of comprehension, sounds she understands but can’t articulate herself. The creatures seem to be leading her toward the city’s glow.

  In her dream, she remains inert, drifting this way, that way, this way again, venturing neither forward nor back. Norfolk’s phosphorescence dims and fades as she watches. She sees, but never touches, its light.

  LORENA TAKES A deep breath of auditorium air, a redolent blend, of sweat and dust and springtime flowers that bloom outside the propped-open windows. It’s still light outside, a rosy twilight thatwashes the ocher walls of the high-school auditorium with pale pink.

  “Can you smell it?” she asks Delia, who sits next to her on the hard wooden seats. They are the only occupants of this row. The other competitors for roles in the Community Theater production of Guys and Dolls sit in a nervous clot in the front row.

  “Smell what?” Delia takes a nostril-dilating sniff.

  “Show business.” Lorena closes her eyes. “The excitement. The applause. The blood, the sweat, the tears.”

  “Smells like mold to me.”

  Lorena pulls her knee up to her chin and rests one shiny black tap shoe on the seat to retie its bow. “I’ve been practicing like you said. I really think I’ve got my routine down. It’s different from when you saw it.”

  “Yeah?” Delia asks. “How?”

  “You’ll see,” Lorena says with a teasing smile. “I’ve added a lot of new steps I’ve seen Cassie do.”

  “Cassie? I didn’t know she could dance.”

  “Me, either, but I think she’s got my talent. She imitates these steps she sees on TV, steps I’ve never seen before.” Lorena stops herself. She doesn’t want to get into how she catches Cassie dancing in front of the test pattern, how just yesterday she saw her doing some dance that involved her arms arcing over her shoulders, then holding her nose like she was swimming. And another step where she scratched under her arms like a monkey.

  “What’s that?” she had asked Cassie, who responded by pointing to the test pattern as she gyrated and sang “Come on baby, do the locomotion.” Startled, Lorena turned the TV off, but then asked a sulking Cassie to show her the steps she just made up.

  “I didn’t make them up,” Cassie protested, but showed her anyway. Lorena quickly added them to her routine, a last-minute but, Lorena was certain, impressive addition sure to wow the director of the production of Guys and Dolls she was auditioning for tonight—her first step on the road to stardom.

  A parade of hopefuls sings and dances across the auditorium stage, few of whom present any competition that Lorena can see. She and Delia suppress their giggles at the chunky ballerina who staggers dizzily offstage after her third pirouette. They sneer openly at the off-key baritone whom Lorena recognizes as her dry cleaner.

  “Ne-ext,” calls the director in a nasal whine. “Lorena Palmer,” he reads from a list. He’s wearing dungarees and a little beret and it’s rumored that he once had a bit part in a Hitchcock film—a nonspeaking part, but you could recognize him in the crowd. “Lorena Palmer,” he repeats. “Where aaa-re you?”

  “Here, here.” She scrabbles sideways out of the row into the aisle, adjusting her tap pants as she goes. Before she ascends to the stage, she hands a green record to an assistant, who plunks it atop the 45 player.

  “Dancer?” asks the director. He sounds bored. From the stage, all Lorena can see of him is the top of his beret, round and red with a little stem coming out of the top like a pumpkin. “You bet,” she says, flashing what she hopes is a dazzling smile before she takes her position. The auditorium looms like a musky cavern before her. She sees Delia—tousled curls bright in the gloom, face turned upward expectantly—give her a thumbs-up. Lorena nods at the assistant, then waits, trembling, as the needle drops onto the record.

  WOOO-WOOO-ooo. Slowly at first, her arms rotate to the relentless rhythm, picking up the pace, churning churning chug-a-chugga-chug-a-chugga, now the feet, a subtle tap, then faster, faster, she gets into the groove, she’s moving to the music, she’s bopping with the beat, yes this is what it’s all about, and she flings herself into the new moves she learned from Cassie, arms crawling in that swimming motion, a quick, segue into the monkey scratch. She throws the director a saucy wink; his reaction is a bug-eyed stare. She can tell that he’s in awe.

  She revs up for her grand finale And … split! down she goes, legs splayed, arms high, big smile. Delia’s enthusiastic if solitary applause echoes through the auditorium.

  “Thank you,” says the director in a strangled voice. He hunches over his list. “Next!”

  “Thank you,” sings Lorena to the top of his beret.

  “How’d I do?” she asks Delia as she plops into her seat.

  “Um. You were just… spectacular. No, really. Just spectacular.”

  A lithe blonde is nervously taking her place onstage. Lorena elbows Delia. “Falsies,” she says. But she’s wrong. As the blonde begins her routine, it is clear that her bounce is authentic, a gentle rise and fall that synchronizes with each perfectly executed leap and twirl. Worse, she has hair that undulates in waves, a golden curtain she uses as a prop, sweeping it before her face, flinging it back dramatically, running her fingers through its shimmering strands in a gesture that seems choreographed.

  “She looks like Veronica Lake,” says Delia.

  Lorena slumps in her seat, arms folded. “Veronica Lake isn’t a dancer.”

