Surviving the Applewhites

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  Jake, his earphones pushed back on his head, was slouched at his desk now with Winston at his feet, doing his best to fend off Destiny’s eternal questions. “What kinda stuff did you puts on your hair to make it red? Paint? How come you did red? Could you make it green instead? Could you make it blue or purple or silver?” E.D. remembered a nature documentary she’d seen where a male lion was being tormented by a cub who bit his tail and pounced on his back and chewed on his ears. Eventually the lion had swatted the cub with one huge paw and sent it tumbling. She hoped her father, who was the teacher on call today, would get here before Jake got fed up enough with Destiny to do any swatting. Her father was late. It was already almost nine-thirty.

  She was just pouring the water into the bucket when Randolph appeared in the schoolroom doorway in pajamas and slippers, his hair disheveled and his eyes screwed up against the daylight. “Awful night,” he said. “Didn’t get a wink of sleep.” He peered at Jake. “We’re supposed to be keeping an eye on you till you get adjusted, but you’re just going to have to work on your own today. You do have something you can do, right?”

  Jake shrugged.

  “Good. Good. Excellent.” Randolph reached over and grabbed the earphones off Jake’s head. Jake swore as Randolph pulled the wire loose from his Walkman, but Randolph paid no attention. “These things’ll make you deaf by the time you’re twenty.”

  Randolph put the earphones around his neck and then rubbed his face with both hands as he turned to E.D. “The audition was a disaster. A raging disaster! You’d be amazed at how many stage mothers there are in a town the size of Traybridge. Unfortunately none of their kids has a shred of talent. And the adults! I’m not insisting on a Julie Andrews or a Mary Martin, but it would be nice to have one or two people who can sing and act, preferably at the same time. I’ll be on the phone all day, calling everyone who’s ever directed a musical in this state, trying to locate some—within driving distance, if possible. Thanks to Cordelia, I have to find a dance person, too. I gave her an opportunity to participate in what could be the best piece of musical theater ever produced in this county, and she turned me down cold. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child!”

  He started away and then turned back. “Where’s that wretched little road menace who destroyed my car? And why hasn’t the tow truck come to drag away that piece of junk he was driving? It looks like someone’s had a demolition derby in our front yard.”

  “He’s in Dogwood Cottage,” E.D. said. “Grandpa said he could deal with his car today.”

  “He’d better have himself a first-rate lawyer if he wants to get out of this with a penny in his pocket.” He left, muttering under his breath about reckless driving. E.D. was starting to stir the wheat paste into the water when he put his head back through the doorway. “If you really need anything this morning, you can come and get me. If you really need it.” He blinked at Jake once or twice. “Independence. That’s what the Creative Academy is all about. Independence! Remember that.” Then he was gone.

  “I’ll bet you never went to a school before where the teachers were too busy to hang out in the classroom with the students,” E.D. said to Jake.

  “He stole my earphones!” Jake said. “He can’t do that.”

  “He already did.” She turned to Destiny, who was talking about hair colors again. If no adult was going to protect the cub from the lion, she’d have to. “Destiny, you go find today’s newspaper and bring it to me, and I’ll set you up with your fingerpaints when you get back.”

  Destiny went off humming to himself, and E.D. handed Jake her curriculum notebook. “I don’t see how you’re going to catch up with any of this, but if you aren’t planning to go to Juvenile Hall, you might as well do something. Butterflies of the Carolinas is over there on the computer desk. And there are a couple of butterfly websites you can check out.”

  Jake set the notebook on his desk. “I can catch up whenever I feel like it. I never got expelled for being dumb.”

  “That depends on how smart you think it was to land yourself here.” She tossed him some newspapers. “If you don’t want to read about butterflies, you can tear strips.”

  “Tear strips?”

  “Newspaper strips.” She explained about the papier-mâché caterpillar, about Teaching Opportunities.

  “What kind of caterpillar is it supposed to be?” He looked at the chart on the wall. “Better make it a great spangled fritillary, since you haven’t caught one.”

  “The caterpillar I’m making is a monarch,” she said stiffly. “It has the prettiest chrysalis. But I will catch a fritillary.”

