Surviving the Applewhites

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  Chapter Eight

  Jake stared at the serving dishes on the table. Visions of starvation rose again in his mind. There was a casserole of zucchini and onions, there were sliced tomatoes, cooked carrots, green beans, beets, and a bowl of something dark green and slimy looking that Lucille identified as beet greens. “All from my garden,” she told Jeremy Bernstein proudly. She didn’t elaborate on nature spirits or dream communication.

  When Archie came from the kitchen with a huge platter, Jake’s hopes rose. There had been bacon at breakfast. These people did eat meat. But when the platter was set down in front of Zedediah, who was seated at the head of the table, Jake sighed. There were a couple of hot dogs, one bratwurst, a handful of breaded shrimp, a chicken thigh and drumstick, and a couple of indeterminate patties that might have been meat or might have been veggie burgers.

  “This was it, eh?” the old man asked Archie. Archie shrugged and nodded.

  “I planned a really nice dinner, honestly I did. I just thought you were coming next week,” Sybil Jameson said to Bernstein. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Randolph forgot to do the grocery shopping,” Archie explained as he sat down. “This was all that was left in the freezer.”

  Bernstein shook his head. “No problem. Honestly. No problem. I’ve been thinking of becoming a vegetarian anyway.”

  “If God had wanted humans to be vegetarians,” Zedediah said, “He’d have given them cow’s teeth and an extra stomach.” He passed the platter down the table. “Get what you want first, young man—no telling what would be left if you waited your turn.”

  By the time the platter got to Jake, all that was left were the patties. Jake’s stomach growled as he put one between the tiny mounds of vegetables on his plate. He wondered what sort of food was served at Juvenile Hall.

  As everyone began to eat, Zedediah asked Bernstein about the magazine he wrote for.

  Bernstein’s eyes lit up, and he looked fully alive for the first time since he’d emerged from his ruined car. “The New World Literary Review. It won the Brohmer East Coast Arts Foundation award for three years in a row for its arts criticism and”—he turned to look at Sybil, who was at the end of the table opposite Zedediah—“in-depth interviews of the literary geniuses of our time. It’s that sort of interview that I came to do.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought the Petunia Grantham mysteries could get anyone classified as a literary genius,” Zedediah said. “The books sell like potato chips, but—”

  Bernstein choked on a bite of carrot. “Haven’t you told them?” he asked Sybil. He looked around the table. “It must be difficult for the family of a writer of Ms. Jameson’s stature to fully appreciate the jewel they have in their midst. The Petunia Grantham mysteries are splendid examples of their genre, of course. But our readers are getting a sneak preview of her new work. The first two chapters of what will no doubt be heralded as the literary masterpiece of the new century will be printed in the next issue. I’ve been sent to do the interview that will accompany those chapters. Everyone at the Review is terrifically excited. It’s an event of enormous interest to the whole literary community when a writer as popular as Ms. Jameson stakes out new artistic territory. The world is awaiting the coming Great American Novel with bated breath.”

  “It must be getting blue in the face by this time,” Cordelia said. “If it’s the book she started when I was in kindergarten, the world’s been waiting for this particular Great American Novel for more than ten years.”

  “And well worth the wait,” Bernstein said, “judging from the opening chapters, which I’ve been privileged to read. One can’t rush a work of art.”

  “Who would have guessed that Debbie Applewhite would turn into a literary genius before our eyes,” Zedediah said.

  “Debbie Applewhite?”

  “Zedediah!” Sybil said, her face flushing red. She turned to Bernstein. “That’s off the record! I’ve been Sybil Jameson for nearly twenty years. My parents named me Debbie. For Debbie Reynolds. I can’t imagine what they were thinking of.”

  “But he said Applewhite?”

  “My married name, of course.”

