Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

He hardly ever went into Lord and Taylor’s because it made him sad that she worked there. But he wanted to see her. He felt as if he had been running and running and had never touched base. It was a kind of anxiety that came on him lately: that he was rushing forward, but leaving something behind. Not that he could grab her over the counter at Lord and Taylor’s. And he had no idea what he was going to say when he saw her.

He leaned on the counter and waited while she folded something and handed it to a customer and thanked her. She knew he was there, but didn’t acknowledge him.

“You know what Lois Lane wonders when she’s flying with Superman?” Nina said, without showing any surprise at seeing him.

“What?”

“She’s thinking: Can you read my mind?”

“I can’t. What are you thinking?”

“That I don’t like working at Lord and Taylor’s, and I’m embarrassed for you to be here.”

“Why should you be embarrassed? Your mother is the only one who believes in success for college grads, right?”

“This place is creepy. You don’t belong here. I hope I don’t belong here.”

“Can you read my mind?” he said. “I feel like it’s been steamrollered. I feel like a tumbleweed might blow out of my ear when the winds shift in the desert in there.”

“God,” she said. “Stop it.”

“I can’t come over tonight,” he said. “John Joel’s at the orthodontist’s, and I’ve got to take him back to Rye this afternoon.”

“Then come back,” she said.

“Come back again ?” he said. He hesitated. “Maybe I should have dinner with them.”

“Then do it,” she said.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sit around and get stoned,” he said.

She shrugged.

“I’ll drive back in,” he said. “I’m meeting him for lunch. He and Nick and I are having lunch. Maybe that’s good enough.”

“Listen,” she said. “If you think you should have dinner with them tonight, do it.”

“He was telling me… Did you ever see those things called snakes? They’re about the size of a cigarette, and when you light them they expand and curl like a snake? I hadn’t thought about them since I was a kid. Do you know the things I’m talking about?”

“I don’t think Lord and Taylor’s carries them.”

“Come on,” he said. “You know the things I mean?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re not just saying that?”

“No. Why would I pretend to know what snakes are? The boy who lived next door to us used to light snakes. What about them?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to get some snakes and sparklers for the Fourth of July?”

“All right,” she said. “Why?”

“You sound like my kid.”

“Is this another one of your things about how much younger I am than you? Even if I am, I’m more together than you are.”

“That’s the truth.”

“Maybe you ought to go to work,” she said. She laid her hand over his.

“I was scared to death of those things,” he said. “The truth of it is that I hated caps and cherry bombs and snakes. How did I ever make it through the Army?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was barely born. Remember?”

“I want to get a snake and have you light it, okay? You light it, and this time if I feel like jumping back, I jump back.”

He realized for the first time that a woman was waiting politely beside him, holding a package of panty hose.

The de rigueur picture on the desk: Nantucket, rented boat, August vacation. The children: not the children as they really were, even then. Mary in her gingerbread-man bathing suit, wet pigtails tied with red ribbons, staring seriously into the camera; John Joel still a baby, sitting on the deck at Louise’s feet, Louise’s face a little blurred because at the last second she had moved slightly, trying to make him look into the camera. Before he was fat. When he still had his downy, shoulder-length baby hair. Louise tall and tanned, seven months pregnant, wearing a gingerbread-man bathing suit like Mary’s, but without the ruffle. And from the left, harsh sunlight, washing out the deck so that it looked as if Louise was poised on the edge of something, a woman not bending forward to direct her little boy’s attention to the lens, but moving to protect him from something more serious. At the right was the jagged shadow of the ship’s big sail. How strange that years later he would be fascinated not by the people but by the light and shadow, the light washing out one side of the photograph and the dark shadow jabbing toward them from the other side. He could not remember, and the picture did not help himremember, what it was like to take a family vacation in Nantucket. How easy to look back and see that things were ending, going wrong. Even the way shadows fell in a snapshot became symbolic .

When Mary and John Joel were asleep, they had lain in their cabin and she had curled on her side, with her back to him, and he had made love to her that way, holding her stomach in the front. They had been afraid that the children, separated from them by a wall the thickness of cardboard, would wake up, that a wave would toss the ship at the wrong moment, that it was late in the pregnancy and there might be pain .

Not true: Those were easier things to say to each other than what they were really afraid of .

MARY WAS watching as Angela dipped the tiny sable brush into the small glass bottle, wiped the brush on the lip of the bottle, then opened her mouth as though she were singing “o” and slowly outlined her top lip with the plum-colored lip gloss.

Downstairs, Angela’s father was complaining about his latest case to Angela’s mother, who was reading the evening paper and eating an apple. His ranting had driven Angela and Mary upstairs, and then they had started to fool around with Angela’s make-up.

“He lost five hundred dollars over the weekend in Saratoga,” Angela said. “And Mom says that he thinks he’s going to lose this case.”

“That looks great,” Mary said. “Your mouth is so sensual. It looks like Bianca Jagger’s.”

“I’ve got big lips,” Angela said. “I read that if you emphasize your worst features people will think they’re beautiful because you think they are.” Angela shrugged. She was sitting on an old piano stool, covered with red velvet, in front of an Art Deco vanity that her grandmother had given her for her birthday. Inside one of the drawers (her grandmother got the vanity at an auction) there had been a card with ten heart-shaped buttons on it, and in another drawer what was probably the veil from a hat, dotted with little white flowers that had curled into balls with age and dirt — and, best of all, scratched in the top drawer, “Richard loves Daniel.” Angela had taken the veil and the card of buttons and put them in that drawer. She opened it again to see if the message, surrounded by the big scratched heart, was still there. It was.

“He’s really fucked-up,” Angela said. “Maybe he lost a thousand dollars. Sometimes he takes a thousand.”

“Peter Frampton gets his hair curled, I think,” Mary said. “God — I wish I looked like his girlfriend. The one who sued him. She was so incredible.”

“Bobby Pendergast took Annie’s copy of ‘I’m in You’ to the park and was playing Frisbee with it. She went down there and she goes, ‘What are you doing?’ and he goes, ‘He’s a faggot.’ All those Pendergasts are creeps.”