Ivory Apples

by Lisa Goldstein

  We picked out a place apart from the others and I lay down. I couldn’t fall asleep, though; my mind raced with worry, and rocks and broken concrete dug into me no matter which way I turned. Whenever I started to doze off I’d hear a shout or a car alarm and wake up again, wondering where I was.

  One question haunted me that night: Had I been right to leave my sisters? I told myself over and over again that they knew nothing, that Ms. Burden would have no reason to torment them. Still, I promised myself I’d go past our house every so often.

  My time on the streets stands apart from anything else I’ve ever done. Everything was heightened, clarified, shining with its own light. Ordinary objects—streetlamps, cars, trees—seemed to have been invented just moments before, something new and astonishing.

  Things were different for another reason too: I’d given myself over to Piper and could only follow his lead. I reveled in his excitement, the sense that I was risking everything at every moment. I told myself that I deserved some enjoyment for a change. Though enjoyment was a tame word for what he gave me—it was rapture, exhilaration, wildness.

  The days unrolled like a dream, or like watching a movie and being a part of it at the same time. But unlike with a dream, I remember most of what we did. Sometimes I wish I didn’t.

  Piper’s trick with the hats had impressed me, but he turned out to be even more dexterous than I’d thought. He could exchange jackets or watches, or slip a wallet from one pocket into another.

  He set trash cans alight as we passed them, and built bonfires in empty lots. But he tired of this after a while and moved on to abandoned buildings, though I always made sure no one was inside before we struck the match. He loved to watch the flames climbing the walls, the changing colors, the black smoke and then bursts of red and gold like fireworks. And I loved it too after a while, the sheer destructiveness of it.

  We broke into houses when their owners were out. Sometimes we stole from them, but mostly we’d do other things: rearrange the furniture, or leave something valuable that we’d taken from another house, or put a page of my poetry in the center of an otherwise empty table. Every so often I wondered what they made of the poetry, written with a dull pencil on a dirty scrap of paper.

  We never kept any of the things we stole. They were unimportant to him, and he gave them away, as I said, or lost them. So I ended up living in shelters or falling-down shacks, under freeway overpasses or in one-room apartments with three or four roommates. I’d managed to find new shoes, but the soles had long since worn away, and I wore clothes I’d salvaged from dumpsters. One of my best finds was a blanket, to keep me warm through the cold nights, but I lost it when spring came.

  I worked sometimes, illegal jobs since I hadn’t brought any identification with me, and no one would hire a fifteen-year-old in any case. I worked at an ice cream parlor for a while, and as a cashier at a movie theater, but Piper always managed to get me fired sooner or later. He hated the boredom of going to the same place every day, doing the same thing over and over.

  Once, when he tucked a fat wallet into the pocket of a homeless person, I wondered if I’d misjudged him, if his purpose was to right the wrongs of the world. But he didn’t like that notion, and later that day we went to a bar where he switched around the patrons’ drinks. One of the women, I’d overheard, had been sober for ten months and had had a Coke in front of her. I don’t know what he gave her in exchange, but within a few minutes she was slurring her words.

  He felt my outrage, but he wasn’t in the least abashed. I shake things up, he said. I slip between the rules, the heavy pillars holding up the world. I disturb, I confound.

  A few days later, during a rare quiet time, I thought about what he’d said. I’d had a similar idea about poetry, that I’d found a way through the words, through the very letters on the page. This was what tricksters did, I realized, this was what Maeve had been trying to tell me. They—we?—steal through the barriers of convention, of laws, and bring back fire from the gods. Not literal fire, but the fire of inspiration.

  So was he right to switch drinks on that poor woman? I still didn’t think so, but he grew impatient when I asked him about it.

  And I was writing poetry, pages and pages of it. Setting Piper free had set something else free within me. In fact, I remember now that it hadn’t been Piper who’d cost me my job at the ice cream parlor; I’d lost it because I’d set down my scoop in the middle of an order to scribble something on an old sales receipt, unable to wait until the end of my shift.

