Falling in Place (2 page)

The other thing Billy and Auerberg had thought to do, which was so funny, was to get hold of Anthony O’Dell—he had had to start summer school late because his father died and he had to ride the train with his mother to bury his father in Chicago—and convince him it would be funny if he lisped and stuttered. O’Dell did it, and very well—he raised his hand all the time and did it so convincingly that by the time a few days had gone by, they just wanted him to snap out of it.

The telephone rang, and she took a final swallow of Tab before she got up to answer it.

“Hello, Sunbeam,” her father said. “How was school?”

“Suck-o,” she said.

“You could at least say something pleasant before you’re foul-mouthed. If you have to be foul-mouthed.”

“You’d be too, if you had to sit there and listen to her giving a dramatic reading of
Vanity Fair
.”

“Never read that one.”

“She probably didn’t either, and that’s why she was reading it out loud.”

“If you’re so smart, how come you flunked English?”

“Because you can only be smart in so many things. Like, I’m really good at knowing how many rows of beans Jack can plant in his garden if his garden is in the shape of a parallelogram and I know the lengths of two sides.”

“The reason I called,” he said, “is because when your mother called the house during her break there was no answer. She wanted me to ask you to put the hamburger meat out to thaw.”

“The retard’s up in the tree, doing his tree frog number. He tried to spit on me and missed.”

“Did he really try to spit on you?”

“Yeah. What are you gonna do—tear off your gray business suit and glasses in the nearest phone booth and fly in from the Big Apple to deck him?”

“I don’t own a gray business suit, and you should try to find a phone booth on a New York street that has a door that closes.”

“Navy blue? What color do you own?”

“A fire-engine-red leisure suit, made of Dacron polyester. You think I’m a total ass or something? A gray business suit. Don’t tell me you’d like it if your dad was the sort who’d button himself into a vest and stick a pocket watch in one pocket and a Hershey’s Kiss for his little princess in the other.”

“You’re so weird. So you wear a sports jacket. You think that’s so different from a suit.”

“My Sunshine Girl,” he said. “Pretty as a berry, sweet as a dream. Suck-o yourself.”

He hung up.

The record ended. She flipped it to the other side. A tiny feather of dust rose off the record and settled on it again. She watched it spin. Too small to cause any problem. She decided not to bother to blow it away.

June. A long time left in summer school, having Lost in the Forest read them things from books at the end of every class. She did it to kill time, probably. She said she was doing it because language was beautiful (crab-claw), and it was very rare that a person knew how to read aloud well. Presumably Lost in the Forest did: She read in whispers and sudden gasps, sometimes slowly, then fast, looking at the book as if there were real movement there, as if characters hardly larger than specks of dust were actually
running and quarreling and jumping in the air, while Lost in the Forest stared down at them appreciatively, like God.

There was going to be a true-false test about the first chapter of Tom
Jones
on Monday. There had already been a test on “The Pardoner’s Tale,” and there was going to be a test at the end of the week on
Pride and Prejudice
. The first test had been an essay, but Lost in the Forest said that they would not have to write more essays; for what she was being paid, she wouldn’t consider reading twenty of their ill-expressed opinions again. “I’d worry that you’d tell your parents what I said,” Lost in the Forest had told them, “but none of you can communicate clearly enough to get your message across.” She had sniffed. A self-righteous Mary Poppins sniff, but she had neither taken off nor landed. She had stood rooted to the spot, and then she had sighed deeply and fumbled in her book bag and read them a poem about somebody falling out of the sky while some other people worked. Then, gazing up at the globe-shaped light in the classroom ceiling, she had said that they could leave, ten minutes early. Auerberg had looked back at the schoolroom and had called their attention to Lost in the Forest, standing at the window, watching them walk away. The ones who saw her had waved dramatically; Billy had bent over as if he were mooning her; Claude Williams had made circles with his wrist, pretending to lasso her.

She had done nothing in reply. She had just stood there, watching them, hating them, and feeling a little sorry for them, and sorrier for herself. She wished that the sidewalk would sink and they would disappear from her life as easily as when you wave goodbye to company, the elevator door closes and they’re gone. Oh, maybe a second of joking, when the slightly drunken guests push the “Door Open” button to say a final thank you, and the hostess is caught off-guard, looking blank-faced and exhausted. But then gone, taken away, all over. No: They’d be back the next day, and the next. They’d be there all of July, and so would she. And that lunch bag, thank God she had been able to tell by the weight of it that it was not a sandwich and her little bag of raw carrots. Thank God it wasn’t a bomb—that these children were not destructive, just stupid. She had no curiosity about what it was.

“Lost in the Forest, you are such a drag,” Mary said to the
empty house. She went upstairs. In her room, she took off the Peter Frampton T-shirt and put it on the bed, unzipped her jeans, took them off and her satin underpants, too (a Christmas present from Angela: an upside-down strawberry ice cream cone painted on them, neon pink melting where her pubic hair began, spattering pink all the way to where the pants curved into her crotch).

She went over to her wall. There were six posters of Peter Frampton, all the same. In the posters, he had his head tilted. His hair was very curly and his mouth was pale. His blue eyes were paler than her own. His skin looked as if it had been photographed through a screen. Up close to the poster, you could see the faint lines of the grid marks.