  The blonde winds up her routine with a precise pirouette. The director’s beret is tipped back, he gives a little patter of applause. “Thank you,” he says. “Very nice. And you are …” He checks his list, “Miss Ellenson?” She smiles prettily, nods. “Very nice, Miss Ellenson.”

  Miss Ellenson is chosen for the cast. Lorena is not. She and Delia slog out of the auditorium accompanied by the plunking notes of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” and the nasal voice of the director assigning the coveted roles.

  “It was the hair,” says Lorena. “The way she flung it around and all.”

  “Yeah,” says Delia.

 
“Men like that kind of hair. Long and blond. I bet that director woulda paid more attention if I didn’t have such straight mousy hair.”

  “You have nice hair,” Delia says. “Nothing wrong with your hair.”

  “Was it my dancing?” Lorena stops and turns to Delia. “Is that it? My dancing wasn’t as good as hers? Tell me the truth.”

  “No, no.” Delia hesitates. “She was pretty good, though. But,” she adds at Lorena’s stricken look, “not as … exciting as you, all those new moves and all.”

  “So what did I do wrong?” Lorena wails. “It’s the hair, isn’t it? Be honest now.”

  “Well …”

  “So what should I do?”

  “Maybe take some dancing lessons?”

  “YOU KNOW I hear stories all the time, every day, Lawdamercy, everybody’s got a story and it’s always bad.” Maybelle gives Lorena’s hair a mighty yank as it disappears into the last of the metal rollers. Lorena is captive in the pink plastic chair at Maybelle’s House of Beauty, imprisoned in rollers attached by rubber-coated wires to the permanent-wave machine above her.

  Maybelle grabs the big black plug of the machine, rams it into the wall receptacle. Lorena can almost hear the sputter and zap of electricity flowing into the rollers, frying her hair into the curls and spirals men go crazy for. As she sits, she envisions one man in particular: Binky Quisenberry. She closes her eyes, imagines herself the star of a Flash Gordon movie, prisoner of the space aliens, her brain connected to the machine. Binky would come, her handsome soldier, and rescue her.

  Maybelle rants on, chunky arms crossed, her stumpy body in its pink beautician’s uniform planted in front of Lorena as her hair cooks in the machine. “… a buncha whiners, that’s all I hear, their husbands did this their husbands did that, well I say like President Truman said, If ya can’t stand the heat get outta the kitchen. Get outta the kitchen, you dumbbells, y’all got better things to do in life, just don’t come whining to me. Look, I don’tneed a man in my life, I got my byooty parler, I got my own business, what do I need a man to tell me what to do?”

  Lorena nods agreeably, the rollers and wires nodding with her. They burn her scalp but she doesn’t want to whine, not to Maybelle, not to this bastion of womanhood whose tough little face would knot up even more if Lorena confesses that the reason she is enduring this torture by perm is not only to advance her wished-for career but to enchant the enemy: men.

  She’s done. Maybelle releases her from the machine. Lorena’s hair sproings out in hard little curls and she lets Maybelle steer her first to the washbasin for a shampoo, then to her chair for a pincurl set, and finally to a seat beneath the helmet of the dryer to laminate the twisted coils into submission. Exhausted, Lorena sinks into the chair in front of the mirror for her comb-out. Maybelle wields comb and brush in a frenzy, poufing Lorena’s perm out to a mammoth puffball, foreign and frizzy. Lorena reaches up, touches it. It feels like mesh.

  Maybelle steps back, beaming. “Like it, honey?”

  Lorena feels like crying. This is not her hair. She wanted waves, big deep Veronica Lake waves, a swoop over one eye, sexy. Not this dandelion head. She looks like Nancy in the funny papers.

  “Will it go down?” she asks, fearful of Maybelle’s wrath.

  “Nah, honey, don’t worry,” Maybelle reassures her. “That’s the beauty of these perm machines, not like those newfangled cold waves. These are permanent perms.”

  “Not even a little?” Lorena’s voice breaks. “Even if I wash it a lot?”

  “Sugarplum, you’ve got curls till you cut ‘em off.”

  Lorena stares at herself in Maybelle’s mirror. And in a tiny voice she says, “I want to look like Veronica Lake.”

  “Well,” Maybelle says, scurrying for her appointment book, “I can fit you in next Tuesday for bleach.”

  7

  CASSIE

  MOM WENT TO Maybelle’s and came home looking like Harpo Marx. She got a perm, a perm so huge it looks like she’d have to jump to touch the top of her head. I hate it when people see her with me. She didn’t like the perm either, at first, but since Delia told her it made her look taller she thinks maybe it’s not so bad.

  The worst part is that now Mom wants to curl my hair. She wants me to look like Shirley Temple, who was her favorite movie star when Mom was my age. Ever since she saw me doing some dance steps, Mom thinks I inherited what she calls “her talent.” When I told her I learned those steps from test-pattern TV, she got mad, but she still wanted me to show her how to do them. I’ve caught her practicing in front of her mirror. It’s enough to make you want to curl up and die.

