Golden Delicious (3 page)

Reader: Won’t
what
?

Won’t anything—won’t talk; won’t
be
. My parents took me to see a doctorcoat who specialized in early speech, and he sent us home with something called “the Vox”—an iron-lung-type case which was designed to help with vocal development.

I remember that box—the hours, days, years lying awake inside it. Speakers inside the box filled it with sounds: squawks, yipes, zoops, words, and sentences. “The capital of North Dakota is Bismarck,” the speakers would say. “B-I-S-M-A-R-C-K.”

“I’m not,” I thought to the Vox.

“Water freezes at thirty-two words per second.

“You live in
America
. A-M-E-R-I-C-A.

“You have one nose and two ears. Ears rhymes with years. Years rhymes with fears.”

Slowly, I learned more words. “I’m lonely,” I thought to the Vox.

“Everyone is lonely,” the Vox replied. “At least you have the Reader.”

Which was a good point.

“I want to get out of here,” I prayed.

“No, you don’t,” said the Vox. “You wouldn’t survive a year in Appleseed.”

“Why not?” I prayed. “What’s wrong with me?”

The Vox looked me over. “Where to even
begin
,” it said.

That box became my first cage. Remember looking through the foggy glass and seeing the sunlight shouting through the window?

Reader: Who—me? I just got here. I just now arrived in Appleseed.

How I’d send my thoughts to run around the neighborhood so they could tell me what it looked like? How, sometimes, my sister would peer down through the glass at me, her curly blond hair obstructing almost all of the light?

“Help!” my thoughts would say to her.

“
?” she’d say. “Can you hear me?”

“Get me out of here!” I’d think.

I remember my Mom’s visits, too: how she’d open up the Vox to feed me food or vitamins. If there were tears on my face, she’d wipe them away. If I still didn’t stop crying, she’d lift me out of the Vox and cradle me. “This is only temporary,” she’d say. “OK?”

“OK,” my thought would say.

Then she’d put me back into the Vox, lock it, and leave.

“We were getting desperate,” my Dad said, as we neared The Ear’s neighborhood. With the house inching along Five, my parents started to panic: how far would they have to go before finding a plot? “We were starting to think that we might have to live in
Connecticut
!” my Dad said.

Then, just a few miles from the Connecticut border, my house spoke up. “What about that one?” it said, and
pointed to a banged-up sign. I knew that sign—it sang,
APPLESEED, EST. 1775
, and below it,
ALL NEW WORDS MUST REGISTER AT THE TOWN HALL
.

My parents had never even
heard
of Appleseed. Was it a real town? When they checked the map, though, they found the word “Appleseed”—a tiny round quell in the corner of the state.

Just at that moment, my Dad said, he and my Mom heard a sound from the other room—a “chirp,” my Mom called it. They ignored it at first, but then they heard it again. My Mom once told me that it sounded like a baby bird.

They followed the sound through the house—“Chirp! Chirp!”—and into the TV room, where Briana sat next to the Vox. “What’s making that sound?” my Mom asked Briana.

“That’s
,” said Bri, matter-of-factly.

My parents looked at the Vox. They heard the chirp again.

“See?” said Briana.

My Dad opened the steel case. I have a foggy memory of this moment—of everyone standing over me, and of opening my mouth wide to make the biggest sound I could.

“Appa,” I said.

My parents looked at each other.

“See?” said Briana.

“Appa,” I said again.

“He’s saying
apple
,” my sister announced.

My Mom once told me that tears appeared on my father’s
face when I made my first sounds. My Dad, meanwhile, said my Mom ran back out to the porch and steered the house off the winding ramp and into Appleseed. “Your Mom thought it was a signal or something,” my Dad said.

“So it’s
my
fault we ended up here?” I said.

“It’s no one’s
fault
,” my Dad said. “We’d just been praying for so long for you to speak. We took this as the reply.”

It was another two hours of house-traffic before our house actually crossed the line into town. My Dad steered us past sentences about schools, a town hall, a town green, a small downtown, an amphitheatre, and long stretches of wilderness.

“And apple trees everywhere,” my Dad said, turning onto the old dirt road where The Ear’s shack stood. “So many different kinds!”

“There are different kinds of apples?” I said.

“ ’Course there are,” he said. “Dozens. Don’t you remember?”

I shook my head.

As my parents steered the house through the town, though, they became discouraged: there were plots available with
FOR SALE
signs on the lawns, but all of them cost far more meaning than my parents could borrow. It wasn’t until they drove the house over to the Northeast Side—down Bliss Road, past Laurel Brook, and onto Converse Street—that they started to see houses in their range of meaning. The houses in that corner were shabbier, my Dad said: one had a stain on its pants; another drank from a bottle wrapped in paper.

