Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

  “I was so nervous I left my basket up there.”

  “John Joel,” his mother said, “will you go get it for her?”

  He took his time going back with the basket, and he swung it and let some of the strawberries fall out. He was thinking that Nick wouldn’t give Tiffy the time of day. He thought Nick was a lot cooler than Tiffy. He wondered, because he liked Nick more than any of his mother’s women friends, if he was a queer. When he got back with the basket, Tiffy was talking to his mother.

  “… the role of women in certain fairy tales,” Tiffy was saying. “I guess it’s obvious to people now that most often it’s the women who are monsters or the ones who have to wait for Prince Charming. But I was wondering today what those fairy tales would sound like if even the most evil, stupid women told it from their perspective. Even granting that they were evil. I wonder if a lot of them weren’t evil just because they were so worn down. I can imagine the fisherman’s wife thinking: If he chooses this as his work, then let him have the long days, the cold and the risk. Let him pull with all his might, and instead of coming up with a fat, golden bass, let him snag a sunken tire. Let it be as round as the world, with a great hole in the center.” Tiffy was talking loudly and waving her arms. “If that’s what the man wants, then let him have that.” He handed the basket to his mother.

  “Thank you,” Tiffy said, reaching for it. “That was awfully nice of you.”

  “How come you’re a feminist and you’re afraid of snakes?”

  “What?” Tiffy said, looking embarrassed. “Being afraid of a snake has to do with politics?”

  “John Joel,” his mother said.

  “What about lunch?” he said. He was tired of waiting for it.

  The farmer tipped the berries onto the scale and wrote down how much Tiffy owed on a white pad stained with strawberry juice. He showed her the figure but didn’t read it out loud, as if it were confidential. Tiffy reached into her pants pocket and handed him a ten-dollar bill.

  “Maybe there’s someplace cooler than here to have a picnic,” his mother said. “Let’s go somewhere near the water, if you feel like it.”

  “It’s fine with me,” Tiffy said. “Actually, we could sit under the big tree in my backyard if you’d like to. Isn’t that crazy? To put everything in a picnic basket and then end up on the back lawn? Like some funny French film or something.”

  “Her car makes me sick,” John Joel said to his mother, loud enough for Tiffy to hear him.

  “What?” his mother said. She also looked hot. He thought that if he hadn’t come along, his mother and Tiffy would probably have had a good time. He felt sorry for her, and he wondered why she had insisted—almost insisted—that he come. At least he was better company than Mary. Mary was always looking for a fight, and all he wanted to do was keep quiet. “It makes me carsick,” he said.

  “Well, sit in the front this time and see if that makes it better,” his mother said. “I’ll sit in the back.”

  “That’s not going to help,” he said. He didn’t know if it would or not, but he didn’t want his mother in the back seat. He didn’t want to ride next to Tiffy, and he didn’t want his mother to have to be in the back. “Forget it,” he said. “I didn’t puke.”

  “John Joel,” she said, “don’t be ridiculous. It’s nothing to be ashamed of if you felt sick. We’ll have Tiffy drive slower, and there won’t be as much motion in the front seat, I don’t think.”

  “Come on,” he said, kicking a rock. They were in the driveway now, and Tiffy was walking ahead of them. “Forget it, okay?” he said. He knew that if his mother didn’t forget it, he was going to cry.

  “Just give it a try,” his mother said.

  “I don’t want to,” he said. “Come on. Forget it.”

  “Why?” she said. She put her hand on his shoulder and tried to get him to look at her. “Why does everybody try to fight me on the smallest thing?”

  “Get off,” he said, shrugging her hand off. Her hand felt light on his shoulder, and warm. It made him realize how sweaty he was all over, once the material was pressed against his skin that way. Suddenly he wanted to be out of his clothes, somewhere cool. He thought about the men and women, the white-plaster men and women, in the museum. He thought that it would be wonderful to be so white and still.

  “Tiffy,” his mother said, “let John Joel ride up front with you. The motion in the back seat is making him sick.”

  “You don’t mind riding with a feminist?” Tiffy said to him.

