Test Pattern

by Marjorie Klein

  I start crying, I can’t stop, I watch my tears roll down until my face is wetter than when Normie squirted it. I’m crying for my hair, for what it is and what it will be. “Well, it’s not that bad,” Mom says, like she’s trying to make me feel better. “Maybe next week I’ll take you to Maybelle for a perm.”

  “No!” I shriek. “I’ll kill myself. I don’t want Maybelle to give me a perm.”

  So the next day, when I see the box of Lilt Party Girl Children’s Home Permanent she’s bought for me, I throw the whole thing in the trash even though it cost a dollar fifty. I don’t care about curls. My hair will be forever straight, and I will never be Shirley Temple

  8

  LORENA

  WELL, THIS HAIRDO is better. It even has a name: the Poodle Cut. Lorena pats her newly shorn curls, turns her head this way, then that way, looks at herself as Maybelle holds the hand mirror up so she can see the back. “Honey,” Maybelle says, “you look just like Faye Emerson. The spitting image. People will stop you on the street and ask, ‘Didn’t I see you on TV last night?’”

  Cutting was the only solution to the puffball head Lorena had acquired when her hair was fried in the perm machine, then bleached to the color of corn niblets. She couldn’t wear a scarf everywhere, and her good hat with the red plastic cherries looked silly unless she was dressed up with gloves and all. So she had skulked back to Maybelle to throw herself at her mercy, pleading ignorance as to the care and feeding of her head. “I just can’t do a thing with it,” Lorena had whimpered. “I don’t have your talent.”

  Maybelle had preened a little at that, nodded sagely, then offered her solution: cut it. “Hon, you got body now. All’s you needis shape so’s you can just wash and wear, like Mary Martin in South Pacific.” Then, snapping her scissors in great sweeps, she snipped and clipped until all that was left was a tidy little cap of curls.

  When Lorena gets home, she surveys her poodle head in the bathroom mirror. Her face looks round, her ears stick out, and with her bangs curled tight like that, her forehead seems to go on forever. She has no chance of being mistaken for Faye Emerson.

  EVERY TIME LORENA does something to her hair, she has her Hair Dream. In the dream, her mother is shearing Lorena’s hair with giant scissors, just as she did when Lorena was four and stuck chewing gum in her hair.

  She remembers the knotty clump hardening, stuck like a stone near her scalp. Her mother yanked at it with a big black comb, pulling and pulling while Lorena screamed in pain. But the gum remained rigid, so out came the sewing scissors, blades clacking sharply like the bill of an angry bird. Chunks of Lorena’s shiny brown hair fell around her feet until she could hardly see the tile on the bathroom floor.

  But her mother wasn’t finished. She took Poppy’s shaving brush, scrubbed it furiously in his soap mug, grabbed Lorena’s patchy head, and lathered it up. Ignoring Lorena’s cries, she drew the straight razor across her head, around the ears, over the crown, down the back to her neck. Lorena screamed the whole time, No no Mommy no, but her mother held her tight between her legs, locking Lorena’s head in the crook of her elbow.

  When she was finished, her mother picked Lorena up so she could see herself in the mirror, shiny-head bald, her ears big and pink as a rat’s. Lorena ran into her room, threw herself on her bed, and cried until she fell asleep without dinner. When she woke up in the middle of the night, she reached up and felt her slick smooth head and cried again until morning.

  She still has the dream, even now, almost thirty years later. In the dream she feels the straight razor as it is drawn across her head, scraping the skin over the ears, across the crown, down the back to her neck. She sees her ears like pink parentheses on either side of her tearful face, feels the slippery smoothness of her head. And she still wakes up crying, sobbing into her pillow as she did when she was four years old.

  “YOU GOT A poodle cut.” Delia’s nails, pink and oval as Jordan Almonds, pick at Lorena’s curls as they walk into the Paramount for the Saturday matinee. “You’re getting so daring!” They lean back in the worn plush seats and chew Jujubes while they wait for the lights to go down.

  Jujubes, Jujyfruits, Sugar Babies, Good and Plentys: like popcorn, Lorena eats those only in the movies, never anywhere else. Movie food is food to be eaten one piece at a time, from a box, in the dark. When food she has relegated to a certain place or time—turkey at Thanksgiving, candy corn at Halloween, hot dogs at the beach—is eaten out of context, it never seems to taste the same.

