Falling in Place (22 page)

“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 towel. 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.

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?”