Falling in Place (19 page)

“COME WITH ME,”
Louise said. “It’ll be fun. It’ll be more fun than lying around the house all day.

“I don’t want to,” John Joel said.

“Come on,” Louise said. “Tiffy’s made lots of picnic food and we’ll go berry-picking. I’ll make a strawberry pie. But you have to come help me.”

“Mary doesn’t have to come.”

“Mary is at Angela’s. Come on. Why do I have to urge my children to move? It’s not going above eighty today. It’s a perfect day to pick berries.”

“Why can’t I stay here?” John Joel said.

“To tell you the truth, you can. But I wish you’d come with me. I know you’re depressed about something, and if you won’t tell me, at least let me try to cheer you up.”

“I don’t like Tiffy,” he said.

“How could you not like Tiffy? You’ll like her. You hardly know her. Your father badmouths every woman I know. Don’t pick up all your father’s prejudices.”

“I don’t even see him,” John Joel said.

“You see him on the weekends,” Louise said. “Come on. If we
start talking about this, I’m going to get depressed, and I’
m
in a good mood today.”

“What am I supposed to say to people who want to know how come he’s never around?”

“Is that what’s bothering you?” Louise said. She sat on the sofa, across from the chair where he was sitting and reading a
Zap
comic.

He nodded yes. It was a lie, but he wanted to see what she’d say,

“Say we’re separated,” she said.

“He’s here on the weekends,” John Joel said. He hadn’t wanted her to say that. He hadn’t thought she would.

“Ask your father what you should say. As far as I’m concerned, it’s an adequate answer to nosy people to say we’re separated.”

“It’s going to be plenty hot getting berries today.”

“I think you can stand it. Last time: Are you coming?”

He put down the comic book and got out of the chair. “Mary doesn’t have to come,” he said again, but he didn’t want her to be coming, and he knew that his mother knew that. She didn’t say anything. She got up and stretched and went into the kitchen and began taking containers out of the cabinet.

“Wear an old shirt and shorts so it doesn’t matter if they get stained,” she said.

He went upstairs. It had been three days since he and Parker had been in New York, and Parker hadn’t called him to apologize. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have seen Parker again, but he wanted to be able to hang up on him. He hoped that Parker had gotten into trouble with his mother.

He tried to put on his madras shorts, but they wouldn’t zip up all the way. He put on a pair of cut-off denim shorts that didn’t button, but that zipped and that had a reliable zipper. He put on a white shirt with a rip down the back, from snagging himself when he was getting out of the tree. His mother never mended things that were ripped. She’d approve of his choosing this shirt to go berry-picking in.

“Why are you so blue today?” she said when he came downstairs.

“I’m not. Lay off.”

“I can’t even inquire about how my children are feeling without being told to lay off?”

“I thought we were going out,” he said.

“As soon as I find a bag to put these containers in.”

“What’s for lunch?” he said.

“I don’t know. Tiffy’s bringing a picnic.”

“Chicken,” he said. “I’ll bet you.”

“It probably is chicken. Will that be all right with you?”

He held the door open for her. She walked out, swinging the bag she was carrying, humming a song. The car was hot inside from sitting in the sun. She opened her door, then went around to his side and unlocked it and opened that door. Heat poured out of the car.

“You never told me what you did in New York,” she said, getting in her side, throwing the bag into the back seat. He got in and closed his door. His shorts were tight across his stomach.

“Nothing much,” he said.

“Nothing much. New York City. If you want some suggestions, I can offer a few the next time you go in.”

“I’m sick of New York,” he said. “It’s too hot in the summer.”

“Take the boat out to the Statue of Liberty. Remember when we all did that last summer? Or the summer before, I guess. I love that ride. It’s not too long, and it’s so cool. I was telling your father that we ought to go to Nantucket this summer and rent a boat for a week. Would you like that?”

“Sure. I guess.”

“Tell him,” she said. “If we gang up on him, he’ll take us.”

“Isn’t he taking a vacation?” John Joel said.

“Of course he’ll take a vacation. But we’re going to have to persuade him to take it in Nantucket.”

“Maybe he’s going on vacation alone,” John Joel said.

