Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

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.”

JOHN JOEL was in Parker’s bedroom. There was a poster of Donna Summer on the wall above Parker’s bed, and another poster of the Incredible Hulk. Parker had cut Donna Summer’s face out of the poster and put it in the Incredible Hulk’s hand. In the space where Donna Summer’s face had been, he had put a picture of his mother. He had hung it behind the poster, frame and all. You could really tell that that face did not go with that long black hair. John Joel looked more closely at Donna Summer’s head in the hand of the Incredible Hulk. Parker had put a wad of gum over one of Donna Summer’s eyes. There was also a picture of Washington crossing the Delaware in the room. On the glass, over Washington’s face, he had put another picture of Donna Summer’s head that he had cut out of a magazine. His mother was always asking him to straighten up his room.

Parker kept a towel in his room, on a towel rack. Once he had gotten poison ivy after using the same towel his father had used when he had raked and burned leaves and showered, and since Parker had not been outside the house that day, he was sure that he had contracted poison ivy from his father’s towel. He bought himself five red towels with money he had gotten for his birthday and told his parents never to use them. His mother had said that he was being ridiculous, and that she wouldn’t launder the towels — they’d bleed for the first ten washings, probably. So Parker took care of his own towels: He arranged them a certain way on the towel rack, so he could tell if they’d been tampered with, and he washed them in the basement sink, and he had never had poison ivy again. He had never forgiven his father, either. Before he got poison ivy, Parker wouldn’t do yard work unless his father paid him, but after he got poison ivy, no amount of money would get him into the yard.

Parker tossed down his comic book. The comic, which he’d bought in New York, was called Endless Torture —it was a parody of genuine sadistic magazines — which Parker paid bums fifty cents to buy for him in the city. In the comic, people bleeding to death with their arms cut off were always trying to hail cabs on deserted streets, and people who had had their tongues ripped out were shown one frame later gagged with their own tongues. People spouted blood like fountains; their arms and legs went sailing through the air like Frisbees; their eyes really popped. Parker kept all the magazines and comics neatly laid out between his mattress and box spring. He knew where they all were; he had their positions memorized the way a chess player can close his eyes and envision all the pieces perfectly. He knew whether to lift the mattress near the pillow or at the foot of the bed. He could also close his eyes and flip the book open to a given scene. The book would fall open exactly on, or maybe two or three pages before or after, the picture he had in mind. He also had a few men’s magazines: Playboy and Oui and Hustler . He liked the pictures in Hustler of what syphilis would do, and he gave thanks that the poison ivy hadn’t done anything like that to him. But these magazines weren’t his favorites. He thought that the funniest magazine was the one called Animal Antics . It told stupid fairy tales about animals, and there were black and white and a few color pictures of animals dressed up. Most of the pictures showed the animals’ genitals. Parker always thought the pictures were just as funny, even if he’d just looked at them five minutes before: the monkey in the ballerina’s pink crinoline tutu bending over to get a banana, its pink anus pointed at the camera; a cow on its side, udders full, staring blankly at the camera, a big yellow bonnet on its head and blue make-up above its eyes. There were also close-ups of a bunch of red ants feeding on a Hershey’s Kiss melting in the sun, swarming around a discarded used prophylactic.