Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

  Parker liked to stay in his room. He had a ten-speed Schwinn he had gotten for Christmas mounted on the wall of his room, and he never went out riding. He had skates that he had gotten the same Christmas that he sometimes put on and rolled around the basement on when nobody else was home. He had weights that he didn’t lift and a punching bag that he didn’t punch. His father gave him the things for presents, thinking that he might lose weight if he weren’t so sedentary. Parker wouldn’t use them, and when his mother asked him to straighten up his room, he always replied by asking her to have his father load out all the things that he had given him. There was a picture in Animal Antics of an ape in tennis shoes and a white sweatband around its head, slugging a punching bag that was painted with big breasts. In this, as in all of the pictures, the animal’s face was expressionless.

  “So when do you get your wires?” Parker said. He opened his mouth and made his eyes big, imitating Jaws in the James Bond movies. Parker curled his fingers and pretended to be gripping something in midair. He cocked his head and slowly, with his eyes huge, pretended to be biting the thing in half. “See Moonraker?” he said. “It’s not as sexy as some of them, but it’s good. Jaws gets on Bond’s side for a while, and in space there’s a war and they blow off each other’s heads with lasers.” Parker twitched like a person being electrocuted. He was jerking his finger at John Joel, pretending it was a gun. “You’ll get braces and look like Jaws,” Parker said. “But you’d have to wear stilts. I wonder if you’re going to grow any taller. You’re supposed to start growing about now. I grew a lot in the last year.”

  “You’re still as ugly as a Baby Ruth.”

  “Listen to who’s talking. Brace face.”

  “A lot of people have got braces.”

  Parker hooked his big toe under the top of one sock and began to push it down.

  “Did you see Moonraker or not?” Parker said.

  “I didn’t see it yet.”

  “I saw it with my mother, but it’s gone from that theater. It’s still in New York, though. Do you want to go?”

  “Where would you get the money?”

  “I’ve got ten bucks, smart-ass,” Parker said.

  “How’d you get it?”

  “I found it blowing down the street. Okay?”

  “You took it from your mother’s purse again.”

  “Boy,” Parker said, slipping his sock onto the floor. “You’d better report me to the Boy Scouts. A person like me isn’t safe to take old ladies across the street.” Parker laughed. The other sock came off and he flipped it to the opposite side of the room. “What’d you come over for if you wanted to act like an asshole?”

  “You called me, Parker,” John Joel said.

  “Yeah. I call you and you act like you’re my girlfriend or something, and I hurt your feelings or something, and you hang up and then you come over here. I wasn’t going to answer the door. I didn’t want you standing out there like an asshole, hollering at the window all day, though.”

  “I ought to get going,” John Joel said.

  “Yeah. Now you want me to beg you to stay. You’re weird, man.” Parker raised his hands again and bit down, into air. “Jaws cuts the cable when they’re in this glassed-in car, riding down the mountain,” Parker said. “You know what my mother says about the movie? She keeps talking about the girls in the movie, like it’s Miss America or something. Marge Pendergast was with us, and that creepy kid Stanley of hers, and she kept asking Marge how come the girl with Bond can run all around in those high-heeled shoes. They kept talking about how good the girl’s hair looked. They go to movies to see how women can run in high heels.”

  “What’s your mother hanging out with her for all the time? I thought they had a big fight.”

  “They did. But Marge is always up for playing tennis. My mother hates doubles, and Marge is always up for playing singles with her. I wonder what she looks like with her tits cut off.” Parker sucked at a mosquito bite on his wrist. “My father knew a guy that just had one ball. One dropped down and the other one didn’t, so they did something to look for the other ball, but it wasn’t in there.”

  “Who does your mother hang out with?” Parker said.

  “Tiffy.”

