Test Pattern

by Marjorie Klein

  “I’m not making it up. I’m telling the truth.”

  “Remember Pookie?”

  Oh, no, Pookie again. They never let me forget Pookie. “I was little then,” I say. “I know I made Pookie up.”

  He’s quiet a minute. Then he says, “What else do you see?”

  I don’t feel like telling him. I know he won’t believe me.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  He looks off across the water and doesn’t talk anymore. I lie next to him, not touching now, and look up at Cassie-opeia. I think about what the man said on test-pattern TV. “Billions and billions of stars,” he said. Billions and billions of stars.

  16

  LORENA

  ON THURSDAY, BINKY arrives with a box in his bag. Purple-wrapped, pink-bowed, the box is from Naughty but Nice, a shop Lorena has passed but never had the nerve to enter. She peels back the purple tissue paper and stares at the little black wisps, transparent as smoke, that lie within. She lifts the bra, amazed at its lightness, its laciness, its complete lack of function.

  She has never seen panties like these. Why, she could see right through them. And what was this? A garter belt? He wants her to wear stockings? These stockings? Black lace, the seams accentuated with little hearts? She never knew there was such a thing. And, he adds before she takes the box into the bathroom to try everything on, put on your high heels.

  How does she look? She studies herself in the mirror. She’s never dressed in lingerie like this. Does she look like a movie star? Like Mitzi Gaynor? All she can see of herself in the medicine chest mirror is to the bottom of the bra. She jumps to get a better view but can’t jump high enough, so she steps on the toilet lid and stretches herself over the sink to look in the mirror.

  “What happened?” she hears Binky call as she crashes to the floor, taking the toothbrush holder with her. “I just tripped, it’s nothing,” she sings, wiggling her elbow to test it before languidly limping out.

  Binky sits naked on the bed. His uniform is folded neatly over the chair. His mailman’s cap sits at attention on top of his clothes, looking official. “You okay?” he asks.

  She nods. Her elbow hurts. She’s okay, but more important, does she look okay?

  She must, for Binky pounces. He springs off the bed and, balancing on his sturdy legs, pulls her into his grip. She gasps as he crushes her against his body. She is Lana Turner; he is Robert Mitchum. He is Bogey; she is Bacall. She is … in pain.

  “Aaaaa-a-a!” she wails, grabbing at her elbow.

  “What’s wrong?” He leaps back as if she were a leper.

  “I hurt my elbow,” she confesses. “In the bathroom.”

  “Bad?”

  “I don’t think it’s broken.”

  “Good,” he says, relieved. “Just relax. I’ll help you forget it.” And then he does, and does again, and they thrash about until the sheets are tied in knots. She revels in the power of wispy bras of black lace, of barely-there panties Binky slides down with his teeth, of sexy stockings that make her legs look so good wrapped around Binky’s neck. “Ooooh,” she hears herself moan, “Oooh, Wally.”

  “Wally?”

  “I meant Binky.”

  “You said Wally.” He backs off, pulls the sheet over himself.

  She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know how Wally popped up just at this moment, just when she was having such a good time with Binky. “I had been thinking about him, you know, being a talent scout and all.”

  “Now? You think about him now? Are you bored or something?”

  “No!” And she means it. “That was the most … incredible sex I’ve ever had. I guess I was thinking about the things I like the most in this world and one is you and the other is dancing. And somehow they all got mixed up and came out ‘Wally.’”

  “The most incredible sex you’ve ever had?” he asks, preening. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes,” she breathes, and lays hands on his still-tender parts. “The very best.” And then it happens again, and this time it truly is the most incredible sex she’s ever had.

  As Binky slides into a doze, Lorena traces a finger around his ear, along his neck, then follows the path of the scar that wanders over his shoulder and down his back. “Do you remember the explosion?” she asks, lazily grazing the scar’s lumpy Cream of Wheat surface with the tip of one curved fingernail.

  “What explosion?” he murmurs.

  “In the war. When you got the scar.”

  “Wasn’t an explosion.”

  “Was it a bullet?”

