“She’s pretty strange, too,” John Joel said.
“Everybody is, I guess. Everybody has their little secrets and their little half-truths. All those people at lunch in New York hedging and dodging like football players.”
“I know something about her even she doesn’t know,” John Joel said.
“About Parker’s mother?”
“Yeah. I shouldn’t tell.”
“How could you know something she doesn’t know?”
“Promise you won’t tell?”
Louise shrugged. “I can’t imagine what I’d find out about her that I’d care about. All she does is play tennis, anyway. Does it have to do with her tennis game?”
“No. It’s that Parker put a pinhole in her diaphragm.”
Louise snapped her head around to look at him. “What did you say?” she said.
He blushed. Parker had had to explain to him what it meant. Now he knew what it meant, and he was suddenly embarrassed to have mentioned it. He should have told her, instead, about the naked plaster people in the museum.
“What?” she said again.
“Parker did it. With a pin.”
“Parker said he did it. Parker wouldn’t do that, would he?”
“Sure,” he said. “Parker’d do it.”
She was still staring at him. “You realize—” she began.
“I know,” he said, and shrugged. “Parker thinks it’s a real good joke. He says it’s her fault if she doesn’t check.”
“But that’s awful,” she said.
“Parker found it. It was in her top drawer. He thought it was a big compact. He opened it and didn’t see any mirror, and then he found out later what it was, and he pricked a hole in it.”
“She’ll see it, won’t she?” Louise said. “Does Parker think that’s funny? She’d never dream Parker would find her diaphragm and do that.”
“She ought to. He’d do anything.”
“What do you mean?” Louise said. “Has he done something worse than that?”
“He just does strange stuff. What I told you about the ticket stubs isn’t exactly the way it happened. He burned them, on the sidewalk outside the train station. He does stuff there’s no point in doing.”
“He’s very disturbed.”
“He’s no friend of mine,” John Joel said.
“But honey — are you sure about that other thing? Mightn’t he just brag that he’d pulled a stunt like that but not really do it?”
“No,” John Joel said. “He’d do it. He wouldn’t care.”
“Imagine Georgia having another little monster like Parker,” Louise said. She brushed her hair out of her face. “I didn’t know you knew what a diaphragm was,” she said.
He blushed again, looked out the window. “I knew,” he said.
“But that’s just horrible” she said. “Parker’s a monster.”
“He rolls cigarettes like they’re joints, but they’re not. He carries them in the pack with his Salems and he smokes them going down the street with his hand cupped around them and he drags on them funny, like they’re joints. He smokes a pack a day of real cigarettes.”
“You don’t smoke with him, do you?”
“He’s no friend of mine.”
“But do you?”
“No,” John Joel said. He was embarrassed that he didn’t, that he wasn’t lying to her. He didn’t know why he’d told her so much. He slid forward in the seat and looked out the window, as they pulled into Tiffy’s driveway. There were day lilies, very tall, falling forward into the driveway, and there were daisies and tall electric-pink phlox. Tiffy’s husband was working in the garden, staking a rosebush. He waved with a pair of pruning shears.
“Hi,” Louise said, getting out of the car. “Tiffy inside?”
“She’s in the garage,” he said. “Hi,” he said, pointing the shears at John Joel.
“Hi,” John Joel said.
“Hi, Tiffy,” Louise called. Tiffy came out of the garage, wiping her forehead on her arm. She had her hair in braids, and for a second that made her look, to John Joel, a little like Nina, in New York. She had on white shorts, and a white halter top, and she was carrying a plant she had just repotted. “I have to take a quick shower and then I’m all ready to go,” she said. “Come inside where it’s cool.”
They followed her into the house. Louise pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table. John Joel pulled out a chair for himself and sat down. The shorts were cutting into his thighs. It smelled like chicken in her kitchen, and he looked at the clock to see how close to lunchtime it was. It was noon. If he were home, he could be eating.