  “Pretty sure of yourself.”

  “I’ll catch one!”

  When Destiny brought back the paper, E.D. spread it on the floor in the corner of the room and set him up with some huge pieces of shiny white paper, a bowl of water, and a box of fingerpaints. Before she let him start, she buttoned a paint-smeared man’s shirt onto him backward so that it hung like a dress from his chin to his ankles. He settled happily and began to work, smearing not only the paper, but the shirt and sometimes his face with color. As he painted, he talked steadily to himself, to the paint, to the paper. When he wasn’t talking, he was repeating nonsense syllables over and over again, in a sort of singsong chant. “You get used to it,” E.D. told Jake. “After a while you won’t notice him anymore—like the sound of a refrigerator turning on and off.”

  Jake, still slouched, began tearing strips of paper, and E.D. started to work on the caterpillar. By the time she was finished, Jake was reading Butterflies of the Carolinas. She wiped her hands on a rag and told him she would take the caterpillar out in the sun to dry. “Then I’m going to go catch a fritillary.” Destiny was earnestly telling himself about the big orange tiger he was about to paint in the green, green jungle. “You can keep an eye on Destiny.”

  She took Jake’s lack of response as agreement, grabbed the butterfly net, and left. There were no fritillaries in the meadow. There were only a couple of summer azures and an orange sulphur. It couldn’t be getting too late in the season. It was only past the middle of September. She could feel her stomach getting more and more knotted as she pushed her way through the shoulder-high stalks of goldenrod. What if she didn’t find a fritillary? She hated the idea of leaving a space in the Butterfly Project without a check mark. Worse, she’d told Jake she would catch a fritillary. She absolutely had to!

  She was just about to give up when an orange-and-beige butterfly of the right size flew out from behind a tulip tree at the edge of the meadow. It landed on a spray of goldenrod, its wings closed so that she couldn’t see the markings. She crept closer, the net ready in her hand. As she was about to sweep the net to catch it, the butterfly opened its wings and fluttered away. E.D. bit her lip to keep from crying with disappointment. The markings were soft and brown, not black. It was a fritillary all right, but not a great spangled. Three different times she’d caught a variegated fritillary. She knew the difference by this time. Sweaty and furious, she stayed out awhile longer, but finally had to head back. She didn’t want to leave Destiny with Jake for too long.

  As she got close to the house, she saw Jake coming from the direction of the dance studio. Winston was waddling along with him. Destiny wasn’t with them. Beneath the sound of hammering that came from Hal’s room, she could just make out the music for Cordelia’s ballet. Jake must have been watching her again.

  “You were supposed to be keeping an eye on Destiny,” she told him as he joined her.

  “Independence,” he said. “That’s what the Creative Academy is all about!”

  “Destiny’s only four!”

  “A pretty independent four if you ask me. I told him I didn’t think he was independent enough to finish the painting he was working on all by himself. He said he could prove he was. So I let him.”

  “It’s never a good idea to leave Destiny alone.”

  “Didn’t get your fritillary, huh?” He was smirking at her. />
  “I’ll get it!” she said.

  When they got to the schoolroom, Destiny greeted them at the door. “Look at me! Look at me!” His hair, slathered with wheat paste, stood up in clumps and tufts all over his head. “See, Jake? Little-kid hair does so too stand up in points. When it’s all dry, I’m gonna paint it purple! Or green. I like green. Do you like green?”

  Chapter Twelve

  A week later, Jake stood in the bathroom of Wisteria Cottage, humming abstractedly to himself as he gelled his hair into points. He frowned into the mirror. He’d taken on this look so long ago that he could hardly remember himself any other way. But the truth was he was getting tired of doing this every day. It was one thing to go to so much trouble when people took notice, when it got him something he wanted. But here it didn’t get him anything at all. Nobody cared. The only Applewhite who even noticed his hair anymore was Destiny. And that had gotten to be a major pain.