  Jeremy Bernstein looked from Sybil to Zedediah and back again, his eyes at least twice as big as normal. “Applewhite? Your married name is Applewhite! Then your husband, the man who crashed into me—the man I crashed into—is Randolph Applewhite? The theater director?”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “I reviewed his off-Broadway revival of Time Remembered for my college newspaper! It was magnificent. Randolph Applewhite. I didn’t realize. I didn’t—” Bernstein stopped and looked back at Zedediah. His eyes, Jake thought, looked about to pop out of his head. “Applewhite. Zedediah Applewhite? Of Zedediah Applewhite handcrafted wood furniture?”

  Zedediah nodded.

  “Good heavens! And Lucille—Archie—”

  “It’s quite a clan,” Zedediah said.

  “Lucille Applewhite, the poet! This is so amazing. I own both of your chapbooks. And Archie Applewhite—I’ve visited your website. And I saw your Chair with Ottoman in a gallery just last month. It was stunning. So original and inventive.”

  “I hope you had the good sense not to try to sit on it,” Archie said.

  “Applewhite. Jameson. I had no idea. No one at the Review had any idea.” Bernstein put his hand over his heart and took a deep breath. His cheeks had gone pink. “I apologize for my ignorance. I’m so embarrassed. I had no idea that all the Applewhites were the same family. Or that Sybil Jameson was—”

  “An Applewhite as well—by marriage of course,” Zedediah said. “As patriarch of this clan I can’t really take credit for her—or Lucille, for that matter. Except that my sons had the good sense to choose them.”

  “I’m an Applewhite!” Destiny said. “My name’s Destiny Applewhite. Destiny is my first name and—”

  “But this is too wonderful!” Bernstein said. “An artistic dynasty. Like the painters…ah…um…you know…the Wyeths! Or the writing Brontës. Or the acting Barrymores. Except that you each do such different work.” He turned back to Sybil. “You never gave so much as a hint.”

  Sybil was sitting very still. When she spoke, her voice was chilly. “I was under the impression that you were coming to interview me. It didn’t occur to me to mention my family. Any more than it would have occurred to any of them to mention me.”

  “Ah!” Bernstein said. “Yes, well.” He cleared his throat. “But I have to tell you it’s exciting to be sitting here at a table in the midst of so much talent. It’s like expecting to find a diamond and stumbling into an entire mine. The children? Do they—”

  “The children are still exploring their artistic potentials,” Sybil said. “Destiny shows signs of talent in the visual arts. He has a real eye for color.”

  “That’s me, Destiny,” Destiny said. “I gots lots and lots of finger paintings. You want to see my finger paintings?” He got down from the table and went off toward the schoolroom.

  Sybil went on. “Hal, whom you haven’t met—”

  “Nor are likely to, unless you’re planning to put down roots,” Archie said. “None of us has laid eyes on him for months.”

  Sybil frowned at Archie. “Hal is something of an introvert, but I’m sure you understand the sensitive artistic temperament.” Bernstein nodded, his face serious and sympathetic. “He was passionately into painting for a while, but judging from the new sign on his door, the materials he’s been ordering on the Internet, and the sounds coming from his room, he seems to be expanding his range. We all respect his artistic privacy, of course, so we won’t know what he’s working on until he’s ready to show us.”

  “I’m composing and choreographing an original ballet,” Cordelia said. “I also play the music and will dance it. It’s a solo ballet called The Death of Ophelia. From Hamlet, you know.”

  “Ah. Ophelia. Unrequited love, madness, drowning! Superb material for a ballet. An opera even.”

  �
��I don’t sing.”

  “That’s the Achilles heel of the whole Applewhite clan,” Zedediah said. “If there’s a singing gene, we don’t have it. Applewhites don’t sing.”

  “I do!” Destiny had come back in, carrying a large sheet of paper covered with red and green smudges. “I sing all the time.” He put down his finger painting and launched into “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” at the top of his lungs, walking his fingers up an imaginary water-spout. Destiny proved Zedediah’s point, Jake thought.

  From then on the conversation went on around Jake so fast and furiously that he wasn’t sure he could have followed it if he’d wanted to. It was all about art. Mostly Applewhite art. He did his best, in spite of his total loathing of cooked vegetables, to eat enough to keep body and soul together, slipping bits of zuchini and beet and cooked carrot to the dog at his feet under the table. Though he was apparently willing to eat anything, Winston seemed to enjoy beet greens in particular.