  “Yuck,” Parker said. “I saw her during that big snow last winter in these men’s work boots and this big parka of I guess her husband’s, in the grocery store, and she stopped and looked at me like I was weird.” Parker picked the cuticle of his big toe. “I’ll bet she’s twice as ugly as Marge Pendergast, even with her tits,” Parker said. “I wouldn’t mind doing something to scare the shit out of her.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Just something. Scare the shit out of her.” Parker smiled. “You could bet she wouldn’t come running out of a burning house in high heels. She’d have on those manure clompers and she’d probably be dressed up like a man and her husband would be dressed up like a woman. My mother says her husband’s faggy. She probably takes all his clothes and leaves him hers.” Parker smiled again. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “You want to send her something?”

  “What do you mean, send her something?”

  “You know that picture of her in the paper? My mother’s got it around. That picture of the bunch of them, at the sale? We can take one of these—”

  Parker rolled off the bed, and let himself fall to the floor. “Uggggh,” he groaned. “They got me.” He stood up. “Come here,” Parker said. “Come on, I want to show you.”

  When Parker opened his bedroom door, he always looked both ways down the hallway. He did it even when he knew that nobody else was home. “This way,” Parker said, and John Joel followed him. They ended up in Parker’s mother’s bedroom. By the bed there was a big table, and Parker started to shuffle through folded newspapers and letters she had opened and stuffed back in their envelopes, looking for the picture. “Look,” Parker said, when he found it. “Come on.” John Joel followed Parker again, back to his room. Parker closed the door. He took tape and scissors out of his desk drawer and sat on the floor. “Watch,” he said.

  “What happens if your mother looks for that picture?”

  “She doesn’t find it,” Parker said.

  “But Parker—what if she notices it’s gone and Tiffy tells her she got something funny in the mail?”

  “Fat chance. And even if it happened, all I’ve got to do is deny it. What do you think they’re going to do to me?”

  Parker was lifting the top corner of his mattress. He held it up and took out the fourth magazine from the top. It was Animal Antics, and with his eyes closed, Parker flipped it open to the picture of the monkey bending over to get the banana. The picture had been taken indoors; the banana was on wall-to-wall carpeting. Parker shook his head, then carefully ripped the page out of the magazine. He put the magazine back under the mattress before he did anything else. Then he went back to the spot on the floor where John Joel sat, where the scissors and tape were, and cut Tiffy’s head out of the newspaper picture. He positioned it over the monkey’s face and taped it down, using little pieces of tape. John Joel had to admit that it was funny. “Let’s get an envelope,” Parker said. He opened his door and looked both ways again. He went into the hallway and opened a drawer in a table and took an envelope and a stamp out. Then he went back into his bedroom, closed the door, folded the ape picture twice and put it neatly in the envelope. He printed her name, in big letters, across the envelope. Then he went out into the hallway again, to look up her address in the phone book. When it was finished, he said, “Let’s go mail it.”

  “You’re gonna get in trouble, Parker,” John Joel said.

  “Stick around and I’ll show you something,” Parker said.

  Parker was taking another magazine out from under the mattress. It was a GI magazine, and he was tearing off the cover. A Marine, bayonet raised high, was yelling and beckoning troops forward, and behind him a soldier who had stepped on a land mine was being blown sideways, through smoke and flam
e. John Joel looked at the little soldier. He had a horrible expression on his face, and a blob of blood where his nose should be. John Joel studied the picture, as though the nose might be somewhere else. Then Parker cut out Louise’s face and put it over the face of the screaming Marine, her hair partly obscuring the helmet, and began to tear off small pieces of tape to fasten it in place.

  “What do you think I’m going to do with that?” he asked Parker.

  “It’s funny,” Parker said, laughing. “Imagine if your mother was a Marine. I should have used this one for Tiffy and the other one for your mother, maybe. This is nice of me, you know. This magazine cost me a buck and a half.”

  “I thought you told me you lifted it.”

