The Poison Apples, page 20
The stage door.
The cast and crew had keys, of course. But all I had to do was wait around, look unassuming, and then when someone entered or exited, just follow behind as if that was the most normal thing in the universe to do.
So I waited. And waited. I knew the actors—R. included—wouldn’t be arriving until 6:00, so I had plenty of time. Still, it was cold outside. And the street I was standing on was pretty loud, with cars honking and garbage trucks coughing up coffee grinds and turkey carcasses.
Finally, at 4:30, a woman with a baseball cap and glasses hurried up to the stage door and unlocked it. This was my chance. I jumped forward just as she opened the door and tried to follow her inside.
The woman stopped, turned around, and squinted at me.
“Who are you?” she asked.
I wasn’t expecting that.
“Um … I’m…” The truth—that I was R. Klausenhook’s stepdaughter—would have probably gotten me in. But I didn’t want to leave a recognizable trail. “I’m … the assistant stage manager.”
She glared at me. “That’s impossible.”
“Why?” I asked, trying to sound confident.
“Because I’m the assistant stage manager.” Then she stepped all the way inside the building and, pointedly, slammed the door in my face.
Shoot.
I walked back over to my spot on the brick wall next to the theater and went back to waiting. This time, though, I was more nervous. What if I couldn’t get inside? Or what if the woman caught me once I was in the theater and reported me? What if I was arrested? What if the police—
The door was opening.
But this time from the inside.
I darted forward and held it just as a sweaty, overweight man in overalls exited, pushing a cart full of two-by-fours.
He looked at me, surprised. “Thank you, miss.”
I smiled. “No problem.” Then the next sentence just popped out of my mouth. “Everyone in a production should help everyone else out, right?”
He looked confused. “You’re in the production?”
I looked at him, temporarily flummoxed. Then something amazing happened. Without even deciding to, I became R. I lifted my chin. I flared my nostrils. I batted my lashes. I looked simultaneously contemptuous and sympathetic.
“Darling,” I said to the man, “I’m the star.”
He blinked. “Oh. Sorry.”
I waved my hands in the air, picturing myself with long, purple fingernails. “No matter,” I said airily.
Then I stepped inside the darkened theater.
The door slammed behind me.
I took a deep breath, taking in the smell of must and sawdust. Then I lowered my head and walked down the first hallway I saw.
I had to get to the dressing rooms without anyone noticing me.
Luckily, it seemed like almost no one was there. I could hear a few people moving around scenery onstage, but otherwise the theater was silent. I tiptoed down the hallway, checking the sign on every door: PROP ROOM. BOILER ROOM. COSTUME CLOSET.
That last one made me catch my breath. Reena would love me forever if I brought her back some kind of 1920s boa. And a pair of cool Victorian boots for Molly …
I made myself keep walking.
BATHROOM. TECHNICAL SUPPLIES. DRESSING ROOM.
I came to a halt.
DRESSING ROOM. Did all the actors share a single dressing room? It hadn’t occurred to me. If that was true, my plan was in trouble. I took a few steps down the hallway just in case, and peeked at the sign on the next door:
DRESSING ROOM-KLAUSENHOOK.
Perfect. Of course R. would demand her own dressing room. How could I have expected anything less of her?
I pressed my ear to the door, and holding my breath, listened for any sounds inside.
Nothing.
I reached into my jacket and felt for the little pouch I’d been storing inside my pocket. That morning I’d gone to my old favorite toy store in Brooklyn Heights and walked straight back to the jokes-and-gags section. There it was, in its pink package with a cartoon on it of a man scratching himself wildly, his eyes bugging out in pain.
FRANKIE’S EXTRA-POWERFUL SUPER LONG-LASTING ITCHING POWDER.
I’d never bought it as a kid, just stared at it with curious longing. But now Frankie’s itching powder was going to serve a real purpose in my life.
It was going to ruin R.’s career.
I was going to sneak into her dressing room and pour it in her shoes. In her dress. In her pantyhose. In the Russian shawl she’d been wearing around the house so as not to “break character.”
There was no way that R. was going to be able to turn in the kind of awe-inspiring, life-changing, breathtaking performance that all the theater critics in all the New York newspapers had been anticipating. Not if her skin was on fire. That was the definition of breaking character. And—as she’d made a point of telling me and Dad five times over breakfast—everyone who was anyone was going to be at opening night. The reviews would come out the next morning.
I opened the door and stepped into the dressing room.
And there she was.
Sitting in front of the dressing room mirror on a stool. Hunched over, wrapped in her shawl.
Crying.
My jaw dropped. I stood there, trying to decide whether or not I should just run out of the room without offering an explanation.
R. slowly lifted her head up and stared at me, mascara streaks running down her face. “Alice?” she croaked.
I nodded.
“You came,” she wept. “You came to see me. That’s so nice.”
She put her head in her hands and cried even harder.
I took a tiny step toward her. “What’s—” I started to say.
“Your father called and told you?” she asked through her sobs.
