Falling in Place

by Ann Beattie

  He hated to have nothing to do but hang out with his mother or go to Parker’s. For a while he put it off, flipping through comics he had already looked at three or four times, and Pig Fig was really the only funny one. He flipped through that one again, then picked up the comics and decided to return them to Parker and have a piece of orange cake. He remembered to lock the door when he went out, and to leave the key under a big shell that was in among his mother’s iris. He would have liked for Mary to have forgotten her key and be locked out, but she’d probably go to Angela’s until dinner anyway, and if his mother came home and saw that he’d left the back door open, he’d catch hell.

  Parker did his usual routine of not answering the door. John Joel rang the bell, and knocked on the door and yelled Parker’s name. Finally, he heard Parker, in no special hurry, coming to answer the door.

  “What?” Parker said, opening the door.

  “I brought your comics back.”

  “Yeah,” Parker said. “You came for cake.”

  Parker stood aside, and he walked in.

  “I lied about the cake,” Parker said.

  “I don’t want any cake,” John Joel said. “I just wanted to return your comics.”

  “You want it,” Parker said. “There is one, too. Come in the kitchen.”

  He followed Parker into the kitchen. The wallpaper in the kitchen was blue, with a pattern of white chickens, columns of half-inch-high chickens. There was a long plate-rail across one wall, where Parker’s mother kept her collection of old plates with animals and farm scenes. There was a blue tablecloth on the table, and salt and pepper shakers shaped like chickens. Parker lifted up the salt shaker and took it to the sink. He put his finger under the water, and let a single drop of water hit the circle of tiny holes in the chicken’s head. Then he dried it off and put it back on the table. He got a knife out of a drawer, and two plates. He cut two pieces of cake: a large one for himself, and a medium one for John Joel. He got two Cokes out of the refrigerator, and shook John Joel’s can lightly, three or four times, before he grinned and handed it to him. John Joel let it sit there. He only cared about the cake, anyway. And when his piece was gone, he was going to cut another one. He’d like to see what Parker would do to stop him. They ate in silence. Parker thumbed through Pig Fig and laughed as he ate. John Joel finished first and picked up the cake knife, but he didn’t cut another piece. He wiped the icing onto his finger and licked it.

  “Come on upstairs,” Parker said. “I want to show you something.”

  He had already seen what Parker had to show: the two green fishing tackle boxes, with his grandfather’s things in them.

  “Why’d you bring them upstairs?” John Joel said.

  “Just felt like it,” Parker said. “He’s away on a trip. He’s not going to know. If she finds them, serves her right for snooping in my room. Let her find them. I’d like to see her face.”

  Parker took out the pen with the little lady that did the striptease.

  “Hey, Parker,” he said. “I saw that.”

  “It’s neat,” Parker said, handing him the pen. “It got screwed up and he doesn’t hit her right. You think there’s somebody who repairs pens like this?” Parker tilted it, smiling. “Look,” he said. “Stupid man’s aim is off.”

  Parker put the two boxes on his bed. He lifted the ties out again, and put them in a pile. He had something small in his hand that John Joel couldn’t see.

  “Reach out,” Parker said.

  “For what?”

  “Because I said to. You scared I’m going to blow you up or something?”

  “What have you got?”

  “Jesus, are you an infant,” Parker said. “Go to shake hands with me. Come on.”

  John Joel put his hand out. It was sticky from the cake. Parker’s hand came forward, and John Joel saw a thin ring of metal around Parker’s middle finger, and then something hard pressed into the palm of his hand. It was a palm buzzer. Parker took it off and showed John Joel the small circle of metal with a bulge in the middle that made a loud buzzing sound when pressure was put on it.

  Parker put the ties and the palm buzzer back into the box and pulled some comics out from under his bed. He flopped onto his stomach and started to read one. John Joel went to the bathroom. He undid the button at the top of his shorts, and pulled his shirt out, to be more comfortable. He ran the cold water and wiped his wet hand over his face, patted his face dry on somebody’s towel. He felt even stickier. He went back to Parker’s room, thinking about asking for more cake.

  He and Parker read comics. Parker got up from the bed and touched his toes. “Bet you can’t,” he said to John Joel. John Joel was pretty sure he couldn’t. He ignored Parker. He ran his tongue over his teeth and thought how much he didn’t want braces. Parker had a magazine about dentists—a picture book, on cheap paper that almost fell apart when you touched it, so Parker turned the pages carefully, like the pages of a rare book. The magazine showed dentist’s instruments, larger than life, and there were pictures of women with their eyes like pinwheels and their legs spread, dentists pressed against their crotches, bending over and probing into their mouths. The writing in the magazine was all in some foreign language, but the people in the pictures looked like Americans.

  “You should have seen Marathon Man,” Parker said. “Ask your orthodontist if he saw that.”

  After a while, when John Joel said he was going home, Parker got up and offered him another piece of cake. They went to the kitchen and Parker cut two slices, this time even more unequal in size, and flopped them onto the same plates they had eaten off before. The morning paper was on the table, and there was a picture of Rosalynn Carter standing with some foreign woman. “Dumb hag scumbag,” Parker said, examining the paper. He turned the picture of Rosalynn Carter face down on the table and picked up his piece of cake and ate it out of his fingers.

