Bad Apple

  This is what passes for conversation with the Riley sisters. Can’t you just feel the love?

  It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, there were four of us: one slightly sarcastic mom, one slightly gloomy dad, two girls who only occasionally hated each other. Now we walk around snarking and sniping like some fake movie family.

  I think about the affidavit, why she wrote it. Maybe Madge thought Dad would take her with him. Maybe she thought he would save her.

  Pib crouches under the kitchen table and hacks up a hairball. He backs away from it as if he’s shocked at what’s been fermenting inside him.

  ( comments )

  “My dad left two years ago. I don’t blame him; I would have left, too. I can’t imagine having to be married to my mom. She’s what you call a nutcracker, okay? And, sure, it affected Tola, just like I said it did. But Tola isn’t as close to Dad as I am. She thinks she is, but she’s not.”

  —Tiffany Riley, sister

  “You always feel sorry for a girl like that. A lonely girl. Scared. The green hair is a big clue. But then, students do tell stories to get attention. Girls tell stories. And Mr. Mymer was a convenient target for impressionable girls. I told him not to wear those ridiculous T-shirts. I told him to get a haircut. He laughed and said I worried too much. Now look who’s worried.”

  —Tamara Duckmann, teacher

  “She has this huge cat. Enormous. I’ve never seen a cat that big, except in a zoo. It’s almost as big as she is. It follows her down the street like a dog. Anyway, I’ve had to talk to her about that cat, because sometimes he leaves dead things on our front porch, mice or chipmunks or fuzzy bits that used to be alive, and that really upsets my wife. Can’t have the wife upset, now can we? But I’ve never seen that teacher anywhere around here, and I think I would have. I consider myself the unofficial neighborhood watch, ha ha. If something was going on between those two, she kept it to herself. But teenagers are good at that. Keeping secrets.”

  —Todd Rosentople, neighbor

  WOLF WOMAN

  An hour later, we’re in the car, our substitute father, Mr. Doctor, at the wheel. He’s spoken exactly one sentence during the twenty-minute ride: “To Grandmother’s house we go!”

  We’ve been having dinner at Grandma’s every Monday night since before I was born. We kept the tradition going even after my mom divorced my dad and we had to bring Mr. Doctor with us. Grandma Emmy and Grandpa Joe don’t know what to make of Mr. Doctor; he’s so dull in comparison to the rest of us. But Grandma and Grandpa don’t seem to hold that against him.

  When we get there, Grandma Emmy drags Mr. Doctor outside to show him the new fence they had installed in the backyard, basically because he’s the only one boring enough to care about things like fences. Madge goes downstairs to play something slow and mournful on the piano in the basement. I hang in the kitchen with Grandpa Joe, who is stirring a big pot of sauce. We’re all pretending that everything is 100 percent A-OK, that I’m a perfectly normal adolescent going through a perfectly normal adolescence.

  “Well. I guess your sister’s still obsessed with that funeral music,” Grandpa says as the notes waft upstairs. “I wish she’d learn to play a cancan.”

  “She likes the funeral music. She says it cheers her up,” I tell him. “So do all those war movies.”

  “Hmmm,” says Grandpa Joe. He fought in a war and doesn’t find anything about wars cheerful. “Does she still cry a lot?”

  “All the time. When she’s not breathing into lunch bags. She’s got a new doctor, though. Mom is hoping this one will work. I’m not so sure. Madge hates him just like she hated the other ones.”

  Grandpa blinks. I’m not sure what they did with girls like Madge in his day. Gave them lobotomies, probably. Maybe that’s something I’ll suggest to Madge the next time she tries to kick my cat.

  Grandpa hands me a spoon and waves at the pot of sauce on the stove. I stir it, smelling the garlic and oregano. He rips a hunk of bread off a loaf, dips it into the sauce, and hands it to me. I take a bite. It tastes a lot like ketchup with garlic and oregano, but I eat it so fast that the sauce gets all over my face. Such a lady.

  “Good?”

  “Good,” I say.

  He tries some. “Tastes like ketchup,” he says.

  “I like ketchup.”