  The day with the wheat paste Destiny had absolutely insisted on letting his hair dry that way, though Jake and E.D. had kept him from painting it. Jake understood, now, why wheat paste was used to do papier-mâché. When it dried, it was like rock. Sybil Jameson had refused to take any motherly responsibility for the situation at all. “You’re the one who gave him the idea in the first place,” she told Jake. “You wash the stuff out.” Jake had never handled a screaming, flailing four-year-old before. It had taken an hour and a half of head soaking and hysteria to get all the wheat paste out, and by that time Jake had been as wet and exhausted as Destiny.

  That had been only the beginning. The next day Destiny had painted his hair with green fingerpaint. The day after that he’d used colored markers to give it rainbow stripes. Luckily, they were watercolor ones. Destiny was so prone to coloring things that weren’t meant to be colored that permanent markers had been banned from the Applewhite household altogether.

  Nobody minded the boy spending the day with vividly colored hair, but Sybil insisted the color be washed out before bed. Jake, of course, had to do it. And Destiny had turned it into a game to see how hard he could make it for Jake to get the job done. Very hard! The kid was incorrigible. What the Applewhites ought to do, Jake thought, was shave Destiny’s head!

  Jake stared at his own hair. It was getting too long for this. Besides, the dark brown roots were showing now in a way that was starting to look scruffy instead of intentional. Then there was the problem of his clothes. It was hot out. Sunny and hot and humid. Black clothes made it seem even hotter. And black clothes were the only clothes he owned. He’d worn the spiked collar only twice—it had made his neck sweat and then chafed it raw.

  Jake was beginning to feel he was disappearing altogether. Nobody except E.D. and Destiny noticed when he swore. Destiny giggled and E.D. just sighed and shook her head. Nothing he’d done before to show people who he was and what he stood for worked here.

  He couldn’t even chill out the way he used to. No TV to watch. His Walkman was useless without earphones. If he dared to smoke where he could be seen, somebody was sure to snatch away his cigarette. It wasn’t only Zedediah who did it. Archie had, and Lucille, too. Archie only snatched and stomped, but Lucille had delivered a ten-minute lecture—not on the dangers of cigarette smoking, which he’d heard about a zillion times before, but on the desecration of tobacco, which she said was sacred to American Indian spirituality. By the end of the lecture she’d worked herself into tears about the “wanton destruction of native culture in the Americas.” Lucille Applewhite was such an incredibly cheerful person it was actually painful to see her in tears. It wasn’t the sort of feeling Jake was used to.

  So he’d taken one of his last cigarettes out into the meadow three days ago to find a place to smoke it in peace. There’d been no place to sit in the meadow. He’d found a log by the edge of the pond and settled himself there. Winston had gone along with him, and Jake had no sooner lit his cigarette and taken a nice, long, relaxing drag than the dog got himself stuck in the mud by the cattails and started howling as if he were being murdered. When Jake went to pull him out, he got stuck, too. It was the smelliest, blackest, most disgusting mud he’d ever encountered, and it snatched one of his sneakers right off his foot. By the time he’d managed to crawl out, drag the dog free, and find his sneaker, he was muck from neck to toe.

  Later, he’d found two ticks on the back of his neck, their heads buried in his skin, sucking his blood. Archie had pulled them off with tweezers and assured him that he wasn’t likely to get Rocky Mountain spotted fever, since the ticks hadn’t been on him long enough, but the ordeal had wrecked the whole idea of sneaking off for a relaxing smoke.

  Apart from the pond incident, the dog was getting to be a real nuisance. Where Jake went, Winston went. He had abandoned the main house altogether and taken up residence in Wisteria Cottage. More specifically in Jake’s room. Though Jake insisted the dog sleep on the lavender braided rug, when he woke in the morning at the horrible predawn hour when Archie ground his coffee before going out for his morning exercise, Winston was invariably lying alongside him, pinning him beneath the covers, snoring steadily and drooling on his pillow. He had to shove the dog off the bed if he had to get up to go to the bathroom.