  “I didn’t even want to come,” he said, whirling to face his mother.

  “What am I supposed to do, just let you lie around the house all summer? You’re ten years old. You must be interested in something besides hanging out with your father and Nick and going to lunches with whatever pretty girl there is that week. Last summer you went fishing,” she said. “What’s gotten into everybody? My son tells his father jokes about feminists, and my daughter has to be forced to leave her shrine to Peter Frampton to endure an evening with the family.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tiffy said. “I was just teasing. Get in the car, both of you.”

  He tried to get in the back seat, but his mother climbed in before he could. She was faster than he was—faster and thinner, and she just squeezed around him. He glared at her, not appreciating it at all. He got in next to Tiffy and rolled down his window. The strawberries were at his feet, and he had the urge to take his foot and just start mashing them. He did have a better time with Nick and his father, and if he wanted to be left alone, he didn’t see why he couldn’t be left alone. Mary got out of everything by having somewhere to go. She was always at Angela’s and he was around the house, so his mother picked on him. Maybe being an orphan wasn’t so bad; if you were an orphan, maybe people didn’t notice you all the time. He pushed his hair out of his eyes. Tiffy was humming, pretending everything was all right. His mother was in the back seat, not making any effort to talk. And the car was going over ruts in the road, and he hoped again that he wouldn’t be sick. He didn’t want anything else to happen. He just wanted to go home. He wanted to eat. And he wanted to slam Parker into a wall, break his arm for the way he’d acted. He was acting badly, he knew, but Parker acted even worse, and for that, he wanted to kill him. He was also sure that Parker hadn’t called—that if he had stayed there all day, he still wouldn’t have had the pleasure of answering the phone and hearing Parker apologize, so he could hang up on him.

  His mother began laughing in the back seat. First just a sound he thought might be a hiccough, then a genuine laugh. She put her hand over her mouth and tried to stifle the laugh, but it was no good: She just took her hand away and fell over against the door. Tiffy looked at her in the rear-view mirror. “Dare I ask?” Tiffy said. “Oh,” Louise said, “I can’t tell you, but I was thinking about a secret John Joel told me on the way over, and it just–” She couldn’t get her breath. He found himself smiling, though he didn’t mean to. “It just puts everything in perspective. It’s such a dirty trick that one person pulled on another. I wish I had nerve like that, sometimes. I really do. It’s really really horrible, but it’s so awful and so funny.” She was wiping her eyes. He turned around and saw her wiping her eyes.

  “You can’t tell,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, “I wasn’t going to tell. It’s just all so ghastly. It’s selling you such a bill of goods to tell you that you should get married and have a family and be secure. Jesus! What your own family will do to you.”

  “This sounds like a real whopper,” Tiffy said.

  “It is,” Louise said. “But don’t worry. It’s not somebody you like. This is somebody who almost deserves it.” She started to laugh again, and he thought he was going to be sick—it was as if her laughter was shaking the car. There was noise in his head he couldn’t get rid of, and if he was going to not be sick, he needed to be quiet to fight it down. But it passed. It passed, and his mother stopped laughing and by the time they got to Tiffy’s she wasn’t eve
n smiling.

  They had the picnic in the backyard, and when a bird flying over dropped its white shit on the sheet Tiffy had spread on the grass, Tiffy said it was symbolic. Her laughter wasn’t like his mother’s, though; it sounded entirely different.

