Falling in Place Read Free Page A

tempted to pick up the phone and say, in her most faraway voice: “This is the spirit of Madrid, and I have captured your sons forever. Don’t watch for them in the breeze or in sunlight. I have their power. I have sucked their souls as empty as the inside of a straw.”
    Enough dope smoking for the day. Strange how hard two tokes could hit. They could wipe you out when you were not yet wide awake.
    She went to look in the refrigerator. She settled for leftover hummus and some pita bread and sat on the counter and dipped the bread into the bowl. It tasted like baby food. When she finished eating, though, there would be no one to wipe her chin and put her on her back to admire her while she kicked her legs. Instead, she would go to the laundromat—the one next door to the donut shop, to torture herself for having given up refined sugar.
    How could the students not care about the pilgrimage to Canterbury? How could she care that such idiots did not care? How couldMitch what’s-his-name have had the nerve to follow her as she walked to her sister’s apartment and then make a twisted face at her, letting her see that it was him? Didn’t they care that she could take it out on them later, in the classroom? Didn’t they care that they were making such fools of themselves in front of an adult? She would have been mortified not to have appeared sophisticated when she was their age.
    But where did sophistication get you? It got you selected for an education at a classy college, and when you graduated, this kind of part-time job was the best thing you could get, and the pay was no good, and your brain—after so much time realizing that she
had
a brain—was now being challenged by trivia. How can I kill bugs without using bug spray? Where is the best place to wash clothes? Should I or should I not go out to the swimming pool in back of my sister’s condominium? By the time her education was completed, her brain would be worn down to a little stub, pencil shavings on the floor.
    “My hair hurts,” Spangle’s mother said when Cynthia picked up the telephone. “I had it in a rubber band yesterday, but this is the first time it’s hurt, so I don’t think it’s that. It’s Freudian, I guess. It feels like somebody’s tugged it.”
    She was not calling about her hair.
    “Tell me without my having to ask whether you’ve heard from him.”
    “I haven’t. I told you that when he left, he said they’d be back this Friday.”
    “One little
par avion, you’d
think. Anyway, I’m hoping they’re really coming back. I’ve lost five pounds. It’s a combination of worrying and eating nothing but poached eggs and drinking Perrier.”
    “I was about to eat when you called,” Cynthia said. Anything to get her off the phone.
    “Don’t tell me if it was fettuccine. I love all those coiled pastas, ready to spring into calories: tortellini and fettuccine and all those curlycue things like enchanted snakes.”
    Heavy breathing. Cynthia would have been frightened if Tess Spangle had done that early in the conversation, before she identified herself.
    “Who’s meeting their plane?” Tess said.
    “Nobody.”
    “It doesn’t seem right. Of course I wasn’t invited. I always let myself be taken advantage of, and I won’t put myself in the position of being made a fool of, too. Of course, if they don’t come on the plane Friday, and I’m there, who would know but me that I was made a fool of again? My shrink would know. I’d tell the shrink. The shrink would try to make it all appear normal. He’s insidious that way. ‘Why blame yourself for meeting a plane?’ ”
    “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
    “If a woman goes to the airport and no one knows she’s there, does she still exist at the airport? Do you play philosophical games with your students, or are they too young? How can anyone be young?”
    “I see it Monday through Friday.”
    “Poor dear. Friday the men will come bounding