  I remembered my vow to see my sisters, of course, but usually Piper managed to keep my mind on other things. Sometimes my longing overcame me and I started to head toward home, and he would suggest silly or funny or wonderful things to change my mind. And I felt that somehow I deserved to stay with him, that I’d been so unhappy for so long, and this was my reward.

  After a few months we hitched rides to other cities, Corvallis, Salem, Portland. He’d gotten tired of Eugene, but I think he was also trying to keep me away from my old life.

  We met dangerous people in our travels, thieves and drunks and violent men and women. Piper took part in most of what they did, stealing cars and robbing people lying in the streets, but there was one place where I refused to follow, and that was drinking alcohol or taking drugs. Not for any moral reason, but because what he gave me was so much better, so much more intoxicating. What I had, I thought, was what most of these people were searching for.

  At first I felt afraid a lot of the time, worried about getting attacked or raped. A man did hit me once, but Piper helped me fight back, and after that I felt more confident. And no one ever raped me, though that might have also been due to Piper; he had a deranged way of acting that signaled to any rapist that I would do anything to get away. I did sleep with people when I wanted to, men and women both. Piper approved of this, the way he approved of any easy impulse. I told myself it was Piper, as a man, who was attracted to the women.

  Two or three times I sensed someone following me, but when I looked around there was never anyone there. The next time I felt watched I slipped down an alley and waited. A man walked by, looking horribly familiar, though I couldn’t remember where or when I’d seen him. He was short, chubby, with blond hair so pale it disappeared in a strong light, the color of weak lemonade. He wore wire-frame glasses, ovals that barely covered his eyes.

  Piper was drawn to him, and urged me to leave my hiding place. I stayed where I was, the only time on the streets that I disobeyed him. He understood danger, but not the threat of it, the present but not the future.

  Had Ms. Burden sent this man to look for me? Was that where I had seen him before? Where did she find them, these men like Ted-or-Ned who were willing to work for her?

  Looking back on the whole experience now, I can see how hard it was. I was hungry a lot, and dirty and tired, and I remember always looking for a public restroom because I couldn’t pee in public the way men did. I slept in the rain and had a sore throat that never went away. People shouted insults or set their dogs on me, though the dogs seemed to sense Piper’s presence and wagged their tails with delight instead of attacking. I was nearly arrested several times. But in my memory even the worst parts are burnished with enchantment.

  And once . . . once we went to an Adela Madden Conference.

  At first, when Piper broke in to a house and urged me to take a shower, I didn’t know what he had in mind. The shower was my first in a long time, and I stayed there even after the water had gone cold, trying to work the grime out of my skin.

  After I finished, Piper set out some clothes from a wardrobe—a suit with black trousers and a black jacket, a white blouse with a frilly bow at the throat, black shoes with a slight heel. They felt somehow wrong when I put them on, too smooth, too whole. My clothing usually scratched and pinched in places, or hung badly, or had gaping holes.

  I looked at myself in a full-length mirror, studying this person I hadn’t seen for months. My hair was long and tan
gled, even after I had used the shampoo in the shower and most of a bottle of conditioner. My face had turned an unhealthy red, the color of a faded brick, from living outdoors. Something strange lurked within my eyes, as if I’d just woken from a year-long dream.

  I asked him why I was dressing up, but he didn’t answer. He stole a car and we headed north along Interstate 5.

  A while later we came to Portland. He directed me off the freeway and through the city to a hotel.

  A sign in front of the hotel said, “Welcome to the Sixteenth Annual Adela Madden Conference.” I grinned, thrilled, and he caught my happiness and reflected it back to me, a feedback loop of delight.

  We parked and went inside, where we registered for the conference with a thick wad of bills I didn’t remember stealing. The man behind the desk asked for my name and I hesitated; I was certain that Ms. Burden was here somewhere, and that she would see my name if they published a list of attendees. “Jane Green,” I said, my mother’s maiden name.