“I…”
“I just … I can’t imagine going on tonight. I can’t do it. I can’t go on.” Her shoulders started shaking.
What was happening? I was living in some kind of alternate universe. One in which R. wanted to sabotage her own career.
“Why can’t you go on?” I asked.
She looked at me indignantly, even more makeup started to drip off her eyelashes and eyelids. “Would you have been able to go onstage and play Ranevskaya right after your mother died?”
My mouth opened and then closed.
R.’s mother had died?
I’d seen R. at lunch and everything had seemed just fine.
“Um,” I said. And then after a pause: “No. No, I wouldn’t have.”
R. flung herself onto the dressing room cabinet and moaned. Weirdly enough, she was actually reminding me of a real person for the first time in the entire year I’d known her.
“I’m so sorry,” I said softly. “I know how awful it feels.”
“They called twenty minutes ago,” she sobbed. “A heart attack. She was perfectly … the last time I talked to her she seemed fine.”
“Where does—where did she live?” I asked.
“Cleveland, Ohio.”
I was shocked. “That’s where you’re from?”
She nodded. I’d had no idea. I had always just assumed that R. was born and raised in Manhattan. Or at least Paris. Or London. Maybe—although it was a stretch—Madrid.
Definitely not Cleveland.
I pulled up a stool and sat down next to her. After a second, I reached out and touched her shoulder. She didn’t pull away, so I started stroking it, making a small circle with the tips of my fingers. Just like my mom used to do when I was a kid.
She began breathing in big, heaving gulps.
Watching her, it was all coming back to me. The call from the hospital in the middle of the night. Dad and I had stayed there until midnight and then took a cab back to the house to get a few hours of sleep before we went back to visit Mom in the morning. And then the phone rang at 4:00 AM, and from my bed I had heard Dad let out a strange yell … a totally new and unfamiliar sound.…
Tears were starting to spring into my eyes. I tried to blink them back.
“Listen,” I told R. firmly. “You have to go on tonight.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Do you have an understudy?”
“No.” She sniffed. “This show is all about my performance.”
Of course.
“Just get through it,” I said helplessly.
“I can’t. I’m not in character. I feel…” She burst into a fresh round of choking sobs. “I feel like I’m five years old.”
I kept rubbing her shoulder, unsure of what to say or do next. “I’m sorry, R. I understand what it’s like, and it’s horrible.”
She nodded. “I know you do,” she murmured.
I was shocked. There was no sarcasm in her tone, no irony. We’d just communicated for the first time.
“Oh, God,” she bawled. “I’m going to ruin my career. I can’t do it. I can’t go on.”
I sighed. “Listen. Two days after my mom died I had an English final. And I was sure I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even get out of bed or speak to anyone. But I knew that if I missed the final, I’d have to make it up a week later. And I probably wasn’t going to be feeling any better a week later. I was maybe gonna be feeling worse, because in a week my mom would still be dead, and the realization would just be sinking in even more. Then I realized that if I didn’t take the test at all, I wouldn’t be able to finish eighth grade.”
She blinked at me through her tear-encrusted eyelashes. “What did you do?”
“I woke up the morning of the test and I thought: I can’t do this. There is no way I can get out of bed and take a shower and put on my clothes and go to school. It is physically impossible.”
R. stared at me, her mouth open, a small droplet of snot hanging from the tip of her nose. “And?”
“And then I got out of bed and put on my clothes and went to school and took the test.” I started to giggle, remembering. “I refused to take a shower, though. I don’t know why. Somehow taking a shower still seemed impossible.”
R. cracked a tiny smile. “That makes sense.”
We were silent for a while.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she said finally. “I can’t believe you took an English test right after your mother died.”
“I got a C-minus,” I admitted.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s still a miracle.”
I thought about it. “Well, you know what? I was just performing. That morning I was just pretending to be someone whose mother hadn’t just died.”
R. nodded. “You took your fate into your own hands.”
I stared at her. Reclaiming your life. Taking your fate into your own hands. That was the goal of the Poison Apples.
But had I already reclaimed my own life without even realizing it?
R. stood up shakily and pulled the shawl around her shoulders. She faced the dressing mirror and slowly began wiping the makeup stains off her face. “I’ll go to Cleveland on Monday,” she said softly. “That’s when we have the day off.”
I stood up, too. “Good for you, R.”
She turned and faced me. Her green eyes pierced into mine. “Thank you, Alice.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
She bit her lip. “Listen. I’m sorry if I…”
I held my breath. I’d never even heard the words I’m sorry come out of R.’s mouth before. What was she going to apologize for? Sending me off to boarding school? Selling the brownstone? Making me a flower girl instead of a bridesmaid? Screaming at me at least once an hour? Trying in every way possible to ruin my life?
After a long pause, she shook her head. “Never mind.”
Then she turned back to the mirror and started pulling her hair back with her hands.
I tried to look like I didn’t care. “Okay,” I said, taking a step back toward the dressing room door, “I’m gonna go now.”
She nodded, not taking her eyes off her own reflection. “I’ll see you after the show.”
“Cool.”
