Falling in Place

Eleven

“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?”

“He just does strange stuff. What I told you about the ticket stubs isn’t exactly the way it happened. He burned them, on the sidewalk outside the train station. He does stuff there’s no point in doing.”

“He’s very disturbed.”

“He’s no friend of mine,” John Joel said.

“But honey — are you sure about that other thing? Mightn’t he just brag that he’d pulled a stunt like that but not really do it?”

“No,” John Joel said. “He’d do it. He wouldn’t care.”

“Imagine Georgia having another little monster like Parker,” Louise said. She brushed her hair out of her face. “I didn’t know you knew what a diaphragm was,” she said.

He blushed again, looked out the window. “I knew,” he said.

“But that’s just horrible” she said. “Parker’s a monster.”

“He rolls cigarettes like they’re joints, but they’re not. He carries them in the pack with his Salems and he smokes them going down the street with his hand cupped around them and he drags on them funny, like they’re joints. He smokes a pack a day of real cigarettes.”

“You don’t smoke with him, do you?”

“He’s no friend of mine.”

“But do you?”

“No,” John Joel said. He was embarrassed that he didn’t, that he wasn’t lying to her. He didn’t know why he’d told her so much. He slid forward in the seat and looked out the window, as they pulled into Tiffy’s driveway. There were day lilies, very tall, falling forward into the driveway, and there were daisies and tall electric-pink phlox. Tiffy’s husband was working in the garden, staking a rosebush. He waved with a pair of pruning shears.

“Hi,” Louise said, getting out of the car. “Tiffy inside?”

“She’s in the garage,” he said. “Hi,” he said, pointing the shears at John Joel.

“Hi,” John Joel said.

“Hi, Tiffy,” Louise called. Tiffy came out of the garage, wiping her forehead on her arm. She had her hair in braids, and for a second that made her look, to John Joel, a little like Nina, in New York. She had on white shorts, and a white halter top, and she was carrying a plant she had just repotted. “I have to take a quick shower and then I’m all ready to go,” she said. “Come inside where it’s cool.”

They followed her into the house. Louise pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table. John Joel pulled out a chair for himself and sat down. The shorts were cutting into his thighs. It smelled like chicken in her kitchen, and he looked at the clock to see how close to lunchtime it was. It was noon. If he were home, he could be eating.

“There’s wine in the fridge,” Tiffy called downstairs. The water went on in the shower.

Louise didn’t get up. “Do you want a Coke if she has one?” she said. He shook his head no. He wanted a Coke, but he wanted more to get out of the house. He wanted to pick the berries and have the picnic and have it over with. The magazine on the table wasn’t worth looking at: The New Republic. All Tiffy’s cups were pottery, and Coke tasted funny in cups like that. He thought about the milkshake he had bought Parker and wished he had his money back.

Louise got up and took a blue pottery cup down from the shelf over the sink and went to the refrigerator. She poured wine into her cup from the jug and put the jug back in the refrigerator. Tiffy’s refrigerator was always interesting: It was filled with colors instead of with wrapped packages: apples loose on a shelf, peaches, limes and lemons, pale-sea-green bottles of Perrier, orange juice in a glass bottle so that you could see the deep-orange color. Tiffy was hollering something from upstairs, but they couldn’t tell what she was saying.

She came down in a few minutes, in green slacks and a black halter, wearing tennis shoes, her hair still braided, but sopping wet.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” she said, picking up the basket on the kitchen table. She said to John Joel: “What are you doing this summer?”

“Nothing much,” he said.

“My car,” Tiffy said. “I cleaned it inside, and everybody has to praise it.”

“It looks wonderful,” Louise said.

“I want to sit in the back,” John Joel said.

“There’s no place to vacuum your car around here,” Tiffy said. “I gave up. Last night I wet a sponge and sponged this car clean. It was full of grit and dog hair from my sister’s dog. It looked horrible. Does it smell like dog? I can’t even tell anymore.” Tiffy waved to her husband as she pulled out of the driveway. He had on a straw hat, and he tipped it as the car pulled away.