  I’m sitting on the wicker hamper and she’s twisting my stringy brown hair around strips of torn rags, trying to make it curl in corkscrews like Shirley Temple’s hair in this picture Mom toreout of an old Photoplay. She propped the picture up over the sink, keeps checking it to see which way to roll the rags so I’ll have Shirley Temple curls instead of my own ugly hair.

  I hear the kids outside yelling in the court. When I look out the window, Normie and Weezie and Ginny Sue are chasing each other with water pistols. What am I doing inside when they’re having fun outside? I want to squirt Normie with my water pistol, get him back for the last time he got me. When I try to escape Mom, she grabs me back. First I have to be beautiful. Mom knots the last rag to my scalp. I feel as though a thousand bees have landed on my head. I hate this. I start pulling at the rags. I want them out.

  “If you take them out, you won’t be beautiful,” Mom says. “You won’t look like Shirley Temple. Don’t you want to look like Shirley Temple for Delia’s May Day party?”

  I don’t want to go to Delia’s stupid May Day party. What I really want to do is blast Normie up the nose with my water pistol like he did to me the other day. I could run out and get him while my hair is setting, but I’m not about to go outside and show my rag-knotted head to the kids in the court. Besides, Mom won’t let me because if I jiggle the rags loose I won’t have curls and I won’t look like Shirley Temple.

  BOING-G-G. MOM UNWRAPS the first curl. It hangs like a chocolate spring next to my cheek, where a Shirley Temple dimple should be. I smile wide trying to force the dimple out, and Mom unwraps the next curl. It looks like a twin to the spring on the other side.

  Mom is happy. She hums “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” As she unties each rag, another curl boings down, and when she finishes, my face is buried under a wiggly forest of curls. Mom smiles. “See?” she says. “You can be pretty.”

  I don’t feel pretty. I feel dopey. Mom makes me wear my pink party dress. It’s such a baby dress, with a big bow tied in the backand smocking all across where I should have titties but don’t. I’d rather have clothes like some of the people on test-pattern TV. They dress different all the time.

  Lots of times they just wear regular clothes like anybody. But other times they wear these great costumes. Sometimes the men don’t wear suits. Sometimes their pants fit tight and then get real wide below the knee, or else they’re so droopy they look like they’re going to fall off. And girls wear pants a lot, all kinds of pants. Skinny pants, wide pants, stocking pants, dungaree pants. Or else they wear skirts so teeny they might as well be shorts.

  Sometimes kids wear funny hats and neat shoes, not just Buster Browns or Mary Janes, but boot shoes, or shoes that look like they’re on blocks, or huge tennis shoes that everybody wears in some shows, not just kids but ladies and men, too. I’d like some of those big fat shoes myself.

  But no, I have to wear my stupid party dress and Mary Janes. When I’m all dressed, I go outside to wait for Mom and Dad. I slide my yellow water pistol into the pocket of my dress. I stand on the porch of our house and watch while Normie pins Weezie on her back and squirts water all over her face. She’s screaming and Ginny Sue is yelling at me, “Come on! Let’s get him!”

  I jump up and the two of us attack Normie, pull him off Weezie, and blast him with our water pistols. I give him a great nose shot which makes hi
m so mad he wrestles my pistol away. He gives it to me with both barrels, squirting and squirting until my face is dripping and my hair is flopping like an old mop against my cheeks.

  Here comes Mom out the door in her new shirtwaist dress and white gloves and her good hat with the plastic cherries. Dad is dragging behind her. She’s made him wear his suit.

  Mom looks at me like I grew another head or something. “What happened to your hair?” she squeaks.

  “What?” I say like I don’t know.

  “Five minutes! You’re outside five minutes and look at you!”

  Her hand is crawling over my head like a tarantula. “How did you get so wet?” She spins like a top on one high heel and heads back for the door. “Come on, we’ve got to fix you in a hurry. Criminy,” she mutters under her breath, “she’s hopeless.” She drags me to the bathroom and I stare at the hopeless person in the mirror.

  “I didn’t do it.” I sniff as tears roll down my undimpled cheeks. “Normie did it.”

  She doesn’t say anything, just grits her teeth, grabs a towel, and rubs my hair really hard. She tries to twirl some life back into it, but it hangs in strips like flypaper. Only the ends bend up, just a little, to remind me they were curls a few minutes ago.

  “Straight as a stick,” Mom grumps. “Like trying to curl raw spaghetti.” She shakes her own head, carefully, so she doesn’t mess up her Harpo hairdo. “Looks like you’ve got Gramma’s hair.”

  Oh no! Not Gramma’s hair. Straight, thin, gray, such awful hair she had to wear it in a bun. I see myself doing what Gramma did, braiding her waist-length hair over one shoulder, her stubby fingers weaving over under over under until the last little wisp disappeared into a tail that she strangled with a rubber band. Then she reached back and twisted the braid around one finger, round and round on the top of her head, jabbing it with U-shaped hairpins she took one at a time from where they were clamped between her lips. She twisted and jabbed until the braid became a hard gray lump that didn’t move until nighttime when she let it tumble like a snake down her back.