  I hadn’t thought of Ms. Burden for a while, not since I’d seen that blond man. Now I looked around me, apprehensive, wondering what I would do if I ran into either one of them. But I was too overwhelmed to stay worried for long.

  I couldn’t decide where to go first. The crush of people seemed strange, and so did the hotel itself, which smelled like cleaning fluid and static electricity. I set off at random, caught up in the crowd.

  I went past meeting rooms with names of the panels on the doors: “What Happened to Fo’c’sle Flynn?,” “Comparing Apples and Oranges,” even one called “Why Have the Letters Stopped?” I was too excited to sit through them, though, and I walked on to the Art Show, amazed at all the paintings and sculptures people had created from Aunt Maeve’s book.

  Then I wandered through the Dealers Room, past a spectacular array of books and posters, clothing and jewelry. I saw a new novel with “As extraordinary as Ivory Apples” on the front cover and nearly bought it, but by then I believed as Piper did about possessions, that it was better not to own anything, to travel light.

  I turned away from the counter and saw Ms. Burden walking down another aisle. I hurried outside.

  I looked behind me, making sure she wasn’t following, then continued down the hall. A woman came toward me, and as she got closer I saw that her nametag read “Eliza Woodbury.” She was one of those cute geeks, with over-large glasses and long hair falling down her back. Without thinking, I said, “Hey, I like your posts!”

  “Thanks,” she said, and kept going.

  I turned to watch her. She joined a group of people and they greeted each other, laughing and shouting. Why had I expected anything else from her, after all? She was a kind of celebrity here, someone with a following, and I was nobody.

  Never mind, Piper said. Imagine what she’d say if she knew who you were. Who your great-aunt is.

  He was right, and I cheered up. It was too bad I couldn’t post on the Adela Madden website, but if she only talked to people from the forums there, well, that was her loss.

  Despite Eliza Woodbury I felt comfortable here, as if I belonged. Part of it, I realized, was that people no longer walked away when I approached, or talked about me as if I wasn’t there. I must have accumulated a terrible odor before I’d taken that shower, but it had happened so slowly I’d never noticed it.

  Eliza Woodbury and her friends went into a lecture room, and I followed them. A moment later the lights dimmed, and a man made his way to a podium at the front.

  “I think we all know that Adela Madden’s sister was Lydia Madden,” he said. “Lydia died in 1993, at age 67. During her life she almost certainly kept up with her sister, and knew when her sister died, if indeed she had died. But, strangely enough, no one’s ever looked into Lydia Madden. Who was she? Why didn’t she tell the world what had happened to Adela?”

  I was starting to feel uneasy, wondering where he was going with this. Had he researched Lydia’s daughter? Her son-in-law, her grandchildren?

  A slide appeared on the screen above him, a familiar-looking photo in black and white. “Here’s the famous photograph of the sisters as children, the one Lydia Madden sent to a fanzine in the seventies,” the speaker said.

  Two girls were sitting on some rocks in a field, squinting into the camera. Their white hair frizzed outward and disappeared against the sun-bleached sky, as if they were dissolving into air. You could almost feel the heat, hear the monotonous chirp of the cicadas.

  The slide changed to an official-looking piece of paper, with a lacy border and “Certificate of Marriage” written at the top in curlicue letters. “In 1953, Lydia married a man named Samuel Green,” the speaker went on. “As you can see from the certificate, the marriage took place in Albany, New York.”

  I remembered Grampa Sam, a silly, funny man who’d played games with us when we were very young. He did all the usual things like pretending to steal our noses or hiding behind his hands and then peeking out again, but he could also blow smoke out of his ears, or somehow convinced us he could—anyway, I never figured out how he did it. They’d both smoked a lot, and Lydia had died of lung cancer when I was six. Sam had died when I was ten, so my memory of him was clearer.

  “Samuel Green’s father, Abraham Greenbaum, had come to the United States from Poland in 1924,” the speaker said. “‘Greenbaum,’ perhaps appropriately for someone connected with the author of Ivory Apples, means ‘green tree’ in German. The name was shortened at Ellis Island.

