The Apple

“There is a Goddamned apple missing!”

Mommy’s bellow could be heard throughout the house and out into the yard, and both she and Brother froze at the sound. A sly grin crossed Brother’s face as he went back to frying ants with his magnifying glass. She waited tensely for the inevitable summons.

“Both you kids get in here, right now!” Brother ignored the command in favour of crisping a few more ants, but she was taking no chances. Dropping her doll on the grass, heedless of its unsupervised proximity to Brother, she dashed into the house.

“What is it, Mommy?” she asked, skidding to a halt on the dreary streaked brown asphalt tile.

“ ‘What is it, Mommy?’ ” her mother mimicked in a sarcastic sing-song voice. “What, are you deaf? I said there is an apple missing! What do you know about it?”

No matter what she said, she was going to be in trouble…either for tattling on Brother or for not stopping him from eating the apple. She wondered which one would get the least punishment. Tattling, she decided. “Brother ate it,” she said simply.

“You knew this and you didn’t stop him?” Mother’s voice was eerily soft. She nodded silently.

“And you didn’t tell me?” Uh oh. Should have pleaded ignorance. She shook her head slowly from side to side.

“And why not, pray tell?” Mother asked.

Because she was afraid of being punished for tattling? Because she was afraid of being punished for not stopping him from eating the apple? Because she was afraid? None of those answers would work…they would make mother more angry, make her say something like “Afraid? Afraid? You want afraid? I’ll give you something to be afraid of!”

“Well, miss…” Mother said impatiently. “I am waiting for your answer. You are taking so long, I hope for your sake it is a really good one.”

What could she say? “I forgot. I was playing dolls and I…”

“Get me the strap,” Mother interrupted her.

“Nooooo, Mommy!” she wailed, her knees losing their integrity and putting her into a half crouch. “Noooo! I didn’t do anything!”

“Exactly,” Mommy said. “You didn’t stop him, you didn’t tell me, you just let it happen. Now get me that strap.” Mommy stood silently, hands on hips, unmoved by her sobbing pleas and promises to never again transgress. “If I have to get that strap myself,” Mommy interrupted, “You’ll get more for defying me.”

She took the two steps to the kitchen door and removed the thin length of leather…formerly a dog leash now devoid of its metal clip…and handed it reluctantly to her mother. “I didn’t do anything,” she sobbed. “It’s not fair. Brother did it, not me!”

“You didn’t tell me,” Mommy said. “Lay across that chair and take your pants down…all the way down…down to your ankles.” She complied, clenching her buttocks and her bladder muscles against the anticipated blows. “You are the oldest,” Mommy grunted with the first swing. A streak of liquid fire wrapped itself around her lower body as the thin lash curled around a pale, thin thigh. She clenched her teeth to contain the scream. “I can’t be everywhere,” her mother yelled, swinging again, raising a thin angry line across her upraised buttocks. “It’s your job to keep an eye on him and keep him out of trouble.” Swish! Crack! “I don’t know why you have to defy me at every turn! He doesn’t know any better but you do!”

Mommy’s invective continued unabated, accompanied by the raining blows until exhaustion set in. Her arm tired, Mommy threw the strap on the floor and looked at the pale little body quivering in front of her, raised red lash marks criss-crossing it like a dilapidated lattice. Mommy sighed. “Stop that blubbering,” she commanded, her voice tired. “Clean up.”

“I didn’t do anything,” came a thin, weak sob. “I didn’t do anything,” the sound repeated.

Mommy’s lips thinned. “Unless you want more where that came from, I suggest you shut your Goddamned mouth and get your ass out of this kitchen.” Mommy paused as she scrambled to obey. “And send your brother in to me.”

Leaving Dolly in the front yard with Brother had been a mistake, she saw upon entering the front yard. There were several small, black-rimmed pinholes in her pink rubber arms and legs and Brother was busily trying to burn a hole through Dolly’s belly button with his magnifying glass. She could just kill Uncle Pete for giving him that thing…one day he was going to set the house on fire, like he tried to set the school on fire with purloined matches when he was five. Brother had a fascination with fire that she thought was creepy, although nobody else seemed to think so. She ran to rescue her doll.

Experience told her that grabbing the doll and engaging in a tug-of-war with him would culminate only in a dismembered doll. He was bigger, heavier, stronger than she was, for all that he was two years younger, and in a physical contest with him, she invariably lost…sometimes quite painfully. Her backside still smarting, she called out to him “Brother! Mommy wants to see you in the kitchen, right now!”

