Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

“What?” she said again.

  “Parker did it. With a pin.”

  “Parker said he did it. Parker wouldn’t do that, would he?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Parker’d do it.”

  She was still staring at him. “You realize–” she began.

  “I know,” he said, and shrugged. “Parker thinks it’s a real good joke. He says it’s her fault if she doesn’t check.”

  “But that’s awful,” she said.

  “Parker found it. It was in her top drawer. He thought it was a big compact. He opened it and didn’t see any mirror, and then he found out later what it was, and he pricked a hole in it.”

  “She’ll see it, won’t she?” Louise said. “Does Parker think that’s funny? She’d never dream Parker would find her diaphragm and do that.”

  “She ought to. He’d do anything.”

  “What do you mean?” Louise said. “Has he done something worse than that?”

  “He just does strange stuff. What I told you about the ticket stubs isn’t exactly the way it happened. He burned them, on the sidewalk outside the train station. He does stuff there’s no point in doing.”

  “He’s very disturbed.”

  “He’s no friend of mine,” John Joel said.

  “But honey—are you sure about that other thing? Mightn’t he just brag that he’d pulled a stunt like that but not really do it?”

  “No,” John Joel said. “He’d do it. He wouldn’t care.”

  “Imagine Georgia having another little monster like Parker,” Louise said. She brushed her hair out of her face. “I didn’t know you knew what a diaphragm was,” she said.

  He blushed again, looked out the window. “I knew,” he said.

  “But that’s just horrible” she said. “Parker’s a monster.”

  “He rolls cigarettes like they’re joints, but they’re not. He carries them in the pack with his Salems and he smokes them going down the street with his hand cupped around them and he drags on them funny, like they’re joints. He smokes a pack a day of real cigarettes.”

  “You don’t smoke with him, do you?”

  “He’s no friend of mine.”

  “But do you?”

  “No,” John Joel said. He was embarrassed that he didn’t, that he wasn’t lying to her. He didn’t know why he’d told her so much. He slid forward in the seat and looked out the window, as they pulled into Tiffy’s driveway. There were day lilies, very tall, falling forward into the driveway, and there were daisies and tall electric-pink phlox. Tiffy’s husband was working in the garden, staking a rosebush. He waved with a pair of pruning shears.

  “Hi,” Louise said, getting out of the car. “Tiffy inside?”

  “She’s in the garage,” he said. “Hi,” he said, pointing the shears at John Joel.

  “Hi,” John Joel said.

  “Hi, Tiffy,” Louise called. Tiffy came out of the garage, wiping her forehead on her arm. She had her hair in braids, and for a second that made her look, to John Joel, a little like Nina, in New York. She had on white shorts, and a white halter top, and she was carrying a plant she had just repotted. “I have to take a quick shower and then I’m all ready to go,” she said. “Come inside where it’s cool.”

  They followed her into the house. Louise pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table. John Joel pulled out a chair for himself and sat down. The shorts were cutting into his thighs. It smelled like chicken in her kitchen, and he looked at the clock to see how close to lunchtime it was. It was noon. If he were home, he could be eating.

  “There’s wine in the fridge,” Tiffy called downstairs. The water went on in the shower.

  Louise didn’t get up. “Do you want a Coke if she has one?” she said. He shook his head no. He wanted a Coke, but he wanted more to get out of the house. He wanted to pick the berries and have the picnic and have it over with. The magazine on the table wasn’t worth looking at: The New Republic. All Tiffy’s cups were pottery, and Coke tasted funny in cups like that. He thought about the milkshake he had bought Parker and wished he had his money back.

  Louise got up and took a blue pottery cup down from the shelf over the sink and went to the refrigerator. She poured wine into her cup from the jug and put the jug back in the refrigerator. Tiffy’s refrigerator was always interesting: It was filled with colors instead of with wrapped packages: apples loose on a shelf, peaches, limes and lemons, pale-sea-green bottles of Perrier, orange juice in a glass bottle so that you could see the deep-orange color. Tiffy was hollering something from upstairs, but they couldn’t tell what she was saying.

