Ivory Apples

by Lisa Goldstein

  Whenever something unusual happened an apparition would appear soon afterward, a small skinny man driving a coach no more than four feet high. The man, according to the few people who would talk about what they’d seen, had dark spiky hair that shot out around his top hat, and the coach looked more like a house or a castle, with sharp turrets and chimneys and a roof fenced in by iron spears. The horses neighed, the whip cracked, the bridles jingled, but the man himself never spoke. Instead he would doff his hat and open his mouth wide in soundless laughter.

  Almost no one in Pommerie Town mentioned the changes, or the spiky little man. Some seemed truly not to see them; others had to force themselves to say nothing. But a few people, braver souls than the rest, would talk about them in whispers, and only among themselves.

  I was pretty sure I recognized the coachman. My creature laughed a lot as well, his mouth as wide as a trumpet bell.

  I wondered if Aunt Maeve had one of the creatures within her too, and if its presence was why she had written her book. It gave another meaning to Ms. Burden’s prophecy that I would become a writer, an uncomfortable one.

  It began to rain for days on end, and there were times when we couldn’t meet Ms. Burden in the park, when we had to come home straight after school. Still, we saw her as often as we could. Even I started looking forward to those meetings. Whatever else I thought about her, those games were fun.

  One day she took a pack of cards out of her purse and dealt a card to each of us. “Now look at your card,” she said. Then, as Semiramis opened her mouth, she said, “Don’t tell anyone what it is. One of you has the Joker, and you’re the Murderer, out to kill us all. The way you kill someone is by looking at them and winking, and they have to drop dead. The rest of us can guess who the Murderer is, but if you’re wrong you have to drop dead too.”

  Amaranth gave herself away by winking at Ms. Burden the minute the card was in her hand. Semiramis got the Joker next and could barely contain her giggles; that and the fact that she couldn’t wink and had to contort her face instead ended her turn immediately. Still, they seemed to enjoy themselves, and Beatriz and I had long runs where we murdered nearly everyone.

  A squall of rain fell, and I saw darker storm clouds massing in the distance. I felt disappointed; I could have sat there and played cards all day.

  The others wanted to keep going too, but I got them up and made them hand their cards back to Ms. Burden. “Goodbye,” I said, hoping to hurry them along.

  “Goodbye,” Ms. Burden said. She was still sitting on the ground, looking bereft, the rain pattering around her. I wondered what she was going to do for the rest of the day.

  “Come to dinner with us,” Beatriz said.

  I stared at her. None of us had ever invited an adult home for dinner; it had never even occurred to me.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly,” Ms. Burden said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, there won’t be enough.”

  “Sure there will. Esperanza makes enough for an army.”

  “Yeah, come with us!” Semiramis said.

  All my suspicions of Ms. Burden came flooding back. What did she want from us? Was this what she’d been aiming for all this time? Who carries a pack of cards in their purse?

  “All right, then,” she said.

  We ran down the streets through the rain, Ms. Burden holding her enormous purse over her head to keep herself dry. Amaranth burst through the door shouting, “We brought someone for dinner!”

  Philip came downstairs. Ms. Burden waited for someone to introduce her, and then, seeing that we didn’t know even the most basic rules of politeness, she moved forward. “Hello, I’m Kate Burden,” she said, brushing her hand against her pants and holding it out. “I met your children in the park—they’re enchanting company.”

  Philip shook her hand, glancing briefly at all the colors on her fingernails. Then he looked at her, his gaze lingering on her face, and suddenly I understood. I felt sick, a slow dragging pain in my stomach. She didn’t just want to take Jane’s role as our mother; she wanted to marry Philip, to insinuate herself completely into our lives.

  My sisters didn’t seem to notice anything. They looked eager, excited, probably hoping he would like her as much as they did.

  “I hope I’m not intruding,” she said.

  “No, not at all,” Philip said. “Esperanza always makes too much anyway.”

  “Is Esperanza your wife?”

  “No, she’s the housekeeper.” Was I imagining it, or did she look relieved? “Come on, let’s eat.”

  We went into the dining room and sat around the table. Esperanza came out from the kitchen with a salad, then returned with a platter of roast beef. We ate in silence for a while, and then Philip asked, “And what do you do, Ms. Burden?”

  I looked up, interested in what she would say. I’d asked her the same thing, and she had never answered.

  She took a bite of roast beef. “Kate, please. My, this is good. What do I do? Well, right now I’m unemployed, unfortunately. My last job was working at a bank, but they let me go.”

  “She was a makeup artist in Hollywood once,” I said. I was starting to wonder if she’d made up that story, and most of the other stories she told us, and I wanted to see if she’d lie to an adult. And maybe the creature had given me a nudge here, had wanted to add his own pinch of mischief.

  “Really?” Philip said.

  “It was a long time ago,” Ms. Burden said. “But yes, I’d love to do something like that again.”

  “Why did you stop?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s a long story. My mother fell ill, and I had to nurse her, and then when all of that was over the job was gone.”

  “That wasn’t very long.”