He continued to concentrate on burning a hole in the doll’s belly. “Mommy says if she has to come get you, she’s bringing the strap!”

That got his attention and he looked up at her, paling when he saw her swollen, tear-stained face. “You better hurry,” she said, “Or you’re gonna get it too!”

She could see him weigh his options, then put down the doll and magnifying glass and head for the house with uncharacteristic slowness. Brother never did anything except at a frenzied rush. The moment he was out of sight she snatched up the magnifying lens and went into the flowerbed beneath the living room window and dug a small hole with her hands beneath the flowering maple. She shoved the offending piece of glass into the earth and covered it over, scattering leaf litter over it to disguise the little grave. Quickly, she darted out onto the lawn, snatched up Dolly, and hurried to her room, making soothing apologetic sounds to the abused doll. She should never have left Dolly out in the grass with Brother, she thought guiltily, and the doll’s injuries were her own fault.

She could hear Mommy hollering at Brother. “I am not made out of money!” Mommy yelled. “I buy exactly enough apples for each of you to have one in your school lunch every day. And now there’s one missing!” She waited for the tell-tale “thwack” of the strap, but no sound emerged from the kitchen save Mommy’s scolding voice, and soon enough, that ended. No spanking. She sighed and cuddled her battered doll closer. “He ate the apple but I got the spanking,” she said softly, looking into the blue glass eyes. “That’s not fair. That’s not fair at all!”

From outside an indignant bellow went up and she hugged the doll closely, smiling tightly with delight. Brother had discovered his evil glass was missing, she was sure. The front door banged as he re-entered the house, crying for Mommy. “Uncle Pete gave me that!” he wailed. “She took it, I know she did!”

Ah, her room was about to be tossed. She sometimes wondered if she was some kind of witch, with her uncanny ability to tell the future and, sure enough, her bedroom door slammed open and Mommy filled the portal like an avenging angel. “Where is it?” Mommy demanded, that dangerous “don’t you dare give me any crap!” look on her face. “What did you do with Brother’s magnifying glass?”

She shook her head and hugged the doll closer. “I don’t have it,” she said quite truthfully. "The last time I saw it, it was in the front yard.” Again, a true statement.

Mommy looked unconvinced and did not stay Brother’s hand as he pulled the contents of her closet floor out into the room and strewed them about, then ransacked her chest of drawers. It wasn’t until he started pulling the bed apart that Mommy stayed his hand. “Did you leave it in the front yard?” she queried. He nodded his head affirmatively. “Then maybe some kid picked it up while you were in the house,” she said. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times, don’t leave your toys outside!” Mommy shook her head and turned to leave, muttering “You kids never appreciate anything,” as she walked away, but then stopped and turned back momentarily. “Clean up this Goddamned mess.”

Brother followed Mommy down the hall, complaining bitterly about his missing instrument of destruction, leaving the carnage of her room behind. With a sigh she set about putting things to right, the labour of restoring the order of her room a small price to pay for the satisfaction of saving her little bit of the world from further predation. The telephone rang and she heard Mommy snap at Brother’s whining complaints, telling him if he couldn’t take care of his toys, it was not her problem.

“Hello?” she heard Mommy’s instantly cheerful voice. How did Mommy do that, she wondered? How did Mommy go from screaming and cursing at them to being sweet and cheerful to someone else in an instant? A shudder wracked her thin frame. It was scary, knowing that Mommy could go from a spitting rage to absolute calm and good humour in a single breath…because Mommy could take it the other direction, too…and often did.

“Bettie!” Mommy’s voice sounded delighted. “Oh, fine, fine. Settling a little problem with the kids, that’s all. You’d think I was made out of money, the way they eat me out of house and home!” There was a pause while Mommy listened to her friend’s chatter.

“Friday night? I’m sure I can make it. Eddie has to work, but I’ll tell him I’m going to your place for something. Can Nancy babysit? Eddie will get pissed if I leave the kids alone and he’ll get home before I do.” There was another pause.

“Oh, I just got this gorgeous silk cocktail dress that will be perfect!” Mommy almost giggled. “It’s peacock blue, embroidered all over, and looks Chinese, with that Mandarin collar…it should be a man-magnet!” Another pause, then the sound of Mommy’s voice became muffled, and then the conversation was over.

