Surviving the Applewhites: Chapters 10–19

She was going to make a papier-mâché caterpillar and chrysalis to teach Destiny about metamorphosis.

She was going to make a papier-mâché caterpillar and chrysalis to teach Destiny about metamorphosis.

She was just pouring the water into the bucket when Randolph appeared in the schoolroom doorway in pajamas and slippers, his hair disheveled and his eyes screwed up against the daylight.

Destiny was earnestly telling himself about the big orange tiger he was about to paint in the green, green jungle.

It was a fritillary all right, but not a great spangled. Three different times she’d caught a variegated fritillary. She knew the difference by this time.

Destiny was so prone to coloring things that weren’t meant to be colored that permanent markers had been banned from the Applewhite household altogether.

Jake, of course, had to do it. And Destiny had turned it into a game to see how hard he could make it for Jake to get the job done. Very hard! The kid was incorrigible.

He’d worn the spiked collar only twice—it had made his neck sweat and then chafed it raw.

Archie only snatched and stomped, but Lucille had delivered a ten-minute lecture—not on the dangers of cigarette smoking, which he’d heard about a zillion times before, but on the desecration of tobacco, which she said was sacred to American Indian spirituality.

By the end of the lecture she’d worked herself into tears about the “wanton destruction of native culture in the Americas.”

Though Jake insisted the dog sleep on the lavender braided rug, when he woke in the morning at the horrible predawn hour when Archie ground his coffee before going out for his morning exercise, Winston was invariably lying alongside him, pinning him beneath the covers, snoring steadily and drooling on his pillow.

They should have used The Sound of Music. It would have been faster. After twenty-four hours the people in the cult would have laid down their guns and come out on their hands and knees, eyes as crazed as Wolfie’s, singing compulsively about female deer and kitten whiskers.

Her ballet, she claimed, was changing from a discordant tragedy to something resembling a polka.

Even in those few blessed hours when Randolph took the CD and went off to Traybridge for what he called his “eternal, unending, utterly futile auditions," there was no respite.

Even in those few blessed hours when Randolph took the CD and went off to Traybridge for what he called his “eternal, unending, utterly futile auditions," there was no respite.

The Teaching Opportunity and a paper describing the project and its results were what she called the Culminating Events.

In all these interminable auditions I haven’t found a single person who could come close to playing Rolf.

Their food trough was empty.

But right this minute it didn’t make her feel one whit better.

"I do hope you’re going to be finishing up tonight," she said. "Our people are getting a little restive, I’m afraid."
Jake didn’t know what restive meant, but from the way people treated one another and him in particular, he figured it must mean “hostile."

The Baron von Trapp, an Austrian naval officer whose wife had died, hired a young woman from a nearby convent to be a governess to his seven children. After the governess had taught all the children to sing, the baron fell in love with her.

With an ungainly leap, Winston managed to launch himself from the driveway onto Jake's lap, landing like a ten-ton truck, his back claws digging into Jake’s legs, his tongue slathering Jake’s face with foamy saliva.

He had to close his mouth firmly against the onslaught of basset greeting.

"You can’t go away anymore," Cordelia said to Jake. “That’s all there is to it. Not without Winston. Nothing would make him stop. I offered him liver treats, his favorite, and he looked at me as if I was out of my mind. He was inconsolable. Wherever you go, you have to take Winston with you!”

It’s been the most grueling audition process I’ve ever been through in my life. And the hardest part of it was finding the person to play Maria.

She was beginning to have a strong premonition of catastrophe.

He had the same dark, solemn, almost mournful eyes.

She’d consulted with the nature spirits, and they had had no advice except to relinquish her need for control.

When Sybil had broached the subject, speaking to Hal’s closed door, he had said that he was creating a website where he could sell his sculpture and he needed his computer every minute.

She’d been trying to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream while she waited for him to finish whatever it was he was doing now, but the incessant tap of the computer keys had made it impossible to concentrate.

He had a meeting with the technical staff that afternoon to sort things out, and he had no psychic energy left over for trivialities.

"That's the whole trouble. I keep writing plot. I actually killed a character off yesterday morning. I couldn’t help myself. My masterpiece is turning inexorably into a Petunia Grantham mystery!”

"You don’t want to sit at a computer now. It’s October. The leaves are turning. The air is cooling off. Day after day we have sunshine and blue sky. But it’s all too fleeting. The rainy season’s on its way. Go out now, while the world is still perfect. Smell it. Listen to it. Take it in before it goes."

Jake had shown initiative. Good sense. Creativity. Even cooperation. So Jake could do his thing, whatever, besides singing, he decided that thing might be, and she could go back to doing hers.

"What do you play? A dulcimer, I suppose. Or a didgeridoo.”