Test Pattern (8 page)

“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.”

M
OM 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 him 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.

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

W
ELL, 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.