Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

Parker liked to stay in his room. He had a ten-speed Schwinn he had gotten for Christmas mounted on the wall of his room, and he never went out riding. He had skates that he had gotten the same Christmas that he sometimes put on and rolled around the basement on when nobody else was home. He had weights that he didn’t lift and a punching bag that he didn’t punch. His father gave him the things for presents, thinking that he might lose weight if he weren’t so sedentary. Parker wouldn’t use them, and when his mother asked him to straighten up his room, he always replied by asking her to have his father load out all the things that he had given him. There was a picture in Animal Antics of an ape in tennis shoes and a white sweatband around its head, slugging a punching bag that was painted with big breasts. In this, as in all of the pictures, the animal’s face was expressionless.

“So when do you get your wires?” Parker said. He opened his mouth and made his eyes big, imitating Jaws in the James Bond movies. Parker curled his fingers and pretended to be gripping something in midair. He cocked his head and slowly, with his eyes huge, pretended to be biting the thing in half. “See Moonraker?” he said. “It’s not as sexy as some of them, but it’s good. Jaws gets on Bond’s side for a while, and in space there’s a war and they blow off each other’s heads with lasers.” Parker twitched like a person being electrocuted. He was jerking his finger at John Joel, pretending it was a gun. “You’ll get braces and look like Jaws,” Parker said. “But you’d have to wear stilts. I wonder if you’re going to grow any taller. You’re supposed to start growing about now. I grew a lot in the last year.”

“You’re still as ugly as a Baby Ruth.”

“Listen to who’s talking. Brace face.”

“A lot of people have got braces.”

Parker hooked his big toe under the top of one sock and began to push it down.

“Did you see Moonraker or not?” Parker said.

“I didn’t see it yet.”

“I saw it with my mother, but it’s gone from that theater. It’s still in New York, though. Do you want to go?”

“Where would you get the money?”

“I’ve got ten bucks, smart-ass,” Parker said.

“How’d you get it?”

“I found it blowing down the street. Okay?”

“You took it from your mother’s purse again.”

“Boy,” Parker said, slipping his sock onto the floor. “You’d better report me to the Boy Scouts. A person like me isn’t safe to take old ladies across the street.” Parker laughed. The other sock came off and he flipped it to the opposite side of the room. “What’d you come over for if you wanted to act like an asshole?”

“You called me , Parker,” John Joel said.

“Yeah. I call you and you act like you’re my girlfriend or something, and I hurt your feelings or something, and you hang up and then you come over here. I wasn’t going to answer the door. I didn’t want you standing out there like an asshole, hollering at the window all day, though.”

“I ought to get going,” John Joel said.

“Yeah. Now you want me to beg you to stay. You’re weird, man.” Parker raised his hands again and bit down, into air. “Jaws cuts the cable when they’re in this glassed-in car, riding down the mountain,” Parker said. “You know what my mother says about the movie? She keeps talking about the girls in the movie, like it’s Miss America or something. Marge Pendergast was with us, and that creepy kid Stanley of hers, and she kept asking Marge how come the girl with Bond can run all around in those high-heeled shoes. They kept talking about how good the girl’s hair looked. They go to movies to see how women can run in high heels.”

“What’s your mother hanging out with her for all the time? I thought they had a big fight.”

“They did. But Marge is always up for playing tennis. My mother hates doubles, and Marge is always up for playing singles with her. I wonder what she looks like with her tits cut off.” Parker sucked at a mosquito bite on his wrist. “My father knew a guy that just had one ball. One dropped down and the other one didn’t, so they did something to look for the other ball, but it wasn’t in there.”

“Who does your mother hang out with?” Parker said.

“Tiffy.”

“Yuck,” Parker said. “I saw her during that big snow last winter in these men’s work boots and this big parka of I guess her husband’s, in the grocery store, and she stopped and looked at me like I was weird.” Parker picked the cuticle of his big toe. “I’ll bet she’s twice as ugly as Marge Pendergast, even with her tits,” Parker said. “I wouldn’t mind doing something to scare the shit out of her.”

“What would you do?”

“Just something. Scare the shit out of her.” Parker smiled. “You could bet she wouldn’t come running out of a burning house in high heels. She’d have on those manure clompers and she’d probably be dressed up like a man and her husband would be dressed up like a woman. My mother says her husband’s faggy. She probably takes all his clothes and leaves him hers.” Parker smiled again. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “You want to send her something?”

“What do you mean, send her something?”

“You know that picture of her in the paper? My mother’s got it around. That picture of the bunch of them, at the sale? We can take one of these—”

Parker rolled off the bed, and let himself fall to the floor. “Uggggh,” he groaned. “They got me.” He stood up. “Come here,” Parker said. “Come on, I want to show you.”

When Parker opened his bedroom door, he always looked both ways down the hallway. He did it even when he knew that nobody else was home. “This way,” Parker said, and John Joel followed him. They ended up in Parker’s mother’s bedroom. By the bed there was a big table, and Parker started to shuffle through folded newspapers and letters she had opened and stuffed back in their envelopes, looking for the picture. “Look,” Parker said, when he found it. “Come on.” John Joel followed Parker again, back to his room. Parker closed the door. He took tape and scissors out of his desk drawer and sat on the floor. “Watch,” he said.

“What happens if your mother looks for that picture?”

“She doesn’t find it,” Parker said.

“But Parker — what if she notices it’s gone and Tiffy tells her she got something funny in the mail?”

“Fat chance. And even if it happened, all I’ve got to do is deny it. What do you think they’re going to do to me?”

Parker was lifting the top corner of his mattress. He held it up and took out the fourth magazine from the top. It was Animal Antics , and with his eyes closed, Parker flipped it open to the picture of the monkey bending over to get the banana. The picture had been taken indoors; the banana was on wall-to-wall carpeting. Parker shook his head, then carefully ripped the page out of the magazine. He put the magazine back under the mattress before he did anything else. Then he went back to the spot on the floor where John Joel sat, where the scissors and tape were, and cut Tiffy’s head out of the newspaper picture. He positioned it over the monkey’s face and taped it down, using little pieces of tape. John Joel had to admit that it was funny. “Let’s get an envelope,” Parker said. He opened his door and looked both ways again. He went into the hallway and opened a drawer in a table and took an envelope and a stamp out. Then he went back into his bedroom, closed the door, folded the ape picture twice and put it neatly in the envelope. He printed her name, in big letters, across the envelope. Then he went out into the hallway again, to look up her address in the phone book. When it was finished, he said, “Let’s go mail it.”