“The Mothers are,” she said, shoving a brochure in his face.
My Mom never explained to me why she wanted to be a Mother, but I had my theories. When my Mom was younger, she was tormented by eating disorders. She’d told me the stories—how, at school, they poured loathing in her locker, badgered her with fakeprayers, spread fictional rumors about her. Once, two disorders cornered her on her way home from school and beat my Mom so badly she missed a week of school.
It was a Mother who saved her, my Dad said. One day, my Mom was in a knockdown-dragout with a gang of disorders when a Mother dropped down from the sky and unfurled her warskirt. Those disorders landed in the hospital with fractured everythings—fractured egos, fractured goals, fractured sorrow.
You couldn’t just be a Mother, though—you had to be chosen. They hadn’t recruited for over five years, so my Mom was training for the day they opened the books again. She worked hard: she fasted; learned to box; bought a video about levitation and another about size-changing, which taught her how to think herself taller or shorter at will. She took meaningful courses on seeing the future and revising the past.
Once, when my Mom was at work, I found her videos and asked the TV to show one to me. I thought I’d impress my Mom if I could learn how to change size like she did. Just ten or fifteen minutes into the first taped lesson—how to reduce—my Mom walked in from work. “What are you doing?” she said.
I was about the size of a Converse hi-top. “Nothing,” I said.
She turned off the TV.
“You’ve caused enough trouble already,” she said. “Or will in the future.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
She shook her head and held up her hands. “I’m just saying,” she said, “you can’t go around taking other people’s things, .”
“OK,” I said.
The following Monday, we received a general prayer that the happiness would be restored. When we turned the faucets on that afternoon, though, they spat out happiness caked with sadness and the carcasses of doubts. I remember the four of us standing in the kitchen, waiting for the pipes to clear. My Dad let the happiness run for a few minutes, and then he poured some in a glass and held the happiness up to the light.
“Is it OK?” my Mom said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
My sister grabbed the glass from him and drank from it. “Augh,” she said, spitting it back.
“Is it happiness?” I said.
Briana shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t know what it is.”
My mother took a sip. “It’s not sadness,” she said. “Ralph, try it.”
My father reached for the glass, but I took it from him and drank. The liquid was thick and sludgy. It wasn’t happiness, but it wasn’t sadness either. “It’s bitter,” I said. “Is it bitterness?”
I handed the glass to my Dad; he studied the liquid, swished it around and took a sip. “It’s melancholy,” he announced. “They must be flushing the pipes still.”
I took the glass back. I took another sip, and another.
“Easy, ,” said my Dad.
“ likes it,” Briana announced.
I gulped down the rest of the melancholy, turned on the tap, and poured myself another glass.
THE BIG WHY
WHITE TRANSPARENT
That winter I developed a skin condition—an itching—and soon it had spread all over my arms and my neck and my ears. When I showed it to my Mom, she waited until my Dad came home and then called me into the kitchen. “Show your father,” she said. I held out my arm, and my father made a face at my mother.
The next day my mother took me to see our doctor, Doctor Coat. Coat and my Mom sometimes worked together at the hospital, but we went to see him in his office in Appleseed Springs. He took one look at my arm and said, “Ah. OK. Sure. No big surprise here, given your family history.”
I just stood there. “What’s he talking about?” said one of my thoughts.
“I’m almost positive this is divorcitis,” he said. “We knew that someday this might be a possibility.” Then he looked to my Mom, whose face was a blade.
“It’s what?” I said.
“Oh,” said Doctor Coat. “I didn’t mean—I just assumed—”
The word was too big for my mouth. “Divorce—”
“—itis,” said Doctor Coat. “It causes eczema—that’s the skin irritation here—moodiness, blurred vision, nausea, and an inability to have romantic relationships.”
“What do you mean, my family history?”
Doctor Coat held up his hands. “I am really sorry, Di,” he said. “I didn’t mean to complicate things.”
I looked at my Mom. “You have it?”
“Both me and your Dad,” said my Mom.
“But you’re married,” I said.
“A lot of married people have it,” Doctor Coat said. “About forty percent of Americans, actually.”
“And there’s a treatment for it,” my Mom said.
“Several, actually,” Doctor Coat said to me. “Most people with divorcitis take passive-aggressiveness, which you can buy in pill form or as a salve.”
“I take the pills,” my Mom said.
“But there’s a brand-new treatment on the market—evidence suggests that it quiets the divorcitis over time. So, who knows! With these meds, you may be able to stand in the same room as someone—maybe even, years from now, give them a hug!” He pulled a notepad from his pocket and wrote a prescription.
I took the paper and read it. “Music pills?” I said.
The Coat nodded. “Now, there are some side effects—defamilization, fatigue, that kind of thing. But they’ll keep the eczema at bay.”
“When will this go away?” I said.
They both stared at me.
“I don’t want to sugarcoat this for you, ,” said the Coat. “It will probably always be very difficult for you to have a happy romantic relationship.”
