Surviving the Applewhites

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  Today was Zedediah’s day to be teacher on call. Unlike the rest of the family, Zedediah had a habit of actually showing up. He’d even demand to see what they’d been doing and ask them questions about it. Jake hated Zedediah’s days. On his first one the old man had asked Jake what gave him joy. Jake hadn’t understood the question. “You mean what do I like to do?”

  “I mean,” Zedediah had said, “exactly what I said. What gives you joy?”

  Jake hadn’t been able to come up with an answer.

  “Once you know that, you will know what you want from an education and you’ll be able to set your own program. Meantime, just do what E.D. is doing.” Every time Zedediah had been on call since then, when he checked out whatever work Jake had done, he’d given him a look that seemed to say that Jake Semple was a screwup who was never going to amount to anything. E.D., of course, never got such a look.

  At least he’d have something to show Zedediah this time. Not something E.D. had thought up. He put the caterpillars and the parsley into the aquarium and added a couple of sticks, propped against the glass and held in place with lumps of modeling clay. Then he tied a piece of cheesecloth over the top of the aquarium to keep the caterpillars in and lettered a sign that said METAMORPHOSIS, A LIVING DEMONSTRATION. He taped the sign to the front of the aquarium. This would be an infinitely better Teaching Opportunity than a papier-mâché caterpillar and chrysalis. Destiny—and all the rest of the family, for that matter—would get to watch the caterpillars pupate and then turn into butterflies.

  The Internet website that had had the photo of the black swallowtail caterpillar had advised keeping butterflies inside once they’d emerged from their pupa state rather than releasing them. That way they could be cared for and guarded all the way through the life cycle. More butterflies could be safely raised indoors that way and eventually released to increase their numbers in the wild. Butterflies were in trouble, it said, from pesticides and habitat loss. Raising them for release could help. The website gave a recipe for feeding the butterflies once they hatched. They would get to know you and come land on your hand to feed, it said. You could offer the concoction, made of soy sauce, Gatorade, and milk, and they would unroll their long, strawlike tongues and suck it up. The mixture sounded disgusting, but the website promised that the butterflies would love it. You could also make a plain sugar syrup or just put out a piece of ripe melon where they could get to it, and they would feed themselves.

  He draped newspapers over the aquarium so E.D. and Zedediah wouldn’t see it the minute they came in, and then sat down at his desk with a book about the Civil War E.D had given him. When E.D. came in and began gathering what she had done during the week to show Zedediah, Jake began humming the title song from The Sound of Music. Before she had a chance to react, Zedediah arrived with Destiny, who was loudly yodeling the song about the lonely goatherd. As usual, he was slightly off-key.

  “Zedediah,” E.D. said, “make him stop!”

  “That’s enough now,” Zedediah said to Destiny.

  “What’s a goatherd?” Destiny asked.

  “A boy who takes the goats up to the pastures in the mountains to feed. And watches out for them. Protects them.”

  “And why is he lonely?”

  “You’d be lonely, too, if your only friends were goats,” E.D. said as she held out her curriculum notebook to Zedediah. “I’ve checked off everything I’ve finished. My report on the Battle of Gettysburg is all done—I just haven’t had a chance to print it out yet. Jeremy’s been on the computer a lot.”

  “We must let him know that you need your time on it, too. Maybe Hal can let him use his sometimes.” Zedediah looked over E.D.’s notebook. “Good. Good. I see you’ve started reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He turned to Jake. “Have you begun it yet?”

  Jake shook his head. “I’m reading Hamlet instead. Because of Cordelia’s ballet.” He could tell by the look on her face that E.D. hadn’t read Hamlet yet. Good. He’d actually be ahead of her on something then.

  “How far have you gotten in it?”

  “Not that far. It’s slow going. I’ve been taking it with me to rehearsals, but it’s hard to concentrate there.”

  “I hope you aren’t going to let your role in The Sound of Music interfere with your schoolwork. We have an obligation to your grandfather to be sure you do a little learning while you’re here, you know.”

  Zedediah was giving him that look again. Was he warning Jake that the show could get snatched away from him like a cigarette or his headphones? “We only have rehearsals at night,” Jake said. “I can read it during the day.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve finished the Butterfly Project, though,” Jake said.

  “You can’t have!” E.D. protested. “It was already done.”

  Jake went to the aquarium and whisked away the newspapers. “This is a different way—a better way—to do the Teaching Opportunity. Destiny can see the whole process of metamorphosis—in real life.”

  E.D. stared into the aquarium. “What are those?” She looked more carefully. “Black swallowtails?”

  Jake nodded, humming “The Lonely Goatherd” quietly to himself.

  “Are those worm thingies going to gets to be butterflies?” Destiny asked. Jake nodded again. “And do I gets to see them grow their wings?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Yay, Jake!”

  Jake smiled at E.D., who glowered back at him. Score one for the delinquent kid.

  Chapter Nineteen

  For a week Govindaswami had been teaching them to meditate. E.D. had put meditation under Healthful Living in her curriculum notebook so that she could count it as an academic accomplishment. She was sitting cross-legged on the schoolroom floor now, concentrating on her breathing. In. Out. In. Out. It was supposed to keep her from thinking. Center her. Calm her. Right now it didn’t seem to be working. What she wanted to do was scream.

