Going back to his grandmother’s house in Rye, the day he had had lunch with Nick and his father and the girl whose name he had forgotten again, his father had asked him if he liked any girls. He hated to be asked that, because there weren’t any girls he liked. So he had made up a lie about a girl he had liked who had transferred to another school in the middle of the year. He had even described her: bangs, glasses, tall. They had been in the drinking car, standing up. He had been having a ginger ale, and his father had been having a gin and tonic. “What girls do you like?” he had asked his father. It had just come out, before he realized what a ridiculous question it was. His father had been taken aback by it. His father had said that he liked Louise. “What did you think of Nick’s girlfriend?” his father had asked him after a while. And for some reason he hadn’t wanted to let on that he thought she was pretty. He had shrugged. His father had said, “Not your type, huh?” There was another long pause; then, finishing his drink, his father had said: “Well, I think she’s quite pretty.”
In the front seat, Louise was telling Tiffy about the last picnic the family had gone on.
“There were these two silly girls at the park on Friday night. They were with two boys, and all four of them were drunk, and I actually envied them for having such a mindless good time.”
“There’s nothing wrong with having a mindless good time once in a while.”
“At least I said something that night that I’d wanted to say for a long while. Not that there was any response to it, but I finally said it. It was about my dog. I said that I wished I had the dog back, and that I could be playing ‘get the stick’ with Mr. Blue. No wonder I liked the dog. It was so dogged. It was just like me. It would’ve played ‘get the stick’ until it fell over dead, and I’d go on those stupid picnics and trudge through the snow if he kept saying we should go there.” Louise sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I talk about the dog too much.”
“You don’t talk about it very much,” Tiffy said.
“She does,” John Joel said. “All the time.”
Tiffy pulled into a graveled drive, in the shape of a half circle, and parked behind a yellow truck. Tiffy had found out about this place from a friend: It wasn’t advertised, but one day a week the farmer let people come and pick berries, and he weighed them on a scale on his back porch. Tiffy always knew about things that no one else knew about: meetings in people’s apartments, places to pick strawberries, places to swim without getting caught, books that had been written but not published. Whenever she talked about a book, she’d say: “You have to read it when it comes out,” and when she talked about a movie she’d seen, it was always “at a screening.” He could understand why his mother was in awe of Tiffy, but she was so unlike his mother in so many ways that he was surprised his mother liked her so much. According to his mother, Tiffy did everything right. His father didn’t take Tiffy seriously. His father just thought that Tiffy was pretentious and talked a lot. He hoped that his mother wouldn’t tell his father about this day on the weekend, because they were sure to get into a fight about it.
As he followed his mother and Tiffy through the high grass to the strawberry field, he picked up snatches of the conversation. Tiffy was talking about what was wrong, politically, with The Deer Hunter. She kept stressing that word—politically. His mother nodded and didn’t have much to say. It was hot in the field, and he wished he had on looser clothes. Tiffy had left the basket with the food back in the car. They probably wouldn’t be eating for another hour. He swatted a yellow butterfly away, and when it fluttered he saw that it was a butterfly and a smaller butterfly, or a moth. They swirled up and flew away. A mosquito buzzed in his ear.
There were about ten people over the crest of the hill, picking strawberries that grew in neat rows. He hated the idea of bending over in the heat to pick berries and wondered why he’d come. There was no way out of it. He took the container his mother held out and went to one of the rows and began groping under the leaves for the berries. Every berry was ripe and large, so it didn’t matter what he pulled off. He thought about the pie his mother had said she’d make, and hoped that she’d make two. He hoped that Mary would eat at Angela’s.
His mother and Tiffy were talking about his father. He moved to another row, where he wouldn’t hear them. He had found out enough. He had found out they were separated. He suddenly felt sorry for himself, and a little dizzy in the heat: What if they had done it when he was a baby, what if they had given him away, even, and he had been an orphan? It would be nice if they had given Mary away and kept him. Brandt was already gone. He envied Parker for being an only child and wondered what made him so messed up when he didn’t have anybody he had to share things with or be polite to, except his parents. Nobody would put crap in Parker’s bed that he’d roll over on or cut his foot on. If Parker thought it would be fun to have a brother or a sister, he should just spend a day in his house and see how awful Mary was. He had bought Parker two hamburgers and French fries and a Coke and a chocolate milkshake, and Parker had set fire to the ticket stubs. He bent over too far and lost his balance and remembered shoving Parker and not knocking him over. He thought about seeing Parker one more time — maybe waiting until fall and ganging up on him with some of the other kids — and letting him have it. Then Parker would have something to tell his shrink about. Then he could talk about how he was such an asshole that he’d gotten slugged.
“Are you scowling?” his mother said, “or is the sun too much for you?”
“Sun,” he said.
“Do you think we have enough?” she said.
He nodded yes. He thought that Tiffy would want to keep picking, though, and he guessed right. He and his mother started back for the farmer’s porch before Tiffy did.
“What’s the matter?” she said to him.
“Nothing’s the matter. Everybody’s always asking me what I’m doing and how I’m doing and what girls do I like… ”
“Who asked you that?” she said.
What had he said that for? He didn’t want to go into it. “Parker,” he said.
“Normal enough questions, all of them, aren’t they?” she said.