  Now Jake finished his hair, stepped back, and tripped over Winston, who was lying behind him. The dog yelped and leaped to his feet so that Jake stumbled over him again, cracking his elbow on the sink and his knee on the toilet before he got his balance. He swore. “What’s the matter with you, dog? Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Winston stared up at him with those sad, droopy eyes and wagged his tail. The overwhelming impulse to boot the dog out into the hall vanished. Jake reached down and rubbed the dog behind his ears. There. That proved it. The Jake he knew, the Jake he had always been, was disappearing. And there was nothing—nobody—to put in his place.

  Chapter Thirteen

  E.D. was alone in the schoolroom, sitting at the computer with her hands pressed over her ears. Jake and his canine shadow, Winston, had gone into Traybridge with Archie to get some supplies for the wood shop, and Lucille had taken Destiny along to the library. Jeremy Bernstein was still staying in Dogwood Cottage. He had decided to write a book about what he insisted on calling the Applewhite Artistic Dynasty, and he had been practically monopolizing the schoolroom computer, working on the book and exchanging e-mails with his TV friend, trying to arrange a documentary about them all, or a story on a magazine show at least. But he was out in the wood shop now. It was a chance to get online and do her math. Except that she couldn’t concentrate.

  E.D. had always thought you could get used to sounds, the way you got used to smells after a while. Sensory fatigue, it was called. You would get so you didn’t notice anymore. Like Destiny’s nonstop chatter. She’d told Jake it was like getting used to a refrigerator motor. And she’d been right. Everybody got used to Destiny. You couldn’t survive in this family otherwise.

  But this was different. This was worse. Much, much worse. This was torture. She’d heard somewhere that when the cops or the FBI or somebody had wanted to end a siege with a militant cult, they’d beamed rock and roll music at them from high-powered speakers. She could understand why it would work. Only they shouldn’t have used rock and roll. They should have used The Sound of Music. It would have been faster. After twenty-four hours the people in the cult would have laid down their guns and come out on their hands and knees, eyes as crazed as Wolfie’s, singing compulsively about female deer and kitten whiskers.

  For five days now her father had been playing the CD of The Sound of Music all day, every day. He said he needed to totally immerse himself in the musical ambiance of the show. So everybody was being totally immersed in the musical ambiance of the show. Her mother had begged him to use earphones, but he refused, of course. “They not only destroy your eardrums, they mess up your brain waves!” So the music blared out from the living room speakers, not just through the whole of the main house, but out the open windows and all over Wit’s End.
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br />   Upstairs Hal had gone almost silent for a while after the UPS man dropped off a roll of chicken wire and two gigantic bags of plaster. The sign on his door that had once read HAL APPLEWHITE, PAINTER now said HAL APPLEWHITE, SCULPTOR. But whatever he was sculpting with chicken wire and plaster, Hal had taken up hammering again. Purely, E.D. thought, in self-defense. Sybil had turned up the volume on the white noise machine in her office and had taken to wearing earmuffs in order to keep writing her Great American Novel.

  Cordelia swore the sound carried out to the dance studio. Her ballet, she claimed, was changing from a discordant tragedy to something resembling a polka. Most days Lucille stayed in Wisteria Cottage with all the doors and windows closed and the curtains drawn. She said it was the only way she could write poetry that didn’t fall into rhymes like thread and bread, mitten and kitten. E.D. figured it was the music that had sent Jeremy Bernstein out to the wood shop. He could do interviews with Zedediah and Archie out there, where the power tools overwhelmed any other sounds.

  It wasn’t that E.D. didn’t like the music. She did. But the constant repetition had worn grooves in her brain. Even in those few blessed hours when Randolph took the CD and went off to Traybridge for what he called his “eternal, unending, utterly futile auditions,” there was no respite. The music kept playing over and over in her mind. She would catch herself humming it. Whistling it. It wasn’t just the hills that were alive with this music, it was the trees, the grass, the house, the universe! Even worse, Jake had taken to humming it as well, so that if she did manage to drive it out of her mind briefly, he might bring it rushing back at any moment.

  Randolph Applewhite didn’t very often direct musicals, and when he did, he usually went somewhere else to do it. Some other city in some other state. If he ever got this show cast and if the family survived the rehearsal period, E.D. was going to suggest they make a family rule against his ever again directing a musical from home.