Golden Delicious (6 page)

Of course I did—it was Fialky’s Worryfields! I rocked back and forth in my seat.

“Wow,
,” said the boa. “And I thought you were smart.”

“It’s Fialky’s Worryfields!” I said. “Everyone knows that!”

The boa slammed her fist down on my desk.

One afternoon a few days later, the boa ordered us to practice writing as quietly as we could. That’s what had landed several of these students in Silence School in the first place: their writing—either the sound of the pen on the page, or the noise of the words themselves—was too loud, and their teachers couldn’t take it anymore. That afternoon, we were focusing on the art of saying nothing, in words, on the page. The boa walked from row to row, looking over everyone’s writing. When she reached my desk she stopped. “Today is nice,” I’d scrawled on the page.

The boa held up a lavender finger. “But
nice
has some meaning, doesn’t it?”

I stared at her.

“It’s not negative. It’s actually quite positive!” she barked. “These words should say
nothing
, people!”

A few minutes later, a call came in on the classroom phone and the boa had to go down to the office. She left us writing silent sentences. As soon as she was gone, one of the erasers jumped down from the chalkboard, sidled over to me, and hopped onto my desk. “Ey,” he said.

“You got chalk on my page,” I whispered to him.

“Listen,” said the eraser. “I can’t sit up there watching you fuck up over and over. All she wants is for you to shut up. To just
not talk
. Why can’t you do that?”

“It’s my thoughts. I don’t even know that I’m saying the words.”

“Just take all the things you want to say and store them.”

I thought about this. “Store them for when?”

The eraser furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”

“When do I
say
them?”

“You
don’t
say them, ever,” said the eraser. “Just keep them in your mind.”

Then we heard the boa’s heels clack-echoing through the halls; the eraser dropped off the desk and scurried back up to the blackboard just as the boa stepped into the room. On her way up to the front of the room, the boa walked past my desk. She looked at my page, where I’d written “Today is the day after yesterday.”

She pointed to the sentence. “That still has meaning!”

I studied the words.

“You’re still saying
something
about today!” she shouted.

I looked at the eraser. He put his finger to his lips.

I didn’t say a word all the next day. When I walked out to the bike racks after school, I saw Large Odor unlocking his Haro. “Yo,” he said. “That Trombly is a bitch, isn’t she?”

I shrugged.

“You don’t think so?” said Odor.

I shrugged again. When my thoughts made words, I put the words in drawers in cabinets in my mind. When the cabinets were full, I emptied them out into mental plastic garbage bags. Soon my skull was full of garbage bags of words.

I don’t know if this is related, but it was shortly after that—shortly after I started holding my tongue, or “maturing,” as my Mom called it—that I began to lose my hair. It also might have been a long-term effect of the Vox, which was taken off the market in 1980 after it was found to cause numerous side effects (hair loss among them).

Anyway, that was the year—fifth grade—that I went bald. My hair came off in all one clump one day. I was riding my skateboard and my hair—whoosh!—just fell off my head. I hopped off the board, backtracked until I found the hair, and stuck it back on my head. It wouldn’t stay on my skull, though—it just fell right off again. I had to hold the hair in place as I skated home.

I tried everything I could to keep my hair: baseball hats, chin straps, glue. But it just wouldn’t stay. It had made
up its mind to leave, and there wasn’t anything I could do to convince it otherwise.

There wasn’t any goodbye party for my hair—it didn’t want one. Two weeks after it fell off my skull, I put it on a small hairboat and pushed it off into the Connecticut River. My hair looked back, waved, and paddled away.

I missed it like crazy. I wrote my hair letters and prayed to it. “I know you’re busy,” I said in my prayer, “but please let me know how you’re doing when you can.”

“I’m good—great, actually,” my hair prayed back. “And you?”

“Just OK,” I said.

“It’s beautiful here,” my hair prayed. “I’m working at a radio station.”

“What radio station?”

My hair prayed the call letters but I didn’t recognize them. “I doubt you can get it where you are,” prayed the hair. “Anyway, I don’t make a lot of meaning, but I really like it. The people are so nice.”

“That sounds so awesome,” I prayed.

“And I’m renting a house near the beach.”

“Cool,” I prayed. “Maybe I could come visit.”

“Maybe sometime, sure,” said my hair.

I guess I always thought that my hair would come back to its life in Appleseed—that it and I would reunite at some point. But that was an invention on my part. One day I prayed to my hair and the hair didn’t answer. I tried praying again a week later and the prayer channel had been closed—my prayer went right to an operator. “I’m trying to reach my hair,” I prayed to the operator.

“That prayer channel has been shut down,” the operator said.

“Is there a forwarding channel?”

“I’m sorry, there isn’t,” prayed the operator.

So I stopped praying to my hair. When I got older, I understood. That hair had its own life to lead, a whole world to see, while I was stuck here in this tiny town, the sun laughing off my pate.

How I miss those Sunday mornings in Appleseed, the applesun rising over Mount Epstein, my father and sister and I already out the door, in my father’s truck, on the hunt: on our way to an estate sale, a tag sale, or the Appleseed Flea Market. I’ve searched every corner of my mind for an unread page with a flea market on it, but with no luck: once a page is read, it can’t be unread; once the past has passed it’s gone. Still, I can go back in my mind to those quiet streets, the morning chatter of my thoughts, the cough of the dashboard and squeal of the struts as we roared down Highway Five.