  Parker trailed him home. He kept walking behind him, and when John Joel turned around Parker would puff out his cheeks and waddle.

  “You’re so thin yourself,” John Joel said.

  “Let’s see you touch your toes,” Parker said.

  Parker picked up a rock and threw it at a squirrel. When a car came down the road, he zigged and zagged, so that the car didn’t know if he was going to run out in front of it or not. John Joel didn’t know how Parker could do things like that: What if the person in the car knew him, or his parents? Parker picked up another rock and threw it at a tree. It hit the tree and rebounded, and John Joel ducked. Parker laughed.

  “You’re a real asshole,” John Joel said.

  He saw his mother’s car in the driveway and was secretly glad that he could get rid of Parker. Parker wouldn’t hang around if his mother was there.

  “I want to show you something,” Parker said.

  “I’m going inside,” John Joel said.

  Parker pulled the small black gun out of his pants pocket.

  “Get that out of here,” John Joel said. “If my mother sees that, both of us are going to catch hell.”

  “What,” Parker said, “there’s a law against it?”

  “There is,” John Joel said. “There’s a law.”

  “What’s it called: the Scaredy Baby’s Law? Come on. I want to show you something.”

  He couldn’t go in the house with Parker carrying the gun, and Parker wouldn’t put it away.

  “Come on,” Parker said, walking to the back of the lawn.

  Parker climbed the tree. John Joel climbed behind him. He wished that his mother knew he was home, that she would call him. He hoped she might look out the kitchen door and see him. She had put on the sprinkler, and it was turning in a circle, jetting water out over her iris, wetting the abelia bush. The bees hovered anyway, jerking back from the spray, a few flying forward, into the soaking bush. Some bees hung to the wet bright-green branches, clustered almost like Japanese beetles, even though the water kept raining into the bush.

  “What do you want now?” John Joel sa
id.

  “Ambush,” Parker said.

  On cue—exactly on cue—John Joel saw Angela and Mary, walking into the field.

  “Pshew! Pshew!” Parker said, aiming the gun at a bird hopping by the tree. “Wait’ll you see Moonraker, when all those guys floating in space get zapped by lasers.”

  “Put that away,” John Joel said. “You’ll scare her. If she sees you with that, it’s going to get me in trouble with my mother.” John Joel stared at Parker. “I mean it,” he said. “I’m telling you.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” Parker said. He seemed more dismayed than angry. He seemed unreasonable. Parker had the gun in his right hand, and John Joel, on his left, couldn’t think how to get it away from him.

  “You are really stupid,” Parker said. “You think I’d carry a gun around that had a bullet in it? That would make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it? If you’re so scared, you can hold on to it, so I don’t blow your sister away,” Parker said, handing him the gun. “You love your sister? You fall in love with your sister?”

  “I hate her,” John Joel said.

  Angela waved and turned back toward her house. Mary walked forward, jumping over something, zigzagging because she knew the path to take to avoid poison ivy. If his mother saw her in the field, Mary would catch hell. He hoped that his mother would come out into the backyard and see her.

  Mary didn’t see them in the tree, or if she did, she was doing a better-than-average job of ignoring them. A bird flew away as she was almost out of the field. She turned and flicked something off the back of her jeans. Something small fell back into the field, a burr or a bug.

  He called her name, and pulled the trigger, because he thought that Parker had been telling the truth. He didn’t even have the gun aimed, and still he hit her.

  Tiffy lifted the slice of lemon out of her glass of iced tea and let tea drip into the glass. She sucked the lemon, put it on the table next to the glass.

  “I never thought about it until last night—it never struck me as strange in any way, because I’m so conditioned. I’m so slow to come around to understanding some things. Think about it: The fairy godmother changes a pumpkin into a coach, mice into horses, a rat into a coachman, lizards into footmen, and work clothes into a silver and gold dress, and what does she say when she sends her off to the ball? To be back at midnight. If she had the power to do all those other things, did she really lack the power to make them last past midnight? It’s just another story about virginity. You’ve got to read My Mother, My Self. Nancy Friday can’t be wrong.” Tiffy sucked on the lemon. “Interesting, too, that she doesn’t transform anything into glass slippers—that she touches her magic ring to Cinderella’s work clothes to turn them into fine threads, but the glass slippers are just brought forward, as if they always existed. Do you know what Freud says about shoes?”

  Then they heard the shot. They both knew it was a shot, but Louise said to Tiffy, “What was that?” and Tiffy said what it was. They got up from the table together, and Louise heard another sound, the sound of Tiffy’s glass turning over. She looked back at the table and saw Tiffy reaching for the toppled glass, but too late: a pale-brown puddle was washing over Perrault’s Fairy Tales. Louise stared stupidly. She was afraid to look, because she knew what it was. She knew that something horrible had happened, because there had been no sound before the shot, and no sound after it was fired: It just existed in itself, strange and loud, and then there was nothing but whatever it was she was going to see when she got to the door. The door was closed—Tiffy had suggested that, saying that the kitchen would be cooler with the fan going and the door closed, that the screen door let in more hot air than… .

