Test Pattern (13 page)

Sure, they’re still building aircraft carriers like the
Forrestal,
and don’t think he’s not proud to be part of that, part of creating what’s going to be the biggest warship in the world, but then what? There’s talk of layoffs, too many workers, not enough work. Not that he’s worried they’ll lay
him
off, he’s proven his skill, his value, his loyalty. It’s clear he’d give his life for the shipyard, just like his daddy did.

But these days, when he talks about the shipyard, he seems deflated, like some of his innards were sucked out. Sometimes, Lorena thinks, Pete seems shorter at the end of the day than he was when he left for work.

Aside from Pete’s problems at work, they hardly talk about what they’ve done all day. Used to be, when they were first married, they’d share silly stories about things that happened and people they knew, but now all they talk about is what’s on TV. Pete never asks about what she’s thinking or doing. He doesn’t know that Lorena tried out for the Community Theater and didn’t make it. He doesn’t even know she has a tap costume.

Well, she thinks, maybe she can perk him up by telling him about her plans. After all, Binky was interested, even offered to introduce her to his cousin Wally the talent scout. Surely her own husband would want to know about her new ambition. She’d leave out the part about Binky and Wally.

“You know,” she begins, “I think I can make a career with my talent.”

“Talent?”

“I dance, remember?” She pouts. “Don’t you remember how much I like to dance?”

He shrugs. “So? I like to eat. I’m not making a career of it.”

“Well,” she says, ignoring that. “I’ve been getting up a routine. So I can try out for
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts
.” Excited now, she goes to the closet and pulls out her costume and tap

shoes. “Don’tcha love this?” she says, holding the red satin tap pants and tuxedo top up to her body, turning this way and that.

Pete blinks. “Where do you think you’re going to wear that?”

“For my audition, silly.” She feels flirtatious now. Just the sight of the flippy pants puts her in a dancing mood. “Wanna see my routine?”

“No. No, I do not want to see your routine.” He falls silent, scrutinizes her as if she were a mutant. “You’re nuts,” he concludes. “I don’t know what’s happened to you lately, but I swear you’re getting as crazy as your aunt Lula.”

“Crazy? Because I have plans? Lula didn’t have plans. She just saw things that weren’t there, flying saucers, stuff like that. That’s
different.”

“Crazy is crazy. Lula. You. Sometimes I think your whole family is nuts.”

“Are you calling my mother a nut?”

“You’re
all
a buncha nuts.”

Lorena slams the bedroom door, takes her costume to the bathroom. The silky slide of the tap pants soothes her as they shimmy over her hips; the crisp tuxedo top makes her feel perky and proud. She stares at herself in the mirror, adjusts the top hat to a sassy tilt.

She’ll show him. Crazy? Nuts? Someday he’ll eat those words.

M
ISS FRITZI WAS once a Rockette. There’s a picture of her in a long line with other Rockettes on the wall of her dance studio, kicking really high like the June Taylor dancers. The Rockettes all look alike with tall fluffy feathers sticking up out of these sparkly caps they wear, so Miss Fritzi put a big red arrow pointing to herself in the picture so you’d know which one she was. She’s about halfway up the line that goes from the stubbiest Rockette to the real tall one in the center.

She’s not a Rockette anymore because she got married. Her husband is an officer stationed at Fort Eustis. Mom said, “Can you believe she gave up dancing in Radio City Music Hall to get married?” Sometimes I think Miss Fritzi feels the same way.

Like today. She has us all in a row and she’s demonstrating a new step. “Cassie,” she chirps in her parakeet voice, “wake up!” because it’s my turn and I’m looking out the window thinking about stuff.

“I’m up,” I say, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, so

Miss Fritzi shows me, hop-shuffle-hop-step-heel-toe, but my tap shoes won’t do that, they feel heavy and clunky like my feet belong to somebody else. The tops of Miss Fritzi’s ears go purple, which happens when she gets upset.

“You must pay attention,” she peeps. “Think of dancing as teamwork. Now,” she says, shaking herself like a ruffled-up bird that’s smoothing its feathers, “all together now, and a one-and-a-two-and-a-hop-shuffle-hop-step-heel-toe.”