  “Ivy!” Philip said. “Ms. Burden—Kate—is our guest here.”

  The creature stirred, became more alert. “Well, why say something is a long story when it takes you five seconds to tell it?”

  “Ivy!” Philip said again.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Ms. Burden said. “I know what she means. It felt like a long time to me, that’s all. She was ill for years, and I spent most of my time taking care of her, and then she died.”

  I had another rude comment all ready, but now it seemed stupid and ill-considered and I said nothing. We had all stopped at once, in fact, stopped everything, eating and talking and breathing, and I knew that we were all thinking of Jane.

  “Our mother died too,” Amaranth said finally.

  “Did she?” Ms. Burden said. “It’s a terrible thing, to lose a mother so young.”

  Amaranth nodded, though I was pretty sure she didn’t understand yet what Jane’s death meant. Ms. Burden looked at Philip, clearly wanting to know more but not sure she could ask. We hadn’t told her about our mother’s death; we rarely talked about it with outsiders.

  “Jane died five years ago,” Philip said. He shook his head. “Well, let’s talk about something more cheerful. And Beatriz, finish your dinner.”

  “I am finished,” she said. She’d left about half the roast on her plate, though she’d eaten the salad. This was more of her wanting to imitate Ms. Burden, I knew, trying to starve herself into thinness.

  “What do you do, Philip?” Ms. Burden asked.

  He told her about working at the university, about engineering, about each new crop of students arriving seemingly more ignorant than the last. This was one of his pet subjects, and it took us through dinner and into dessert. To her credit, Ms. Burden seemed interested, asking questions and nodding in all the right places.

  She made to leave soon after that. “Well, thank you for looking after the children,” Philip said at the front door. “You really don’t have to do so much with them.”

  “Oh, it’s no problem—they’re very well-behaved.”

  Philip looked at us, startled. She waved her multi-colored fingers at us one last time, and then she was gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE CREATURE AND HIS ENCHA
NTMENT was always with me. Sometimes I found myself wanting it like an addiction—and sometimes, usually when I was very tired or unhappy, I would loosen his bonds and let myself be carried along by his whims.

  Once after I did this in school I noticed a group of students staring at me. One of them started to vocalize the theme to The X-Files , and I realized that I had just said or done something with no memory of what it was.

  Another time I—or he—let out an enormous fart while we were crowding up to go into class. Luckily no one believed I’d ever do such a thing; instead the kids blamed one of the school outcasts, a boy who smelled like sour milk.

  I felt bad when they made fun of him, but the creature didn’t seem to care. He didn’t appear to think about fairness, just did what he wanted, whatever made him laugh. Later, though, he had me pick a flower and leave it on the boy’s desk, and the boy floated in a daze of happiness all that day.

  And once, at lunchtime in the cafeteria, I picked up a flute belonging to someone in the school orchestra. I had never even held a flute before, but somehow I found myself playing the song that had captivated me in the grove. I left the cafeteria and went out into the hall, still playing, and other students followed me, dancing and laughing. More and more kids joined in, until dozens of them were lined up behind me, spinning down the corridor.

  I found myself in front of a padlocked door and started to turn away. The creature seemed to know how to work the combination, though, and opened it in a matter of seconds. I went through the door and saw a set of stairs. I knew it was dangerous, that I had to stop, but I was still in the grip of the creature’s madness, transported by my high mad glee.

  A woman came running out of a classroom. “What are you kids doing?” she said. “Get away from there, right now!”

  Most of the students melted away. “You there!” she said. “What are you thinking? That door goes up to the roof.”

  I wanted more than anything to go outside, to smell the fresh air around me. I made a great effort to rein the creature in. “I—I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know! That’s it—you’re spending a week in detention, starting today.”

  The flute’s owner hurried up, panting from her run. “That’s my—my—” she said.

  “And give her that flute,” the teacher said.

  I began to get a reputation around school. Some people thought of me as strange, unpredictable, and started to avoid me. Others seemed admiring, but these were scary, edgy kids, not people I wanted to be friends with. My friend River took me aside and told me she was worried about me.

  At different times I felt resentment or anger, or a sense of loss for my old life. And sometimes I even felt hatred, hatred for this creature who had upended everything, who was turning me into an outcast.

  Another change was happening to me, something I only understood later. I’d always liked words, the sounds of them, the way they flowed and chimed and merged with other words to bring something new into the world. Now words seemed to cascade through my mind, lovely words like “simoom” or “cardamom,” jagged, arresting words like “quotidian” or “physiognomy,” and I’d have to stop what I was doing and look them up.

  After a while I was able to grab hold of this chaos, to see a way through it. I made lists of words and scraps of sentences, then used Philip’s computer to arrange and rearrange them, patching them together in different ways. And the more I did this the more I reached for, the more I went beyond the rules I’d learned from books and in school. I got so deep into words that it felt as if I’d pushed myself into them, through them, that the letters on the page had been sentinels keeping me out, and I had found a path between them.

