Golden Delicious (25 page)

“Hey buddy,” said the other bank.

“Let’s take a walk, buddy,” said the first bank. They
put their cement hands on my Dad’s shoulders and walked across the street to the worryfields.

I don’t know what they said? But the next day, my Dad went to Muir Drop Forge and filled out an application. They hired him on the spot. He came home that night with his hands and arms covered in the soot of toil.

Soon, my sister’s auctions became unwieldy. There were two hundred people at our house every day; the traffic got so bad that my Dad had to park his truck across the street in the worryfields. Word of my sister’s talents traveled. She was a celebrity—there were articles every week about her in the gossip page of
The Daily Core
.

One afternoon that fall, I was watching the auction from the roof with Sentence by my side when I noticed a hooded figure in the back of the crowd. I couldn’t see his face—I’m still not sure that he
had
a face—nor did I see him arrive. He was just suddenly
there
, in a dark orange velvet cape, standing silently. When the auction was over, he waited until the crowd dispersed and then stepped forward to the pulpit to speak with my sister. I couldn’t hear what he said, but after a few minutes my sister brought the man into the house to see my Dad. I climbed back inside and ran down the stairs to see the three of them—my Dad, my sister, and the hooded man—sitting at the dining-room table. “Go to your room,
,” my Dad said.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“Go,” my Dad said.

I went down into the basement, but I sent two of my thoughts reconning to record the conversation.
The hooded man’s voice was like a bubbly stream—his words all ran together. He said that he was from a famed auction school somewhere far beyond the margin—some place called Pilgrim Auctions—and that he was here because he’d heard the stories about my sister. He wanted my father’s permission for my sister to attend his school for auctioneers. “She’sgifted,” said the hooded man, “butwhatyou​seehere​isjustthe​beginning.”

“She’s doing just fine right here in Appleseed,” said my Dad.

“I-could-do-better,” my sister said.

“Shecould,” said the hooded man.

“She’s just started,” my Dad said.

“Nottrue—shesalways​
been
anauct​ioneer,” said the man.

“She has?” my Dad said.

“Andshe
coul​d
bethebestt​heverybest​auctioneer​thatApples​eedhaseve​rseen,” he told my father.

“We’re very flattered,” said my father. “But Briana has a bright future—”

“My-name-is-the-
Auctioneer
,” said the Auctioneer.

“—college,” my Dad said. “A meaningful career.”

“You’re-not-being-fair!” my sister shouted.

“Auctioning here at home is one thing,” my Dad said to her. “Leaving home at sixteen years old is another.”

“
Mom
-left!” she said. “Why-can’t-I?”

“Mom didn’t
leave
,” said my Dad. “She’s helping protect Appleseed.”

“This-is-my-
dream
!” shouted the Auctioneer.

“The answer is no,” my Dad said.

At that point, my thought said, the hooded man stood
up and walked out of the house. When I looked out my bedroom window I saw him floating down Converse Street.

My sister was hysterical. She ran to her room and slammed the door. “What-about-what-
I
-want!” she hollered from behind the door. “I-hate-it-here! I-hate-this-
house
!”

“What did
I
do?” the house said.

I knocked on her door. “Bri,” I said. “Can I come in?”

“No!” she said. “Go away!”

The house began to cry a little. “All I’ve ever been is
nice
to you.”

I went back to my sister’s room an hour later and knocked again. “Bri?” I said. “Auctioneer?” This time she didn’t answer at all.

“You asleep?” I asked.

I stood there for a minute and then went back down to the basement.

The next morning I walked upstairs and saw the door to the Auctioneer’s room ajar. I went in. The drawers in her dresser were open and there were clothes everywhere. I opened her closet door; her suitcase wasn’t there.

I ran downstairs and looked in every room. I sprinted out to the backyard and then into the front yard and looked up and down our street. “I am.” followed me, whimpering. I stood there for a few minutes, staring one way and the other. My sister wasn’t anywhere. The Auctioneer was gone.

The following summer—the summer before my junior year at Appleseed High—I began dating the Appleseed Community Theater. I met her by accident, when I was walking Sentence one day in downtown Appleseed. All of a sudden he started pulling me toward an unfamiliar building. Sentence had very good hearing, though, and he often got excited when he heard other sentences—even if I, myself, couldn’t hear them. When he started sniffing the steps of the small wooden building, I heard talking inside.

“Cute clause,” said the building. “What’s his name?”

“Sentence,” I said. “He heard people talking, and—”

“Yeah. We’re putting on a trueplay,” said the building.

I looked up at her. The sign above the door read
APPLESEED COMMUNITY THEATER
. “A true what?” I said.

“Play. Theater,” said the theater.

I’d seen theater productions in my high school. I said, “I didn’t know there was any theater in Appleseed.”

“Yeah—just moved here from Cambridge,” said the theater.

Sentence lunged at the leash.