  “Back in the day, we thought ketchup was tomato sauce. My mom put it on spaghetti. This was before the war. Before we knew any real Italians.”

  “We live in New Jersey. I can’t imagine not knowing any Italians.”

  “Well, you also can’t imagine not having a cell phone.”

  “True.”

  Grandma and Grandpa are old, but they’re not old old. Not in spirit, anyway. They go out dancing every weekend. Grandma bowls and plays bingo, and Grandpa golfs and cooks. Well, he tries to cook. He took some lessons and experiments on his family. Grandma thinks this is funny and lets him. I help Grandpa sometimes, chopping vegetables, basting chickens, browning meatballs. Since I inherited my appetite from him, Grandpa Joe always lets me eat as much as I want without the weird judgmental faces. Good thing the food is getting better. Also that I am a connoisseur of crap.

  “Paint anything new lately?” he asks.

  I tell him about the substitute teacher, how she said my painting died on the canvas.

  “She’s just jealous that her paintings don’t die on the canvas,” he says.

  “I don’t think it was a compliment, Grandpa.”

  “Why not?” he says. “I thought art was supposed to be dramatic. Dying is pretty dramatic.”

  “I guess,” I say, sighing. “But I did have a dream a while ago. It was pretty dramatic.”

  “Really? What kind of dream?”

  “I was in this castle. All stone and stained glass and tapestries. And there was a beautiful queen on the throne. She had long, silvery hair and a blue velvet dress. Little birds circled her head like a sort of crown, singing happy songs.”

  “Birds,” he says.

  “Yeah, birds. The only weird thing about the dream was her feet. She didn’t have human feet. She had bird’s feet. And they were orange.”

  “Interesting.”

  “It makes sense, though. The bird’s feet, I mean. In the original ‘Cinderella,’ there wasn’t any fairy godmother. It was a pair of magical birds that gave her the gown and the shoes and all that stuff. So I was thinking that I might paint her. If I can.”

  “What do you mean, if you can?”

  “Sometimes what you have in your head doesn’t come out on the canvas. Sometimes you don’t even know where to start.”

  “But you’re going to try?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It certainly sounds out of the ordinary,” he says. For Grandpa, anything out of the ordinary is a good thing. Works for me, because I’m not smart or driven like my sister or mom; I’m not some straight-A machine. When I was little, Grandpa Joe was the one who went through my school folders piece by piece, examining every drawing, every construction paper report. Grandpa Joe is my biggest fan. He’s always checking my web page for photos of any new paintings I’ve posted. He says it gives him something useful to do with the laptop my mom gave him for Christmas, which Grandma keeps unplugging because she’s afraid it will set the house on fire.

  He says, “I’ll want to see that painting when it’s finished.”

  “You’re the only one. Well, you and…” I’m about to say Mr. Mymer, but I don’t finish. I don’t have to. Grandpa knows who I’m talking about. He’s heard about Mr. Mymer a million times.

  I think he might ask about Mr. Mymer, but he says, “Your mom wouldn’t like your painting?”

  “Are you kidding?” I say. “Things like that scare her. She can’t understand why I don’t paint normal pictures.”

  “What are normal pictures?”

  “Sailing ships in tranquil harbors? Bunnies in bowties? Whiskers on kittens? Princesses with regular feet?”

  “She’s proud of
you.”

  “She wants me to think about advertising as a possible career.”

  He laughs. “Your dad’s an artist type and he did okay. Well, he did fine eventually. How is he?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Why don’t you call him up?”

  “I have,” I say. He would see us soon. Yes, he promised. Hannalore says hello. Hannalore can’t wait to see us also. Which means Hannalore’s in the process of interviewing huntsmen and has several promising candidates picked out. They will have to provide their own axes, and they will be required to bring her our bloody hearts after they murder us in the woods.

  To my grandpa, I say: “Dad’s busy.”

  “Shouldn’t be too busy for you,” he says.

  I don’t have to lie to Grandpa. “No, he shouldn’t.”