“Now tell me what you’ve really been doing this summer,” Tiffy said, looking in the rear-view mirror. He slid around in the back seat. He couldn’t think what to tell her except to tell the story about going to the museum again. So he told her about the show he had seen, or tried to, but she broke in: She’d seen it, too. And Calder’s Circus. She started talking about that, how quirky it was, how it always made her smile to see it. How she wanted to shrink and get inside with the circus animals and performers, and tumble around in the case with them at night, because she was sure they did. “I don’t know,” she said to Louise. “Maybe I’m just getting old, but when I went through the Segal show, I felt so frustrated. I felt like those things were so still, and when I stopped to look at Calder’s Circus again on the way out, I felt like they had little hearts beating, and that their little eyes blinked and their mouths smiled when they were alone. When Segal’s people were alone, I thought they’d be just as still. That they couldn’t move, under any conditions.”

Tiffy’s car was an old Cadillac, a black 1955 Cadillac, and it rode as though the shocks were completely worn-out. He had been in her car once before, and he just remembered that it had made him sick. It was hot in the back seat, too, even though Tiffy was driving fast enough that wind blew through the car and slapped him in the face. He tried to concentrate on not being sick. He kept thinking about the picture of the relative that Parker had given away, of how strange the woman in the picture looked. Pictures of his mother when she was a young girl looked the same way; not that she looked anything like Parker’s funny-faced relative, but the pose was the same: The faces looked flat, and they were close to the camera. There was a picture on his father’s dresser — what used to be his father’s dresser — of his mother when she graduated from high school. It was a hand-colored photograph, his mother had told him, and the pearls she wore around her neck were the same color as her teeth and the whites of her eyes. She had on a pink sweater in the picture, and a barrette in her hair, and he could not imagine his mother looking that way. As mothers went, she was pretty. She wore a little make-up, unlike Tiffy, and she didn’t have a horsey face like Parker’s mother, and nobody was as ugly as Marge Pendergast. All her children were ugly, too. He wished that he looked more like his mother or father. He wondered if he would be better-looking if he weren’t fat. Mary wasn’t fat, but she wasn’t very good-looking, and he thought that was true objectively — not just because she was his sister and he hated her.

Going back to his grandmother’s house in Rye, the day he had had lunch with Nick and his father and the girl whose name he had forgotten again, his father had asked him if he liked any girls. He hated to be asked that, because there weren’t any girls he liked. So he had made up a lie about a girl he had liked who had transferred to another school in the middle of the year. He had even described her: bangs, glasses, tall. They had been in the drinking car, standing up. He had been having a ginger ale, and his father had been having a gin and tonic. “What girls do you like?” he had asked his father. It had just come out, before he realized what a ridiculous question it was. His father had been taken aback by it. His father had said that he liked Louise. “What did you think of Nick’s girlfriend?” his father had asked him after a while. And for some reason he hadn’t wanted to let on that he thought she was pretty. He had shrugged. His father had said, “Not your type, huh?” There was another long pause; then, finishing his drink, his father had said: “Well, I think she’s quite pretty.”

In the front seat, Louise was telling Tiffy about the last picnic the family had gone on.

“There were these two silly girls at the park on Friday night. They were with two boys, and all four of them were drunk, and I actually envied them for having such a mindless good time.”

“There’s nothing wrong with having a mindless good time once in a while.”

“At least I said something that night that I’d wanted to say for a long while. Not that there was any response to it, but I finally said it. It was about my dog. I said that I wished I had the dog back, and that I could be playing ‘get the stick’ with Mr. Blue. No wonder I liked the dog. It was so dogged. It was just like me. It would’ve played ‘get the stick’ until it fell over dead, and I’d go on those stupid picnics and trudge through the snow if he kept saying we should go there.” Louise sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I talk about the dog too much.”

“You don’t talk about it very much,” Tiffy said.

“She does,” John Joel said. “All the time.”

