Falling in Place

Seventeen

HE WAS TRICKED. Parker set him up for it. After refusing to go into the city with John Joel, Parker called, suspecting, no doubt, that John Joel wouldn’t go alone. They talked for a while on the phone about trying to get a ride to the movies to see Moonraker. Parker told him he wouldn’t understand half the movie, but if he didn’t talk during it, he’d explain what he didn’t get afterward. John Joel’s mother was doing an errand for one of the hospital patients, though, so she couldn’t take them, and Parker’s mother had laryngitis. Parker had him hold the phone while he asked his mother if she was in bed because she was sick with something in addition to laryngitis, or whether she could get up and take them to the movies. Parker’s mother had written: “You don’t have a sympathetic bone in your body.” Parker suggested calling Frankie Wu. Wu’s mother didn’t work, and when they got to the theater, they could ditch Wu and meet him outside when it was over. John Joel said that wasn’t a good idea. Parker said, “Ah, you pansy.” When they hung up, John Joel went into the living room, sprawled in the chair, and got a comic to read. It was one he had borrowed from Parker, called Pig Fig, and it showed pigs being fed into a giant machine that ground them into pulp, and pig-faced bakers molding the pulp into the nearly round shape of a fig.

“So are you going to flunk summer school?” he said to Mary as she walked into the room to get her purse.

She had her tablet and her book in her hand. She picked up her purse, pretending not to hear him.

“Think I’ll go to New York today and have some fun,” he said.

Mary was doing something in the kitchen. She was humming a Linda Ronstadt song, getting something out of the refrigerator.

“Wanna make me another breakfast?” he said, following her into the kitchen.

“You need it,” she said. “You look like a breakfast. You know which part? The sausage part.” She jabbed her finger into the roll of fat above his Bermuda shorts. A pain shot through his stomach.

“I’m not ignorant, though,” he said. “Fuzz Scuzz.”

Parker had taught him that insult. Somebody that made you itch to look at them was a Fuzz Scuzz. He said it to her again, curling his fingers and making a face.

“How old are you?” she said. “Ten?”

“Daddy and Nick and I had lunch in New York,” he said. “You’ve never had lunch with Daddy in New York, have you?”

“If Daddy really wanted to see you, he’d live here,” Mary said. She got a Tab out of the refrigerator. “You’re probably why he doesn’t,” she said. “He can’t stand you.”

“I hear you’ve got a crush on Lloyd Bergman,” he said. “Somebody whose brother was at that party you and Angela went to told me. Want to know who?”

“No,” she said. She opened the Tab, took a sip.

“Frankie Wu’s brother. How come you don’t get a crush on him?” John Joel pulled the skin at the corner of his eyes, making them into slits.

“You don’t look as ugly that way,” she said.

“Are you the homeliest girl in summer school?” he said.

“Beat your meat,” she said. She slung her purse over her shoulder and picked up the can of Tab, clutched her books under her arm. She was carrying a lot of stuff, and he watched her, hoping she’d drop something going out the door. She walked very close to the door and opened it with a stiff flick of her wrist. She went out, and he heard the slow hiss as the door closed behind her. As usual, she had topped him with an insult he didn’t understand. It reminded him that he was hungry and hadn’t eaten for two hours, since his mother fixed him breakfast. He opened the refrigerator, saw that there was hamburger meat, and took out the package, ripped off a handful and made it round. He put a lump of butter in a pan and turned on the stove. When the butter sputtered into liquid, he pressed the hamburger into the pan. It was ten o’clock. She was late for school, and he was surprised that she was going. His mother had stalked out of the house, after calling Mary three times and getting no response. Mary’s breakfast was still on the table. The eggs had congealed. The toast was all buttery shine. The bacon looked fine. He picked up a piece and ate it. As the hamburger cooked, he ate the other two pieces.

He was finishing the hamburger when Parker called again.

“What do you want?” he said to Parker.

“I want you to come over. I want to show you something.”

“What have you got that I haven’t seen?”

“What are your big plans for the day?” Parker said. “I’ve got about a dozen comics you haven’t seen, for one thing. My mother made an orange cake before she got sick. She’s going out, anyway. Somebody just called her, and she’s getting dressed.”

“I thought she was sick.”

“Listen,” Parker said, “I’m not going to beg you.” He hung up.

John Joel took his last bite of hamburger and put the plate in the sink. He went outside and ran across the lawn, after a bird that was pecking in the grass. The bird flew away, and he watched it go, higher and higher, until it landed in the peach tree. The peaches got about half the size of peaches in the store, then turned gray and dropped from the tree. Mary had put one in his bed, and when he showed his mother, she had yanked Mary by one arm into the room and made her pick up the peach, which had burst, and throw it away. Then she had made Mary strip the bed and wash the sheet in the laundry tub. It was the first time he had seen Mary cry in a long time. It was also the first time he had seen his mother and Mary crying together. While they were downstairs, he had taken his mother’s little manicuring scissors and carefully cut the threads for about two inches along the seam of Mary’s jeans, in the crotch. He tugged, to make sure the seam had come apart. When he tugged, a couple of tiny threads he had missed burst. Parker had taught him that trick. He did it to his mother’s tennis shorts. “You can do too much or too little,” Parker said. “Cutting this much is about right. Don’t tug at the seam, and it’ll open gradually. It’ll open while she’s playing tennis.” Parker had his own scissors. He had scissors in about six sizes, that his grandmother had given him because he told her he was interested in paper cutting. Parker had cut a butterfly shape out of a piece of paper and sent it to his grandmother with a thank you note written on one wing. His grandmother had sent a small knife that had belonged to his grandfather that seemed never to go dull. Parker used that knife for fraying upholstery.

John Joel climbed up in the tree, saying “shit” when he scraped his leg. He weighed more than he had at the beginning of summer, and it was hard to bend his leg as sharply as he needed to to haul himself up on one of the branches. When he got to the limb he usually sat on, or stretched out on, he settled himself and examined the scrape on his leg. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bleeding. He clamped his hand over it and hoped the pressure would stop the stinging.

There was nothing to do. He stared at the big bumblebees hovering around the abelia, and wished that there were some way to blindfold Mary and lead her into the bush. He looked at the lot between their house and Angela’s. Some butterflies flew up from the brush. It was a sticky, hot day. His stomach felt heavy, but he was also hungry. He swung his legs back and forth, too lazy, after just having climbed into the tree, to work his way down and go back to the kitchen for more food. He thought about Parker’s mother’s orange cake. He had eaten a piece of that cake before. There were thin rounds of orange on the top, around the edge, like little wheels on their sides. When Parker’s mother was making bread, or a soufflé, Parker would go into the kitchen, if she was on the second floor, and jump hard outside the oven. He didn’t do anything to ruin her orange cakes. His mother had stopped making bread. Most of her energy now went into making orange cakes that were perfectly shaped, tall, beautiful. John Joel watched a bird hopping around on the grass. The bird didn’t know he was up in the tree. “Meow,” he said, drawing the word out, speaking in as high a pitch as possible. The bird jumped along. John Joel did it again. The bird flew a few feet forward, continued to hop along the grass. Only when John Joel started to climb down from the tree did it fly away.

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 said.

“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.