  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is playing. Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe. “She’s getting divorced, you know,” Delia says.

  “Who?” Lorena asks, poking her finger at a Jujube stuck on a back molar.

  “Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio. Louella Parsons said so in her column.”

  “Awww.” Lorena is genuinely dismayed. It seemed like such a perfect match, the glamorous movie star and the famous baseball player. “Why?”

  “She was making this movie where she stands on a subway grating and the wind blows her skirt up and her underpants show. All these people were watching while they were filming and he got really upset, and they had this big fight.” Delia shrugs, popsa Jujube in her mouth. “Seems like a dumb reason to get divorced.”

  Lorena nods. It sure does. She could think of lots of other reasons to get divorced, like having to make biscuits every night, or not being allowed to talk when Cavalcade of Sports is on, or being so bored you could scream. But mostly only movie stars get divorced unless you’re someone like Delia. Delia isn’t afraid of anything. Not of being talked about, or of having to work, or of being alone. Delia is the bravest person she knows.

  “Bobo Rockefeller got divorced from Winthrop and got five and a half million bucks,” Delia is saying. “Now, that’s a good reason to get divorced.”

  “Why did you get divorced?” Lorena blurts. She knows Delia walked out on Farley when he smacked her with the turkey leg, but Lorena had shied away from asking if it wasn’t something more. People didn’t get divorced unless it was so unspeakable that they never spoke of it. “I don’t know if I could do that, just walk out.”

  “Well, sugar, why would you? You’ve got a kid who needs you and a guy who doesn’t beat up on you—”

  “He beat up on you?” Lorena interrupts.

  “Yeah,” Delia says with an embarrassed shrug. “I didn’t want to tell anybody, not even you, Lorena. The turkey was just the last straw. So leaving Farley was easy, ‘specially since I don’t have kids. Now I’m thirty-three, no husband in sight, and even if one shows up down the road, that’ll be kinda late to start having babies. So what’s left but to have a good time?”

  And that she does. Delia never seems sad, never stops laughing her big neighing bray that makes people turn around and raise their eyebrows. She moves like she knows where she’s going, attracts attention with dresses a size too small for comfort, doesn’t care that people call her The Divorcée.

  Lorena examines Marilyn Monroe as she appears breathless and bosomy on the big screen. Well, she figures, there’s somebody won’t have a problem finding herself a new husband.

  * * *

  LORENA AND DELLA are sharing a banana split at Peoples drugstore after the movie. The dust-encrusted ceiling fan buzzes overhead, ruffling lipstick-imprinted paper napkins that clutter the tabletop of the booth where they’re sitting. Two partially smoked Chesterfields lie cold and contorted in the ashtray, remnants of Delia and Lorena’s latest attempt at smoking, with which they have experimented since high school. Neither enjoys it, but both are determined to emulate Bette Davis’s sophisticated technique. Delia has mastered the art of inhaling smoke through her nostrils after exhaling it through her mouth, a feat Lorena envies and practices when alone.

  Delia points to the profile drawing of a girl on the matchbook cover over the words “Draw Me.” “I did that,” she says.

  “Did what?”

  “Drew her. If you draw her exactly like that, the Famous Artists School wil
l let you sign up for correspondence classes where they teach you how to paint.”

  “You want to paint?”

  “I guess. I know I can draw okay. Look. I practiced a lot.” Delia digs out a pencil and painstakingly copies the girl’s profile on a napkin, halting with each movement of the pencil to check what she’s done against the matchbook cover.

  “Hey,” says Lorena when Delia displays her finished product. “That’s pretty okay. I bet you get in.”

  “Yeah. I hope so. I always wanted to be a famous artist.” She tucks the matchbook into her purse, then looks at Lorena with a sly smile. “Guess who I ran into when I was mailing my drawing at the post office?”

  “Who?” Lorena licks her spoon with a chocolate-coated tongue.

  “Binky Quisenberry.”

  Lorena gags on the ice cream she has sucked into the back of her throat.

  “Are you okay?” Delia asks. Lorena nods, speechless. “Anyway,” Delia blithely continues, “he was real friendly, told me he’s out of the service now. Looks real cute in his uniform.”