  While she was thinking, Tiffy passed her and threw open the door.

  Eighteen

  CYNTHIA HAD talked to Bobby on the phone, and now she was talking to him in person. Spangle’s old friend had become a writer, and he was on his way to New York to talk to agents. That didn’t delight him, but as he talked he found more and more reasons to like the idea of going to New York. Bagels—he could get bagels there. Bookstores—he might be able to find a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s book about writing a novel at a bookstore he’d heard about off Broadway at 95th. He had heard that a copy was there, and the stupid friend who’d told him—his friend Honig was so stupid he couldn’t believe it—he’d told Honig to look for the book, and Honig hadn’t realized that he had meant he should also buy it. Used-clothing stores—they might have a cowboy shirt similar to one he had lost, with a satin skull that looked as if it had been drawn by Georgia O’Keeffe sewn over the pocket.

  “How did you lose a shirt?” she said.

  “I was at the laundromat and I think somebody saw it going into the washing machine and pulled it out when I left to buy a newspaper. That’s all I can think. I’ve lost shoes, because I’ve forgotten I was wearing them. You know—at a lake or something, you just walk back to the car not thinking about shoes—but I can’t think myself how else I could have lost the cowboy shirt. Actually, maybe cowboy shirts aren’t really my thing. Maybe it was just that one I liked. I hate cowboy boots. These are what I like.”

  Bobby held up his foot. He had a huge foot, and he was wearing bright-orange running shoes with a white stripe curving around the side. “Can’t wear these to teach in,” Bobby said. “Got to get shoes. What else is there to buy besides cowboy boots for shoes? Some goddamn old man’s shoes that lace up? Jesus, do I hate to think about teaching.”

  “When does the semester—” she said.

  “Hey!” Bobby said, before she finished her sentence. “Excuse me for breaking in, but when I think of something, if I don’t say it, I lose it.” He took off his glasses, blew on them, wiped them on the tail of his shirt. “I forgot what I was going to say,” he said.

  “Were you going to say something about teaching?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Right. Right. I was going to ask you about Yale. You said you’re at Yale.”

  “I don’t even want to think about it. I just want a vacation. All I want is a rest, and for this heat wave to break.”

  “Where did I say that bookstore was?” Bobby said.

  “Broadway and 95th.”

  “God!” Bobby said. “If you hadn’t remembered, I would have lost it just like that.”

  He snapped his fingers. They didn’t make any sound, because his hands were wet. He was drinking beer, and the can was sweating. Bobby kept wiping his hand on his denim shorts. “What are they going to do, come into my classroom and carry me out? What am I buying shoes for, and wearing slacks with a crease down the front? These are my shoes, you know?”

  Bobby held up his big puffy orange foot. “Do you have a piece of paper?” he said. “If I don’t write down that address, I’ll get there and I’ll never remember it.”

  She watched him print: B’way

  95th cowboy

  shirt bagels

  When Bobby wrote, he bent his head and put his eye down close to the page, the way a young child writes, having to concentrate both on the idea and on the handwriting. Bobby’s handwriting was just about illegible. Three typists who had been given his novel had quit. When he wanted to be sure to understand his writing himself, he printed. He explained all this to her as he continued the message to himself: “Kathryn and Daphne?”

  “Just had an idea,” Bobby said. He put the top back on the pen. He put the pen in his pocket, realized it was hers, took it out and put it on the table. A little blue card fell out with the pen. The blue card said: “Zut alors!” Bobby looked embarrassed. He turned the card over; it was a foreign language flash card. She read, in English, “My goodness!”

  “My pockets,” Bobby sighed, pulling a wad of papers out of his shirt pocket. He spread the things out over the table. There was a fake twenty-dollar bill that he said his nephew had given him, a folded piece of yellow paper that turned out to be a receipt from the dry cleaner’s (“The shirt!” Bobby said, pointing to a line of writing. “I’ve found my shirt
!”), a thin pocket calculator, a gum wrapper, several index cards with notes for poems on them, a photo-booth picture, one of three, that he kept meaning to send his sister for her locket (not his idea, she wanted the thing), and a dried leaf that he wanted to try to find out about. She didn’t know what it was. “What do you think?” he said. “Is this a common leaf?”

  “What did you do with the other pictures?” she said.

  “I gave them to women,” he said. “They were profile shots. I look better in profile.” He examined his running shoes. “Don’t want to go running, do you?” he said.

  “It’s too hot.”

  “Maybe later,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “You really wouldn’t mind if I slept on the sofa tonight? I don’t like to drive into New York at night. I would like a bagel, though. Maybe later we can go out and find a bagel.” He finished his beer and bent the can in half. He took it to the kitchen and threw it away, opened the refrigerator and took out another one. It was Coors beer. He had brought a six-pack with him.