Falling in Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

a picture of the two of them at a Hollywood party. Their hair was more noticeable than it might have been because the photographer had gotten so close to snap them that their features had been washed out. It was almost like looking at people without faces, but Peter Frampton’s expression, however faint, was unmistakable: the expression on the poster. Peter Frampton and his girlfriend—the paper identified her only as his “lady love”—would have thought that this scene was hopelessly bourgeois. If Peter Frampton went on a picnic, Mary was sure that he went naked, in a speedboat, to some private island at midnight, with the lady love and a bottle of champagne. He wouldn’t be seen dead in a button-down shirt hanging out of a pair of baggy jeans, with a bag full of things to have a barbecue with and a wife and three children trailing behind him. On Peter Frampton’s picnic, he would want to pour champagne on the lady love’s nipples and lap off the sweet, tiny bubbles; he wouldn’t want to find out how many feminists it took to change a light bulb.
    She had bought a pen and ink and a book about calligraphy so that she could write a love letter to Peter Frampton.
    Stupid Lost in the Forest had had a tantrum when nobody hadany idea why Becky had thrown away the dictionary in the first chapter of
Vanity Fair
. “You probably think that getting rid of a book that heavy would just be common sense,” she had said. She had threatened to make them write essays called “What I Did with My Summer.” Even Lost in the Forest, much as Mary hated to admit it, was probably having a better summer than she was. She was on her own, and if her parents were somewhere having a barbecue, she didn’t have to go along. She could stay home and read one of her precious books and understand every word of it. Even reading a book would be better than coming to the park on Friday evening and eating hot dogs, with mosquitoes closing in as it got dark, and nobody with anything to say. Her father was deliberately walking them this far on the path by the side of the access road so they would be tired when they got to just the place he wanted them to be, and nobody would talk, and he could read the paper and listen to the radio. Her mother knew it, too. Her mother was glaring at his back as he walked ahead of them. Brandt was swinging on John Joel’s arm, singing “Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the Af-ri-can ex-plorer… ” He lived with his grandmother, John’s mother, and he watched television all the time. He knew a lot of routines from Marx Brothers movies. Last week he had driven everybody crazy by putting one leg up for them to hold, and when they swatted it down, bobbing his leg up again. He was also able to imitate, perfectly, Harpo’s eye roll and Groucho’s walk. He did it so often that Louise was embarrassed, worried that people would think he was retarded. She was always worried that somebody would think one of her children was retarded. She was also worried that neighbors would see in her windows. Never mind that no neighbors could see through the tall fir trees that bordered their lawn, and that there was a huge lot between their house and the Dowells’: The neighbors would see from the road, driving home. See
what?
    John spent the weekends at home. The rest of the week he lived with his mother in Rye, and Brandt and Henri the big black poodle lived with them. John had gone there, in part, because his mother said she had cancer when she didn’t. When he found out the truth, he didn’t much care: Rye was a short drive to New York, and he hated commuting.
    At first he had gone alone, and then he had returned for the poodle. There had been two dogs, and suddenly, when they were both five years old, one of them (at least) had started shitting in the house. Louise had been convinced that it was the poodle. She had always liked the German shepherd better. But an experiment with blue food coloring in the poodle’s food had pinned