Surviving the Applewhites

by Stephanie S. Tolan

“We won’t let Blackie have it till it cools. Hot water will dissolve the sugar faster,” Jake said. When the water boiled, Jake put a cup of sugar into a bowl and poured in some water. He stirred awhile, then poured in some more. “I think that should do it,” he said.

  Destiny frowned. “Blackie won’t like that. Butterflies like flowers. That isn’t pretty like flowers.” Destiny climbed onto a stool and got a packet of grape Kool-Aid out of the cupboard. “We can make it purple. That’s pretty.”

  Jake shrugged. If butterflies could eat soy sauce and Gatorade, grape Kool-Aid probably wouldn’t hurt them.

  Destiny dumped the package of drink powder into the bowl and Jake stirred it. “That’s good!” Destiny said, looking at the deep purple syrup. “Pretty.”

  Jake nodded. “Blackie will love it.”

  Jake poured a little into a saucer and set it on the counter. “Now that’ll be cool in a minute and he’ll come and sit on the edge and drink some. I think.”

  They waited. And waited. Blackie didn’t move off the philodendron. Finally, Jake put his hand out in front of the butterfly, thinking he might shoo it off the plant and down to the counter. To his surprise, it stepped onto his fingers. Gently and carefully, he moved his hand down next to the saucer and the butterfly began uncoiling its long, black tongue. In a moment, the butterfly stepped delicately off Jake’s hand and onto the edge of the saucer, then stretched its tongue like a long straw into the purple liquid.

  “It’s working! It’s working!” Destiny said. “He’s drinking!”

  Jake could hardly believe his eyes. He wished he had E.D.’s camera.

  After a while Blackie coiled his tongue back up and fluttered away from the saucer. He flew around the kitchen a couple of times and then landed on Destiny’s shoulder. Destiny’s eyes got very big and round. “Look, Jake. He likes me!”

  “Of course he does. Now, if you are very quiet and walk very carefully, maybe he’ll ride up to your room with you.” He picked up the butterfly net, just in case, and followed as Destiny took tiny baby steps out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

  Three hours later Jake was in the schoolroom going over his lines when Randolph, E.D., Jeremy, and Cordelia got home. E.D. came in to see if any of the other butterflies had come out. She didn’t believe him about Blackie and the Kool-Aid. “You’ll see for yourself tomorrow,” he told her.

  “Where’s the butterfly now?” she asked.

  “Somewhere in Destiny’s room.”

  “Is Destiny asleep?”

  “He wasn’t when I came down a little while ago. He was singing to Blackie. He says Blackie is the bestest pet he’s ever had except that he can’t pet him. I tried to get him to go to sleep about an hour ago, but it was no good. He’s used to being up till rehearsal’s over.”

  “It’s a good thing.”

  “Why?” E.D. sighed. “Dad’s decided on the replacement Gretl.”

  “Not Priscilla Montrose?”

  “This is Randolph Applewhite we’re talking about here. Of course he’s not going to use Priscilla Montrose. He’s going to call Mrs. Montrose first thing tomorrow morning and tell her his choice. When she hears it, she’ll cancel the show. He’d rather have a musical with good singers canceled than one with lousy singers that actually happens.”

  “Who’s he going to cast?”

  “Destiny.”

  Jake felt his jaw drop. “He can’t cast Destiny. Gretl’s a girl!”

  “He’s the director; he can do anything he likes. He’s going to turn Gretl into a boy and call him Hans. Destiny’s little enough to be cute, which is more than you could say about Priscilla Montrose. There’s nothing in the script that can’t work that way.” E.D. sighed deeply. “It won’t matter, though. The whole reason Mrs. Montrose hasn’t canceled it already, the whole reason she didn’t get up and leave the minute she took a bite of Govindaswami’s chicken, was that she thought her daughter was going to get to be on network television. The minute she finds out that isn’t going to happen, it’ll all be over.”