  Grandpa always liked my father, even when Dad was barely making any money selling his miniatures at flea markets and Grandpa had to give him loans. Grandpa Joe said that too few people in the world know what they really want to do. He thought my dad was a lucky man simply because he knew what his passion was. Even something as odd as building little models.

  But he’s mad at Dad now, I can see that. He grabs the wooden spoon, tastes the sauce, and makes a face.

  “Are you sure this is okay?”

  “It’s great.”

  “It’s not too bitter? Doesn’t need more sugar?”

  “I like it the way it is.”

  “Hmmm,” Grandpa Joe says. He coughs, pounding his chest.

  The food is on the table, and we are at the table, when she walks in. No one would ever imagine that she and I were related. She’s as big as I am small, with a pile of thick, dark hair, big hands, and man-sized feet. Bigger than Hannalore even, which might be why they hate each other.

  Mom is pissed at me, but she tries to keep up appearances for Grandma and Grandpa. She kisses them both gently on the cheek, as if they’re something that could be broken if loved too hard.

  “Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad. Everything looks great.” She tosses her coat and briefcase on the bench in the kitchen and takes a seat. We dig in. I heap my plate with spaghetti and meatballs, salad, and garlic bread. My mom, as tall as she is, takes one meatball and about three strands of spaghetti. My sister, after pigging out on Oreo crumbs and bread balls, eats only salad. As Madge picks through her lettuce, she talks about how, during wartime, people do plenty of normal stuff in addition to all the killing and the dying, and isn’t that amazing? “People go to dances, listen to music, have babies, bicker over stupid things like where someone put the mug with the yellow happy face,” she says. “This guy Noël Coward wrote a whole play after his apartment and office were destroyed by Nazi bombs, some comedy about a society guy whose marriage is haunted by the ghost of his first wife. It was a huge hit.”

  My mother is nodding uh-huh while frowning at Madge’s greasy ponytail. You can see her wanting to ask about Madge’s shower status. She is saved by Mr. Doctor, who tells a story of a fifth-grader who passed out while getting his braces adjusted for the first time. “We had to call the ambulance and everything,” says Mr. Doctor. And everything.

  I talk about Rumpelstiltskin. Not the “dies on the canvas moment,” but the other ones. How she said Valerie Schenke’s accidental spill looked like Jackson Pollock, how her heart ached when she looked into the breast-eyes of the pseudo-Picasso.

  Grandma Emmy laughs. Madge nods. Mom says, “What kind of outfit is that supposed to be?”

  I’m wearing my standard uniform: fishnets with a black skirt. My style is kind of punk-slash-goth-slash-early-Madonna—lots of netted items, filmy shirts and skirts, camisoles and corsets, a ton of layers. To change outfits, I usually replace the inner layer, say, the leggings under my skirt, and then move the other layers out, like sharks replace their teeth.

  “What’s wrong with my outfit?”

  She stabs at her meatball as if it has offended her. “You look like a cross between a vampire and a saloon girl.”

  I twirl spaghetti around my fork. “You say that like it’s bad.”

  “I don’t like this…”

  I fill the word in for her. “Attitude?”

  She glares at me. Not like Madge, whose eyes and brain and mouth are on fire. My mom’s cold. Frozen. If you touch her, your skin will come off.

  I say, “Anyway, I thought we were talking about my outfit.”

  “The outfit is part of the attitude.”

  I try to be funny. I try to keep up appearances, too. “Uh, Mom, we do have pictures of you when you were in high school. I seem to recall a troubled relationship with hair spray.”

  “I wonder if it’s that…man.”

  My mother won’t even speak his name. Mr. Mymer is now in the same league as Voldemort.

  Grandma Emmy says, “Does anyone want any more spaghetti?”

  Grandpa Joe says, “Maybe you should talk about this another time.”

  I say, “I’ve been wearing these kinds of clothes long before I met Mr. Mymer.”

  “But since you’ve been in his class, you stay up all night painting those pictures.”

  “What’s wrong with taking my art seriously?”

  Mr. Doctor says, “I had another patient who brought his pet gerbil in his pocket. His name was Fred. The gerbil. Not the patient.”

