Golden Delicious (13 page)

“We must have screwed up the point of view when we disconnected the piano from the land,” I said.

“Fuck
me
,” you said. You
knew
we shouldn’t have agreed to help Ralph. Something awful always comes of it. “So what’s this?” he said.

“This is
all
points of view,” you all said.

It was; we could feel the sudden pressure of new narrators—of
your
point of view, and
your
point of view, and the passing tree’s point of view, and every morsel of roadside
sand
’s point of view. But there wasn’t anything we, I, or they could do except get home, plant the piano, and see if rerooting it would help. And that’s what they—we; he, he, and he—did. We/they made it back to Appleseed and I/the Possum drove the truck out into the worryfields and instructed my/his truck to drop the piano into the soil.

I dropped the piano where they told me to.

So this is my new home, I thought.

By then it was dark, so I went back to my shed, and we went into the house. We ate quickly and then lay down in our beds. The force from all those points of view was tremendous for us. The only way we could sleep was to believe that this would change—that the story, the switching POVs, the pressure, would soon be over. Make it stop, we prayed. We sent out those prayers, but they went unanswered.

I thought my Mom would grow to love Sentence, but she didn’t. I found it cool that “I am.” was always changing—to “I am older,” and then “I am seeing,” then “I am hearing,” and “I am hearing new things,” but my Mom didn’t appreciate it. If the sentence pooped or peed in the house (which happened hardly ever—“I am.” was basically housebroken), she lost her
shit
. “
Look
at this!” she’d shout at me, pointing at the droppings of language. “Whose letter turds are these?” As if there was any question.

When Sentence tried to befriend my Mom, that only made her angrier. I remember seeing “I am aware that time is passing” trying to curl up next to my Mom while she was reading on the gold couch one day. My Mom pushed the sentence off. “
No!
” she told him, and Sentence whimpered and recoiled.

“You don’t have to be mean to him,” I said.

My Mom went back to reading.

A few weeks later, I came home from school and I couldn’t find Sentence—I walked all over the house looking for him. Then I went out to the gym, where my Mom was levitating. “Have you seen ‘I am.’?” I asked her.

“Nope,” she said.

I went outside and then back into the house. Suddenly I heard a very quiet repetitive sound:
scuff scuff scuff
. Something was scratching. I followed the sound to the pantry door. When I opened it I saw “I am.” standing there in the dark, his “I” ’s wide and panicked.

My Mom came in from the garage a few minutes later. “Sentence was locked in the pantry,” I told her. “In the dark!”

“Really?” she said.

“Did you do this?” I asked.

“Oh, honey—of course not,” she said.

“He was probably scratching for hours!”

“I honestly had no idea he was in there. Or else I would have let him out!”

“I think you put him in there on purpose because you hate him so much,” I said.

“I don’t
hate
anyone,
,” she said. “Just because I recognize the
risks of
—”

“That’s such bullcrap!” I said.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“You hate
everyone
!” I shouted.

My Mom pointed her finger at me. “I’ll be gone someday,
—”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“—and then you’ll wish you were nicer to me.”

Shortly after that, two clauses got in a fight in the margin across the street. This would happen every once in a while—you’d hear the wild, high squeal and pitter-patter of language chasing language through trees. That day, I ran outside just in time to see the clauses scamper across Converse
and tussle on the treebelt, ripping up the page right in front of our house.

My mother heard the commotion from her gym and stormed out through the garage door. “Oh,
Christ
!” she said.

By then the sentences were gone.

“What the hell happened to the lawn?”

Neither the Reader nor I said anything.

“Did
you
do this?” Mom asked the Reader.

“Me?” you said. “No.”

“
?” said my Mother.

“We were just standing here,” I said.

“Don’t
lie
,
,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said. “It was two sentences fighting across the street.”

“Piece of
crap
,” she said. I don’t know if she was talking to the sentences or to me.

My Mom was changing—being replaced by a sadder, more angry version of herself. She stopped eating—eating
anything
, I mean. She grew resentful about work and my Dad’s minimal meaning, and impatient with all the junk my sister kept around the house and with my perpetual lateness. One time? She was supposed to pick me up from school, and I was a few minutes late as usual. When I went out to the circle and looked for her car, I saw the Cloudy Fart driving away down Grassy Gutter. I waved my hands and ran down the sidewalk shouting. And I
know
she saw me—I saw her eyes in the rearview mirror. But she turned down Williams and drove away, and I had to walk home in the snowy cold.

My mom wasn’t the only one souring, though. About
three months after I found “I am.” in fact, the happiness taps in our home faltered and sputtered and ran dry. My sister noticed it first, when she turned on the happiness faucet in the backyard—to wash a dead icebox that she’d found at the flea market—and the faucet coughed and spit. As a landlord, my Dad knew a lot about happiness—where the shutoffs were, how to check the gauges, how to increase the feed. When he read the meter, though, he saw that the supply was low.

“Well?” said my Mom from the top of the stairs.

My Dad checked the expansion tank. When he shook it, you could hear a pinging inside.

“There’s air in the tank,” he said.

“Ralph?” hollered my Mom.

“It’s empty!” my Dad called up.

“I’m calling the DPWC,” my Mom said.

The Public Works Cones confirmed it: our whole
neighborhood
was out of happiness. There was a problem with a conversion facility on Tanglewood, they said, and they didn’t know when it’d be up and running again. For the time being, the Cones said, we all needed to make do with little or no happiness.

As soon as my Mom hung up the phone, my Dad got into his truck and drove to the store for some bottled joy. He returned empty-handed an hour later, though. “You should have seen the lines,” he said.

We were downtrodden—just plain
sad
—all that week. My father ignored calls from tenants and spent the afternoons drinking hard cider on the porch. My sister gave up on the icebox she was trying to restore and just put it
out on the curb. Me, I was so sluggish I couldn’t do anything—not even read or walk “I am.” He started peeing on the rug in the corner of the living room and no one even said anything about it.

My mother handled the sadness differently: she spent most of the weekend in her home gym. This was right around the time when my Mom became fascinated with the Mothers—the highly trained, heavily armed militia group that lived in Nests perched in high trees, flew in formation above Appleseed, and descended at the first sign of trouble. All of a sudden, the Mothers were all my Mom talked about—how heroic and brave they were, how thankful the town should be for their protection.

Reader: Protection from
what
?

From intruders of any kind: thoughts sent from other towns to confuse us, meaning-scammers, traveling rust or decay, dangerous words or sentences, etceteras, et cetera. If they picked up a threat or imbalance in some history or exposition, they’d take the long, difficult flight back through the years to the page where that imbalance appeared. According to my Mom, the Mothers would revise right there on the spot: change a word, a sentence, a whole
paragraph
, even, if they needed to.

My father scoffed at all this. He didn’t dispute the Mothers’ presence—you could often see them, plain as ink, floating over the pages in their flightskirts and goggles—but he thought their reputation was exaggerated. Their brochures boasted of training in aikido, thought-stopping, judo, size-changing, and karate—they bragged about victories in secret wars, saving Appleseed from near-coups and
future infestations, changing the histories of disease and oppression. My Dad had his doubts. “No one is that strong or that tough,” I heard him tell my Mom once.

“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.