  They were riding home from Tiffy’s house, and he was thinking about being on the train with his father. One of the bad things about being ten years old was that he wasn’t yet six feet tall like his father, and in all kinds of small ways, being short was an embarrassment. If you were fully grown, you could look at something in a museum out of the corner of your eye if you didn’t really want to be seen looking at it. You could stand in the drinking car of the train and just put your fingertips out to steady yourself when the train swayed or lurched, instead of having to reach up and hang on like a child. He always got tired standing on the train and wondered why his father didn’t. It seemed that since his father was taller, and weighed more than he did—though not by much—that his father’s feet would hurt more than his did. “I’m full of illusions about making an escape,” his father said. “Some days I think about it so much, in so many different situations, that I’d out-worry a prisoner of war.” The trees and buildings sailing by the train. The cold blasts of air conditioning. The heavy door opening and closing again. He had wondered, standing and being shaken by the train, whether part of the reason his father wanted him to be escorted around New York didn’t have to do with the fact that his father would envy him for getting lost. His father always arranged things for him to do and places for them to meet, when his father knew perfectly well that he and Parker went into the city on the train alone. Sometimes he envied Brandt for having his father around so much. He couldn’t remember how his father had acted toward him when he was a baby Brandt’s age, but he had thought, even then, that his father probably liked him better than he liked Mary. Fathers liked sons better. But he knew that what his father had been saying on the train included him; his father had meant escaping from all of them—not just to Rye, and not just by going into the city to work. He understood what his father meant.

  On the train, his father had said, “Not your type, huh?” And he had been embarrassed that he was so young, that he didn’t have a type, that he didn’t think he ever would. If anybody liked him, ever, he would be grateful. The older girls he knew were like Mary, or worse. Angela was worse. He really couldn’t imagine the sort of girl he would ever like. When it got time to kiss a girl, he would have braces on, and he’d be embarrassed to do it. Thinking about it made him want to escape, too.

  “I guess Tiffy wasn’t all that nice to you today,” his mother said. “She can be pretty insensitive to people’s moods sometimes.”

  “I’m not in a mood,” he said. “I just didn’t want to go. I knew it wouldn’t be any fun.”

  “What would your ideal day be?” his mother said.

  “Have Mary out of the house,” he said. “Have the air conditioner on and read comics. No big deal.”

  “But wouldn’t you like to do something exciting?” his mother said.

  “What?” he said. “Run around New York in the heat?”

  “You and Tiffy are both depressing,” she said. “In your different ways. It’s so hard to really talk to either of you. You act like it’s a big effort to speak two consecutive sentences to me, and Tiffy just reacts to what interests her. When you told her about the show at the Whitney, she wanted to talk about Calder, and she didn’t care what you had to say.”

  “She’s like a teacher,” he said. He put his fingers under the band of his shorts and felt the skin wrinkled where the material had cut into his skin. “She is a teacher,” he said. “Figures.”

  “Maybe she’s not a very good teacher,” his mother said. “I never thought about that. I just think about all the things that she does—I never really thought about how good she was at them.”

  “You’re nicer than she is” he said.

  “Well,” she said, “since you dislike her, I should hope so.”

  “Not my type,” he said.

  His mother laughed. “No,” she said. “I could tell that.”

  “Who’s your type?” he asked his mother.

  “What an odd question to ask your mother. I’m married to your father, so he must be my type, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but you’re separated.”

  “I’m not looking for other men, if that’s what’s got you worried.”

  “A movie star or anybody,” he said. “I just meant do you always like men like Dad?”

  “There are movie stars I think are good-looking, but they’re not really my type,” she said. “Do you mean who do I think is good-looking?”

  “Do you think Nick is?” he said.

  “Definitely not my type,” she said.

  “But a lot of girls like him.”

  “Nick,” she said. “That’s a funny idea. We really don’t like each other.”

  She had come to a full stop at a stop sign and wasn’t starting away. “Donald Sutherland is good-looking,” she said. “Donald Sutherland in Klute.”

  “What are we sitting here for?” he said.

  “I was just thinking for a second.”

  “Come on,” he said, “get going.”

  “It’s terrible,” she said, pulling away. “I don’t even have fantasies anymore.”

  “What fantasies did you have?”

  She started to laugh. “Unbelievable” she said. “I’m talking to my ten-year-old son, driving down a road in suburbia, and he’s asking me about what fantasies I used to have. Oh, it kills me. It kills me that a man, even if he’s ten years old, can still stump me. How did we start talking about this, John Joel?”

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  “I guess Tiffy has always been a sort of fantasy. I guess I’ve always wanted to think that she was nearly perfect, and that she had it all together, and that there was a way I could be like her. But I’m not even so sure that’s true.”