  Hal had refused to let Jeremy Bernstein use his computer. When Sybil had broached the subject, speaking to Hal’s closed door, he had said that he was creating a website where he could sell his sculpture and he needed his computer every minute. Besides, he couldn’t let anyone into his room any more than he could come out of his room himself. “I need my creative privacy,” he had shouted through the door. So Jeremy had been allowed to take over the schoolroom computer almost completely.

  He was at the keyboard now, tapping away. He’d been there last night when she’d finally given up and gone to bed. This morning he had been there already at eight-thirty. She’d been trying to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream while she waited for him to finish whatever it was he was doing now, but the incessant tap of the computer keys had made it impossible to concentrate. She hadn’t done her math. She hadn’t written the story she was supposed to write for language arts.

  She’d gone to her father about it as soon as he got up, to beg him to put his foot down either with Hal or with Jeremy. But he’d told her that things were going badly with the Traybridge Little Theatre. He had a meeting with the technical staff that afternoon to sort things out, and he had no psychic energy left over for trivialities. Trivialities!

  She’d taken the problem to her mother then. That had been a mistake. She had stuck her head into her mother’s office and her mother had thrown a dictionary at her. Well, maybe not actually at her. It had missed by a foot. Sybil Jameson was having writer’s block. E.D. wished her mother had told the family that. She never would have gone near the office if she’d known. They all knew better than to go near Sybil during a block.

  That was Jeremy’s fault, too, E.D. thought. With him there doing his article about Sybil’s Great American Novel, asking her questions about it, begging to be allowed to read the newest bits of it, she didn’t dare to admit that the Great American Novel had come to a screeching halt. “Plot!” she had told E.D. after apologizing for throwing the dictionary. “That’s the whole trouble. I keep writing plot. I actually killed a character off yesterday
morning. I couldn’t help myself. My masterpiece is turning inexorably into a Petunia Grantham mystery!” E.D. had ended up going down to the kitchen to make her mother a soothing cup of tea.

  She’d tried to find Archie then, but he’d gone fishing. Archie had become unaccountably obsessed with fishing. Lucille, who had been meditating herself when E.D. found her, looked up at her and smiled through a wreath of incense. The smile reminded E.D. of Govindaswami’s. “What can possibly be wrong in the present moment?” Lucille had said to her. “Ask yourself that and you’ll find the answer.” E.D. had no idea what that meant, but she could recognize a dead end when she encountered it.

  Even Zedediah had let her down. “Consider it an unexpected blessing,” he’d said. “You don’t want to sit at a computer now. It’s October. The leaves are turning. The air is cooling off. Day after day we have sunshine and blue sky. But it’s all too fleeting. The rainy season’s on its way. Go out now, while the world is still perfect. Smell it. Listen to it. Take it in before it goes.”

  “I thought you wanted us to learn!” she’d said.

  “There are many ways to learn,” her grandfather had said.

  E.D. discovered, now, that she had lost track of her breathing altogether. In. Out. It was no good. She opened her eyes—and saw immediately Jake’s metamorphosis project. Almost half of the caterpillars were now dark curved shapes hanging by thin threads from the twigs he’d put in. The others were busily munching away on bunches of parsley, growing ever fatter, leaving piles of tiny dark green balls of caterpillar dung on the floor of the aquarium. She hated Jake Semple. Of course this was a better idea than papier-mâché. Why had it never occurred to her to collect caterpillars?

  The day Jake had made the aquarium had been the last day he and E.D. had been a class. It had been agreed at dinner that night that there wasn’t really any more need for clumping them. Jake had shown initiative. Good sense. Creativity. Even cooperation. So Jake could do his thing, whatever, besides singing, he decided that thing might be, and she could go back to doing hers.

  Since then, as far as she could tell, Jake’s thing had had almost nothing to do with real work. His thing had been to go hiking with Winston. Most of the time Destiny tagged along. They’d take lunch in a backpack and come back late in the afternoon, sweaty or muddy, singing at the top of their lungs. Then they’d check to see if any butterflies had hatched and unload whatever they’d collected on their rambles. Jake called it all natural history. E.D. called it clutter.

  The schoolroom was littered with their mess. There were shoe boxes full of bright leaves, bowls full of hickory and beechnuts, pinecones and acorns; there were bird feathers, stones, and a big jar of slimy green water from the pond that Destiny claimed was full of “teensy buggy things” that they would check on every so often with a big magnifying glass. Jake hadn’t even looked for a book that would tell them what the buggy things were! Destiny called everything they brought back, just like the caterpillars, “magics.” Her little brother might learn about metamorphosis, but it seemed perfectly clear to E.D. that he was learning nothing else at all.

  She disentangled her legs and got up from the floor. If she couldn’t write or do her math or do research on the Internet, she’d take her copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream outside and finish reading it before the rainy season.