His mother was turning on the air conditioning, steering with one hand as she rolled up her window.

“Why do you say that?” she said.

He shrugged. “Maybe he’d go alone.”

“Did he say that to you?”

“No, he didn’t say it. I just thought that since you’re separated he might not take a vacation with us this year.”

“Yes he will,” his mother said. She didn’t sound sure. The air conditioning was already making his knees cold. He drew up his legs.

“Are you going to tell me about the fight you had with Parker?”

“I told you. It wasn’t any fight. He’s just stupid.”

“I’m not too crazy about him myself. Did something happen in New York with Parker—is that why you don’t want to go back?”

“I’m going back next week. I’ve got to get braces, don’t I?”

“I mean for fun. And yes, you have to get braces. I know you don’t like the idea, but you wouldn’t like crooked teeth when you grew up, either.”

“I wouldn’t care.”

“You’d care then.”

“I wouldn’t care,” he said again.

“God,” she said, sighing. “Maybe you wouldn’t. You’re a pretty blasé kid.”

“What does that mean?”

“Blasé? It means you let everything roll off your back like water.” She smiled. “I didn’t realize what an old-fashioned expression that was,” she said. “I guess it is.”

She always came to a full stop at stop signs. It drove him crazy. A dog was running at the side of the road. He waited for her to say something about her dog. She looked, but didn’t say anything.

“I’ll tell you one thing Parker did. We went to the museum and he told me his mother would pay me back if I showed her the tickets, and then he—” He broke off, and decided it would be better to hedge on the truth. “Parker tore up the ticket stubs.”

“On purpose?”

“Sure, on purpose.”

“What was the point of that?” she said.

He shrugged. “He’s stupid.”

“The other thing that surprises me is that you went to a museum. What did you see?”

“Where’d you think we’d go? Some porn movie?”

“I do have some faith in you, John Joel. I just didn’t think the two of you would go to a museum. I think it’s wonderful that you did.”

“Nick took me the week before,” he said.

“Really? And you liked it and went back?”

“I sort of liked it. It was these plaster people.”

“Oh,” she said. “You saw the Segal show at the Whitney.”

He shrugged.

“Well, tell me about it,” she said.

“I read what he wrote about one of the things, and he said it was his friends. One of them was all blue, and it had a face like a goat.”

“I’d like to see that,” she said.

“Some of it was dumb,” he said. He decided not to tell her about the people naked in bed, or the women’s bodies.

“Do you like Nick?” she asked him.

“Sure. He’s okay.”

“Just okay?”

“I don’t love him or anything.”

“Your father does. Your father worships him.”

John Joel shrugged. “He’s a nice guy,” he said.

“Maybe I’m just jealous,” she said. She turned down the air conditioner. They were passing the reservoir, with the geyser of white water shooting up.

“Nick’s got a pretty girlfriend,” he said.

“A lot of them,” she said. “Was this one black or foreign? Or white for a change?”

“She had
huge
eyes and she was pretty. She worked at some department store. Nick was surprised to see her, when she showed up outside the museum. Dad was late. He finally showed.”

“Nick finds a new one every week,” she said.

“Her name was Nina,” he said. “I just remembered.”

“Nina who works in a department store. Let me guess: Bloomie’s?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Bloomie’s. And she was twenty-five, right?”

“You would have liked her,” he said.

“Right?” she said.

“About,” he said.

“They don’t come over twenty-five. That model gets discontinued.”

“You sound like you’re talking to Dad.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I envy those lunches—flirting with somebody nice, all of it paid for with an expense account.”

“You want to flirt with somebody?” he said.

“Oh, you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t.”

“You shouldn’t dislike Nick,” he said. “He’s okay.”

“So I hear. Constantly.”

“You’re the one who wanted to talk about him,” he said.