She continued sorting the jumbled piles of clothes and toys that had been her room when Mommy appeared suddenly in the doorway. “Don’t you say a word to your father,” Mommy warned. “Not one word, do you understand?”

She looked up, an uncomprehending expression carefully in place. “What?” she asked. Mommy stood there for a moment, examining her face minutely for signs of deception, and finally turned and walked away. She picked up a pajama top that Mommy had made, yellow flannel with fluffy little lambs on it, and resisted the urge to bite into it and tear it in half.

First Kiss

There was this boy at school…Kenny Woodruff…who liked her. Trouble was, she didn’t like him. Not even a little bit.

He was nice enough to play with when they were younger, and he lived in one of the big, older houses in the neighbourhood with a second story and old, big trees that were very cool for climbing. His front yard had a really big old pepper tree with a swing and a platform that could be accessed by climbing up slats of wood that had been nailed to the trunk and bigger branches like ladder rungs. You could sit up there alone like a princess in a tower and read or just daydream, hidden away from those mere mortals who congregated below to argue over whose turn it was to play on the swing.

The trouble was, he really liked her. In that kind of boy-girl way that really wasn’t hugely interesting to her. She actually liked his younger brother, Kevin, better. She and Kevin were the same age and Kenny was two years older, even though he was in her grade. He had been held back a year in elementary school and she had skipped a grade. He should be in the ninth grade, she should be in the seventh…they were both in the eighth, although they really didn’t have any classes together…they hadn’t since starting junior high. They’d been in the same fifth and sixth grade classrooms, but in junior high she was in the advanced classes and Kenny was not. But she saw him every day on the school bus and he took it upon himself to walk her to and from the bus every day, despite her attempts to discourage him. It was a blessing when Kevin got to junior high because now he joined them, despite Kenny’s attempts to discourage him. She was, it seemed, the object of Kenny’s romantic dreams, her own feelings notwithstanding.

This was one of those rare times when it was very useful to have a famously difficult mother. She could easily ditch Kenny at the front gate simply by saying that her mother would kill her if she let a boy in. It took him several months to wonder how her mother would know and when he suspiciously asked, she just shrugged. “The neighbours spy for my mother,” she said, nodding in the direction of the house directly across the street…the first house on the block to have a true plate glass picture window, and home of the most notorious gossip on the block, Carolyn Reede. “My mother plays pinochle with Mrs. Reede,” she told him. “And you know Mrs. Reede knows everything that goes on in the neighbourhood.” He had left with a closed, sullen face, but at least he left.

Kenny had grown a considerable amount in the past couple of years, and he was a taller, thicker, beefier version of his brother, Kevin. Nearly platinum blond and extremely fair skinned, when something bothered Kenny it was easy to tell…one merely looked for his face to suffuse with blood and turn beet red. He seemed a bit excitable to her…a bit like Brother, who was annoyingly fidgety and simply could not keep his hands off of anything that attracted his interest, no matter who it belonged to…and she found this unnerving at times. Kenny was not the cheerful, affable boy his brother was, and sometimes his hulking intensity scared her.

She was beginning to notice that some boys were cuter than others, even allowing that she might find it nice to actually kiss one or two of them. There was Nick Phillips, who liked to work out on the bars during lunch break…he was very cute and could do some amazing things on the bars…and he was very nice, too. But her friend Bernadette had her eye on him, was flirting with him, so she kept her interest to herself. But Kenny Woodruff? Kenny was hulking where Nick was muscular, Kenny was blunt and bumbling where Nick was respectful and well-mannered, and Kenny was, while not actually stupid, lacking in the kind of intelligence that would advance him either academically or socially. And his single-minded pursuit of her was more than just a little scary.

But she still went over to his house. She liked sitting on the platform up in the tree, above the rest of the world, remote, unseen, untouchable. Up on the platform, hidden in the long, feathery limbs of the pepper tree, she felt safe from the rest of the world. It was the closest thing she had to a sanctuary.

They weren’t supposed to go out after school, but she and Brother had come to an unspoken agreement…once their chores were done and Mommy had called and checked up on them, they would go out to play…and they would not tattle on each other. She had no idea where Brother went and presumed he had no idea where he might find her. But ten to fifteen minutes before Mommy was expected, they would each scramble home and take up their posts in their respective bedrooms, doing something suitably innocuous like reading or homework. Mommy did not allow them to watch TV, play outside, or have friends over to the house when she was not there. Theirs was a daily ritual.