  Jake felt his stomach clench. No! It could not all be over. Enough bad things had happened to him this year! He was going to do this. He was going to play Rolf. He and Jeannie Ng were going to sing their duet and dance and he was going to kiss her. He was going to hold a gun on the von Trapps when they were escaping. And to do all this he was going to cut off his scarlet hair and take off his eyebrow ring and all his earrings.

  “It’s your fault,” E.D. told him. “You’re the one who taught Destiny to sing. If he hadn’t heard Destiny, he would have had to cast Priscilla.”

  “I didn’t teach Destiny; I just sang with him. All it was was practice. Maybe all of you can sing.”

  “The thing is, it doesn’t matter. It’s all over.”

  Jake thought about what had happened ever since Randolph Applewhite had asked his family for help. And then he smiled. Little by little, he felt his stomach unclenching. E.D. was wrong. How could she, an actual member of the Applewhite family, possibly think it could all be over? All of them, even the invisible Hal, had put their whole selves into this show by now. Not just family, either. Bernstein. Govindaswami. It didn’t matter anymore that it was Randolph’s show, that it was a project nobody else had wanted anything to do with. Everybody was involved in it now.

  And the way these people got involved was like nothing he’d ever seen before. They might moan and groan and grouch and complain about how much there was to do, but they put everything else aside and did it. “Passion,” Govindaswami had said. That was it. What the Applewhites did they did with passion. They cared about the show now the way some people cared about flying around the world in a balloon or sailing across the ocean alone or climbing Mt. Everest. “She may cancel it, but it’ll happen anyway. Some way or another, it’ll happen. You’ll see. I’ll make you a bet.”

  E.D. was an Applewhite after all, he thought. She knew better than to take the bet.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  E.D. woke early, dreading her father’s call to Mrs. Montrose. She tried for a while to go back to sleep, but she couldn’t. Finally, she decided that she didn’t want to face catastrophe on an empty stomach, so she pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and headed downstairs to fix herself something to eat.

  Destiny was already up. She could hear him in the kitchen singing “Do-Re-Mi.” Dad’s right, she thought. Destiny can sing a whole lot better than Priscilla Montrose. She hoped what Jake had said would turn out to be true, that there would be a show for Destiny to sing in. When she got to the kitchen, it was the butterfly she noticed first, standing on a saucer full of purple syrup, its wings moving delicately, its long tube of a tongue arched into the liquid.

  Then she noticed a puddle of purple syrup on the counter and a bowl in the middle of the puddle. And then she noticed Destiny. He had a purple-stained towel around his shoulders and purple syrup in his hair and running down over his ears and neck.

  He stopped singing and grinned at her. “Isn’t he beautiful? His name is Blackie, and he stayed in my room the whole night. He roded down on my shoulder and I fed him. He’s the bestest pet I ever had. He—”

  “Why did you put syrup in your hair?”

  “That lady said Kool-Aid won’t wash out. Jake washes all my other colors out. Now my hair gets to stay purple like Jake’s gets to stay red.”

  E.D. had her brother on a stool by the sink with his head under the faucet when her father came in. As much of a mess as the sticky purple syrup had made, it had not turned Destiny’s hair purple. Almost all the color had washed out, leaving his white blond hair with just the tiniest tinge of lavender. His hands and his ears were another thing altogether. They were stained a deep, purply gray, and his fingernails were almost black.

  Randolph stood in the doorway and looked. E.D. braced herself for his reaction. But her father let out a long, dramatic sigh. “I suppose this is what comes of getting up in the middle of the night,” he muttered as he set about making a pot of coffee. The butterfly flut
tered up to the philodendron.

  “Might as well get it over with,” Randolph said when he’d drunk his coffee. He went off to make the phone call to Mrs. Montrose. E.D. scrubbed and scrubbed Destiny’s hands and fingernails with soap and a nail-brush until most of the color was gone. But she dared not take a brush to his ears. They were apparently going to have to fade on their own.

  When her father came back ten minutes later, he was shaking his head. “It would have been interesting, integrating a purple-eared boy named Hans into the show.”

  “She canceled it?” E.D. asked.

  “She canceled it.”

  “Did you try to reason with her?”