  She had just gotten it out of her desk when she heard a car skid to a stop on the driveway, and a car door slam, followed by footsteps thundering up onto the porch. “Help!” The front door banged open and then slammed shut. “Help!” It was her father’s voice, booming so that he could have been heard halfway to Traybridge. “Help, I said. Help! Help! Help! Where is this family when you need them?” There was a pause. Then, “FIRE!”

  Jeremy leaped up from his seat at the computer. He and E.D. collided as they tried to get through the schoolroom door at the same time. When they got to the front hall, Sybil was coming down the stairs, her hair disheveled, her computer glasses bouncing on her chest. Cordelia came from the kitchen, a doughnut in her hand.

  “They’re right,” her father said. “Never yell for help these days. Nobody wants to help. But yell ‘Fire’ and they come like bats out of hell, intent on saving their own skins.”

  “What is it?” Sybil asked. “What’s happened?”

  By this time Lucille and Govindaswami and Zedediah had all reached the front porch and were trying unsucessfully to sort out who would hold the door and who would come in through it. “Is someone dying?” Govindaswami asked. “Take me to him. Who is it?”

  “Not who—what,” Randolph said. “Dying! Dead!”

  “There’s no need to yell anymore,” Sybil said. “We’re all here now. At least everybody within a radius of five miles is here. What are you talking about?”

  “My show! I’m talking about my show. The Sound of Music. You may have heard of it.”

  “No need for sarcasm, Randolph,” Zedediah said.

  “They’ve all quit!”

  “Who’s all quit?” Cordelia asked.

  “The entire technical staff. Designer, costumer, choreographer, lights, props, even the stage manager! Murder, that’s what it is. Cold-blooded murder.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened? I just told you. They all quit. I called a technical meeting to sort out a few problems, and ten minutes into it they all just got up and walked out. No reason whatsoever!”

  “There must have been a reason. People don’t just—”

  “That wretched Montrose woman put them up to it, that’s the reason. Ever since I refused to cast that untalented little brat of hers, she’s been looking for a way to get rid of me. But she couldn’t just cancel the show, not with the way I cast it. Someone might think it was racism. The theater might lose its funding.”

  “But what did they say the reason was?” Sybil persisted.

  “Oh, well. They said that I was too demanding. They said I was a perfectionist. That I didn’t respect them—the stupid, incompetent, clueless ignoramuses. Now I ask you—”

  “Sounds about right to me,” Zedediah said.

  “Don’t start, Father.”

  “Oh,” Sybil said. “Oh, I get it now. I understand why you came in hollering ‘Help!’ at the top of your lungs. You’ve gone and bullied those poor people—”

  “Bullied? Bullied? I’m the director. They’re the tech staff—”

  “—you’ve gone and bullied and belittled those poor people until they couldn’t take it anymore, and now you expect us to come running to the rescue.”

  “I expect my talented and creative family to gather around me and support me in my hour of need.”

  “Nobody asked you to accept that job, Randolph.”

  “It’s my work! I’m a director. I direct. They offered me a show and I took it on. Which of you would have done anything different? This is a crisis. An emergency. A screaming disaster.”

  “The rest of us have our work, too,” Sybil said.

  Lucille put her hand on Randolph’s arm. “What, exactly, do you need?”

  “Costumes. Sets. Props. Choreography. Music. Lights. Everything!”

  “I can do costumes,” Lucille said. She turned to Sybil. “We could do them together. You could use a little break from the Great American Novel, couldn’t you?”

  Sybil stood for a moment, her hand on the stair railing. She glanced at Jeremy Bernstein and then looked back at Lucille, carefully avoiding E.D.’s eyes. “Well—it would be a great sacrifice, of course. The book has been going so smoothly. But—all right.” She turned to Randolph. “I’ll do it on one condition.”

  Randolph sighed loudly. “What condition is that?”

  “That you don’t try bullying me. If your family is going to save your skin, you’d better remember that we’re all artists in our own right. You may direct. You may not bully!”

  “You know me, my dear. I always give respect where respect is due.”

  The door at the top of the stairs opened a cra
ck. “I’ll design the set,” Hal’s voice called down. The door clicked shut again.

  “I suppose Archie and I could build it,” Zedediah said.

  “All right, all right,” Cordelia said. She took a bite of the doughnut. “I’ll do the choreography.”

  “I need someone to play the music,” Randolph said. “Could you play the show, too?”

  Cordelia shook her head. “I don’t read music. You know that. I play by ear.”

  “I could contribute,” Govindaswami said. “I could play the music on my sitar.”

  “Sitar? That Indian stringed instrument? Ah—ah, well—thank you. It’s good of you to offer. But I don’t think Rodgers and Hammerstein thought of having the score orchestrated for sitar.”

  Jeremy Bernstein cleared his throat. “Er…um. Excuse me, but perhaps I could play the show.”

  “Wonderful!” Randolph said. “The theater has a halfway decent synthesizer. I can arrange for you to—”

  “Um. I have never actually played a synthesizer.”

  “What do you play? A dulcimer, I suppose. Or a didgeridoo.”

  There was a long silence. Finally Jeremy mumbled something that E.D. couldn’t hear. Her father hadn’t heard either.