Mary put her cheek to his, rolled her head until her mouth touched his lips. The paper was smooth and cool. She took her mouth away and said two words: “Peter Frampton.” “Peter” made her mouth open. “Frampton” made her pucker her lips so that ending the word was a kiss. This was Mary’s routine. She did it every day. And every day it was predictable that Peter Frampton would not come to life, that when she said “Peter” and her mouth opened, his tongue would not come into her mouth. No point in hoping against hope for the extraordinary: a small seed exploding into a giant beanstalk; a body falling from the sky. A body falling from the sky?

She had forgotten to put out the hamburger meat.

“Spangle,” Cynthia said. “Tell me that I am not actually seeing what I’m seeing.”

“You’re blind,” he said. “You don’t see anything. Stumble into bed and let your other senses take over.”

“Spangle,” she said, “I can understand that I might have deserved a put-down like this if sending this notice around had been my idea, but I only typed it because the vice-principal told me to. So do you think it was a good idea to draw a little picture of me on the ditto master? Do you think that was funny? Did you think I’d like that?”

“It’s a good drawing. Besides, those money-up-the-ass parents will love it. They’ll think it establishes rapport. You watch: You’ll get yourself invited to a garden party.”

“You’re a real shit. Now I’m going to have to do this thing over.”

“No you won’t. Just tape a piece of paper over the drawing.”

The room was dark except for the frog night light on the table beside the bed. She had left the ditto master on the table when she got undressed and went to take a shower, and Spangle—bored, trying to twirl a Frisbee on his first finger—had picked up the piece
of paper and a pen and doodled Cynthia’s face. It was not a caricature; it was what he thought she really looked like
.

“Believe me,” Spangle said. “Watch all the nice notes you get.”

“And you’re going to go to the garden party with me?”

“ ‘Can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself,’ ” Spangle sighed. “I am going to be on a mission of great importance, retrieving my brother from the mysteries of Madrid. Hoping he isn’t already married and that there isn’t already an olive-skinned infant and a maid he’s two-timing Rosita with. Hoping to get him back to law school. My esteemed brother. Have to be careful not to piss him off, though. I’m almost out of the money the old man left me, but he hasn’t run out of his. As far as I know.”

“Move over,” she said
.

“Speak right into the microphone,” Spangle said, kicking back the sheet and taking his penis in his hand. “Do you think there are really tankers full of crude oil off the coast that the United States is stopping from making deliveries? Are you angry about gas rationing?”

“Get over,” she said, nudging him with her hip
.

“Come closer,” Spangle said. “The mike isn’t picking this up.”

“I’m going to have to deal with your neurotic mother all the time you’re in Madrid.”

“Do you think… ” Spangle said, raising his pelvis in the air and pointing his penis toward her
.

“God almighty,” she said. “If you want to play with yourself don’t let me interrupt.”

She pushed until she had enough bed space to lie down on
.

“I’m a tanker,” Spangle said, rolling toward her, holding his erect penis, “and I’m steaming in to make a delivery.”

“Get off,” she said. “I’m not amused, Spangle.”

“What’s today’s date?” he said. “Tomorrow had better be an odd day, because I’ll never make it to Bradley Field on an eighth of a tank.”

Two

CYNTHIA DREAMED
that she was falling. It was a late afternoon fright dream. When she took naps after teaching, she often had to wake herself up in the middle of some nightmare. At night she slept all right, but when she napped she was likely to have nightmares. It was worth the risk, though: When she slept, she forgot the students, and if she had a nightmare and shook herself awake, she was always glad to find herself in her lover’s apartment, instead of at the high school. Her sister had left her the key to her condominium while she was in Mexico for the summer, but Cynthia found the cramped New Haven apartment more comfortable. That, and that idiotic Mitch Auerberg—he was older than the rest of them, and had failed a similar course the summer before—who had followed her home one day on his motorcycle and gunned it and streaked off when she saw him. He was probably hiding in the bushes like Popeye, waiting for her to go out back of the building in her bathing suit so he could scare her—she did not think he was capable of worse than that. She went on the assumption that there was no great malice in those children, and that was what kept her going to work every day.

She found a joint on the night table and lit it, got out of bed
and went into the kitchen. She turned on the window fan and undid her pigtails, putting the rubber bands on the counter. An ant ran around them and disappeared down the crack between the wall and the counter. Her lover, Peter Spangle, would not let her buy any chemical bug killers; his own nightmares were about being at the test site when an atomic bomb was detonated. He was sure that it was the odor of Raid that provoked his nightmares. Raid, he insisted: not all the acid he had taken; not the recent newspaper reports linking exposure to radiation with cancer.

Spangle was in Madrid, trying to talk his brother Jonathan into returning to law school. His mother had paid for the trip to Madrid. She had paid for his brother’s trip, too, not realizing that Jonathan had intended his vacation to be a year long. She was afraid, now that Peter was in Madrid, that he would stay too—that the country had some secret power over highly intelligent white American males. She called the apartment often, to see if there was any word on how things were going. She also complained that her new wall-to-wall carpeting was fuzzing, and that as soon as an avocado seed took root, it rotted. When Spangle had been in the apartment and his mother called, she only spoke briefly to Cynthia, to exchange a few banalities. Now that her son was gone and she had no one else to talk to, she sometimes called twice a night. Cynthia was tempted to pick up the phone and say, in her most faraway voice: “This is the spirit of Madrid, and I have captured your sons forever. Don’t watch for them in the breeze or in sunlight. I have their power. I have sucked their souls as empty as the inside of a straw.”