  She came down in a few minutes, in green slacks and a black halter, wearing tennis shoes, her hair still braided, but sopping wet.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” she said, picking up the basket on the kitchen table. She said to John Joel: “What are you doing this summer?”

  “Nothing much,” he said.

  “My car,” Tiffy said. “I cleaned it inside, and everybody has to praise it.”

  “It looks wonderful,” Louise said.

  “I want to sit in the back,” John Joel said.

  “There’s no place to vacuum your car around here,” Tiffy said. “I gave up. Last night I wet a sponge and sponged this car clean. It was full of grit and dog hair from my sister’s dog. It looked horrible. Does it smell like dog? I can’t even tell anymore.” Tiffy waved to her husband as she pulled out of the driveway. He had on a straw hat, and he tipped it as the car pulled away.

  “Now tell me what you’ve really been doing this summer,” Tiffy said, looking in the rear-view mirror. He slid around in the back seat. He couldn’t think what to tell her except to tell the story about going to the museum again. So he told her about the show he had seen, or tried to, but she broke in: She’d seen it, too. And Calder’s Circus. She started talking about that, how quirky it was, how it always made her smile to see it. How she wanted to shrink and get inside with the circus animals and performers, and tumble around in the case with them at night, because she was sure they did. “I don’t know,” she said to Louise. “Maybe I’m just getting old, but when I went through the Segal show, I felt so frustrated. I felt like those things were so still, and when I stopped to look at Calder’s Circus again on the way out, I felt like they had little hearts beating, and that their little eyes blinked and their mouths smiled when they were alone. When Segal’s people were alone, I thought they’d be just as still. That they couldn’t move, under any conditions.”

  Tiffy’s car was an old Cadillac, a black 1955 Cadillac, and it rode as though the shocks were completely worn-out. He had been in her car once before, and he just remembered that it had made him sick. It was hot in the back seat, too, even though Tiffy was driving fast enough that wind blew through the car and slapped him in the face. He tried to concentrate on not being sick. He kept thinking about the picture of the relative that Parker had given away, of how strange the woman in the picture looked. Pictures of his mother when she was a young girl looked the same way; not that she looked anything like Parker’s funny-faced relative, but the pose was the same: The faces looked flat, and they were close to the camera. There was a picture on his father’s dresser—what used to be his father’s dresser—of his mother when she graduated from high school. It was a hand-colored photograph, his mother had told him, and the pearls she wore around her neck were the same color as her teeth and the whites of her eyes. She had on a pink sweater in the picture, and a barrette in her hair, and he could not imagine his mother looking that way. As mothers went, she was pretty. She wore a little make-up, unlike Tiffy, and she didn’t have a horsey face like Parker’s mother, and nobody was as ugly as Marge Pendergast. All her children were ugly, too. He wished that he looked more like his mother or father. He wondered if he would be better-looking if he weren’t fat. Mary wasn’t fat, but she wasn’t very good-looking, and he thought that was true objectively—not just because she was his sister and he hated her.

  Going back to his grandmother’s house
in Rye, the day he had had lunch with Nick and his father and the girl whose name he had forgotten again, his father had asked him if he liked any girls. He hated to be asked that, because there weren’t any girls he liked. So he had made up a lie about a girl he had liked who had transferred to another school in the middle of the year. He had even described her: bangs, glasses, tall. They had been in the drinking car, standing up. He had been having a ginger ale, and his father had been having a gin and tonic. “What girls do you like?” he had asked his father. It had just come out, before he realized what a ridiculous question it was. His father had been taken aback by it. His father had said that he liked Louise. “What did you think of Nick’s girlfriend?” his father had asked him after a while. And for some reason he hadn’t wanted to let on that he thought she was pretty. He had shrugged. His father had said, “Not your type, huh?” There was another long pause; then, finishing his drink, his father had said: “Well, I think she’s quite pretty.”