“They’re rehearsing—you can watch if you want,” she said.

We stepped inside and saw rows of empty seats and a bright stage full of people and sentences. A man dressed like a sea captain was having a conversation with an old boat. The boat was storming back and forth across the stage, shouting out a plot for revenge. “Let’s say that buoy disappears somewhere.”

“But where?” the captain said.

“Doesn’t matter where,” said the boat. “Just so long as it’s kept quiet.”

We stepped outside after a few minutes, and I thanked the theater. “I’ll come back and see the show,” I said.

“And we’re looking for help if you know anyone. We still need a props master.”

“A what?” I said.

That was a great time for me—a season of promise and discovery. I did the props for every show that season—
Dandelion Braise, Stormnote
, and
Too Many Bagels
—and grew to really love working in the theater. It was located in a bad neighborhood, full of meaninglessers—two times I had the seats of my Bicycle Built for Two stolen—but I didn’t care. I liked having somewhere to go in the afternoons after school, and I could usually find most of the props that I needed at the flea bee.

Plus, you weren’t ever alone when you worked on a show—every cast and crew was like a family. I saw the director, Eric Wig, and his wife Ellen, who often played the leads, every day, while I hardly saw my
own
family at all. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone there that I was ugly
and unremarkable—I was willing to work, and everyone seemed to appreciate that. My thoughts were always buoyant when a new show began. When one ended, I couldn’t get those thoughts off the couch if their lives depended on it.

Three weeks into rehearsals for
Stormnote
, though, the old trombone who was cast as the Old Man had an aneurysm on stage and died. I was right there when it happened. He was supposed to say his lines—“Are those
vultures
?”—and then shake his fist. At that moment he stepped forward and said, “Are those—whose vultures are those?”

“That’s not the line, Terry,” said Eric, looking down at his script.

“Reset the vultures!” shouted the stage manager, an easychair named Carol.

The trombone stood up, stumbled, made a terrible honking sound, and fell down on the boat.

“Whoa!” shouted a sandbag from the wings.

The trombone was shaking on the floor of the theater.

“Terry?” shouted the Community Theater.

We all ran out on stage. The Community Theater called the ParamediCones, but by the time they got there the old trombone was gone.

I went to the trombone’s funeral along with other people from the cast and crew. It was really sad. “You probably think you know everything about my father,” said Terry’s daughter at the pulpit. “But he was more than just a successful actor. Do you know, for example, that he was an inventor?”

Some people smiled through tears; others looked miffed.

“That he invented the Morp, for example?”

And there, in the corner, was a morp—one of the original prototypes.

The Mothers did a formation flyover and the bessoffs led the procession into the graveyard. “Let his body bring apples,” said the bessoffs in unison, and they lowered his body into the ground.

Rehearsals resumed two days later. That afternoon, I was in the vom fixing one of the scrolls when Eric called me over to the orchestra pit. He looked at me cemeterily and then leaned forward and said, “We need an Old Man.”

My eyebrows wormed.

“Any interest?”

“Me?” I said.

“You’re the oldest one here,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “Almost everyone here is older than me.”

“How old are you?” said the wig.

“I’m sixteen,” I said.

Wig stood up. “Haw,” he said.

I stared at him.

His head haunted forward. “You’re sixt
een
?” he whispered.

“My birthday was in April,” I said.

“Jesus,
,” he said. “I thought you were fifty. At least! Sixty, maybe.”

“No,” I said. “I’m a junior at Appleseed High.”

“But—because you’re—wow.” Wig put his hands on his hips. “Well,” he said, “Do you want to be the Old Man?”

“You mean
act
?” one of my thoughts said.

“On the stage?” another thought said.

My face must have changed because the wig said, “It’s a very minor role.”

So I took the part, wore the dead man’s clothes, stood on the deck of the falseboat, and looked out into the sea. “Fish?” I shouted. “In space?” Then I cast my fake fishing rod out into the real water. On cue, the lead fish down below looked at the hook and primrosed to the crowd.

It was my first taste of performance, of standing in front of people as someone not myself, of playing a role. I loved it. I thought maybe I could do this, make a career out of it—be a minor character: the ugly one in the background; the non-hero, the shithead—one of those corner-warts that make the beautiful look
more
beautiful!

I was so proud of my performance, of the fact that I—me! Not the Auctioneer, but me!—had an actual role in a play, that I asked my Dad if he’d come see the last show. He said he would if he could get off work, but he didn’t make it. By then he was working at Muir Drop and in meaning-debt to some pretty imposing banks. He prayed to me that he was sorry, and I prayed back that I understood.

That night after the show there was a party at the deadgroves. I didn’t plan on going—I’d never been invited to a party before, and I didn’t know exactly how they worked. I was unlocking my bike from the rack, though, when the theater pulled up beside me in a night-blue Jeep.

COMMUNITY THEATER

Hey,
!