I opened the door and was about to leave when she called after me: “Alice?”
I whirled around. Maybe the apology was coming after all.
She was looking at me curiously, her head tilted, her hands on her hips. “How did you get here ten minutes after I called your father and told him about my mother?”
I shrugged helplessly.
“The commute from the Upper West Side is at least twenty minutes,” she said.
“Um…” I said.
We looked at each other.
“It was a Thanksgiving miracle,” I blurted out. Then I turned and ran as fast as I could, down the hallway, out the stage door, and onto the crowded, smelly street.
SEVEN
Reena
It was our old house. Or at least it looked like our old house, from the outside. Same marble white mansion, same green lawn, same puny dying palm tree next the driveway that Pradeep had always refused to let us chop down. (He had a tendency to get attached to random nonhuman objects and attribute them with human traits. “That tree is a good tree!” he would scream at us. “It knows right from wrong!”)
So when Dad pulled up to the house after picking us up from the airport in his brand-new red Audi, I was relieved to see that the tree (or “Palmy,” as Pradeep was fond of calling it when he was younger) was still there. I wasn’t sure how Pradeep would’ve reacted if they’d chopped it down.
And then we stepped inside.
It’s hard to describe what we encountered in the foyer of what used to be our normal, all-American home. I guess it was the twenty-foot-tall wooden statue of Vishnu that caught my attention first. And I only found out it was Vishnu because I gasped and said, “What is that?”
“Vishnu,” Shanti said, gliding out of the kitchen and smiling at us. “Don’t you recognize Vishnu? He’s one of the most famous Hindu gods.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know any Hindu gods.”
Pradeep tugged at my sleeve and pointed. “Forget Vishnu. Look at that.”
There was a huge golden fountain right next to the entrance to the living room, with a gigantic leaping golden fish spitting an arc of water out of its mouth.
I shook my head in disbelief.
“And that.” Pradeep pointed to the right. There was a tapestry hanging on the wall next to the staircase. Set against a forest background, it was an intricately embroidered picture of a blue man intertwined with a red woman.
“Oh, my God!” Pradeep shouted. “Are they having sex?!”
Dad, who was standing behind us, placed his hands on our shoulders. “Okay, you two. Calm down. The house is decorated differently now. No reason to go crazy.”
“I repeat the question,” Pradeep said, not taking his eyes off the tapestry. “Are they having—”
“ENOUGH!” Dad boomed.
We fell silent.
I gazed around the foyer, then walked over and peeked into the living room. Then I opened the kitchen door, looked inside, swallowed a gasp, and walked back into the foyer.
“Wow,” I said to Dad and Shanti. “It’s very…”
“Different!” she said cheerfully.
I nodded. “Also … Indian. It’s very Indian.”
Dad shot me a warning glance.
“Yep,” Pradeep piped up. “It’s, like, more Indian than it was when four Indian people were living here.”
“Pradeep…,” Dad said.
“Which makes me think,” Pradeep said thoughtfully, “is it actually Indian at all? Or is it just a white person’s version of—”
“OKAY!” Dad yelled. “I’m taking your bags upstairs! Follow me!”
We followed him. Reluctantly.
“Rash!” Shanti called up after us. “Don’t forget! The landscapers are coming this afternoon!”
We turned around at the landing and peered down at her.
“Why are the landscapers coming?” Pradeep asked suspiciously.
“Forget it,” Dad said.
But Shanti didn’t hear him. “To cut down that tree!” she yelled gaily up to us. “The horrible little one next to the driveway!”
I can’t even really put into words the look that passed across my brother’s face.
But I will never forget it.
* * *
“Why don’t you come see me tonight?” My mother’s voice was buzzing plaintively in my ear. Sort of like a mosquito.
I transferred my cell phone from one side of my face to the other and propped my legs up on the windowsill. I was sitting in my bedroom, which—it was hard to believe—looked pretty much the same as it did before.
Except for a tiny decal of a many-armed Hindu goddess stuck onto the windowpane.
But I was okay with that.
“I’ll come visit you and Pria tomorrow, Mommy, okay?”
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand why your father and…” Her voice shook. “… and That Woman get to see you first.”
I sighed. “You don’t understand. I have something I have to do here tonight.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
She sighed. “I sold the flat-screen TV. Did I already tell you that?”
“Yes.” My mother had taken up the habit of calling me and telling me which luxury items she was being forced to sell, post-divorce. So far she’d mourned the loss of her Manolo Blahnik high heels, her television, her visits to her favorite five-hundred-dollar-an-hour hairdresser, and her jet skis. (There was no way she was giving up her Porsche or her personal trainer or her monthly visit to the Golden Door Spa. Or the lawyer she’d hired to sue my father within an inch of his life.)
“So what are you doing tonight? Are you doing something fun with That Woman?”
“No. They’re not even home. They went to some kind of fund-raiser.” The second I said it I realized it was a mistake.
My mother gasped in indignation. “You’re choosing to be home alone tonight when your poor mother is—”
Without even thinking, I pressed End on my cell phone and snapped it shut.
