Surviving the Applewhites (9 page)

F
or 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 crack. “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.

“What? What do you play?”

Bernstein cleared his throat again and said, “The accordion.”

“You’re kidding.”

Bernstein looked up, his mouth tightening. “I am not kidding! I learned during my family’s summers in the Poconos when I was a kid. I wore a satin shirt and played in an accordion band!”

“You have your accordion with you?”

He shook his head. “Of course not. Nobody knows. I haven’t told a soul about this since I left junior high
school. But I could have my mother ship it.”

“Accordion.
The Sound of Music
on the accordion. Well, why not?” Randolph said. “It’s better than kazoos.”

E.D. turned and headed back toward the schoolroom. As intense and dramatic as all this was, it had nothing to do with her. Her father needed everybody else, not her.

“E.D.!” her father called. “Where are you going?”

“To get my Shakespeare,” she said. “You don’t need me.”

“Don’t need you? Didn’t you hear me say my stage manager quit? Of course I need you—more than anyone. There’s nobody else in this family even remotely organized enough to handle the job! There’s no time for Shakespeare now! There’s work to be done.”

E.D. gave her head a little shake as if to clear her ears. Her father dug into his briefcase and came up with a fat spiral notebook, a yellow legal pad covered with handwritten notes, and a calendar. He held them out to her. “Let’s go someplace where we won’t be disturbed. I need you all caught up and ready to go before tonight’s rehearsal. I’ll talk to the rest of you at dinner.”

J
ake was trying to get ready for rehearsal with Destiny, yodeling the lonely goatherd song in his wake, when it dawned on him that his life had slipped finally and utterly out of his control.

He’d become impossibly entangled with the Applewhites. First Winston had adopted him and then, by what seemed the same invisible and mysterious process, Destiny had, too. The kid had begun explaining to anyone who would listen that Jake was the “bestest brother in the whole wide world.” Jake had told him and told him that just because he had
come to live at Wit’s End it didn’t mean he was Destiny’s brother, but Destiny was impervious to minor details of fact.

When the family took over all the technical jobs on
The Sound of Music,
everybody was too busy working on the show to have time to look after a four-year-old. Jake only had to go to rehearsal. He had more time than anybody. And since Destiny had already adopted him anyway, he had somehow become a kind of full-time baby-sitter. Nobody had actually
asked
him to look after Destiny, and he hadn’t exactly volunteered. It had just happened.

Jake could understand why Hal wasn’t enough of a brother for Destiny. The set designs had appeared outside his door as he finished them. Then he’d built a model, which had also been left in the hall during the night, followed by the renderings—the drawings that Zedediah and Archie were using to build the parts of the set they could build in the wood shop. So far none of this had required Hal to come out of his room. Jake had still never met him face-to-face.

Wit’s End had become a beehive of theatrical activity. The number of costumes required was vastly greater than Lucille and Sybil could handle alone, so Cordelia, who had quickly finished the choreography and only had to go to a few rehearsals, was immediately drafted into the costume crew. Lucille had a sewing machine, but two more had been rented and
bolts and bolts of cloth brought from town. When even the three of them, working steadily and grumbling loudly, could not churn out nuns’ habits fast enough, they shanghaied Govindaswami, who was pretty good with a needle, to help.

Jake had no idea what a guru normally did, except for meditating, which didn’t seem to be a full-time occupation. But if Govindaswami was any sort of example, gurus had a variety of talents. After Randolph’s emergency had been declared, when it became clear that nobody had time to fix meals, Govindaswami had abandoned his fast and taken over the kitchen. His sewing was adequate, but his cooking turned out to be spectacular. Dramatic, intense—
hot
—but spectacular.

Grocery runs were no longer a haphazard occurrence. Having quickly discovered that Traybridge had no grocery that stocked the ingredients he needed, Govindaswami would borrow Archie’s pickup and disappear for hours at a time, coming back with huge bags of rice, bags and boxes of meats and vegetables, and various strange herbs and spices, from which he concocted meals the like of which Jake had never encountered. Once, after Wolfie had gotten loose again and torn open a huge burlap bag full of rice that Govindaswami had set on the ground by the truck while he took the rest of his purchases inside, Jake had seen the man looking speculatively at the goat.
But Jake figured that had been only his imagination. Even if Indians ate goat, which Jake didn’t think they did, Govindaswami would never go after Lucille’s beloved Wolfie.

It was an education in itself to watch Govindaswami in the kitchen. “Passion,” he would say to Jake and Destiny as he moved around the room, chopping and stirring and tasting. “Passion is necessary to all of life. All of life. Meditating, working, cooking, eating. Especially eating!”

It took the Applewhites no time at all to adapt to the change in their dietary habits. Cordelia even gave up her green gunk. No matter how busy they were, everybody stopped whatever they were doing at lunch, and again at dinnertime, to gather in the dining room for the feasts Govindaswami prepared. There were curries, chutneys, and wonderful soft flat-breads. As much food as appeared on the table invariably disappeared before the end of the meal. Some of the dishes were so spicy they were almost too painful to eat, but Govindaswami explained that yogurt and sugar both cooled the tongue. He served plenty of yogurt sauces and gallons of Destiny’s favorite, grape Kool-Aid.