  “Nah.”

  “A bayonet?”

  “Nah.”

  “Well, what was it?”

  “Barbed wire.”

  “Barbed wire?” She examines the scar closely. “How?”

  “Crawled under it.”

  “Escaping the enemy?”

  He chuckles. “Y’might say so.”

  “The Germans?” She shakes his shoulder. “Come on. Tell me.”

  “No Germans. Belgians.”

  “We were fighting the Belgians?” Lorena’s forehead wrinkles in puzzlement.

  “Well, I was. Two of them, anyway.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Binky raises himself onto an elbow, eyes twinkling with mischievous memory. “I was escaping back into camp. Had this Belgian girl, had her in a haystack, and then her brothers took after me like they woulda killed me.” He shakes his head. “They would have, too, if I hadn’t gotten under that wire first.”

  Lorena backs away from him. “You told me you were wounded. In battle. The Ardennes.”

  “Well, it was near the Ardennes. And it was kinda a battle.” He gets an aw-shucks look on his face. “I never really saw battle,” he confesses. “But I heard it.”

  Lorena moves to the other side of the bed. “You lied to me.”

  He gives her a lopsided grin that both infuriates and charms her. “Naw. I didn’t really lie. Just … stretched the truth.”

  “That’s lying.”

  “Naw it’s not. Lying is when you swear you’re telling the truth. Did I swear? I did not.”

  Lorena doesn’t answer. Binky continues.

  “If you just mention something, that don’t mean it’s necessarily true, it just means you’re mentioning it. But if you swear on something like God or your mother or like that, then that means it’s really true.” He looks contrite, gazes at her from beneath sorrowful eyebrows. “If I lied, it was only because I wanted to impress you.”

  “You wanted to impress me?” She is impressed.

  “Well, you looked so pretty that day in the parking lot. And I felt like such a goofus when I realized it was you I had yelled at outside the trailer. So I guess I just wanted to make myself look good.”

  “Aw.” Lorena feels bad for him now. “You looked good to me anyway.”

  “You look good to me now,” he responds, moving his hand slowly up her leg. She is quite astonished at her response, which exceeds the avidity of just a short while ago. This time, whatever

  inhibitions she had held in reserve have vanished. As she and Binky complete their acrobatics, she realizes she’s chalked up a personal record.

  Three times, she tabulates, I’ve never done it three times in one day—in one hour—and then it dawns on her. She grabs at his watch. “Oh my God,” she gasps. “It’s almost four o’clock!”

  Flinging her gray flannel robe around her, hastily stuffing bits of lingerie into its pockets, she steers Binky out the back door just as she hears Cassie fumbling with the key to the front-door lock.

  Lorena scurries into the living room to greet her. “How was your dancing lesson?” she asks, heart pounding.

  “Okay.” Cassie doesn’t look at Lorena.

  “Good,” says Lorena. She thrusts her hands deep into the pockets of her robe, clutches the wispy remnants of her three-times-in-one-hour with Binky. She’s relieved when Cassie skips up the stairs to her room without uttering another word.

  I’VE DONE
IT again, Lorena thinks, stretching to see the hair disaster reflected in her rearview mirror as she drives home from Maybelle’s. She had asked for a double dose of bleach for a more Mitzi look, but now she looks electrified. She hopes Binky doesn’t hate it as much as she does.

  She parks, then skulks hurriedly down the sidewalk hoping no one will see her. It’s a long walk from the street, past the court, past all the other houses with their flaking white paint, to her house at the end. She fumbles in her purse for her keys, buried in a disintegrating wad of Kleenex from a sneezing session she endured at Maybelle’s. It’s a wonder Maybelle herself hasn’t dissolved from all those chemicals, she thinks.

  After the crisp breeze that swept the outdoors, the living room seems musty, dark even though it’s early afternoon, thick with the burned odor from the Swanson’s she left in the oven too long last night. The window shade, dull ocher in the gloom, is pulled all the way down, its frayed ring dangling far below the sill. Itwas yanked there by Pete before yesterday’s dinner to shut out the distraction of kids playing kickball while he was trying to watch Treasury Men in Action.