They were going up the steep hill that led to Tiffy’s house. Another dog, out on a lawn; this time it was a German shepherd, the kind his mother’s had been, and he would have bet all the money in his wallet that she’d say something. He would never forget being out on the front lawn with his mother the day Mr. Blue was hit by a car. His own scream had sounded like a woman’s, and his mother had opened her mouth but made no sound at all. The paper boy—there had been a new paper boy, and he would throw the paper onto the lawn from the other side of the street… his mother’s dog had been standing at the side of the house, and it had seen the paper boy raise his arm with the rolled-up paper, and suddenly the dog had gone bounding into the street because he thought the paper boy was playing “get the stick” with him. He had lunged into a car with a heavy thump. Now, John Joel looked at his mother. She was looking in the rear-view mirror and had seen the dog, but wasn’t saying anything. She said: “This is pretty in here. It’s quiet, too—off the main road.”

“Do you wish you worked in New York?” he said.

“Why do you ask that?”

“I thought you might.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I like it here. I think I’m lucky that we have enough money that I don’t have to work and that when the sun is shining and I’m feeling pretty good, I can go meet a friend and have a picnic and pick strawberries. It’s a pretty nice life.” She came to a full stop at the stop sign, then went slowly forward about twenty feet and stopped again, where she could see. “I don’t know what kind of a job I could get anyway,” she said.

“Tiffy’s got a job.”

“Tiffy has a Ph.D. and teaches at NYU and will probably be booted out before she gets tenure, on general principles.”

“Couldn’t you be a teacher?” he said.

“What’s this? You’re trying to send your mother off to work?”

“Just if you wanted a job,” he said. “You could get a job.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Seriously. I’m glad you have faith in me.”

While he wasn’t looking, a little dog ran across a lawn close to the car, and she said, “I wish I had had a job when Mr. Blue died. I don’t know why I took it so hard, but to this day it’s all I can do to look at a dog that reminds me of Mr. Blue in any way. That one was nothing like him—just the way it was having fun, running across the lawn after something.”

“I was talking about the cats to Parker. He said his mother told him to drown them.”

“You shouldn’t talk about that,” his mother said. “He’s going to a psychiatrist. Things like that you should probably leave to the two of them to talk about.”

“Yeah, but you don’t even think he should tell the truth?”

“I think he’s embarrassed the story got around. I don’t know how it did. I think his mother told some people. I think part of Parker’s problem is that his mother is more interested in everybody else than she is in her own son.”

“Yeah, but he said it was an alley cat.”

Louise laughed. “A two-hundred-dollar chocolate point,” she said. “That’s crazy, too: his mother paying that kind of money for a cat, and then having it put to sleep. It wasn’t the cat’s fault that he tried to go after it and the kittens. You’d think at least she would have tried to find a good home for it.”

“She’s pretty strange, too,” John Joel said.

“Everybody is, I guess. Everybody has their little secrets and their little half-truths. All those people at lunch in New York hedging and dodging like football players.”

“I know something about her even she doesn’t know,” John Joel said.

“About Parker’s mother?”

“Yeah. I shouldn’t tell.”

“How could you know something she doesn’t know?”

“Promise you won’t tell?”

Louise shrugged. “I can’t imagine what I’d find out about her that I’d care about. All she does is play tennis, anyway. Does it have to do with her tennis game?”

“No. It’s that Parker put a pinhole in her diaphragm.”

Louise snapped her head around to look at him. “What did you say?” she said.

He blushed. Parker had had to explain to him what it meant. Now he knew what it meant, and he was suddenly embarrassed to have mentioned it. He should have told her, instead, about the naked plaster people in the museum.

“What?” she said again.

“Parker did it. With a pin.”

“Parker
said
he did it. Parker wouldn’t
do
that, would he?”

“Sure,” he said. “Parker’d do it.”

She was still staring at him. “You realize–” she began.

“I know,” he said, and shrugged. “Parker thinks it’s a real good joke. He says it’s her fault if she doesn’t check.”

“But that’s
awful,”
she said.

“Parker found it. It was in her top drawer. He thought it was a big compact. He opened it and didn’t see any mirror, and then he found out later what it was, and he pricked a hole in it.”

“She’ll see it, won’t she?” Louise said. “Does Parker think that’s funny? She’d never
dream
Parker would find her diaphragm and do that.”

“She ought to. He’d do anything.”

“What do you mean?” Louise said. “Has he done something worse than that?”