  “I wish you’d pay this much attention to your other classes,” my mother tells me. “You’re in high school.”

  “So?”

  “So I thought I told you to take that thing out of your nose.”

  “Non sequitur!” sings Madge.

  “Dad said I could get my nose pierced.”

  “I don’t care what he said. Besides, neither of you was invited to his million-dollar wedding. You could wear an Indian headdress and he wouldn’t care.”

  I tap my nose ring, which isn’t a ring but a tiny (fake) diamond. “Dad likes it. And he doesn’t have any free time. He’s working.”

  “Yeah, now he is.” She tears into her lettuce. It is terrible, terrible lettuce. It is lettuce with an attitude. “I should have known he’d find success in building little toy houses.”

  I finish her thought. “Because he’s such a child?”

  “Finally, my little girl is learning,” she says. “No stars in your eyes.”

  “Just in my nose.”

  She grabs the salad tongs from the table and waves them at me. “Which you will remove immediately or have removed for you.”

  And then dinner is done, the dishes swept from the table and washed by Grandma Emmy, who can’t bear to sit still. Also, she wants to clear the table so that she and Mr. Doctor can play cards. She loves beating him at cards. Whenever he’s too slow figuring out what he wants to do with his hand, she slaps her palm on the table and yells, “Come on! I’m losing money!” It always makes Mr. Doctor jump. As they play, my mother looks through her work files, slashing with a red pen. My sister goes back to the piano and pounds out a dirge.

  Grandpa suggests we get some air. It’s cool outside but not cold. Smells clean. Grandpa takes the steps slowly, one at a time, gripping the rail. He says that at his age, one can never be too careful. “I don’t want to fall on my bean and scramble the few brains I have left.”

  “You have plenty of brains left, and they’re only slightly scrambled.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, he says, “And how are your brains these days?”

  “Scrambled.”

  He says, more quietly now, “I’m asking you if you’re all right.”

  I won’t make a joke, not now, not to Grandpa Joe. “I’m not all right,” I say, “but not because my teacher hurt me. Because people think he did. Mom thinks he did.”

  “She worries.”

  “She doesn’t have to. Really. And neither do you.”

  I will him to believe me. I try to put my heart in my eyes. He watches me closely as I speak, then he nods. “Good enough.”

  When we’re standing in the front yard, he takes s
ome deep breaths of the cool October air. “Whew! Any more of that funeral music and I was going to have to make an appointment with the undertaker.”

  “Madge would be happy to go in your place.”

  “Don’t say things like that,” he says sharply.

  “Sorry. I just meant…sorry.”

  Just as quickly, his tone softens. “That’s some sky,” he says. “Do you know why the sky is blue?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red or any other color in the spectrum. I saw that on a nature program.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Makes me dizzy, looking up like this. When you get to be my age, you’ll know what I mean.”

  I look at his sparse gray hair, the bags under his eyes, the brown spots dotting his hands. I always forget how old he is. Eighty-something. More than sixty years older than me. Seems like forever. Grandpa came along before everything—before television, computers, cell phones, digital picture frames, iPods. I know a lot of old and not-so-old people who hate a lot of this stuff, who think the whole world was so much better before all the snotty little jerks came along and ruined it with their earbuds and their ringtones and their stupid, incomprehensible gadgets.

  But not Grandpa. Grandpa blinks his papery eyelids, the eyes beneath them strong and green as olives. “Things change,” he says.

  I’m not sure if he’s talking about Madge or Mr. Mymer or my dad or my mom or me, but it doesn’t matter. “Promise?”

  “Before you know it, Madge will stop playing that funeral music. She’ll dance the tarantella and play the kazoo. You’ll be off to college. You’ll study Greek and Latin and art. You’ll paint princesses with bird beaks. The world will be your oyster.”

  “I hate oysters.”

  “You’ll travel. You’ll go to France.”

  “Mom will never let me.”

  “By then, she won’t have to let you. It will be your choice.”

  My choice? The idea is so remarkable that I can’t even remark on it. I hold his still-strong hand as we admire the sky’s skill with blue.