My Mom nodded and led me out of the office. She put her arm around me as we walked back to the Fart. “How long have you had this?” I asked.
She unlocked the passenger’s-side door. “I got it in my twenties,” she said.
“You and Dad are divorced?”
“Of course not! We fight it.” Mom pulled the Fart into traffic.
After a minute I said, “Why do you?”
My Mom lit a six-foot cigarette, rolled open the window and rested the cigarette against the top of the glass. “Why do we what?” she said.
“Why do you fight it?”
“What do you mean?”
What I meant was, what did they love about each other? Did my Mom love my Dad’s French Canadian frame—the barrel chest and skinny legs? Or his wild black hair and thick square glasses? Did my Dad like my Mom’s shaved head? Her muscles? The lighthouses in her eyes? What specifically?
“Because you love each other?” I said.
“Of course!” she said.
“I can’t believe this,” I said.
My Mom took a drag from her cigarette and blew smoke out of one side of her mouth. “It’s like Coat said—lots of people have it. Odor’s parents.”
“Really?”
“And the Lonelies.”
“They do?” I said.
My Mom nodded.
We farted to Ryan’s Pharmacy to fill the prescription. It took a long time—I read a magazine while my Mom waited in line for the pills. When they were ready, my Mom found me and handed me the bottle. “Here,” she said. “Sooner you take them, sooner you’ll start to feel better.”
The music pills were blue and translucent, and filled with what looked like strobe lights and dancing people.
“Take one,” she said.
I took out a pill and popped it. As soon as I did, the music surged through my body: the magazines started shouting, my knees buckled, and everything improved. “Bluh,” I said.
“You OK?” my Mom said.
Everything was different now. I lo
oked back at the pharmacy counter and the tall, gray-haired, thick-glassed pharmacist behind the glass. I read his face—the mole on his cheek—and realized who he was. I ran right up to the glass. “You’re my mother,” I said.
“,” my Mom said, and put a strong hand on my shoulder. The pharmacist said something to my mother, but his voice was low and bubbly notes.
“My mother,” I told the pharmacist.
“OK. Let’s go home,” my Mom said, and she pulled me away from the glass.
“No! Mom!” I said to the pharmacist.
“We’re leaving, ,” my Mom said, leading me past the line of sick people. After a few steps, though, I tore away from her. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” I spat at her. A man coughed on me and I looked in his face. “You’re my brother,” I said. He looked to his right, at an old woman standing behind him. “You’re my sister,” I told her. “Or my father.”
She was. And I’d missed them so much!
“Come on, ,” said my Mom, and she pulled me forward.
“You’re all my brothers and sisters—” I slurred, “—my family,” and then the very strong stranger pulled me outside into the sharp daylight.
TOPAZ
That spring the apples grew small—ten percent smaller, on average, than they’d been for any year on record. This might not seem like much, but it had serious, immediate ramifications for people in my town. Some clients—surrounding towns who’d bought apples from Appleseed since the days of Johnny Appleseed himself—demanded a discount or sent back their apples in disgust. It was worryfields—everyone was a little less meaningful. My friend Berson’s mother lost her management job, and the time factory where our neighbor Roger Lonely worked shifted him from full time to part time. Then one of my Dad’s tenants—a maître d’ at the East Margin Grill, a fancy apple restaurant downtown—broke his lease and left town.
A month after the harvest, the Board of Select Cones held a special meeting at the Town Hall. I wasn’t there, but my Dad showed me the article in The Daily Core. The article said that there were Mothers in attendance, and that the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was asked to speak to the Board. “It was a very warm winter, is all,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was quoted as saying. “Spring was too short and the apples had no chance to finalize. These are like,” he said, “rough drafts of apples.”
Select Cone Calumet Johnson held up an apple from one of his own trees. “This is a major disappointment,” he told the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Are you praying for the apples to return to size?”
“I am,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed told the Board. “Every day.”
“It’s not only the size of the apples,” Select Cone Rhonda O’Martian was quoted as saying. “They don’t taste like Appleseed apples. Has anyone noticed that?”
Then one of the other Orange Traffic Cones on the Board, Select Cone Hedge Miles, took a bite of the apple on the table. “She’s right,” he said. “It tastes flat. Like paper.”
A day or two after that meeting, my Mom took my sister and me for our weekly shopping trip to the Big Why. The Big Why sold fresh, organic inquiries—everyone in town went there for their questions. It was a nice store, clean and well-organized, with classical music playing in the background and the askings organized by section. If my father went with us, he’d load up the cart with doozies: “What is life for?”s, or “What does it mean to be ‘authentic’?”s. My Mom liked the practicals: “What’s the least amount of food someone can live on?” “How does one survive a bookwormbite?” Bri liked the nuts ’n’ bolts: “How does a planer work?” “What’s a dovetail joint?”
Me? I let my thoughts wander through the aisles. Most of the time they came back with questions about the page itself. “Why do words have to die?” “Does a sentence have a soul?” “If the sentence ‘A tree dies in the woods.’ dies in the woods, does the sentence ‘Does anyone hear it?’ hear it?”