  “In 1959, Sam and Lydia had their only child, a daughter they named Jane. Jane’s birth was registered in Eugene, Oregon, so they must have come west by that time. We don’t know why they moved, but the usual reason for uprooting your family is to find work. In this case, though, there might be another explanation.

  “Adela Madden’s letters to her publisher show her living in Eugene by 1956.” (Another slide, this one a letter signed “Adela.”) “Of course it’s possible that Adela and the Greens had come west at the same time, but I wonder if Adela had moved first, and if she had run into trouble and needed her family around her. As far as we know she never married, never held a job. The book she wrote, her only source of income, sold poorly in its first few years. She must have needed financial help, and perhaps she suggested to Sam and Lydia that they come to Oregon. Or maybe they came on their own, knowing that she needed assistance.”

  People were murmuring around me, impressed by the speaker’s detective work. I didn’t see why. None of this had anything to do with what had brought us all together, with Ivory Apples.

  “She might have needed help for another reason at well,” the speaker said. “Unfortunately, we know very little about Adela Madden, either before or after she wrote her book. The stories we do have, though, show her to be a somewhat unstable woman, a lost woman, someone who had difficulty making her way through the world. Perhaps, away from her family, she had run into trouble with the authorities. Perhaps she needed her sister and brother-in-law to keep her out of prison, or a mental institution.”

  “Lost?” someone muttered.

  A number of people were turning against the speaker now. Most of her fans admired Adela Madden, even loved her. And I felt annoyed too, and then angry. He’d connected the few facts he had with links of “perhaps” and “maybe,” but if you took those away you’d have no argument at all. And yet somehow by the end of it he’d made Aunt Maeve into a criminal, or a madwoman.

  “If we turn to the daughter, Jane Green—”

  That was enough. I stood up. My shadow fell over the slide on the screen, which had changed to a picture of a birth certificate. “Down in front!” someone shouted.

  “What difference does any of this make?” I said, or Piper did. “When you eat an apple, do you wonder who grew it, or plucked it? And yet here you are, a peddler of impoverished drivel, turning conjecture into fact, clouds into dry land.”

  “Let him finish!” someone said.

  “I’ll be taking questions at the end—” the speaker s
aid.

  “Well, I have a question now,” I said. “Why do you think Mae—Adela Madden needed to be kept out of jail? What crime did she commit?”

  “I agree,” someone else said, and to my surprise Eliza Woodbury rose from the audience. “Why is it that all women writers are—what did you say?—unstable and lost?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “As far as we know, Adela Madden was as stable as an omnibus.”

  Eliza Woodbury nodded in approval. Someone else stood up, and to my horror I saw it was Ms. Burden. She had turned toward me, squinting against the light of the projector.

  “Let Dr. Chapman finish his talk,” she said. “We owe him that much courtesy, at least.”

  “This isn’t the first time Chapman’s made these kinds of claims,” a man said from the audience. “If you look at his paper on Emily Dickinson—”

  “We’re not here to discuss Emily Dickinson!” another man yelled.

  Everyone was shouting now, their attention on each other and away from me. I made my way down the row of chairs and headed for the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ms. Burden moving too, coming after me.

  I hurried outside and through the hotel corridor. Then I banged the hotel door open and ran out into the street. As I went I pulled my blouse out of my pants and tore off my jacket and threw it into a trash can, trying to change my appearance.

  Then Piper did something extraordinary. He left me, left my body, and appeared out in the world beside me. I saw him for the first time in four years, a thing made of leaves and twigs, his elbows sharp as thorns. His skin was brown, tinged with green, and his eyes were lit with an ancient mischief.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed.

  “She’s looking for one person, not someone with a child,” he said.

  “You don’t look anything like a child!”

  He grinned, enjoying himself. His mouth was longer than a human’s, reaching almost to his ears.

  “Ivy!” Ms. Burden shouted, sounding a long way behind me. “Ivy, is that you?”