The other five girls do that, sort of, but I’m a step behind because I watch to see what Melanie, the girl next to me does, and then I do it.
“Cassie,”
Miss Fritzi caws, really frazzled now, “if you don’t pay attention, you won’t be ready for recital.”

Recital?

“You mean we have to do this in
front
of people?” I ask.

The girls in line with me twitter nervously except for Melanie, who wears her hair like Miss Fritzi, pulled back into a tight bun like a ballerina. “We get to wear costumes,” Melanie announces. “Flower costumes.”

Not me.

“I can’t,” I say.

“Well, of course you can.” Miss Fritzi’s shoes tap impatiently on the scarred wooden floor. “Everybody gets to wear a costume.”

“I want to be a rose,” says Melanie.

“I don’t want to be anything,” I say.

Miss Fritzi holds her head with both hands like it’s going to come off. “Please God not now,” she says to the ceiling. To me she says, “Your mother has already paid for your costume.” She leans her birdy body over my head. I can hear her teeth scritching together. “All you have to do is …
dance.”
The word comes out like a squawk.
Day-
ance.

So I dance. One step behind Melanie, shuffle-hop-step, I dance without caring because it’s my very last dance. I won’t be a rose, I won’t be a dope. And now I know for sure that I won’t be back.

I STARE OUT the open window of the bus as it carries me home, away from Miss Fritzi and Melanie and dancing forever. The window rattles like maybe it’ll clonk down any second on my elbow but I don’t care because if it breaks my arm it’ll be a perfect excuse to never dance again.

The bus is hot. The black plastic seat is torn and itchy and sticks to my skin. I’m sitting right behind the bus driver, looking at the dark splotch of sweat on the back of his gray bus-driver shirt. I can see his eyes in the mirror above him, just his eyes, nothing else, sly and shadowy. Every now and then they look at me.

Usually I sit in the back of the bus when I ride to school with Molly, even though that’s where the colored people sit. We like to ride there because it’s fun to kneel on the long backseat and make faces out the rear window at the cars behind us. One day Molly asked, “Why can’t the colored people sit up front?” I had never thought about that before but after that I thought about it a lot.

Even when the bus isn’t crowded, colored people have to scrunch together in the back seats. Like now, the front of the bus is pretty empty, just me and a couple of ladies in flowered dresses carrying shopping bags from Nachman’s and this old guy who’s sleeping. But in the back the seats are full, mostly colored ladies who must be maids. Once when the back of the bus was really full, I saw a colored lady standing up, so I pointed at the empty seat next to me for her to sit down and she just looked at me funny, shook her head no, and watched the ceiling of the bus the rest of the way.

Something else I don’t understand is why colored kids go to a different school. I never thought much about that, either, even though our bus passes right by their school on the way to ours. I used to look out the window at the colored kids walking to school, wonder things like How did the girls get their hair allbraided like that, what kind of houses did they live in over in colored town, did they have to list the products of Brazil like we did in geography, stuff like that.

Then one day Molly asked, “How come they go to a school that’s closer to where we live, and we go a school that’s closer to them?” And then I started thinking, Yeah. Why is that? Molly said that in New York, colored and white kids are allowed to go to the same school. Of course, I wouldn’t want to go to their school, being as how it’s all falling apart. It’s just this old wood building with broken windows and flaky paint, instead of brick like ours.

When I asked Mom why we go to a different school from the colored kids, she said, Well, it’s the law. That’s the way things have always been, and that’s just the way things are. But a couple of weeks ago I saw on test-pattern TV where the Supreme Court made a new law that said white and colored kids were going to
have
to go to school together. When I mentioned it to Mr. Finkelstein, he looked surprised and said, Well, it’s about time, but then he asked How did I know that? because he hadn’t heard it on TV or read it in the paper. When I told him I saw it on the test pattern, he looked at me funny like he did when I told him about the Los Angeles Dodgers.

And then yesterday it was big news on regular TV: the Supreme Court said that from now on we’d go to school with colored kids, and it was the law of the land. I asked Dad if that meant I’d have to go to that broken-down old colored school, and he said, “No way is that ever going to happen.” And Mom agreed with him for once. I didn’t even try to tell them about the colored guy I saw on the test pattern who is running for president.