Tiffy pulled into a graveled drive, in the shape of a half circle, and parked behind a yellow truck. Tiffy had found out about this place from a friend: It wasn’t advertised, but one day a week the farmer let people come and pick berries, and he weighed them on a scale on his back porch. Tiffy always knew about things that no one else knew about: meetings in people’s apartments, places to pick strawberries, places to swim without getting caught, books that had been written but not published. Whenever she talked about a book, she’d say: “You have to read it when it comes out,” and when she talked about a movie she’d seen, it was always “at a screening.” He could understand why his mother was in awe of Tiffy, but she was so unlike his mother in so many ways that he was surprised his mother liked her so much. According to his mother, Tiffy did everything right. His father didn’t take Tiffy seriously. His father just thought that Tiffy was pretentious and talked a lot. He hoped that his mother wouldn’t tell his father about this day on the weekend, because they were sure to get into a fight about it.

As he followed his mother and Tiffy through the high grass to the strawberry field, he picked up snatches of the conversation. Tiffy was talking about what was wrong, politically, with The Deer Hunter. She kept stressing that word—politically. His mother nodded and didn’t have much to say. It was hot in the field, and he wished he had on looser clothes. Tiffy had left the basket with the food back in the car. They probably wouldn’t be eating for another hour. He swatted a yellow butterfly away, and when it fluttered he saw that it was a butterfly and a smaller butterfly, or a moth. They swirled up and flew away. A mosquito buzzed in his ear.

There were about ten people over the crest of the hill, picking strawberries that grew in neat rows. He hated the idea of bending over in the heat to pick berries and wondered why he’d come. There was no way out of it. He took the container his mother held out and went to one of the rows and began groping under the leaves for the berries. Every berry was ripe and large, so it didn’t matter what he pulled off. He thought about the pie his mother had said she’d make, and hoped that she’d make two. He hoped that Mary would eat at Angela’s.

His mother and Tiffy were talking about his father. He moved to another row, where he wouldn’t hear them. He had found out enough. He had found out they were separated. He suddenly felt sorry for himself, and a little dizzy in the heat: What if they had done it when he was a baby, what if they had given him away, even, and he had been an orphan? It would be nice if they had given Mary away and kept him. Brandt was already gone. He envied Parker for being an only child and wondered what made him so messed up when he didn’t have anybody he had to share things with or be polite to, except his parents. Nobody would put crap in Parker’s bed that he’d roll over on or cut his foot on. If Parker thought it would be fun to have a brother or a sister, he should just spend a day in his house and see how awful Mary was. He had bought Parker two hamburgers and French fries and a Coke and a chocolate milkshake, and Parker had set fire to the ticket stubs. He bent over too far and lost his balance and remembered shoving Parker and not knocking him over. He thought about seeing Parker one more time — maybe waiting until fall and ganging up on him with some of the other kids — and letting him have it. Then Parker would have something to tell his shrink about. Then he could talk about how he was such an asshole that he’d gotten slugged.

“Are you scowling?” his mother said, “or is the sun too much for you?”

“Sun,” he said.

“Do you think we have enough?” she said.

He nodded yes. He thought that Tiffy would want to keep picking, though, and he guessed right. He and his mother started back for the farmer’s porch before Tiffy did.

“What’s the matter?” she said to him.

“Nothing’s the matter. Everybody’s always asking me what I’m doing and how I’m doing and what girls do I like… ”

“Who asked you that?” she said.

What had he said that for? He didn’t want to go into it. “Parker,” he said.

“Normal enough questions, all of them, aren’t they?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, kicking a rock. “Everything’s normal.”

“Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t say that about Parker.”

“He’s not my friend anyway, so I don’t care.”

“I think he is your friend,” she said. “Why don’t you call him and make up?”

“Make up? He’s an asshole. Parker’s an asshole.”

“I think he’s disturbed, but everybody can make mistakes. Maybe you ought to overlook what he did the other day, if it’s going to bother you so much that he’s not your friend anymore.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” he said.

