Chapter 2 #2
Long ago, Alice, your father and I used to play together as children, though he’s a couple years younger than me.
I watched him for his mother, your grandmother.
And we used to play hide-and-seek. We hid little treasures all over the estate, and in the orchards, back when they belonged to his family.
We’d find them and keep them ourselves. Little treasures.
Stones and china ornaments and, once, a gold tooth, though we threw that into the river.
‘Hey, Miss Alice.’
Alice stood up, taken aback. ‘Hey, Mavis.’
‘Miss Teddy’s pretty tired. I’m going to take her upstairs for her nap before dinner. That okay?’
‘Sure,’ said Alice, pressing her hands to her burning cheeks. ‘Sorry.’
Young women apologize too much, Alice. Don’t be one of them!
‘It’s fine. She likes the company. Don’t you, Teddy?’
But the spell was broken and the real Teddy remained, staring at Alice, talking softly – ‘ Ravenoose! Ravenoose! ’ – moving her hands up and down her knees, rocking very slightly. Her barrette glinted in the late sun, and she smiled sweetly at Alice as she was led away. Mavis paused in the doorway.
‘Bye, Miss Alice.’ She opened the door and the noise from the radio in the kitchen came floating out. ‘Oh, that song again,’ said Mavis, wearily.
Alice smiled, nodded. Everyone, everywhere, was playing ‘Yesterday’.
Her friends had stood in line to buy it as a single.
They sang it, hugging themselves and rolling around, tears in their eyes.
She heard it floating out open windows, from car radios, even in the auditorium at school, as the principal, Mr Williams, said it was such a good song people should understand the lyrics. And he’d put it on and played it.
Yesterday …
Right there in the middle of the auditorium with the whole school, Alice’s face had burned; her head had felt fuzzy and there was a ringing in her ears as she tried not to think about the Rita Hayworth sundae, the sound of tennis, the sight of the deer and the sound of the train, again.
And, most of all, she tried not to think about losing control.
She had blinked and realized somehow she was in the hallway outside. She must have left the auditorium, with no idea she was doing so.
She had felt a hand on her arm and saw Dolores Delaney, staring at her.
‘Hey. You okay, Alice? You’re swaying. You need to get some water? Step out and get some fresh air?’
‘Thank you,’ Alice said. ‘I’m fine. It’s a little stuffy in there, that’s all.’
‘I know how hard it is.’ Dolores’s hand on her arm was cool, and soft. ‘I lost my dad too. Take a minute.’
They were standing in the hallway by the principal’s office. Alice could smell bleach, air freshener, Dolores’s spicy perfume. She was cold; lately she was always cold. Goosebumps formed on her skin.
‘You’re real skinny, Alice,’ said Dolores, and she made as if to put her arm around her, then stopped. ‘Are you eating okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ Alice said again, and she had pushed past Dolores, gone back into the auditorium.
Alice knew she had lost weight, and that there were dark circles under her eyes.
She didn’t like the way her hip bones jutted out; her skin felt stretched across her body.
She didn’t know what was happening to her.
First, she had worried it was her mom who was going crazy, but now she worried it was her, and that, if they found out, they’d have her taken away.
It was the sound of trains, and ‘Yesterday’ she had to avoid.
So, she reasoned, she had to make sure, constantly, carefully, that she wasn’t any place where they might play ‘Yesterday’ or where she might hear the train without realizing it.
If she was crossing the bridge on the way back from school that was okay: she sang the Beatles as loudly as she could, a different song every time from Help!
Just not ‘Yesterday’. She had learned how to act just enough, so they didn’t see how crazy she was going.
And if they said something more, if they seemed to be really trying to see how she was, she’d learned to smile and say she had to dash, she was late for her mom, that they had to get the last of the apples in, which they did, alone this time.
Bob Jansen had loved the Hudson Valley, the myths and stories there.
When he took over the old orchards again, many of the ancient trees had been either dead or tangled with brambles, the leaves spotted black with blight.
He had spent a long time getting the orchards up to scratch the past couple of years and he had loved harvest time, climbing the trees like a monkey, albeit a balding monkey in glasses, plaid shirt and jeans – what he proudly called his ‘outdoor gear’, as though he was one of the first pioneers – calling out to her mother and Alice, ‘Save me some supper, I won’t be too long! ’ Though he always was.
Alice’s mother was up a ladder, collecting apples, when Alice arrived home from Valhalla.
Through the trees, Alice could make out her mother’s white ruffled shirt, and her hair tied up in a patterned red scarf.