  She flips up the living-room shade. Sunshine spatters the orange velvet couch, the Naugahyde chairs, the boomerang-shaped coffee table cluttered with yesterday’s paper. She reaches to pick up a chipped cup half-filled with cold coffee and three drowned Chesterfield butts.

  Then she sees the drawings. They are everywhere, outlined with pencil on notebook paper, colored in with Crayolas. She picks up a drawing of a mutated yellow chicken: big pop eyes perched over a beak, impossibly long neck, ridiculous little wings with hands on the end. “Big Bird” it says in Cassie’s crooked printing.

  Here’s another, a fat furry creature, bright blue with a cavernous no-lip mouth, holding an armload of what looks like cookies. And here’s a strange green froglike being with a bright red tongue, snuggling up to a yellow-wigged pig-woman whose tarty makeup looks like Delia’s on a heavy date.

  Lorena studies the drawings. They are, she must admit, pretty good. She knew Cassie liked to draw, she was always drawing something, Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, what she called her “fashion ladies.” But these drawings, these cartoony people-animals, Lorena’s never seen anything like them.

  When did she do all this? These drawings weren’t here when Cassie left for school this morning, before Lorena’s fateful appointment with Maybelle. Maybe she came home sick. Lorena skips up the stairs to Cassie’s room, looks in. The bed is empty. What is going on?

  17

  CASSIE

  I CAN’T BELIEVE I was so dumb, leaving my drawings around when I came home from school at lunchtime to watch test-pattern TV. I’d done it a few times before—check to see if Mom’s car is parked, watch my show, eat what’s in my lunch bag, go back to school. She never would have found out if I hadn’t been so late that I ran out without thinking and left the drawings behind.

  “What are these?” she says, waving them under my nose as soon as I walk in the door after school.

  “Drawings,” I say.

  “When did you do them?”

  “Today.” I decide to lie just a little. “I felt sick at lunchtime, so I came home. Then I felt better and went back.”

  She frowns while she studies the drawings. “They’re not bad,” she says, and before I can even say thanks, she asks, “Did you copy them from something?”

  “Off a TV show.” I’m trapped.

  “What TV show?”

  “This puppet show. Cookie Monster. Miss Piggy.”

  “What puppet show?”

  I can tell she knows what I’m going to say because her eyebrows collide and her mouth gets her puppet-mouth look, like it’s on hinges. “A show on the test pattern,” I mumble.

  She covers her eyes with both hands and gives a dramatic sigh. “Oh Lordy. Lula lives.”

  “Aunt Lula’s still alive?”

  Mom just shakes her head and looks at me. “Lula made things up, too,” she says. “Maybe Dad’s right. Maybe making things up is just in your blood.”

  Well, they’re both wrong. Aunt Lula’s dead and there’s nothing in my blood. The things that I see I could never make up.

  BECAUSE OF THE drawings and the test-pattern thing, Mom’s got all these rules now, like doing homework before TV, saying yes and no ma’am—stupid rules she just made up because she says Mama Hansen on the Mama show has rules, Mom’s own mom had rules, and when you have rules everybody behaves like they’re supposed to.

  Her dumbest rule is that I can’t ride my bike in the street. She had promised that when I turned eleven she’d let me ride everywhere like everybody else, but then she went back on her promise after she had this argument with Dad the other night during Truth or Consequences. Because of the no-TV-before-homework rule, I was doing boring multiplication problems at the dining-room table while they watched TV, but I could hear the whole fight.

  “Would you tell the truth if they asked you something you didn’t want anybody to know?” Mom asked Dad.

  “It’s a stupid show,” Dad said.

  “Well, suppose you could win a million dollars and get famous if you told something really embarrassing.”

  “All you can win on this stupid show is a toaster or something.

  It would take a lot more than a toaster to make me tell something I’d be sorry for afterward. Especially if I had to do that.”