“It bothers me that I don’t have many friends. Tiffy’s my best friend, and I don’t have a world in common with her. Sometimes I just think she feels sorry for me.”

“Why would she feel sorry for you?”

“What reason would she have for liking me so much? There’s the whole faculty of NYU to talk to if she gets lonesome, and she always knows better than I do what’s going on. She tells me about things. I never tell her about things.”

“You tell her about Dad.”

“Does that bother you? That I talk to people?”

“I don’t care who you talk to,” he said.

“You say that you don’t care so much that I don’t know when you’re serious.” She ate one of the strawberries. “Good,” she said. “I guess it’s cheating to start eating them before they’re weighed, though.”

“Parker’d probably burn them. He’d probably pick them, then try to light them.”

“Strawberries flambé?” she said. “Maybe people just take Parker too seriously.”

“How come you’re on his side all of a sudden?”

“Oh, I’m not really on his side. I just hate to think so badly of him when he’s just a twelve-year-old child. I was pretty strange when I was twelve years old.”

“How?” he said.

“Well, I guess you’d call it being very straight. I wouldn’t let anybody cut my hair. My hair was my proudest possession. And I was very shy and very quiet. I played the piano. Did you know that?”

“What for?” he said.

“What for?”

“Yeah. Did you want to be in an orchestra or something?”

“I never thought about it. I just liked music. My friends all took music lessons. But in those days girls didn’t think in terms of a career, the way they do now.”

“Huh,” he snorted. “Mary with a career.”

“Mary’s very interested in music, actually.”

“Junk music.”

“She likes music. That’s the important thing.”

“I like to think about Mary having a career. She could be a nurse and do mercy killings.”

“If you did some nice things for your sister, she might do some nice things for you.”

“What? Leave me alone?”

“I don’t know what the truth of that is either, John Joel. Do you two really dislike each other that much?”

“I’d just as soon have Parker for a brother as her as a sister.” He ate a strawberry. He wished it were a cookie. “She’s just as crazy as Parker is.”

“You know she isn’t.”

“You don’t know.”

“What don’t I know?”

“Never mind. I’m not ratting on Mary.”

“Why did you say it if you didn’t want me to know?”

He didn’t answer her, because the farmer was on his way out of the house to greet them. “Going to make a pumpkin pie, are you?” he joked, looking at all the containers filled with strawberries.

Tiffy was running to catch up with them. “There’s a little snake in the grass. It’s thin, and had stripes, and it was about this long.” She held her hands apart.

The farmer pretended to be horrified. He spread his arms as wide as they’d go.

“Is it just harmless?” Tiffy said. “It didn’t go away when I was picking, it came toward me, sort of.”

“Friendly,” the farmer said. “Just a grass snake.”

“I was so nervous I left my basket up there.”

“John Joel,” his mother said, “will you go get it for her?”

He took his time going back with the basket, and he swung it and let some of the strawberries fall out. He was thinking that Nick wouldn’t give Tiffy the time of day. He thought Nick was a lot cooler than Tiffy. He wondered, because he liked Nick more than any of his mother’s women friends, if he was a queer. When he got back with the basket, Tiffy was talking to his mother.

“… the role of women in certain fairy tales,” Tiffy was saying. “I guess it’s obvious to people now that most often it’s the women who are monsters or the ones who have to wait for Prince Charming. But I was wondering today what those fairy tales would sound like if even the most evil, stupid women told it from their perspective. Even granting that they were evil. I wonder if a lot of them weren’t evil just because they were so worn down. I can imagine the fisherman’s wife thinking: If he chooses this as his work, then let him have the long days, the cold and the risk. Let him pull with all his might, and instead of coming up with a fat, golden bass, let him snag a sunken tire. Let it be as round as the world, with a great hole in the center.” Tiffy was talking loudly and waving her arms. “If that’s what the man wants, then let him have that.” He handed the basket to his mother.

“Thank you,” Tiffy said, reaching for it. “That was awfully nice of you.”

“How come you’re a feminist and you’re afraid of snakes?”