Betsy did not own any plaid or denim. When Bob had said, earlier that spring, as the latest bill had come in for the wood for the new apple stores, and been added to the demands from the bank for the loan repayments he’d not yet made, that maybe they should try making their own clothes, she had told him firmly, ‘Robert, you can say all you want about that damn Julie Andrews and her curtains, but I’m a Doris Day kinda girl, not damn Julie Andrews, and Doris Day doesn’t make clothes.
’ And Alice’s father had leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard the chair had rocked back and would have fallen over, were it not for the dresser.
‘Hi, Mom.’
‘Hi, honey. You’re late.’
‘Sorry.’
Betsy pushed a tendril of hair that had escaped her scarf out of the way. The ladder shook slightly. ‘Just these and then I think we’ll call it quits.’
Alice set her schoolbag down on the grass. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I’ll hand ’em to you.’ Betsy rocked a little back again. ‘Oh, gosh, how I hate being up ladders,’ she said with a bright cheerfulness. ‘Don’t see how I’ll ever get used to it! Thank you, Allie.’
‘Let me go up, Mom.’
‘No, no. I’m doing fine and it’s for me to get it in, not you. Imagine how bad I’d feel if you fell off and broke your neck.’
As this was unanswerable, Alice stood waiting to carefully receive the apples and put them gently in each piece of tissue paper.
A bruised apple would go rotten, sooner or later, and infect the other apples.
‘A bruised apple is no good.’ She could hear him saying it now, holding one up, staring admiringly at it.
Delicious, tart, crisp, the Bourton Pippin, a little-known variety which her father had painstakingly grafted from rootstock acquired from the farm of an old Jansen family friend.
Each apple, at the exact moment it was ready to be pried from the branch, must be wrapped and laid in a wooden crate not touching its neighbour; the crates stacked in layers in the apple store; and then sold at market, taken to the apple press up the river to be made into apple juice or made into produce that would also be sold.
The crinkling sound of the paper, and the smells of the lichen and apple and faint wet grass – it was apple time, and this made her curiously happy.
‘Were you with your friends today, honey?’ It was worse when her mother was trying to be perky, like Debbie Reynolds.
‘I went to Valhalla.’
‘Oh, Allie –’ Betsy paused. ‘Why do you keep going to see Teddy Kynaston?’
‘She’s my friend.’
‘She’s older than your father. I don’t see what you have to talk about.’
‘I lie out on the porch and we talk. About Dad. About stuff.’
This silenced her mother, but after a few moments of straining to grab a just-out-of-reach apple, she said, ‘Mr Kynaston’s coming back tomorrow. Did I tell you that?’
‘No.’
‘He’s been away for so long. I guess you won’t be able to go up there so much then.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Alice, not caring how rude she sounded.
‘Allie!’ Her mother practically screeched. She handed her the apple. ‘The Kynastons aren’t our friends.’
‘He was Dad’s friend. So was Teddy.’
‘Mr Kynaston’s a gentleman. But your dad, honey –’ Betsy sighed. ‘The Kynastons, they’re our bosses. They’re different from us. I don’t think your dad understood that.’
‘Mom – they were friends!’
‘Oh biscuits they were. Listen to me,’ said her mother, wiping her forehead and carefully climbing down the ladder, the last of the Burton Pippins clenched in her hand. ‘When Teddy had her eighteenth-birthday dance, they hired Louis Armstrong to come play for them. Louis Armstrong , Allie.’
‘I know. Dad was there.’
‘Only because he was a neighbour. Not because they – oh, never mind.’
Alice stared at her mother, fury soaking into her like black ink. ‘Don’t say things like that.’
‘Okay, honey. I’m sorry.’ Betsy pushed her hair away from her face with such force that the scarf came untied and she stared at it as it slid off her open palm on to the grass. ‘Stupid darned –’
Alice bent down and picked up the scarf. ‘We’ve done enough today, Mom. Let’s go in.’
Her mother nodded. ‘I didn’t mean any of that, Allie.
I’m tired, and I’m trying to work out what we’ll live on if we can’t sell these apples; and, even if we can sell them, how on earth we’ll survive.
Your father left us a sliver of Jansen money, enough for two years, if we live like we’re the Ingalls family and’ – she gulped – ‘grind our own flour and don’t buy any new clothes.
’ She handed Alice the last apple to wrap, then brushed her hands together with an exaggerated briskness.
‘Don’t mind me, honey. After all, what did my mom used to say, about problems? ’
‘“To turn, turn will be our delight, / Till by turning, turning we come ’round right,”’ Alice replied.