  In the front seat, Louise was telling Tiffy about the last picnic the family had gone on.

  “There were these two silly girls at the park on Friday night. They were with two boys, and all four of them were drunk, and I actually envied them for having such a mindless good time.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with having a mindless good time once in a while.”

  “At least I said something that night that I’d wanted to say for a long while. Not that there was any response to it, but I finally said it. It was about my dog. I said that I wished I had the dog back, and that I could be playing ‘get the stick’ with Mr. Blue. No wonder I liked the dog. It was so dogged. It was just like me. It would’ve played ‘get the stick’ until it fell over dead, and I’d go on those stupid picnics and trudge through the snow if he kept saying we should go there.” Louise sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I talk about the dog too much.”

  “You don’t talk about it very much,” Tiffy said.

  “She does,” John Joel said. “All the time.”

  Tiffy pulled into a graveled drive, in the shape of a half circle, and parked behind a yellow truck. Tiffy had found out about this place from a friend: It wasn’t advertised, but one day a week the farmer let people come and pick berries, and he weighed them on a scale on his back porch. Tiffy always knew about things that no one else knew about: meetings in people’s apartments, places to pick strawberries, places to swim without getting caught, books that had been written but not published. Whenever she talked about a book, she’d say: “You have to read it when it comes out,” and when she talked about a movie she’d seen, it was always “at a screening.” He could understand why his mother was in awe of Tiffy, but she was so unlike his mother in so many ways that he was surprised his mother liked her so much. According to his mother, Tiffy did everything right. His father didn’t take Tiffy seriously. His father just thought that Tiffy was pretentious and talked a lot. He hoped that his mother wouldn’t tell his father about this day on the weekend, because they were sure to get into a fight about it.

  As he followed his mother and Tiffy through the high grass to the strawberry field, he picked up snatches of the conversation. Tiffy was talking about what was wrong, politically, with The Deer Hunter. She kept stressing that word—politically. His mother nodded and didn’t have much to say. It was hot in the field, and he wished he had on looser clothes. Tiffy had left the basket with the food back in the car. They probably wouldn’t be eating for another hour. He swatted a yellow butterfly away, and when it fluttered he saw that it was a butterfly and a smaller butterfly, or a moth. They swirled up and flew away. A mosquito buzzed in his ear.

  There were about ten people over the crest of the hill, picking strawberries that grew in neat rows. He hated the idea of bending over in the heat to pick berries and wondered why he’d come. There was no way out of it. He took the container his mother held out and went to one of the rows and began groping under the leaves for the berries. Every berry was ripe and large, so it didn’t matter what he pulled off. He thought about the pie his mother had said she’d make, and hoped that she’d make two. He hoped that Mary would eat at Angela’s.

  His mother and Tiffy were talking about his father. He moved to another row, where he wouldn’t hear them. He had found out enough. He had found out they were separated. He suddenly felt sorry for himself, and a little dizzy in the heat: What if they had done it when he was a baby, what if they had given him away, even, and he had been an orphan? It would be nice if they had given Mary away and kept him. Brandt was already gone. He envied Parker for being an only child and wondered what made him so messed up when he didn’t have anybody he had to share things with or be polite to, except his parents. Nobody would put crap in Parker’s bed that he’d roll over on or cut his foot on. If Parker thought it would be fun to have a brother or a sister, he should just spend a day in his house and see how awful Mary was. He had bought Parker two hamburgers and French fries and a Coke and a chocolate milkshake, and Parker had set fire to the ticket stubs. He bent over too far and lost his balance and remembered shoving Parker and not knocking him over. He thought about seeing Parker one more time—maybe waiting until fall and ganging up on him with some of the other kids—and letting him have it. Then Parker would have something to tell his shrink about. Then he could talk about how he was such an asshole that he’d gotten slugged.