It was such a dinner they had just finished. Jake’s mouth still tingled from the lamb curry. Now he was doing his best to make sure he had everything he would need at rehearsal. It wasn’t easy. The other
actors only had to take their script, maybe a bottle of water, and something to do while they were waiting to go onstage. Jake had to take Winston’s leash, in case the dog needed to go out during rehearsal, his water dish, and a bag of liver treats to distract him from howling along with the accordion. There was something about certain notes on the accordion that sent the dog into long, drawn-out howls that only liver treats could stop. Winston’s essential items were already packed in one of the large canvas bags Lucille had provided.

Destiny’s needs were considerably more complicated. It wasn’t easy to keep the kid busy and occupied and out of mischief for the three or four, sometimes even five hours of rehearsal. Even for a four-year-old, Destiny’s boredom threshhold seemed extraordinarily low. Every night Jake filled the bags with as many distractions as he could think of. He took picture books—never the same ones twice in a row. He took a thick pad of paper and watercolor markers. And he always threw in a few toys, though Destiny did not seem particularly interested in toys.

During the last rehearsal, Destiny had found a screwdriver somewhere and spent the whole time Jake was onstage unscrewing seat bottoms in the auditorium. No one had noticed what he was doing until Mrs. Montrose, who had come to observe the rehearsal, sat down in one of the unscrewed seats. It
detached and crashed to the floor, taking her with it. She had blamed Randolph. Randolph had blamed Jake.

So now Jake scoured the schoolroom to come up with new ideas. He added a few handfuls of Legos, some brightly colored sticks of modeling clay, and a box full of miniature cars. “Anything else you want to take?” he asked Destiny.

Destiny stopped singing to ponder this question. “The caterpillars,” he said.

“Can’t take the caterpillars,” Jake told him.

“What if they gets to be butterflies while we’re gone?”

“They won’t all do it at the same time,” Jake assured him. “I’ll take off the top, and if one does, it’ll be here fluttering around the schoolroom when we get back.”

Destiny went back to his song. Cordelia hurried in, carrying a pair of dark brown pants and a shirt. She tossed them at Jake. “Your messenger uniform. At least I think it’ll do. I don’t know what messengers wore in Austria in the thirties. But take it with you and wear it for your scene tonight. See what the Emperor of the World thinks. If he likes it, I can scratch another costume off the list. Except for the hat. We don’t have a hat yet.”

Destiny stopped singing. “I want a uniform! Make me one too, Delia! With a hat.”

“It’s a costume. You’re not in the show. You don’t get
a costume.” Cordelia’s voice was tight.

“But I want one! Like Jake’s. With a hat. I wanna—”

“Listen, you little beast, there are forty-six people in this show and most of them have at least four costumes!
You do not get a costume!
”

“I only have two,” Jake said. “This one and the SS uniform. Randolph said those are rented.”

“Yeah. But we have to do alterations to make them fit. I am not a costumer. I am a dancer! A choreographer! Never again, I tell you. Never, ever, ever again!” Cordelia turned to go. “Thank heavens for the Mother Abbess,” she muttered as she left. “One habit for the whole show. And I’ve finished it.”

Jake folded the uniform and put it into the bag with Destiny’s toys. “Okay, guy. Let’s go.”

Destiny stood with his arms crossed, not moving. “I wanna costume. I wanna be in the show.”

“You can’t. People in the show have to sing. And act.”

“I can sing. What do you gots to do to act?”

“Pretend to be someone you aren’t,” Jake said.

“I can pretend. I pretend I’m a pirate all the time. I—”

“It’s too late. All the parts are already taken. You get to be audience.”

“Does audience get a costume?”

“No. Come on. It’s time to go.”

The trip to rehearsals required two vehicles. The
Miata, with Randolph and E.D., left fifteen minutes ahead because they needed to get to the theater in time to set up. Then came Sybil’s Volvo station wagon, driven by Cordelia, with Jeremy Bernstein and his accordion, Jake and Destiny and Winston. Usually Destiny sang and talked the whole way to Traybridge. Tonight he sat in the corner of the backseat and sulked. At the time the restful silence seemed like a good thing.

It was only later that Jake realized that a sulky Destiny was
never
a good thing. Wearing the messenger uniform that Randolph said made him look like a UPS delivery man, Jake had just finished whirling Jeannie around and was getting himself ready for the kiss that ended their dance when he smelled something burning. Over Jeannie’s shoulder he saw a billowing plume of white smoke.

“Fire!” he yelled.

In the ensuing panic the youngest of the child actors fell off the stage. Her screams combined with Winston’s frenzied barking to nearly drown out the contradictory orders being shouted from all directions.

“Call 911!”

“Get out! Get out! Everybody get outside!”

“Find the fire extinguisher!”

“Call 911!”

It was E.D. who found the extinguisher and put out
the fire before any serious damage was done.

It had started in a wastebasket backstage, where Destiny had taken apart the pad of paper, crumpled every sheet into a ball, and set fire to the papers with Jake’s lighter. He had found the lighter in the pocket of Jake’s pants after Jake had changed into his messenger uniform and gone onstage for his scene.

“I was acting!” Destiny explained when he was found with the incriminating lighter still in his hand. “I was pretending to be Jake, burning down his school. Only I didn’t have any gasoline.”

Randolph, of course, after decreeing that Destiny was never to have matches, lighters, or even paper in his possession again ever in his entire life, blamed Jake.