Test Pattern by Marjorie Klein Read Free Book Online Page A

see if it really is wet. It is. I wipe my finger on my dungarees and hope she doesn’t notice the red smear. I think it’s pretty neat that he paints blobs, but what I really want to look at is the naked painting of her mother.
    When we go into her living room again to play Sorry on her coffee table, I sit on the chair across from the couch so I can look at the painting. While Molly is setting up all the pointy-headed pieces on the Sorry board, I pretend to care about whether she is yellow or I am blue. What I’m really doing is looking over her bent head to stare at her naked mother on the wall behind her.
    She looks a lot like Molly. She is small and round and freckled, with curly reddish hair. She is lying on her side, leaning her head on one hand, looking at me like she’s sleepy. She is smiling. Her lips make a crooked V shape like they do when she’s asking me if I want some cookies, and I look toward the door that goes to the kitchen like she’s going to pop out any minute.
    I’m embarrassed to look at the rest of her, but Molly is still deciding what color Sorry piece she wants, so I do. Her mother’s titties are round and white, and the nipples are big and pink. Down There, there’s hair. It’s reddish, like the hair on her head. I can’t stop looking now, it’s like somebody took my eyes andwired them to the painting, and I can’t even look at Molly when she says “Come
on.
It’s your turn.”
    Finally I force myself to look down and make my move, but my eyes keep jumping to the painting. It’s not like I’ve never seen a naked lady before, because I’ve seen Mom when she’s taking a bath or when she’s wiggling into her bathing suit at the beach. She covers herself up quick, though, so I never get to study all the parts. I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever been able to take a really good look.
    Because of naked Mrs. Finkelstein up there on the wall, I start thinking about what I saw yesterday on test-pattern TV and wondering about men and women and the things they do together. “You know,” I say, sliding my yellow man down the board and bumping Molly’s, “I saw on my show—”
    “Oh, no, not your show again.” Molly rolls her eyes.
    “There’s a show on where people sit up on a stage and yell at each other about sex. Then people in the audience get up and yell at the people on stage about sex.”
    “Made it up.”
    “Did not.”
    “Made it up. Nobody talks about stuff like that. Especially on television.”
    “Cross my heart, there are shows where people yell about sex. Sex with each other. Sex with their daughter’s boyfriend or their husband’s mother or their neighbor’s kid. Sex sex sex. I’ve seen
lots
of shows like that. They all have leaders who run around in the audience with a microphone so people can yell at the people on the stage.”
    “No such thing.”
    “Yeah there is. And there’s another kind of show where people just talk and nobody yells, but a
colored
lady is the leader.”
    “Now I know you made it up. There’s no colored ladies on TV except for on
Amos
’n
Andy.
”
    “Well, there are,” I say because there are, “but what I want toknow is, do people really do those things? You know, have sex with people they’re not married to? Is that allowed?”
    Molly scowls at the Sorry board, then moves her man and bumps mine. “Ha!” she says.
    “Well?” I need to know.
    “I guess,” she says. “Why not?”
    I don’t understand any of this.
    MR. FINKELSTEIN COMES home while we’re playing Sorry, clunks through the door with a big roll of canvas and a bag from the art supply store. He dumps the bag onto the dining-room table and tubes of paint spill out. “Hello, ladies,” he says in his voice that sounds a little like Groucho, a little like the Great Gildersleeve. “Why are you inside on this gawdjus sunny day?”
    “I’m winning,” says Molly.
    “Well, that’s a reason,” he says. He starts picking through his artist’s case,