That day, though, we drove right by the Big Why and kept on going. At first I thought my Mom had made a mistake—I turned in my seat and looked back at the big question mark hanging over the sliding glass doors.
“Mom?” said Briana.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“Shopping for questions,” she said.
“But you just passed the Why,” Bri said.
“We’re going somewhere else today,” she said.
We drove down Williams and toward the Appleseed Line. “What the heck,” I said.
“Where are we going, Mom?” said Briana.
Soon we’d crossed the border into East Appleseed. My thoughts were pacing back and forth across the floors in the rooms of my mind. What, they wanted to know, was wrong with the Big Why?
Ten minutes into East Appleseed, my Mom pulled the Fart into a crumbly parking lot; to the left, I saw a store with a shabby clock over its door. “What’s this?” said Briana.
I read the name on the store window: “The Big When?”
“It’s exactly the same,” my Mom said. “Come on.”
We followed my Mom inside. The store was big and moore, with a funny smell and paint chipping off the walls. I read the signs above the rows—one read “Never,” another “Soon.” “All of these questions are time-based,” said Briana. My Mom ignored her and began pulling questions off the shelf: “When will there be peace?” and, “When will everyone and everything have meaning?”
“These questions suck,” I said, in earshot of a lady stocking Nows in the aisle.
“,” my Mom hissed, looking over at the lady. “They’re fine. Now pick out a question or don’t.”
Briana went one way, my Mom went another, and I wandered over to the bargain bin. There were some really old, faded questions in there, plus some open-ended ones and some broken asks. Before I even had time to choose one, though, I saw my Mom wheeling her shopping cart to the register. I grabbed the closest question and ran to catch up.
When we got back in the Fart my Mom said, “Pretty rad place, huh?”
“Rad?” my sister said.
“Isn’t that what people say? ‘Cool’?” my Mom said. “Was it cool?”
“It was OK,” Briana said.
“It was lame,” I said.
“What questions did you get?” my Mom asked.
“I got one about rain,” said my sister. “When will it rain?”
“It’s supposed to rain tomorrow,” my Mom said, and my sister smiled.
I took my question out of the brown paper bag. “I got ‘When the sky?’ ” I announced.
Neither my Mom nor my sister said anything for a second.
“When what?” said Bri.
“When,” I said. “The sky?”
My Mom looked at me in the rearview mirror. “I’m not sure how to—answer that one, .”
“That’s because he got it from the bargain bin,” Briana said. “None of those have answers, dumbass.”
I looked at the question.
“Crap,” I said. “Mine sucks!”
“Idiot,” Bri said to me.
“Bri,” my Mom said.
“I want to go to the Big Why,” I doaned.
Bri looked at my Mom. “Me, too,” she announced.
“No one’s going to the Why,” Mom said. “We already bought our questions for the week.”
“Mine doesn’t have an answer, though,” I said.
“Well,” my Mom said, lighting a cigarette, “some questions are like that.”
“I already have enough no-answer questions,” I shouted.
“Lower your voice, ,” said my Mom.
“Like: why didn’t anyone tell me about the divorcitis?” I hollered. “Like: where is my hair?”
“I said lower your voice,” my Mom said.
“Like, why am I so fat?”
“You’re fat because you eat so much crap,” my sister said.
“And who’s killing all my thoughts?” I wailed. “And why don’t we have more happiness? What does it
all mean?”
“,” my Mom said through clenched teeth, “you stop shouting right now.”
“I want answers,” I yelled.
“Shut your mouth,” my Mom roared.
“I want ANSWERS!” I howled.
“Sonofabitch,” my Mom said. She pulled the Fart over, got out, scorned around to my side and tore open the door.
“What are you doing?” I said.
She grabbed me by the collar and pulled me out of the car with one hand. “Fucking brat,” she spat, and pushed me back onto the shoulder of the road. I fell back and dropped my question; it broke on the pavement.
“My question,” I whined.
My Mom stormed back around the car, got in, and slammed the door shut.
“Where are you going?” I asked, starting to cry.
Briana looked at me from the backseat, her face a mix of satisfaction and pity.
“Mom!” I said.
“… his fault anyway—” I heard her say, and then, “—goddamned piece of shit.” Then she pulled the car back into traffic.
“Wait!” I shouted. I thought my Mom would turn the Fart around, but she didn’t. The car farted farther and farther away—soon I couldn’t see it.
I stood there crying for a minute or two, looking down at the broken question in my hand. It had cracked at the space seam, right between “when” and “the”—now I held “when” in one hand and “the sky” in the other.
I looked around and tried to get my bearings. I was on a strange page outside Appleseed. I started walking in the direction of the Fart. I walked past houses separated by vast white space. Then I passed a prayer center, an office park, and another prayer center. In twenty minutes or so, I saw the margin for Appleseed. I crossed the thick, smudgy space; soon I was at the edge of the paragraphs describing southeast Appleseed.
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