  “Oh yeah?” Parker said. “If I said so, then I did. I forget which ones I bought and which ones I smuggled out. Stupid old baldie who runs the candy store, you could take money out of his cash register and he wouldn’t know it, I bet.”

  The gray and white newspaper picture fit in with the gray-green helmet and almost looked as if it belonged there. For some reason, it embarrassed him to look at the picture.

  “Here,” Parker said, pushing it toward him.

  “I don’t want the thing,” he said half-heartedly.

  “You don’t know what’s funny when you see it,” Parker said. “To tell you the truth, you probably wouldn’t get half of what’s going on in Moonraker. It’s got a big snake in it, and you’re even afraid of old garden snakes. You’re even afraid of those Fourth of July snakes.”

  “I am not,” John Joel said.

  “Maybe when Tiffy’s husband sees it, he’ll squeal,” Parker said. “I’m going out to mail this. Are you coming?”

  “Why can’t you mail it later?”

  “Come on,” Parker said. “When we come back, I’ll show you something.”

  “Why can’t you show me now?”

  Parker looked disgusted. He started picking things off the floor without saying anything. He put the magazine back under the mattress, and put the tape and scissors in his desk drawer. When he turned around, he didn’t look as disgusted. “Okay,” Parker said. “Are you going to tell everybody in the world I showed you this?”

  “What for?” John Joel shrugged.

  “Because you couldn’t wait to tell your mother that I burned the ticket stubs, and she told my mother.”

  “She did not. You just told me this morning on the phone that you told her, and that she didn’t believe you, and that she wouldn’t give me the three bucks back.”

  Parker smiled. “I was just testing,” he said, “but I’ll bet you told her, didn’t you?”

  “What’s it to you? She didn’t tell your mother. She wouldn’t.”

  “That illustrates what I was telling you before. That illustrates why Tiffy isn’t going to tell my mother what she got in the mail, and if she does, my mother’s not going to put two and two together. Your mother knows about the diaphragm, doesn’t she, she even knows, and she’s not telling my mother.”

  “She doesn’t like your mother.”

  “She doesn’t like my mother because my mother’s a tennis pro, just about, and nobody but Marge Pendergast can keep up with her.”

  “Talk about who loves their mother.”

  “I don’t love her. I just said that she plays pro tennis.”

  “You love her,” John Joel said.

  “Get off,” Parker said, brushing something imaginary from his arm. He went to the door, opened it, and looked both ways. “Just keep your mouth shut about this,” he said.

  “What’s this going to be?” John Joel said.

  “Scared?” Parker said.

  “What would I be scared of?” John Joel said.

  Actually, he was a little scared. He thought the way Parker looked both ways before he came out of his room and crept around the empty house was scary—it was the way people moved in the old movies, when somebody really was hiding and was about to jump out at them. The house was like an old-movie house, too: There were big overstuffed chairs, and there was almost nothing modern around. It had been Parker’s grandmother’s house, and when she died, Parker’s family had moved in.

  “This is probably going to be nothing,” John Joel said.

  “Oh no, Mr. Bill, don’t go down those steps!” Parker squealed. As they went down, Parker was making sounds of explosions: “Pshew! Whew! Boom!”

  The basement smelled like Raid. There was a hum from the sump pump behind the stairs that kept the basement from flooding. It was a creepy basement, full of things that looked like worms but weren’t. Nothing was down there but a washer and dryer and Parker’s father’s workroom. He followed Parker into that room. Above the work table there was a picture of Parker’s grandmother and grandfather, standing beside some hollyhocks. Both of them had on straw hats—hers was wide-brimmed, and part of a hollyhock had been tucked in the band—and they were holding hands and smiling into the camera. The picture was probably from long ago; it was probably taken before Parker was born. There was a picture of three men in Army uniforms, with beer mugs raised—a picture all brown and white, with spots here and there on the picture, like little match flames. And there was a picture of Parker as a baby, sitting in his diapers, holding a toy rabbit. Parker wasn’t a fat baby. He looked nice when he was a baby.

