Free Falling in Place by Ann Beattie Page A

buck teeth seriously. Read what
Psychology Today
says about what’s taken seriously. You with your beautiful straight teeth are going to be taken seriously, and then you can sit around and fend off disaster and listen to jokes. When you laugh, you’ll do it with a set of sparkling white teeth.”
    “If you don’t want to take me, don’t take me. I don’t want to go.”
    “How did we get into this? I got you an appointment. Seeing this guy is like getting in to see King Tut. He’s not going to do anything today. He’s just going to look at your teeth. Maybe take an X-ray.”
    “But then he’s going to do something.”
    “I can’t help it that your teeth are getting crooked.”
    His father brought the car to a stop with a screech of tires that made the garage attendant look up and stare. His father sat there expressionless until the attendant came to the car. The attendant put a piece of paper under the windshield wiper and handed a smaller piece of paper to his father. His father put it in his inside pocket and he and John Joel got out of the car. Walking up the ramp, the attendant called: “How long?”
    “Two o’clock,” John said. “ ‘Happy ever after in the market place,’ ” he sang under his breath.
    They walked two blocks crosstown to the orthodontist’s office. His father pushed a buzzer and they were buzzed in. The receptionist was pregnant, wearing a T-shirt with “Baby” printed across it, and an arrow pointing down. She gave his father a form to fill out and smiled around him at John Joel. When she stood up to take the piece of paper back, John Joel stared at her huge stomach. She smiled again.
    “I’ll wait and hear what he has to say,” his father said.
    John Joel shrugged. “I’m not a baby,” he said.
    “Can you remember what he said?”
    “He hasn’t said anything yet,” John Joel said. It was useless; his father never knew when somebody was kidding, and there was no point in telling him it was a joke, because it had been such a lame one. “I’ll remember,” John Joel said.
    “And you’re going to wait for Nick to pick you up, right? At eleven. He’ll be in the waiting room when you get out. Okay?”
    “Why wouldn’t it be okay?” John Joel said.
    What John had taken to be small photographs of teeth were, he realized, photographs of shells. There was also a basket of shells on the table in front of the couch, and there were small plastic stands that supported shells on the tables at either end of the room. An old
Life
magazine with Ike and Mamie smiling their round-faced smiles was on one table, along with the current issue of
Variety
, the
National Enquirer
and
Commentary
. John looked over the magazines, thinking that this orthodontist was going to cost. He was reluctant to leave John Joel. At his son’s age, he would have waited for his father to leave and then bolted. The pregnant receptionist wouldn’t have had a chance of catching him. He looked at John Joel, slumped in a chair, leafing through a magazine, and decided that his son would do no such thing. Mary was right that John Joel hated to exert himself. He was fat and pale, and the braces were going to make him look even more like the Cheshire cat.
    “Okay, I’ll take off,” he said. “I’ll see you and Nick outside of the museum.”
    “How come Nick’s taking me to the museum?”
    “Because he wasn’t going to be busy today. He said he’d like to.”
    John Joel shrugged.
    “Okay,” John sighed. “See you at lunchtime.”
    “So are we going to another Fourth of July party on that guy’s roof?”
    “What did you say?” John was halfway across the room when he heard his son speaking to him. “You’re talking about the party last year?”
    “Yeah. Are we going again?”
    “Do you want to go again?”
    “I just wanted to know.”
    “Well, I just want to know if you
want
to go again. That’s not a complicated question, is it?”
    “I liked that roof. I just didn’t like the