Test Pattern by Marjorie Klein Read Free Book Online Page B

throwing rolled-up, squished-out tubes into the empty bag and filling the case up with the fat new tubes he just bought. “They must think I eat paint at Allen’s Art Supply,” he says. “I keep that place in business.”
    “Cassie says she sees TV shows that talk about sex,” says Molly. She shakes the dice. It comes up double sixes. I want to disappear without a trace.
    Mr. Finkelstein looks at me and his beard seems to bristle. I’m afraid to look at him, but when I do, he’s laughing. “So what channel is this sex show on?” he says.
    I don’t say a word.
    “She watches shows on the test pattern,” Molly answers for me. “The other day they said ‘penis.’”
    “In what context?” asks Mr. Finkelstein. I don’t know what he means.
    “Cassie says they said a lady got mad at her husband and she cut his penis off.” Molly says this like she’s telling him she had toast for breakfast.
    Mr. Finkelstein’s face scrunches up like he’s in pain. I don’t know what to say, so I say, “I did not!” I can’t believe how much I hate Molly right this very minute.
    Mr. Finkelstein recovers and smiles at me. “You certainly do have a vivid imagination,” he tells me. “What else do you see on your shows?”
    I’m so embarrassed about the penis thing that I start babbling. “The World Series was on. The Los Angeles Dodgers won the pennant.”
    “Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Dodgers,” he says. “And the World Series was over last fall. They didn’t win.”
    “No, I’m sure it was the Los Angeles Dodgers,” I say. He gives me a funny look, like I don’t know baseball or anything, which I do, for a girl. “Maybe it’s a different team,” I say so as not to be rude, but I know that I saw what I saw. It was the Los Angeles Dodgers.
    Molly folds up the Sorry board, puts it away. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go to Al’s and read comic books.” I put my finger to my lips to shush her up but her dad doesn’t get mad and say “You’re what?” like Mom would do.
    I’m so mad at Molly for telling the penis story that I don’t even care whether we go to Al’s or not. All I want to do is get out of their house and disappear from Mr. Finkelstein’s sight.
    When I think about the mothers I know and ask myself which one I would pick if I could, I’d choose Mrs. Finkelstein. She’s different from other mothers. She has long, long hair that hangs down to her waist. She wears flowy dresses down to her ankles and goes barefoot inside, even in winter, and she walks smooth, like she’s on wheels. Sometimes I think she’s not home when I’m over at Molly’s, and then she’ll kind of glide down the stairs to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and then glide on back up. I used to think maybe she was sick but Molly says she’s always up in her room writing poetry.
    “Poetry?” I say. “You mean, roses are red violets are blue?”
    “No,” Molly says, “not like that. She writes books. She’s goingaway this summer to a writers’ colony where all she’ll do is sit in a house in the woods and write all day.” And then she gets this skinny book out of their bookcase which has real books in it and not just magazines, and shows me one of her mother’s poems.
    Well, I’ll tell you, I never saw a poem like that. It doesn’t even rhyme. Or even make sense, something about “the wild weird piglet of your passion.”
    “What does this mean?” I ask Molly.
    She just shrugs. “Oh, she always writes stuff like that. She reads it to Dad after dinner. He really likes this one,” she says, flipping to a poem that starts out “bursting forth from womb a snarl defied O woman woman woman.”
    “Yeah?” I say, trying to figure it out.
    “She writes a lot about women.”
    “Yeah?”
    “About how strong we are and stuff.”
    “Strong?” I think, Maybe she’s right. I can beat Tommy Taylor in arm wrestling, and I always get picked first in kickball.
    “She says I can be anything I want when I