“What?” Tiffy said, looking embarrassed. “Being afraid of a snake has to do with politics?”

“John Joel,” his mother said.

“What about lunch?” he said. He was tired of waiting for it.

The farmer tipped the berries onto the scale and wrote down how much Tiffy owed on a white pad stained with strawberry juice. He showed her the figure but didn’t read it out loud, as if it were confidential. Tiffy reached into her pants pocket and handed him a ten-dollar bill.

“Maybe there’s someplace cooler than here to have a picnic,” his mother said. “Let’s go somewhere near the water, if you feel like it.”

“It’s fine with me,” Tiffy said. “Actually, we could sit under the big tree in my backyard if you’d like to. Isn’t that crazy? To put everything in a picnic basket and then end up on the back lawn? Like some funny French film or something.”

“Her car makes me sick,” John Joel said to his mother, loud enough for Tiffy to hear him.

“What?” his mother said. She also looked hot. He thought that if he hadn’t come along, his mother and Tiffy would probably have had a good time. He felt sorry for her, and he wondered why she had insisted — almost insisted — that he come. At least he was better company than Mary. Mary was always looking for a fight, and all he wanted to do was keep quiet. “It makes me carsick,” he said.

“Well, sit in the front this time and see if that makes it better,” his mother said. “I’ll sit in the back.”

“That’s not going to help,” he said. He didn’t know if it would or not, but he didn’t want his mother in the back seat. He didn’t want to ride next to Tiffy, and he didn’t want his mother to have to be in the back. “Forget it,” he said. “I didn’t puke.”

“John Joel,” she said, “don’t be ridiculous. It’s nothing to be ashamed of if you felt sick. We’ll have Tiffy drive slower, and there won’t be as much motion in the front seat, I don’t think.”

“Come on,” he said, kicking a rock. They were in the driveway now, and Tiffy was walking ahead of them. “Forget it, okay?” he said. He knew that if his mother didn’t forget it, he was going to cry.

“Just give it a try,” his mother said.

“I don’t want to,” he said. “Come on. Forget it.”

“Why?” she said. She put her hand on his shoulder and tried to get him to look at her. “Why does everybody try to fight me on the smallest thing?”

“Get off,” he said, shrugging her hand off. Her hand felt light on his shoulder, and warm. It made him realize how sweaty he was all over, once the material was pressed against his skin that way. Suddenly he wanted to be out of his clothes, somewhere cool. He thought about the men and women, the white-plaster men and women, in the museum. He thought that it would be wonderful to be so white and still.

“Tiffy,” his mother said, “let John Joel ride up front with you. The motion in the back seat is making him sick.”

“You don’t mind riding with a feminist?” Tiffy said to him.

“I didn’t even want to come,” he said, whirling to face his mother.

“What am I supposed to do, just let you lie around the house all summer? You’re ten years old. You must be interested in something besides hanging out with your father and Nick and going to lunches with whatever pretty girl there is that week. Last summer you went fishing,” she said. “What’s gotten into everybody? My son tells his father jokes about feminists, and my daughter has to be forced to leave her shrine to Peter Frampton to endure an evening with the family.”

“I’m sorry,” Tiffy said. “I was just teasing. Get in the car, both of you.”

He tried to get in the back seat, but his mother climbed in before he could. She was faster than he was — faster and thinner, and she just squeezed around him. He glared at her, not appreciating it at all. He got in next to Tiffy and rolled down his window. The strawberries were at his feet, and he had the urge to take his foot and just start mashing them. He did have a better time with Nick and his father, and if he wanted to be left alone, he didn’t see why he couldn’t be left alone. Mary got out of everything by having somewhere to go. She was always at Angela’s and he was around the house, so his mother picked on him. Maybe being an orphan wasn’t so bad; if you were an orphan, maybe people didn’t notice you all the time. He pushed his hair out of his eyes. Tiffy was humming, pretending everything was all right. His mother was in the back seat, not making any effort to talk. And the car was going over ruts in the road, and he hoped again that he wouldn’t be sick. He didn’t want anything else to happen. He just wanted to go home. He wanted to eat. And he wanted to slam Parker into a wall, break his arm for the way he’d acted. He was acting badly, he knew, but Parker acted even worse, and for that, he wanted to kill him. He was also sure that Parker hadn’t called — that if he had stayed there all day, he still wouldn’t have had the pleasure of answering the phone and hearing Parker apologize, so he could hang up on him.