  One day our English teacher gave us an assignment to write anything we wanted. I started on a boring description of a trip my family had taken, too self-conscious to let anyone see the pieces of writing that were so important to me. But something, the creature maybe, or my own pride in these scraps, made me print out one of them and turn it in.

  A few days later the teacher asked me to stay after class. Somehow I knew that he wanted to talk about his homework assignment, so while I waited impatiently for the class to end my mind flickered through dozens of things he might say: what I’d turned in was terrible, it was great, he didn’t understand any of it.

  What he wanted, though, was nothing I’d thought of. “Where did you get this, Ivy?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “This poem. Who’s the real author?”

  “It’s not—” I wanted to say that it wasn’t a poem, but for the first time I realized that that was exactly what it was. “It’s mine. I wrote it.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that. Eleven-year-olds don’t sound like this.”

  “I did—”

  “You know, they keep saying that kids your age know all about computers, much more than old people like me. But don’t worry—even I can look things up on the internet. And you better believe we’re serious about plagiarism here. When I find out where you got this, I’ll be talking to your parents, to the principal.”

  “I didn’t copy it! Go ahead, look it up—you won’t find it.”

  I tried protesting some more, but he dismissed me. I wondered why he thought I’d plagiarized it. Did he really think it was by someone famous? I wasn’t that good, I knew that much. Still, I was glad to find out what it was I’d been writing all this time.

  I don’t know if he ever talked to the principal, but Philip got a phone call that evening, just as he was heading to his room to work.

  “Wait, what did you say?” he said into the phone. There was a pause, and then, “No. Never.” . . . “No, I’m telling you she wouldn’t do that. She works hard on her assignments—she’d never copy someone else.” . . . “Maybe you should trust your students more, then.” . . . “All right, this conversation is over. You keep looking for some great poet who wrote my daughter’s poem, and if you find one you get back to me. But I’m telling you now, that’s not going to happen.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

  I waited for him to ask me if I’d copied the poem. Instead he stood by the phone awhile, scowling to himself, and then turned to me. “Well, he seems to think you’re one of the greats of literature, Ivy. I guess I should see this poem.”

  I felt embarrassed showing it to him, since it still wasn’t where I wanted it to be. I waited nervously while he read it.

  “This is good, Ivy,” he said finally. “Very good.”

  I was at the age where I had a hard time accepting compliments. At the same time, though, I felt a rush of love for him. He had believed me over someone in authority, he’d taken time out of his busy schedule to defend me, and he’d even liked the poem.

  “Yeah, well, what do you know?” I asked. “You’re an engineering professor.”

  “I know enough to answer your Aunt Maeve’s letters. And some of them come from critics and English professors, and no one’s ever guessed what my background is.”

  I never heard anything more about the poem, and I got my usual good grade in English that year.

  Finally, after what seemed like forever, it was time to visit Aunt Maeve again. We crowded into the car and set off, first for the post office and then onto the highway.

  The trees had started to change, matching the fiery leaves I’d seen in Maeve’s grove. The sky was gray, overcast. I sat without saying anything, holding my excitement inside. The creature seemed eager as well, moving within me, alert to his surroundings.

  Every so often Philip would remind us of the importance of keeping Adela Madden’s name a secret, that we had to call her Aunt Maeve if we mentioned her at all. He had come up with a kind of chant during our earliest visits, and he started it again now. “Who are we visiting?” he said.

  “Aunt Maeve!” we shouted. I came in a little behind my sisters, still thinking about all the questions I had for her.

  “What do we call her?”

  “Aunt Maeve!”

  “What na
me do we never use?”

  We kept quiet after this question, because, of course, we weren’t supposed to say her name. I used to giggle at this part when I was younger, and Amaranth and Semiramis giggled at it now.

  Maeve wasn’t working in the garden when we pulled up. We ran outside and swung the rope of bells hanging from her door.

  “Well, hello,” she said, opening the door and looking out at us. “How good of you to stop by.” She seemed surprised, as if she hadn’t expected us, as if we didn’t come visit her every month.

  We filed into the house. I waited until everyone had greeted her and then said, “Aunt Maeve, I need to talk to you.”

  “Of course, dear,” she said. “What about?”

  “About—something important. You know what.”

  Her puzzled expression was back. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Well, you can do all that later,” Philip said. He looked unhappy, probably thinking I wanted to discuss women’s stuff, that he had failed me again. “Let’s get to the letters.”

  It was raining outside now. My sisters and I left Philip and Maeve to their work and wandered through the house. It was cold inside, with all the windows letting out warmth, even though Maeve had turned the heating up.

  Amaranth found a deck of cards and tried to get me to play Murder, but I felt cooped up, jittery, unable to settle to anything. Finally I went into the study, took down a copy of Ivory Apples, and picked up where I’d left off.

  There were more strange things happening in Pommerie Town now, too many for the people living there to ignore. Some left their homes and workplaces and did shocking, uncharacteristic things: an opera singer spent an entire evening on stage just laughing, and another man gave all his money to someone he’d feuded with for years. Marriages frayed, secrets were revealed, and the constabulary were called out to break up fights or stop thefts, though fewer and fewer of the police were showing up to work.