Falling in Place
My esteemed brother. Have to be careful not to piss him off, though. I’m almost out of the money the old man left me, but he hasn’t run out of his. As far as I know.”
    “Move over,” she said
.
    “Speak right into the microphone,” Spangle said, kicking back the sheet and taking his penis in his hand. “Do you think there are really tankers full of crude oil off the coast that the United States is stopping from making deliveries? Are you angry about gas rationing?”
    “Get over,” she said, nudging him with her hip
.
    “Come closer,” Spangle said. “The mike isn’t picking this up.”
    “I’m going to have to deal with your neurotic mother all the time you’re in Madrid.”
    “Do you think… ” Spangle said, raising his pelvis in the air and pointing his penis toward her
.
    “God almighty,” she said. “If you want to play with yourself don’t let me interrupt.”
    She pushed until she had enough bed space to lie down on
.
    “I’m a tanker,” Spangle said, rolling toward her, holding his erect penis, “and I’m steaming in to make a delivery.”
    “Get off,” she said. “I’m not amused, Spangle.”
    “What’s today’s date?” he said. “Tomorrow had better be an odd day, because I’ll never make it to Bradley Field on an eighth of a tank.”

Two
    CYNTHIA DREAMED that she was falling. It was a late afternoon fright dream. When she took naps after teaching, she often had to wake herself up in the middle of some nightmare. At night she slept all right, but when she napped she was likely to have nightmares. It was worth the risk, though: When she slept, she forgot the students, and if she had a nightmare and shook herself awake, she was always glad to find herself in her lover’s apartment, instead of at the high school. Her sister had left her the key to her condominium while she was in Mexico for the summer, but Cynthia found the cramped New Haven apartment more comfortable. That, and that idiotic Mitch Auerberg—he was older than the rest of them, and had failed a similar course the summer before—who had followed her home one day on his motorcycle and gunned it and streaked off when she saw him. He was probably hiding in the bushes like Popeye, waiting for her to go out back of the building in her bathing suit so he could scare her—she did not think he was capable of worse than that. She went on the assumption that there was no great malice in those children, and that was what kept her going to work every day.
    She found a joint on the night table and lit it, got out of bedand went into the kitchen. She turned on the window fan and undid her pigtails, putting the rubber bands on the counter. An ant ran around them and disappeared down the crack between the wall and the counter. Her lover, Peter Spangle, would not let her buy any chemical bug killers; his own nightmares were about being at the test site when an atomic bomb was detonated. He was sure that it was the odor of Raid that provoked his nightmares. Raid, he insisted: not all the acid he had taken; not the recent newspaper reports linking exposure to radiation with cancer.
    Spangle was in Madrid, trying to talk his brother Jonathan into returning to law school. His mother had paid for the trip to Madrid. She had paid for his brother’s trip, too, not realizing that Jonathan had intended his vacation to be a year long. She was afraid, now that Peter was in Madrid, that he would stay too—that the country had some secret power over highly intelligent white American males. She called the apartment often, to see if there was any word on how things were going. She also complained that her new wall-to-wall carpeting was fuzzing, and that as soon as an avocado seed took root, it rotted. When Spangle had been in the apartment and his mother called, she only spoke briefly to Cynthia, to exchange a few banalities. Now that her son was gone and she had no one else to talk to, she sometimes called twice a night. Cynthia was

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