  “If he’s out of the service, why is he in uniform?”

  “Different uniform. He’s working for the post office.”

  “He’s a mailman?”

  “I guess that’s what you are if you work for the post office.”

  “Did he ask you out?” Lorena very deliberately carves into the banana with her spoon, drags it through the chocolate sauce, lifts it to her mouth. She avoids looking at Delia.

  But Delia is looking at Lorena. A little smile separates her tiny curved lips, exposing teeth that seem too big for her mouth. “No-o-o,” she says, “but he did ask about you.”

  “Me?” Lorena interrupts the journey of her spoon to stare at Delia. “How did he know you knew me?”

  “I told him I was with you that day we went to see the trailer, when he was so rude. And then he remembered that we were best friends in high school.”

  “Oh.” Lorena is all out of words.

  Delia isn’t. She tips her head, separates a coppery coil from her nest of natural curls, twirls it around one pink-tipped finger, and says in a singsong voice, “Somebody’s got a crush on someone.”

  Lorena feels her face flame red. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Na-na-na-na-nana,” Delia sings.

  “Well, so what? It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m married.”

  “Never stopped me,” Delia says.

  “Well, it stops me.”

  Delia nods, agreeing. “Yeah, it woulda stopped me, too, if I had a real family like you do. You’re lucky.”

  Lorena busily wipes her mouth with her napkin, takes out her change purse, counts out twenty-five cents for her banana split. “Come on, it’s getting late, I’ve got to get on home.”

  “Oops, you’re right. Big Saturday night.” Delia gives a Betty Boop wink. “Dinner at my house with Alan Ladd to watch The

  Jackie Gleason Show, then"—she yawns and stretches—"it’s early to bed.” She winks again. “And away-y-y we go!”

  “Away we go,” repeats Lorena. And, with a wave at Delia, away she goes.

  LORENA LEAVES THE A&P with a bag of groceries, her flats scuffing as she crosses the barren parking lot. No long, long trailer is in sight, just a sticky stretch of asphalt dotted with cars that glint in the springtime sun. She swings open the car door, half hopes to see a soldier loping toward her, hat tilted over his forehead, hands hanging by their thumbs from his pants pockets.

  But all she sees is a box-shaped woman in wide plaid shorts yank a screaming toddler through the parking lot, and a couple of ponytailed teenage girls sneak a smoke as they straddle the bumper of Lorena’s car. Red-faced, they shuffle away in matching saddle shoes, leaving two squashed butts and a crumpled Pall Mall pack in their wake. Lorena tosses the bag of groceries into the car but doesn’t get in herself. Standing here in the parking lot has twanged something deep within her: memory, desire, a compulsion to buy makeup. She slams the car door and hurries back to the shopping center.

  She’s in Woolworth’s. She bypasses her usual stop, the candy counter, its bins overflowing with M&M’s, Hershey’s Miniatures, Mary Janes. She ignores the alluring aroma of chocolate, the meaty promise of peanuts, the smooth seduction of butterscotch. It is the cosmetics counter that beckons: pots and jars and tubes of goo to smear all over her face.

  Lately she’s felt drab. The hairdo didn’t help, even if Delia insisted she looked perky. “Perky” was not in Pete’s vocabulary; “goofy” was. “Why’d you go and get that goofy haircut?” he had asked when she came home with her poodle cut. “First you frizz it out to there, then you bleach it till it’s dead, and now this goofy haircut. Why don’t you just leave it alone?”

  She pokes around the makeup display. She needs Delia. She examines an eyebrow pencil. What goes with Harpo hair? She unscrews a square bottle: Hazel Bishop Complexion Glow. This color is Rachel. She once knew a girl named Rachel. She smudges a dab of it on her wrist, holds her wrist to her cheek, stares into the warped aluminum that passes for a mirror over the counter. A little pink, but it’ll do.

  Party Puff powder, a dollar, she’ll take it. She streaks her hand with three Westmore “kiss-tested” lipsticks: Rose Petal, Red Flame, Tangerine Dream, fifty-nine cents. Red Flame, she’ll take that, she likes the name. And that cute black pot of crimson rouge. Ring it up: cosmetics, jar of Odo-Ro-No 24-hour Protection Cream, Woodbury Soap for the Skin You Love to Touch.