Late last night I saw on the test pattern that a bunch of colored kids were trying to go to a white school in this town called Little Rock. I remembered the name because the white people there were throwing rocks at the colored kids. When I told Mom that it was true about colored and white going to the same school, that there were even soldiers with bayonets to protect the colored kids, she looked at me like I was crazy and said I was making it up. She thinks I make everything up. She never listens when I try to tell her things.

She doesn’t listen when I tell her I hate dance class, that I don’t want to dance in front of everybody, and that I want to quit. She just says I can’t because “I already paid for your lessons through June and I paid for your costume for the recital and you are not quitting.” When I ask for a real reason, she tells me the same thing she said when I asked why colored kids have to go to a different school: “That’s just the way things are.”

But now I know that just because she says it, it doesn’t mean it’s true. There’s no law that says I have to dance, or wear a flower costume, or make a fool of myself in front of people again. It’s
not
the way things are.

P
ETE IS BURNING the hot dogs. He always burns the hot dogs but he doesn’t care because that’s the way he likes them, coal black and splitting on the outside, pink and frigid on the inside. Nobody wants to eat them, but since he’s in charge of cooking the dogs for Cassie’s birthday party, there isn’t much choice. He’s planned Cassie’s birthdays since her first one, when his mother baked the cake and he dressed up like a clown. One of their few family rituals, Pete’s beloved, silly clown had made its appearance every year until this one.

“Uh, Dad,” Cassie had said when, the week before her birthday, Pete still hadn’t mentioned any plans. “For my birthday, maybe you don’t need to be a clown this year.”

“Birthday? Your birthday’s already?” He looked bewildered, lost.

“Yeah. You forgot?” Cassie shot a worried look at Lorena, who bit her lip in guilt. She had forgotten, too.

“No. No.” He smiled weakly. “You don’t want the clown?”

“I’m too old for a clown, Dad.”

“Sure you are.” He drew her close to him in an awkward gesture. “Too old,” he had said in a faraway voice. “You’re too old now for a clown.”

So here they are—mostly kids except for Delia and Molly’s dad, Max, who walked Molly here and then stayed—standing around the barbecue pit in the shelter on the beach, eating cold hot dogs and birthday cake as the wind kicks up sand all around them.

Pete’s a little drunk from the several bottles of beer he’s downed. He’s in charge, bought the weenies, bought the drinks, fixed the beans. Lorena baked the cake. What’s left of it after the starved guests demolished it is a few crumbs and eleven burned candles embedded in a smear of blue-and-white icing. Cassie huddles with Molly and a couple of girlfriends, giggling over something.

Lorena has invited Delia to keep her company and they sit, heads together at a picnic table, whispering like schoolgirls. Lorena ignores Pete when he raises his bottle in their direction and slurs, “Look at her over there, sipping grape Nehi like it was champagne, so dainty with that little pinkie of hers raised high.” He takes a swig of beer.

Lorena is indeed drinking a grape Nehi, holding the sweating purple bottle right at the spot where her breasts disappear into her off-the-shoulder blouse, a peasant thing with smocking and a red drawstring. She’s wearing shorts. Her skin is the color of iodine. Her eyes are ringed in white where her sunglasses had perched when she baked in the sun at the Chamberlin. She tilts her head as Max shambles up to say hello.

“Well, hi, Lorena,” he says, “and who’s your friend there?”

“This here,” she says, “is Delia. Delia, Max Finkelstein. He’s an artist. He’s Cassie’s best friend Molly’s father. Cassie says he’s got paintings in his house that’ll be in a museum someday, they’re so covered with paint. Just gobs and gobs of it, right out of the tube, she says, just squishes it out, bam, right on the canvas.”

“That right?” says Delia. “I paint, too. Got me one of those

Picture Craft kits where you paint by number. I did mountains the other day, hung it in my living room, makes the whole place just sparkle, it’s so pretty.” She reaches up to retie the scarf holding back her tumble of auburn curls, reaches down to tug at the bottom of her shorts.

“I just started another one called
Twin Scotties,”
Delia says. “It’s dogs. For my bedroom.” Then she gives Max her full display of big and brilliant teeth, a smile so startling that it still amazes Lorena that so many teeth could fit behind those heart-shaped little lips.