“There’s wine in the fridge,” Tiffy called downstairs. The water went on in the shower.
Louise didn’t get up. “Do you want a Coke if she has one?” she said. He shook his head no. He wanted a Coke, but he wanted more to get out of the house. He wanted to pick the berries and have the picnic and have it over with. The magazine on the table wasn’t worth looking at: The New Republic. All Tiffy’s cups were pottery, and Coke tasted funny in cups like that. He thought about the milkshake he had bought Parker and wished he had his money back.
Louise got up and took a blue pottery cup down from the shelf over the sink and went to the refrigerator. She poured wine into her cup from the jug and put the jug back in the refrigerator. Tiffy’s refrigerator was always interesting: It was filled with colors instead of with wrapped packages: apples loose on a shelf, peaches, limes and lemons, pale-sea-green bottles of Perrier, orange juice in a glass bottle so that you could see the deep-orange color. Tiffy was hollering something from upstairs, but they couldn’t tell what she was saying.
She came down in a few minutes, in green slacks and a black halter, wearing tennis shoes, her hair still braided, but sopping wet.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” she said, picking up the basket on the kitchen table. She said to John Joeclass="underline" “What are you doing this summer?”
“Nothing much,” he said.
“My car,” Tiffy said. “I cleaned it inside, and everybody has to praise it.”
“It looks wonderful,” Louise said.
“I want to sit in the back,” John Joel said.
“There’s no place to vacuum your car around here,” Tiffy said. “I gave up. Last night I wet a sponge and sponged this car clean. It was full of grit and dog hair from my sister’s dog. It looked horrible. Does it smell like dog? I can’t even tell anymore.” Tiffy waved to her husband as she pulled out of the driveway. He had on a straw hat, and he tipped it as the car pulled away.
“Now tell me what you’ve really been doing this summer,” Tiffy said, looking in the rear-view mirror. He slid around in the back seat. He couldn’t think what to tell her except to tell the story about going to the museum again. So he told her about the show he had seen, or tried to, but she broke in: She’d seen it, too. And Calder’s Circus. She started talking about that, how quirky it was, how it always made her smile to see it. How she wanted to shrink and get inside with the circus animals and performers, and tumble around in the case with them at night, because she was sure they did. “I don’t know,” she said to Louise. “Maybe I’m just getting old, but when I went through the Segal show, I felt so frustrated. I felt like those things were so still, and when I stopped to look at Calder’s Circus again on the way out, I felt like they had little hearts beating, and that their little eyes blinked and their mouths smiled when they were alone. When Segal’s people were alone, I thought they’d be just as still. That they couldn’t move, under any conditions.”
Tiffy’s car was an old Cadillac, a black 1955 Cadillac, and it rode as though the shocks were completely worn-out. He had been in her car once before, and he just remembered that it had made him sick. It was hot in the back seat, too, even though Tiffy was driving fast enough that wind blew through the car and slapped him in the face. He tried to concentrate on not being sick. He kept thinking about the picture of the relative that Parker had given away, of how strange the woman in the picture looked. Pictures of his mother when she was a young girl looked the same way; not that she looked anything like Parker’s funny-faced relative, but the pose was the same: The faces looked flat, and they were close to the camera. There was a picture on his father’s dresser — what used to be his father’s dresser — of his mother when she graduated from high school. It was a hand-colored photograph, his mother had told him, and the pearls she wore around her neck were the same color as her teeth and the whites of her eyes. She had on a pink sweater in the picture, and a barrette in her hair, and he could not imagine his mother looking that way. As mothers went, she was pretty. She wore a little make-up, unlike Tiffy, and she didn’t have a horsey face like Parker’s mother, and nobody was as ugly as Marge Pendergast. All her children were ugly, too. He wished that he looked more like his mother or father. He wondered if he would be better-looking if he weren’t fat. Mary wasn’t fat, but she wasn’t very good-looking, and he thought that was true objectively — not just because she was his sister and he hated her.