My father’s truck wasn’t like other trucks—it was a strange metaphor of a vehicle, assembled from pieces and parts of other cars. It was asymmetrical, and it had a porch, a beak, and one eye. And it was controlled entirely by ropes. The steering panel reminded me of the wings of an old theater; it contained pulleys, and lever-locks, and complicated hemp ropes running in every direction. One rope was the go-rope; another rope was for turning. You pulled a rope over your head to beep the horn; the seat belt was a rope; the emergency brake was a rope attached to some sandbags stored above the back axle.

My father might have worked different jobs—insurance, real estate, solitudor—but at his applecore he was a collector. He loved finding old stranges, odd forgottens, hardly-brokens—uncovering life among the dead; going to great lengths to save something that someone else had dismissed; spotting meaning that other people looked past. He’d carry around a thrown-away clipboard with lists of items he was looking for:
Doorknob for 2D
, or,
Spare casters?
, or,
BX cable
. Every building he worked on was filled with re-remembered lamp fixtures, whitebearded sinks, ghosty carpets, finickal lightswitches that he’d found or traded with someone. My Dad took the same approach to every expense—everything was recontextualized, almost-but-not-quite broken, hanging on by a thread. All my clothes came from Goodwill, which meant that I was perpetually out of fashion: I wore bandannas when bicycling hats were in vogue; parachute pants during the stonewashed-jeans fad; unmatched Converse hi-tops (one yellow, one
purple
) when my friends were wearing Eastman boat shoes with the laces tied in twisty-knots; jampants and concert T-shirts when everyone wore izods with the collars turned up. At least my Mom took us to the thrift stores, though. My Dad’s clothes? Were the
memories
of clothes. He wore shoes he’d found in a dumpster, glasses that had belonged to a cousin of his who’d died.

One of my Dad’s many talents, though, was networking. He knew all the wheeler-dealers in Appleseed—The Ear, Glen Ukulele, Don La Valley, Armin LaFlame, Murphy, Jack D’elnero—and he worked with all of them in one way or another. He always knew who to go to for help with a repair, to borrow a tool, to find a used strow or a deal on
a belloy. He always talked about one day opening an antique store, a knickknack spot, a trading post. Then every day would be Sunday, he’d say. For all three of us, Sundays felt free.

My sister Briana inherited my Dad’s talents. As far back as I can remember, she was his assistant—my Dad always said she had a great eye for meaning. When she was ten, Briana’s favorite hobby was collecting and refinishing furniture. Then she switched to collecting raw materials—copper tubing and wire, scrap steel—which she’d trade at Appleseed Salvage. Later, she taught herself about electricity: she could repair a light fixture, wire up a three-way switch or a fuse box, fix a garage door opener or the ignition on a heater.

I wasn’t that smart—I just liked going along for the ride. Sundays were one of the only times of the week when I didn’t feel lonely, when I wasn’t consciously aware of how few friends
—real
friends, I mean—I had.

Reader: What about your Mom? Did she go with you?

Hardly ever, actually. She was either working an overnight at the hospital or at home, training in the gym she’d set up in the garage. She looked forward to Sundays, too, though, because she loved having the house to herself. Sometimes my Mom would joke that maybe she should live in another house, separate from our house, “where I can train in peace and quiet,” she snorted.

“Train for what?” I asked her once, and she sort of glared at me.

“I’m just kidding—you know that,” she said.

When my Mom wasn’t working or training, she would
read. Sometimes I’d read next to her. We wouldn’t talk—my Mom would smoke, and sometimes I would eat chips—but I guess I thought I could connect to my mother
through
the books, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, it was usually just the three of us on Sundays. And every trip to the flea market began the same way: my Dad steered the truck past the tables toward a parking spot while my sister scanned the tables for any potential deals. “Aisle—
five
,” my sister said one Sunday. “ ’Bout halfway back.”

“The mirror?”

“The bureau.”

“Is that oak?” My Dad said.

“I can’t tell,” my sister said.

Then we’d park the truck in the fields and the two of them would go charging through the grass toward the bureau.

I went off on my own, meanwhile, looking for used books. I’m not talking about the bound brochures they forced you to read in school—the pages that made a sucking sound when you looked at them, that made your eyes sting and your ears echo. I’m talking about true mysteries and war stories like the ones that you could buy for a theory or two or sometimes even find for free at the Appleseed Recycling Center. It’s weird: until I was twelve or so, I couldn’t have cared less about books or reading. One afternoon that winter, though, I found a truebook on a low shelf in our living room. The book was called
The Appleseed Strangler
. I remember opening it up, seeing all the words trapped there on the page, and feeling an affinity for
them. Holding in so many words, I
myself
sometimes felt like a book—like a cage for sentences.

As I was sprawled out on the living-room floor that day, reading about the Appleseed Strangler, a shadow flashed across the carpet. It was my Mom. “Good story, huh?” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Wait until you get to the end—the hanging,” she said.

Two days later my Mom took me to the Appleseed Free Library, where she signed me up for a card and let me check out two books of my choice. Ever since, I’d collected and read as many books as I could find: murder mysteries, histories, histrionics, fallbacks, toronados, you name it.

One day, though, I was sitting next to my Mom at the Library and reading a fallback when I saw a sentence on the page itch itself. “Woah!” I said.

“What?” she hissed.

“That sentence just
moved
!” I said.

My Mom scorned. She had this one particular scorn that she saved just for me: her whole face squinted, like she was staring into a fierce wind.

“There it goes again!” I said. “It just
changed
, from—”

“
,” she hissed. “Be
quiet
. You’re embarrassing m—”