  “Reason with her? She started babbling like a maniac, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. She said I had violated her trust and the trust of an innocent and impressionable eight-year-old child. What do you suppose she meant by that? I never promised that wretched little girl would get the part.”

  E.D. had never fully explained what she’d told the woman on the phone when she invited her to dinner. She decided this was not a good time to do so.

  “I tell you, the more that woman talked, the more berserk she got. Something about fried chicken and false pretenses and crazed wild animals endangering her daughter’s life. I couldn’t get her to stop, so finally I just hung up on her.”

  As the news of the cancellation spread around Wit’s End, it was as if someone had lit a string of firecrackers. One after another came the explosions. Nobody blamed Mrs. Montrose. They blamed Randolph. “You never once think of anyone except yourself!” she heard her mother say. “It’s not as if it’s a Broadway production. What harm could the little girl have done the show?” All E.D. caught of her father’s answer was the phrase “artistic integrity.”

  Zedediah, who was usually the solid rock under the family’s waves, raged about the customers he had put on hold in order to build sets instead of furniture and the cost of the raw materials they had used from the wood shop. He sounded more like Paulie than himself. Archie yelled about not having had time to finish two of the pieces for his gallery show. Cordelia was the most dramatic. She held her hands out to her father. “Look at them. Just look! My fingers have bled and I’m practically going blind from making ruffles for little girls’ dresses. Besides all those ruffles—and the choreography, and teaching twenty-five people with two left feet how to waltz—I have hemmed four nuns’ habits. Do you know how far it is around the bottom of a nun’s habit?”

  Jeremy Bernstein shrieked when he was told. Thanks to Randolph Applewhite, he said, his television career was over. “First my car, now my career—totaled. Totaled!” Randolph pointed out that his TV career hadn’t actually started yet—and Jeremy burst into tears. Jake just clenched his fists. His face went almost as red as his hair, and he stormed off across the field with Winston following. Lucille, being Lucille, did not explode or shriek or cry. She got a faraway look in her eyes and went off to meditate.

  Govindaswami was the only one entirely unmoved by the news. “Aaahhh,” he said gravely. “This will be a good thing. Everything works for the highest good. Always this is so. You will see. The Universe works in mysterious ways.”

  E.D. went to the schoolroom and watched two more butterflies struggle to break free of their gray-brown cases. She couldn’t help thinking about what Govindaswami had said. It seemed stupid. Worse, it was mean. Everybody was miserable, and he was telling them that their misery was perfectly okay. How could any good, let alone the highest good, come from wasting all that time and effort? And what could be good about having to call people who had their hearts set on being in the show and telling them it was all off?

  Her father was going to call the leads, but as stage manager she was the one who had to call the minor actors. She could hardly bring herself to think about it, much less do it. Govindaswami talked like somebody out of one of those old black-and-white movies, she thought, where everything always turned around just in time for a happy ending.

  It was when she thought about those movies that the idea popped into her mind. Her father had rented one of them once about a theater company that lost its theater. They’d put on the show in a barn instead. Wit’s End had a barn. A big barn. They parked cars in it sometimes, and the riding mower was there. But when it was empty, it was really quite a lot like a theater, except that it didn’t have a stage. Or seats. Or lights. Maybe they could fix that. They’d have to build a stage and find some lights and some sound equipment and some chairs for the audience. They’d have to do publicity. Sell tickets.

  Could they?

  If they could, Jeremy wouldn’t have to give up his television career. The network people might like the story even better this way—art struggling against impossible odds. Today was Friday, October tenth. The original opening had been set for the twenty-fourth. Two weeks away. Fourteen days. E.D. went to find her father.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Jake had found a crumpled cigarette in the bottom of his duffel bag and gone out into the woods to smoke it, Winston tagging loyally along. It hadn’t helped. He realized with considerable shock that he didn’t really like the taste smoking left in his mouth, that he’d never liked it. After two drags he crushed out the cigarette. He swore. He kicked the trunk of a tree. He imagined a house—Mrs. Montrose’s house—going up in flames. The Traybridge Little Theatre blowing up and then settling in a cloud of dust like those buildings they showed being demolished on television. Winston had flopped down a considerable distance away and was eyeing him warily.