  I wanted to see what That was because I could hear the TV audience laughing, so I peeked around the corner. Some guy in a clown outfit was riding a big tricycle down the middle of a street while all the cars honked at him. That must have been his consequence for not telling the truth before the buzzer went off. I wouldn’t do that for a toaster either.

  “What would be the worst truth you could tell?” Mom asked.

  Dad looked like he was going to say something but then he didn’t, just stared at the TV set.

  “Suppose they said they would stick bamboo under your fingernails like the Japs did in the war. Would you tell?” Mom asked.

  “I got nothing to tell,” Dad said. “Anything anybody wants to know about me, they already know it.”

  Mom watched, one finger tapping her chin, as the clown guy got off his tricycle and ran to the side of the road. Then she said, “Truth or consequences: Have you ever, you know, been with anybody else?”

  “Whaddaya mean, been with?”

  “You know. Been to bed with.”

  “Who are you, Bob Barker?” Dad asked, then turned and looked hard at Mom. “Why? Have you?”

  “Of course not,” Mom huffed. She looked away and crossed her arms and made a prissy face. “Besides, I asked you first.”

  “Boy,” Dad said, moving away from her on the couch, “sometimes I think it was you got hit by that truck and knocked cuckoo, not Lula.”

  Mom got this aha look and asked, “Why are you changing the subject, talking about Lula?”

  “You’re crazy,” he said, waving her off. “It’s just that this guy in the clown outfit riding the tricycle reminded me that Lula got hit by a truck when she was riding her bike. Your mother saidthat that’s when Lula started acting peculiar. So,” he added with a snort, “what’s your excuse?”

  Mom made a little tent with her fingers and pressed them against her lips. “Omigod. I forgot she got hit on her bicycle. But she must’ve been crazy before that, crazy enough to ride a bicycle when she was old as thirty-three. Who rides a bicycle when they’re thirty-three?”

  “Don’t matter how old you are if you land on your head.”

  “You think maybe that’s why she was so weird, seeing things and all?”

  “I’d say it contributed.”

  TODAY WHEN I ask Mom if I can ride my bike to the roller rink with some of the kids from the court, she says no.

  “You promised,” I say, and she says, “Don’t whine.” But I want to know why she broke her promise and she says, “Because you can get hit by a truck.” Then I remember last night and how they were talking about truth an
d other people and Aunt Lula on her bike, and I say, “That is so unfair!”

  “What’s unfair?”

  “That just because Aunt Lula got hit by a truck, you broke your promise.”

  “How did you know about Lula and the truck? Were you snooping instead of doing your homework?”

  “You were talking loud.”

  “You were snooping.” She makes her frowny face. “I’m not going to argue with you. No bike riding in the street. And that’s final.”

  I hate her. But I love my bike. It’s blue, a Schwinn, and it has a bell that has rusted a little but still dings. I fling my leg over its saddle, boy-style, and feel as if I could fly. I speed away from home with the wind flipping my hair in my face, all the houses and trees rushing by in a blur. I don’t ride in the street because

  I’m afraid she’ll find out, but I do ride down to the beach, down the steep hill, a no-hands kamikaze run that makes me scream “Banzai!” like in war movies.

  When I get down to the water, I sit in the damp crunchy sand and look over at Norfolk and wonder about stuff: Are Siamese twins always Siamese? How high would you have to go up in the sky before you couldn’t see people anymore? When would be the best time to tell Mom that I quit dancing class?

  When I get home, Mom gives me the third degree, hands on her hips. “Well? Where did you go? Tell me the truth, now.”

  “I went down to the beach.” I feel good because it is the truth. It’s not like that sneaky feeling I have when I come home after I’ve faked going to dancing. I don’t know how much longer I can keep that up. All I know is I can’t keep pretending, riding the bus and hiding out at Al’s newsstand.

  I’m okay at lying a little. I just can’t keep lying big.

  18

  LORENA

  LORENA IS DRESSING for Binky. She knows how he wants her to look by now after weeks of Thursday love: hot, hasty, clock-watching love. On Thursdays she waits, tense and edgy, for Cassie to leave for her dancing lesson. When she hears the door slam, Lorena whips into action.