  “One of those guys is the guy who only had one ball,” Parker said, pointing to the picture of the three men in uniform. “This one of them married somebody who’s a famous dancer, and the one with one ball runs a bar in Santo Domingo, and that one’s my father.” There was a chain dangling from a fluorescent light above the table. Parker pulled the light on. It blinked a couple of times, and then the table was flooded with bright light. Parker pushed aside a hammer and a jar full of nails and screws and lifted two fishing tackle boxes from below the table onto the tabletop. He opened one and put aside several carefully folded wide ties with geometric patterns on them. Underneath the ties there was a pen that, when tilted, showed a tiny woman becoming naked.

  “I’ve seen those,” John Joel said.

  “Seen this?” Parker said. He turned the pen slowly, and from the other side a small naked man with his penis sticking out began to come toward the small naked woman, slowly and imprecisely, like someone floating in space when there’s no gravity. The penis touched the woman’s side. Parker smiled and put the pen back in the box.

  “Look at this,” Parker said. He held out a little dish, or an ashtray, with a drawing on it of a huge woman, being sculpted out of stone by a man who was carving with his penis.

  “This is what I really wanted to show you,” Parker said. He put the things back and opened the other box. In that box there were more ties, some letters and a small black gun. Parker took them out, put them aside, and took out a cardboard box. Inside there was a piece of cardboard that unfolded into the shape of a penis, a narrow black scarf with tiny mothholes in it (Parker held it over his eyes for a second), and a folded piece of paper with a picture of a vagina, pink and brown, about three feet high. “Better than pin the tail on the donkey,” Parker said. Parker chuckled. He zoomed the cardboard penis against the vagina. “It’s not his stuff,” Parker said. “It’s my grandfather’s.” Parker began refolding the piece of paper. “He’s never going to tell me this stuff is here, I bet,” Parker said. He put the two boxes back under the table and pushed the hammer and the jar of screws back into place. “He goes into the boxes. I wet a hair and put it up against that box,” Parker said, pulling the chain to turn the light off. “And the hair was gone.”

  “How do you know that when your spit dried, the hair didn’t fall off?”

  “Because I did it three times,” Parker said. He turned around and showed his teeth, like Jaws. Walking behind him, John Joel saw Parker’s head, in profile, and his hands raised again, holding the imaginary cable that his teeth would snap. Parker’s head fell forward and snapped straight. John Joel kept walking.

  “Well,” John Joel said, “I’ve got to get
home, I guess.”

  “What for?” Parker said.

  “Because my mother’s working today and she told me to take the chicken out of the freezer at two o’clock.”

  “All you’ve got to do is say you forgot.”

  “Nah,” John Joel said. “I guess I’ll go do it. You want to come over?”

  “There’s nothing to do at your house.”

  “What are you going to do here?”

  “Read my magazines. I got a new one I haven’t read yet. It’s called Tons of Fun. About fatsos.”

  “You’ve started laughing at yourself?” John Joel said.

  “I laugh at myself,” Parker said. “If I didn’t want to be fat, I wouldn’t be fat. I like to look this way. It drives my father crazy.”

  “My father, too.”

  “So?” Parker said. “Then it’s worth it.”

  “I don’t have to be fat either,” John Joel said. He had never really thought of that before. “Want to see Tons of Fun?”

  “Nah. I’ve got to go.”

  “Why doesn’t your sister take the chicken out?”

  “Because she’s always over at Angela’s.”

  “So call her and make her go home and do it.”

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “She’s a douchebag,” Parker said.

  “A what?”

  “Get out of here,” Parker said. Parker flopped on his bed.

  “What’s a douchebag?” Parker said. “Get out of here.” He started to laugh.

  “Are we going into New York later on, or what?”

  “Get out of here,” Parker laughed. “Throw me that box of graham crackers on the floor where you’re standing.”