His mother began laughing in the back seat. First just a sound he thought might be a hiccough, then a genuine laugh. She put her hand over her mouth and tried to stifle the laugh, but it was no good: She just took her hand away and fell over against the door. Tiffy looked at her in the rear-view mirror. “Dare I ask?” Tiffy said. “Oh,” Louise said, “I can’t tell you, but I was thinking about a secret John Joel told me on the way over, and it just—” She couldn’t get her breath. He found himself smiling, though he didn’t mean to. “It just puts everything in perspective. It’s such a dirty trick that one person pulled on another. I wish I had nerve like that, sometimes. I really do. It’s really really horrible, but it’s so awful and so funny.” She was wiping her eyes. He turned around and saw her wiping her eyes.

“You can’t tell,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, “I wasn’t going to tell. It’s just all so ghastly. It’s selling you such a bill of goods to tell you that you should get married and have a family and be secure. Jesus! What your own family will do to you.”

“This sounds like a real whopper,” Tiffy said.

“It is,” Louise said. “But don’t worry. It’s not somebody you like. This is somebody who almost deserves it.” She started to laugh again, and he thought he was going to be sick — it was as if her laughter was shaking the car. There was noise in his head he couldn’t get rid of, and if he was going to not be sick, he needed to be quiet to fight it down. But it passed. It passed, and his mother stopped laughing and by the time they got to Tiffy’s she wasn’t even smiling.

They had the picnic in the backyard, and when a bird flying over dropped its white shit on the sheet Tiffy had spread on the grass, Tiffy said it was symbolic. Her laughter wasn’t like his mother’s, though; it sounded entirely different.

They were riding home from Tiffy’s house, and he was thinking about being on the train with his father. One of the bad things about being ten years old was that he wasn’t yet six feet tall like his father, and in all kinds of small ways, being short was an embarrassment. If you were fully grown, you could look at something in a museum out of the corner of your eye if you didn’t really want to be seen looking at it. You could stand in the drinking car of the train and just put your fingertips out to steady yourself when the train swayed or lurched, instead of having to reach up and hang on like a child. He always got tired standing on the train and wondered why his father didn’t. It seemed that since his father was taller, and weighed more than he did — though not by much — that his father’s feet would hurt more than his did. “I’m full of illusions about making an escape,” his father said. “Some days I think about it so much, in so many different situations, that I’d out-worry a prisoner of war.” The trees and buildings sailing by the train. The cold blasts of air conditioning. The heavy door opening and closing again. He had wondered, standing and being shaken by the train, whether part of the reason his father wanted him to be escorted around New York didn’t have to do with the fact that his father would envy him for getting lost. His father always arranged things for him to do and places for them to meet, when his father knew perfectly well that he and Parker went into the city on the train alone. Sometimes he envied Brandt for having his father around so much. He couldn’t remember how his father had acted toward him when he was a baby Brandt’s age, but he had thought, even then, that his father probably liked him better than he liked Mary. Fathers liked sons better. But he knew that what his father had been saying on the train included him; his father had meant escaping from all of them — not just to Rye, and not just by going into the city to work. He understood what his father meant.

On the train, his father had said, “Not your type, huh?” And he had been embarrassed that he was so young, that he didn’t have a type, that he didn’t think he ever would. If anybody liked him, ever, he would be grateful. The older girls he knew were like Mary, or worse. Angela was worse. He really couldn’t imagine the sort of girl he would ever like. When it got time to kiss a girl, he would have braces on, and he’d be embarrassed to do it. Thinking about it made him want to escape, too.

“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.”