Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“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 .