  “You’re very lucky to be invited to participate in this amazing educational opportunity,” Bernstein said to Jake at one point. Jake realized the conversation had come around to the Creative Academy. He nodded dutifully. He hadn’t been listening, so he didn’t know whether Bernstein understood why he’d been “invited to participate.”

  “You know,” Bernstein went on, addressing the whole family now, “I have a friend who’s a producer for a magazine show on one of the television networks. He’s always looking for stories with enough of a hook to interest the network executives. I’ve never had one to give him before, but I think this could be it. The Applewhite artistic dynasty and the home school designed to perpetuate it. If I may borrow a computer, I could e-mail him the idea tonight. I know it would be an invasion of your privacy, but I think those of us who understand the importance of the arts owe it to the rest of America to give them a taste of what it’s all about.”

  Later, while Bernstein and the adults carried the conversation into the living room and Cordelia put Destiny to bed, Jake and E.D. were sent to rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. E.D. said nothing at all as they worked, but she crashed plates and glasses into each other so ferociously, Jake was surprised that nothing broke. What’s her problem? Jake wondered, setting the meat platter on the floor for Winston to lick.

  Chapter Nine

  E.D. slammed the door to her room and threw herself on the bed. Not one word! she thought. Neither her mother nor Zedediah had said a single word about her to Jeremy Bernstein. Her name hadn’t even been mentioned. She might as well have been in Traybridge with her father! Invisible, that’s what she was. The invisible Applewhite. It was too much. She wanted out of this family.

  She turned over and lay on her back, staring up at the posters of rock stars she had taped to the ceiling. Cordelia and Hal didn’t have posters of rock stars. They wouldn’t sink so low as to admit they liked what almost every other kid their age in the whole civilized world liked. Oh no. They were much too individual for that. Much too artsy. And that wimpy Jeremy Bernstein probably never had rock stars on his ceiling either. He probably had posters of Shakespeare or Picasso or—or—Edith Wharton!

  Well, she had news for her family. She might not have a talent that would get a television producer excited about doing a story on her. But she wouldn’t lose track of the date or forget to go to the grocery when they were out of food. Unlike certain other people, she was going to be able to cope with the real world when she got old enough to go out into it on her own.

  The way Jeremy Bernstein had talked about the Creative Academy, anybody would have thought the adults had thought it up specifically to educate the next generation of artistic geniuses. The truth was, she was the only one who was doing anything to keep it any sort of school at all, the only one actually getting an education from it, and the only one making sure that Destiny would get an education.

  She had read somewhere that the best way to learn something was to teach it, so she had built in a Teaching Opportunities section to every single project in her curriculum. When she’d learned enough about each project, she taught the main ideas to Destiny. That way he was learning a whole bunch of things he might never decide to learn on his own, and he was learning them really early, before he was even supposed to be a student in the academy, so that when he began doing his own thing, whatever that turned out to be, he wouldn’t end up as ignorant as Cordelia and Hal were bound to be.

  Jeremy Bernstein was worried about a television show invading their family’s privacy. That just showed how little he understood them. Every last one of them lived to be the center of attention. Even Hal. Turning himself into a recluse guaranteed that people would talk about him.

  She threw her extra pillow across the room. She hated being an Applewhite.

  Chapter Ten

  According to the alarm clock on his bedside table, it was 5:03 A.M. when Jake woke to the shrieking clatter of an electric coffee grinder. He buried his head under the pillow and turned over to go back to sleep. But now that he was awake, he had to go to the bathroom. When he opened the door of his bedroom, he saw Archie, dressed in jogging clothes and bustling around the cottage’s small kitchen area. Jake nodded in his direction but didn’t return Archie’s greeting. How could anyone have that much good cheer at that hour of the morning? Lucille had called Archie a lark. True. Nobody but birds was up at this hour.

  Or so he thought. He had just gone back to bed and was slipping happily into a dream about a spectacularly beautiful dancer in a purple leotard when something thundered across the room and landed on him like a mortar round, knocking the breath out of him. He felt the covers being pulled off his head.