  “Okay, okay,” he said to the dog. “I probably wouldn’t do those things even if I could.” The dog came no closer. “Let’s walk.”

  When the two of them got back, having wandered the whole of Wit’s End, the barn doors were open and the cars had been moved out into the driveway. Zedediah, riding the lawn mower, was coming out, while Archie and someone Jake had never seen before were going in, carrying a stack of two-by-fours. Cordelia and Lucille, both with handkerchiefs tied over their hair, were coming from the main house carrying brooms, mops, and buckets. Jake felt a kind of electricity in the air that was how it must be when an army was getting ready for an all-out assault.

  “Go to the schoolroom and get your assignment,” Cordelia called to him. “I think you’re supposed to help Archie and Hal.”

  Archie and Hal? That stranger whose back he had seen going into the barn must have been Hal—out of his room and into the daylight. He stood for a moment, watching the barn doors, and soon the two came out again. Hal was just about Jake’s size, dressed, as Jake was, in black—black boots, black pants, and a black turtleneck. His long, reddish brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and he sported a goatee that was a scragglier replica of Randolph’s. Hal Applewhite, fifteen-year-old sculptor, looked like a cross between his father and his older sister, except that he had a really bad case of acne. Whatever was going on, Jake thought, it must be big to bring Hal out. Very, very big.

  Over the next ten days it turned out to be bigger than Jake could have imagined. The show would go on, if it took everyone’s dying breath to make it happen. Every member of the cast agreed to stay with the show. For most of them what changed was little more than geography. Instead of going to Traybridge for rehearsals, they now came to Wit’s End. What changed for the Applewhites was something else again.

  Jake had thought that he knew something about the Applewhites and passion. But nothing had prepared him for what happened when all of them, all at the same time, became totally obsessed with the same thing. What had seemed like hard work before now looked like a sort of happy, restful vacation. Gone was any consideration of larks and owls. Work went on day and night. Sleep was relegated to a nap here or there. Jake gave up on his hair altogether; he needed every moment of sleep he could get. He barely had time for showers, let alone for gelling his hair into points.

  The whole of Wit’s End was transformed. The barn became command central, where the basic work of creating a theater from s
cratch went on. Trucks delivered rented folding chairs; rented, borrowed, or scavenged lighting and sound equipment; and lumber. Lots and lots of lumber. At one end of the barn a stage was built, and the loft became the light and sound booth. Wisteria Cottage became the costume shop, with Jake’s room serving as dressing room and costume storage. Jake was given a cot in Zedediah’s cottage, where he and Winston shared the living room with Paulie. The wood shop, of course, was the scene shop. Rehearsals were held in the dance studio. Destiny was moved in with Hal to free up his room, and Govindaswami and Bernstein doubled up in Dogwood Cottage so that Sweet Gum Cottage could be turned into a kind of dormitory to house the people who showed up to lend a hand. It seemed that Randolph knew an almost infinite number of theater people who were between jobs at any given moment. They came in waves, staying for as many days as they could spare and seeming every bit as obsessed while they were there as the Applewhites.

  Govindaswami continued to cook, but no longer did work stop for meals. He took the food to the barn, to the wood shop, to Wisteria Cottage, to wherever people were at work, with the help of Destiny and his red wagon. The delivery man from the lumberyard, who happened to arrive one day when shrimp vindaloo was being set out on a plank between two sawhorses, fell instantly in love with Indian cuisine. He ate two plates full and then came back when his delivery shift was over to help, bringing two friends with him. In return for all they could eat of whatever dinner was being served, the three of them came back for four days in a row to build risers to accommodate folding chairs for an audience of one hundred and fifty.

  There was something for everyone to do, including Destiny, who became a kind of message and delivery service, scurrying all over Wit’s End with his wagon, talking or singing nonstop as he went. Sybil and Jeremy took over marketing and publicity, writing press releases and churning out advertising circulars that labeled the production “The most exciting piece of musical theater ever to appear on a North Carolina stage.”