Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

She hung up and sat in the chair. From the apartment next door, she could hear music. It was a group of people singing “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The people next door had come over once, the first week she stayed in the apartment, early in the morning, to see if she had any goat’s milk she could spare. “Oh man, I really didn’t think so, but the things you least expect can happen sometimes,” the man had said. The woman with him had just said, “Thank you anyway.” She never talked much, Cynthia found out — in fact, the first time she knocked on the door, wanting Cynthia to play Go with her, she had just smiled and held out the box. They apparently had a record of “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and were singing along with it. There seemed to be lots of people singing. There was a noise that sounded like a chair crashing. The record played on, but the people stopped singing. After quite a while, during which Cynthia thought black thoughts about Spangle and her students, someone started singing “Tammy.” The woman who sang it had a clear, high voice that would have been very pleasurable to listen to, if she had been singing something other than “Tammy.”

Cynthia thought that she would like to have enough money to have a house in the country — Spangle had once had that — and to be able to sit in it and not hear a sound. There would be no phone in the house, and there would be no colorful locals, and if there were, they wouldn’t be magicians. They would be traditionally crazy, maybe — religious fanatics, conservatives. It would be nice if there was a garden, and a deer or two; and if the deer grazed in the garden, she would not shoot them. It would be nice to worry, every summer, about what to do with so much zucchini. Zucchini bread. Zucchini bisque. Zucchini biscuits. Zucchini soufflé. Zucchini balls. Zucchini-lentil casserole. Zucchini with zucchini sauce. How had she gotten bombed on three Kahluas?

It was unbelievable. Pendergast’s mother had come in, and why had she wanted her son to pass the course, in spite of his having failed every assignment? Because she did not think that she could cope with one more thing after her double mastectomy. She had said this wearing a thin cotton blouse that was as flat as a piece of paper against her chest. “All I want to do is play tennis and enjoy my summer and hope that I live,” Pendergast’s mother had said to her. The woman had smelled of alcohol. Scotch, probably. Drunk or not, the woman had no breasts. The thought of it made Cynthia jump out of the chair. She went to the window again, and looked out. The street was empty. Finally a little girl and her mother came by. She watched them until they were out of sight. Of course she couldn’t flunk Pendergast. She wondered if she could flunk Mary Knapp. She wondered if she would ever have a better job than the one she had this summer.

There was a fight going on in the hall. A woman was crying. She thought about putting the chain on and peeking out, but decided not to. The woman who was crying — no, a different woman, because the crying kept on — was saying: “You recorded me singing ‘Tammy,’ you son-of-a-bitch. You give me that goddamn cassette.” Another noise that sounded like a chair breaking. People running down the stairs. She went to the window and looked out. A girl about twenty, in a long, wraparound Indian cotton skirt, red running shoes, and a silver halter top was running to the left, and a man was chasing a woman, running to the right. The man caught the woman, picked her up and carried her back toward the building. They passed the building, though, and laughing, continued down the street. Why couldn’t the magician be interested in them? Another woman, with a sailor’s cap and white pants and a black shirt, came down the steps. She didn’t seem to be drunk. She turned around to wave, and Cynthia jerked her head back from the window. She peeked again, to see if the magician was out there. He was, but she couldn’t see him. He really did manage to come out of nowhere. She tried to imagine where he could be hiding that he would have a view of the street in front of the building, but she never saw him.

Pendergast’s mother had asked her if she played tennis.

Bobby called again, this time to give her a message for Spangle. The message was that he was saving an article for Spangle from the New York Times about umbrella bamboo, which flowers once every hundred years, then dies. All the world’s umbrella bamboo was about to flower and die. “It’s not as depressing as it sounds, if you read the article,” Bobby said. “When Spangle gets back, ask him to call me. Here’s my number. Have you got a pencil?”

She found enough Grand Marnier, left over from a soufflé they had made a long time ago, to have a shot-glassful. She drank it, thinking that it was probably possible to combine zucchini and Grand Marnier. The Desperation Cookbook , she would call it. At the end of every recipe it could say, “If desperate, substitute any ingredients.” My God — imagine not having your breasts. What awful things happened to women.

She went into the bedroom and undressed. She took her cotton nightgown from the foot of the bed and put it on, thinking that she would shower later. There was nothing in the apartment to eat, and undressing removed the temptation to go out and find food. There was a New York Times on the bedroom floor. She got into bed, put Spangle’s pillow behind her pillow, and stretched out. Flipping through the paper, she found some answers to a quiz she hadn’t seen:

2. Mr. Niehouse, an American businessman, was rescued and returned to the United States after having been held captive by leftist guerrillas in Venezuela since his kidnapping in February 1976.

3. The number of passenger cars has remained about the same.

She looked through the rest of the paper. Mayor Koch, she found out, had refused to control the pigeon problem by shooting them. His reason was: “When you go after a pigeon, all the people who love pigeons will hate you.” She read about police officer Ignatius Gentile, who jumped in front of a subway car in Brooklyn. She learned that Bloomingdale’s had quickly sold out of its Skylab Protective Helmet. She spent most of the time studying the crossword puzzle, wondering about 49 down: “—Across the Table,” 1934 song. Five letters. The Grand Marnier was gone. Spangle was in Madrid. Pendergast’s mother’s breasts were gone. Only the magician was sure to be out there, all revved up, full of tricks, eager to talk. If she thought he was dangerous, she would have been terrified, but she was more frightened of that crazy what’s-his-name in her class, with his motorcycle and his painted-on smile, than she was of the magician. Maybe she could agree to have coffee and donuts with him in exchange for his coming to her class and doing magic tricks. He could have the students jump through a burning hoop, and if they missed, what the hell.

The phone rang, and she almost didn’t answer it, but at the last minute, the eighth ring, she thought that it might be Spangle. She went to the phone. It was her sister. Cynthia told her that she had written her a letter, but that she didn’t have to worry — it wouldn’t get mailed. In the morning she would be sober, and in the morning, when she dared to go out, the temptation to send it would be gone.

“How nasty was it?” her sister said.

“I said you’d sold out for money and security.”

“That’s certainly true. What was the nasty part?”

Cynthia sighed. “I’m glad I didn’t bother to go mail it.”

“What did you mean before, when you said that in the morning you’d dare to go out?”

“Oh, I wasn’t really serious. There’s some creepy guy around here who’s from the West Coast — I guess that part is true, at least — and he’s got a crush on me. Guess what he is.”