  “Are you scowling?” his mother said, “or is the sun too much for you?”

  “Sun,” he said.

  “Do you think we have enough?” she said.

  He nodded yes. He thought that Tiffy would want to keep picking, though, and he guessed right. He and his mother started back for the farmer’s porch before Tiffy did.

  “What’s the matter?” she said to him.

  “Nothing’s the matter. Everybody’s always asking me what I’m doing and how I’m doing and what girls do I like… ”

  “Who asked you that?” she said.

  What had he said that for? He didn’t want to go into it. “Parker,” he said.

  “Normal enough questions, all of them, aren’t they?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, kicking a rock. “Everything’s normal.”

  “Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t say that about Parker.”

  “He’s not my friend anyway, so I don’t care.”

  “I think he is your friend,” she said. “Why don’t you call him and make up?”

  “Make up? He’s an asshole. Parker’s an asshole.”

  “I think he’s disturbed, but everybody can make mistakes. Maybe you ought to overlook what he did the other day, if it’s going to bother you so much that he’s not your friend anymore.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” he said.

  “It bothers me that I don’t have many friends. Tiffy’s my best friend, and I don’t have a world in common with her. Sometimes I just think she feels sorry for me.”

  “Why would she feel sorry for you?”

  “What reason would she have for liking me so much? There’s the whole faculty of NYU to talk to if she gets lonesome, and she always knows better than I do what’s going on. She tells me about things. I never tell her about things.”

  “You tell her about Dad.”

  “Does that bother you? That I talk to people?”

  “I don’t care who you talk to,” he said.

  “You say that you don’t care so much that I don’t know when you’re serious.” She ate one of the strawberries. “Good,” she said. “I guess it’s cheating to start eating them before they’re weighed, though.”

  “Parker’d probably burn them. He’d probably pick them, then try to light them.”

  “Strawberries flambé?” she said. “Maybe people just take Parker too seriously.”

  “How come you’re on his side all of a sudden?”

  “Oh, I’m not really on his side. I just hate to think so badly of him when he’s just a twelve-year-old child. I was pretty strange when I was twelve years old.”

  “
How?” he said.

  “Well, I guess you’d call it being very straight. I wouldn’t let anybody cut my hair. My hair was my proudest possession. And I was very shy and very quiet. I played the piano. Did you know that?”

  “What for?” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Yeah. Did you want to be in an orchestra or something?”

  “I never thought about it. I just liked music. My friends all took music lessons. But in those days girls didn’t think in terms of a career, the way they do now.”

  “Huh,” he snorted. “Mary with a career.”

  “Mary’s very interested in music, actually.”

  “Junk music.”

  “She likes music. That’s the important thing.”

  “I like to think about Mary having a career. She could be a nurse and do mercy killings.”

  “If you did some nice things for your sister, she might do some nice things for you.”

  “What? Leave me alone?”

  “I don’t know what the truth of that is either, John Joel. Do you two really dislike each other that much?”

  “I’d just as soon have Parker for a brother as her as a sister.” He ate a strawberry. He wished it were a cookie. “She’s just as crazy as Parker is.”

  “You know she isn’t.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “What don’t I know?”

  “Never mind. I’m not ratting on Mary.”

  “Why did you say it if you didn’t want me to know?”

  He didn’t answer her, because the farmer was on his way out of the house to greet them. “Going to make a pumpkin pie, are you?” he joked, looking at all the containers filled with strawberries.

  Tiffy was running to catch up with them. “There’s a little snake in the grass. It’s thin, and had stripes, and it was about this long.” She held her hands apart.

  The farmer pretended to be horrified. He spread his arms as wide as they’d go.

  “Is it just harmless?” Tiffy said. “It didn’t go away when I was picking, it came toward me, sort of.”

  “Friendly,” the farmer said. “Just a grass snake.”