On a warm spring afternoon she heard the creaking of the slats nailed to the tree trunk, an effective announcement of an impending visitor. Expecting Kevin, who like to read as well, she was disappointed to see Kenny’s blond crew cut appear. Without waiting to be invited…it was his tree, after all…he heaved himself up onto the platform and sat, cross legged, entirely too close to her. She wriggled away.

“Don’t you like me?” he said to her without preamble. “You’re always trying to avoid me.”

She didn’t know how to deal with this, and he was sitting too close again. She wriggled further away. “I don’t know what you mean, Kenny,” she temporized. “I like you fine.”

“Do you like me like a boyfriend?” he asked bluntly, moving closer again.

“Ummm…” she hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “No, Kenny, I’m sorry. I like you fine as a friend, but not like a boyfriend.”

She began to grow alarmed as she saw his face begin to colour. “But you like Kevin, don’t you?” he said, his voice tense, ugly. “Don’t you? You like my little brother but not me!”

She shook her head, edging toward the side of the platform where the slats were nailed. “He’s just my friend, Kenny. Like you…just my friend.”

He was beside her again, so close she could smell the soap his mother used to wash his shirt. She made a swift move for the edge of the platform but he blocked her and grabbed her with one hand behind her neck and other gripping her head. Then, horrifyingly, he pressed his mouth to hers. She struggled, beating against him and trying to twist away, oblivious that she was on a platform in a tree, fifteen feet above the ground. His lips were disgustingly slack, sloppy and wet, and he nearly sucked the breath from her before he thrust his repulsive tongue nearly down her throat. Flailing and gagging, she could not dislodge his superior weight and, desperate for air and freedom, she did the only thing that came to mind. She bit down on his tongue with as much force as she could muster.

He bellowed and thrust her away and before he could recover and renew his grasp, she scrambled down the slat ladder and sprinted home, dashing in the door and slamming it behind her. Panting for breath, she went to the bathroom to clean up…if Mommy saw her sweating and winded, there would be ten kinds of hell to pay. A few minutes later she heard Brother come home and, checking the mirror to make sure she looked as if nothing had happened, she left the bathroom, headed for her room.

It wasn’t Brother who had come in the door. Kenny Woodruff, his face glowing red with rage, was in the hallway outside her bedroom, advancing on her.

“You have to go, Kenny,” she said desperately. “My mother will be home any time and you can’t be here.”

Kenny said nothing but continued to slowly advance upon her, like a cat stalking a mouse. She remembered how strong he was when he had hold of her up on the platform, and her heart began to hammer as she edged toward the exit from the hallway that led to the living room…if she could get there, she could make the front door and run to one of the neighbours for help.

“You’ve got to leave,” she said again and looked quickly into Brother’s bedroom to try to distract him as she darted the other direction for the living room.

She almost made it. But he grabbed her by her long ponytail and dragged her to him. “Look what you did to me!” he roared at her, the veins in his eye gone red with his rage. “Look what you’ve done!”

Confused, terrified, she struggled to get free, but he had her ensnared by her long hair and with one had he was forcing her head down, to look at the floor. “Look what you did to me, you goddamned little tease!” His other hand had opened his trousers and in the brief moment before she squeezed her eyes shut, she saw only a mass of engorged, terrifyingly red flesh protruding from the open fly.

“Look at it!” he raged, shaking her head back and forth by her hair. “Look what you did! And now you have to take care of it!”

Attempting to control her feeble struggles had caused Kenny to move them into the living room, but now he started dragging her towards her bedroom. Keeping her eyes tightly squeezed shut, she tried to go limp, make a dead weight of herself, and alternately dig her heels into the cheap thin carpet. She was able only to slow his progress and he inexorably moved towards the bedroom, alternately cursing her and blaming her for his condition.

Then suddenly she was free. “Take your hands off my sister!” she heard and her eyes flew open in surprise. Brother! Her brother had a stick of some kind and he was whacking Kenny over the head and across the back and shouting at him to leave their house and never come back. She began to cry in relief. “Don’t ever touch her again!” she heard him roar to Kenny’s retreating back. “Don’t even talk to her!”

“Oh, thank you!” she sobbed, trying to hug Brother for his rescue, but he pushed her away.

“Go wash your face and comb your hair,” he said, taking the stick and heading towards his bedroom. “Mommy will be home pretty soon and I don’t want her asking a lot of questions that will make us both have to stay home in the afternoon.” He closed his bedroom door.