On the far corner of that street, right across from some worryfields and the margin, was a plot marked forty thousand truths. It was the smallest piece of available land in Appleseed—the house had to scrunch up its elbows to fit on it—and still it was more meaning than my parents could afford. But that was the best option, my Dad said; it was there or back into the month-to-monthing in the margins. So my Dad picked up the
FOR SALE
sign, drove the house to Appleseed Town Hall and signed a Promise of Truths with an interest rate of thirty percent.

“There—Ear’s abode,” my Dad said, pointing to a wooden shack with a dirt driveway. “Now let’s see if he’s home.”

“What does that mean, thirty percent?” I said.

My Dad pulled into the driveway and honked the horn. “It means,” he said, “that if you borrow ten ideas, you pay back thirteen. If you borrow twenty? Pay back twenty-
six
.”

“Holy crap,” I said.

The Ear came out of his shack. He looked older than I remembered him; he had lambchop sideburns and some sort of skin irritation. “Ralph,” he said. He peered into the cab. “Bring your assistant with you?”

“Teaching him the business,” my Dad said.

“Oh yeah?” The Ear turned to me. “Going to be a landlord, like your Dad?”

“I’m going to be a movie person,” I told him.

“Hoping I could borrow your steth,” my Dad said to The Ear.

“Two-meter?”

“Four,” said my Dad.

The Ear motioned for us to follow and we stepped out of the truck. The Ear led us into the shack. There was all sorts of recording equipment inside: tape decks, microphones, wires, and dozens of other devices I couldn’t identify.

“Let’s see here,” The Ear said, searching in a closet. “Ah.” He lifted up a black plastic case. “Four-meter steth,” he said.

On the way back home, I asked my Dad more about the debt. “Weren’t you worried about paying all that meaning back?” I said.

“Of course I was,” he said. “I still am—I worry about it every day. But we didn’t want to live on the margin anymore. Don’t you remember what that was like? Moving every few months? Not really ever having a home?”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember that.”

“We just wanted a good place for you and your sister to grow up.”

“How much do you owe on the house now?”

“All told, about a hundred thou,” he said.

“Seriously?” I said.

“At the time, though, I didn’t care about the meaning. I was just happy that you were out of the voice box. You just kept running around the house, saying ‘Appa-seed,’ ‘Appa-seed.’ You sang it like a song! I would have paid any amount of meaning to see you that happy,” my Dad said.

Because of the Vox, I couldn’t walk correctly for another two years; I had to wear braces on my legs to keep them straight. I remember trying to hobble through the yard, how tired my legs would get. When he had time, my Dad would take me for walks around the block to strengthen my ankles and knees.

If he was at work or busy, my sister and I would play in the yard. She’d run around with her friends on the grass while I sat in the dirt and dug holes in the page. Before we moved to town, I don’t think my parents knew that most of the towns in the county dumped their deadwords in Appleseed, or that the soil was filled with dead language. I’d find all sorts of interesting bugs and deadwords there: commas, semicolons, fragments, wordbones, and other carcasses. My thoughts didn’t know to be worried—they didn’t understand that these vots were once as alive as the wild sentences you’d see across the street in the white woods of the margin, hopping from tree to tree. How was I to know that worry could manifest and worm its way into your mind? I couldn’t even read yet!

One day, I found a deadcomma and took it over to my Mom. It was her day off from work, and she was sitting
in a lawn chair, a book on her lap, a six-foot cigarette sticking out of her mouth. My sister was outside, too—sanding a wooden clock on the patio—while my father stood on a ladder, fixing a gutter.

“Appa,” I said to my Mom.

“Shhh, honey,” my Mom said to me, without looking up from her book.

You never knew with my Mom. Some days her eyes held calm seas, but others—like that day—they held storms.

I offered her the muddy comma—I’m sure it smelled terrible. “Appa,” I said again.

“Uh-huh,” my Mom said.

I put the comma on the page of my Mom’s book.

“Oh,
shit
,
,” my Mom said. “Ralph!”

“Appa,” I said.

“What?” my father said from the ladder.

“Look at what
is playing with,” she said, standing up and shaking the comma off the book. She pointed to it on the ground. “He found this in the
yard
, Ralph. A fucking comma carcass, for Christ’s sake!”

“Can we not swear?” my Dad said, climbing down the ladder.