  “Donald Sutherland,” he said. “Was he in that movie about football?”

  The huge white fountain of water was blowing nearly sky-high in the reservoir. She slowed the car to look at it as they came up on it, and speeded up again when they passed the rows of tall trees that blocked their view. “I guess you always wonder,” she said, “if you’d be a different person if you lived somewhere else. It’s so beautiful here, and we don’t notice it very much, and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help us be happy.” She looked at John Joel. “You must think I’m really silly,” she said. “Do you think I make a good adult?”

  He wondered what would happen if both his parents made an escape at the same time.

  “My God,” his mother said. “All it’s going to take is one little sperm to wiggle its way through a pinhole, and she’ll never know. See that water?” she said. “One microscopic sperm has got as much power as that.”

  Twelve

  JOHN JOEL was in Parker’s bedroom. There was a poster of Donna Summer on the wall above Parker’s bed, and another poster of the Incredible Hulk. Parker had cut Donna Summer’s face out of the poster and put it in the Incredible Hulk’s hand. In the space where Donna Summer’s face had been, he had put a picture of his mother. He had hung it behind the poster, frame and all. You could really tell that that face did not go with that long black hair. John Joel looked more closely at Donna Summer’s head in the hand of the Incredible Hulk. Parker had put a wad of gum over one of Donna Summer’s eyes. There was also a picture of Washington crossing the Delaware in the room. On the glass, over Washington’s face, he had put another picture of Donna Summer’s head that he had cut out of a magazine. His mother was always asking him to straighten up his room.

  Parker kept a towel in his room, on a towel rack. Once he had gotten poison ivy after using the same towel his father had used when he had raked and burned leaves and showered, and since Parker had not been outside the house that day, he was sure that he had contracted poison ivy from his father’s towe
l. He bought himself five red towels with money he had gotten for his birthday and told his parents never to use them. His mother had said that he was being ridiculous, and that she wouldn’t launder the towels—they’d bleed for the first ten washings, probably. So Parker took care of his own towels: He arranged them a certain way on the towel rack, so he could tell if they’d been tampered with, and he washed them in the basement sink, and he had never had poison ivy again. He had never forgiven his father, either. Before he got poison ivy, Parker wouldn’t do yard work unless his father paid him, but after he got poison ivy, no amount of money would get him into the yard.

  Parker tossed down his comic book. The comic, which he’d bought in New York, was called Endless Torture—it was a parody of genuine sadistic magazines—which Parker paid bums fifty cents to buy for him in the city. In the comic, people bleeding to death with their arms cut off were always trying to hail cabs on deserted streets, and people who had had their tongues ripped out were shown one frame later gagged with their own tongues. People spouted blood like fountains; their arms and legs went sailing through the air like Frisbees; their eyes really popped. Parker kept all the magazines and comics neatly laid out between his mattress and box spring. He knew where they all were; he had their positions memorized the way a chess player can close his eyes and envision all the pieces perfectly. He knew whether to lift the mattress near the pillow or at the foot of the bed. He could also close his eyes and flip the book open to a given scene. The book would fall open exactly on, or maybe two or three pages before or after, the picture he had in mind. He also had a few men’s magazines: Playboy and Oui and Hustler. He liked the pictures in Hustler of what syphilis would do, and he gave thanks that the poison ivy hadn’t done anything like that to him. But these magazines weren’t his favorites. He thought that the funniest magazine was the one called Animal Antics. It told stupid fairy tales about animals, and there were black and white and a few color pictures of animals dressed up. Most of the pictures showed the animals’ genitals. Parker always thought the pictures were just as funny, even if he’d just looked at them five minutes before: the monkey in the ballerina’s pink crinoline tutu bending over to get a banana, its pink anus pointed at the camera; a cow on its side, udders full, staring blankly at the camera, a big yellow bonnet on its head and blue make-up above its eyes. There were also close-ups of a bunch of red ants feeding on a Hershey’s Kiss melting in the sun, swarming around a discarded used prophylactic.