  “You are so too awake! Uncle Archie said you was asleep. He said you didn’t even wake up when you went to the bathroom before. You isn’t asleep at all. You gots your eyes open and everything!”

  Groaning, Jake maneuvered so that Destiny’s weight slid off his stomach and onto the edge of the bed. Then he pushed himself up to his elbows. The boy, dressed in pirate pajamas, did not stop talking.

  “Your hair points is all messed and flat. I told you! Nobody gots hair that grows in points like you said. You gots to do something to it to make it do that. I wanna watch you do it. Can I watch? Can I? Huh? Can I?”

  “No!” Jake said. “Go away. I’m not ready to be awake yet. I’m not awake.”

  “Are so. You gots your eyes open and you’re talking. Jake’s awake, Jake’s awake, Jake’s awake!”

  “Go home. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to barge into somebody’s bedroom without knocking?”

  Destiny jumped off the bed, ran to the open door, and knocked on it. “I knocked. Now do I gets to watch you make your hair do points? Can I, can I, can I?”

  “Destiny! What did I tell you?” Archie appeared in the doorway. He shook his head at Jake. “You might as well get up. I could take him away, but he’ll come back. Believe me, you’re better off getting up now. And here’s somebody who followed him over.” Winston came into the room, jumped heavily up onto Jake’s bed, and licked him on the nose.

  “Okay! Okay! I give up.” The prospect of life at Juvenile Hall was beginning to seem tempting.

  Jake took a shower, listening to what seemed like two hundred repetitions of “Frère Jacques,” which could be heard even over the sound of the water running. He got dressed and then let Destiny sit on the edge of the tub while he gelled and combed his hair into its all-over porcupine points. It was somehow a lot harder to do with somebody watching. Winston lay on the damp bath mat, his nose between his paws, his eyes focused on Jake as if the jar of gel were something to eat.

  Archie stuck his head in to tell them he was off to jog and do his morning Tai Chi. “You can have breakfast here if you like—there’s cereal. Or go up to the main house and see what’s there, if anything. Somebody else is bound to be up in a couple of hours.”

  Destiny begged Jake to gel and spike his hair, too, but Jake had no intention of becoming a hairdresser for a four-year-old.
He told Destiny that, even with the gel, only teenage hair would stay up in points. “Little-kid hair won’t do that.”

  When Jake had finished his hair, Lucille still didn’t seem to be up. Jake wasn’t used to being up, dressed, and ready for the day at this hour. He told Destiny to go back to the main house and take Winston with him, but that was like telling a tidal wave to turn around and go back out to sea. So he went into the kitchen and looked through the cupboards till he found a box of Cheerios and two bowls. “You can eat with me,” he told Destiny, who was singing “Pop Goes the Weasel” now, “but after that, you have to go up to the house and get dressed. You don’t want to spend the day in pajamas.”

  Destiny stopped singing long enough to say that he could spend the day in pajamas if he wanted to and sometimes he did.

  Jake sighed. It wouldn’t be possible for Destiny to grow up to be a delinquent—there didn’t seem to be any rules for him to break.

  The only milk in the refrigerator was in a canning jar. He poured it on both bowls of Cheerios. When he put the first spoonful into his mouth, he spit it right back into his spoon. “What’s the matter with this milk?” he said.

  Destiny, chewing a mouthful perfectly cheerfully, shrugged. “It’s from the goatses,” he said when he’d swallowed.

  Jake’s Cheerios went to Winston.

  Chapter Eleven

  In the schoolroom E.D. was getting ready for the day’s work. She was going to start the Teaching Opportunities part of the Butterfly Project because it would give Jake something to do that didn’t involve any interaction with living creatures. If he didn’t want to cooperate, it wouldn’t be her fault. She’d brought a gallon jug of water, a bucket, a box of wheat paste, and a stack of newspapers to tear. She was going to make a papier-mâché caterpillar and chrysalis to teach Destiny about metamorphosis.