  She can hardly wait to get home to try on her new face. With exquisite precision she lays out her purchases on her dressing table, pausing to savor the pristine virginity of each item as she tears off its cellophane: powder puff still white and unsullied, lipstick pointed in a crisp salute, rouge smooth and red as a stoplight. They so perfectly accessorize her dressing table that she almost wants to take a snapshot with her Brownie before she musses them all up.

  It is a lovely dressing table. When she saw it in Nachman’s furniture department, she just had to have it, had to have its kidney-shaped top, its froufrou lace skirt, its teeny tiny drawer with the cut-glass knob. Most of all, she had to have its great big egg-shaped mirror with the movie-star lights all around that made her feel like Marilyn Monroe whenever she turned them on.

  She seats herself on the pink tufted cushion of the dressing-table chair and unfolds a Maybelline ad she cut out of Life illustrating Three Quick Tricks to Eye Beauty. As she uncaps her sharp new pencil in preparation, she reads: “Step one: Draw a narrow line around your eyes with your eyebrow pencil, then upstroke at the outer corner.”

  She draws a wobbly line. It goes down, not up.

  “Step two: Do beautiful, expressive brows.” The model has two perfect black wings flying above her upstroked eyes. Lorena pencils in brows that expand to Groucho dimensions.

  “Step three: Apply mascara, holding the brush to set upswoop.” OW. Lorena pokes herself in the eye with the miniature brush she had dampened with her spit before scrubbing it across the ebony cake. OW. Damn. Her eyes look like Dempsey’s after a losing fight.

  Long minutes later, her dressing table is a shambles. But Lorena’s skin is pink, her cheeks are crimson, and her Red Flame’d lips are all aglow.

  She hears Cassie’s footsteps coming up the stairs. When Lorena opens her bedroom door, Cassie’s face is a mixture of shock and delight.

  “Hey,” says Cassie. “Clarabelle!”

  LORENA IS HUNCHED beneath the kitchen sink with a can of Old Dutch cleanser and a brush, scraping gunk that has accumulated since she cleaned it out last spring. She’s on her hands and knees in an old pair of pedal pushers with a rip in the seat. Making this rusty glop disappear has become her focus, her purpose, her mission in life.

  Spring cleaning: the dreaded annual ritual, relegated to the attic of her mind until Harriet Nelson reminded her that she had neglected her housewifely duty. On last night’s show, Harriet, tidy in her Peter Pan collar blouse, announced to tie-and-jacketed Ozzie, Why, it’s spring-cleaning time! Wh
ereupon Ozzie, jubilant at the chance to do windows, ensnared the equally compliant Ricky and David to clean out the garage. This they did with manic delight, never mussing a hair of their rigid crew cuts.

  Why, Lorena wondered as she watched the Nelson family buff up their already perfect home, wasn’t Pete like Ozzie? Ozzie wouldn’t put his feet on the coffee table and flick ashes on therug. Ozzie would say, “How did your day go, dear?” and compliment her on her pot roast. Ozzie wouldn’t blow his nose in the shower.

  Lorena swore when she got married that her marriage would be different from that of her parents, who sat across from each other at the dinner table like two warring eagles with their talons out. She would never let her husband catch her looking frumpy, dinner would always be on time, her children would be charming and say “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am,” her daughter would wear pinafores and have Shirley Temple curls. Weren’t they supposed to live an Ozzie and Harriet life?

  But here she is, a frump who has dinner on time but not to their liking (“What is this? Snot?” Cassie had asked, poking the okra with her knife), and her child was neither charming nor curly-headed. Lorena felt cheated.

  Instead of having tea at the Ritz, she’s on her knees under the sink, scrubbing away like the maid she could have had if only she had planned her life better. As she scrubs away at the stubborn sink gunk, she lets her mind graze in far-off pastures. She’ll take tap lessons. Perfect her routine. Try out for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. She’s humming “Tea for Two” when she hears the doorbell. She sticks her head out from under the sink, wipes her hands on the pedal pushers, yells “Just a minute,” before she unkinks herself and goes to the door.