Bad Apples

The first thing that struck me about the woman at the door was that she seemed a bit vacant. She had opened the door and greeted me politely enough, yet she never quite focused on my eyes when she looked at me. There was a smell of cabbage soup and (was it?) fresh bread that wafted out of the door as it opened that made my mouth water briefly, but it was gone when she invited me in after my opening pitch, so I chalked it up to skipping lunch and thought no more about it.

We sat in her living room on stiff, formal sofas. Outside, the fall winds blustered around the porch, making boards rattle and skittering leaves across the yellowed lawn. She served me delicate jasmine tea and I spoke to her about The Lord. We spoke about His ineffable mercy and the great love He brings to each moment of every day. She nodded and made appropriate noises but didn’t really seem to be paying much attention. Yet, when I asked her questions, her answers were relevant, so I figured she was actually thinking about her immortal soul. It’s important to have them focused on their souls. Brother Patrick taught me that. Without that focus and the fear of being eternally damned, they can see right through your arguments and you never get a cent out of them. I had got real good at getting people to think about their souls and where they’d be going after they died. I had won the Best Collector Award four months in a row and was going for my fifth. 

Every once in a while, there was a bang from somewhere in the recesses of the house. It was an old, rambling, shambling sort of place, one of those houses thrown up in the 1930s during the depression and then added on to and extended over the years. The kind of house where you keep turning corners and coming upon new rooms, new corridors and unexpected nooks and crannies – perfect for kids playing ‘Hide and Seek, Find and Beat’ on drizzly fall days. Each time the banging happened, I looked up, half-expecting a dog or a child to come barreling through the open door of the room we were in, but there was nothing. The woman never flinched, never twitched an eyelid. She simply smiled and continued talking to me, albeit in her slightly absent-minded way. After a louder and more drawn-out banging sound, I finally asked her, “Is everything alright back there?”

“Why, yes,” she answered, smiling faintly, “Do you think everything is alright?” This wrong-footed me a bit. I’m not used to people asking me questions that are nothing to do with salvation and how to guarantee it. She frowned, then her face softened again and she asked, “So, tell me more about this inner-city project that your church wants to fund.” I floundered for a minute, a bit confused by her side-stepping an explanation, but my well-rehearsed patter saved me from any inept stuttering and I got back into the flow of things pretty easily. We talked for a couple more minutes until I worked the conversation around to the donation of goods or cash to our Center. Cash is great, but not everyone has any on hand when we go collecting. Sister Emilia is a whizz at e-Bay and we’ve sometimes made more off the old stuff that people have donated than any cash they manage to squeeze out of their constricted budgets. I put the final pitch as I usually did, “So, ma’am, would you be willing to build up some o’ that soul-credit I was talking about by helping your more unfortunate brethren with a donation of some kind? I and all my brothers and sisters in The Lord would surely appreciate it.” I gave her a big smile just to be safe and waited.

And waited. She seemed to have frozen, with her head cocked slightly to one side and a half-smile lifting one corner of her mouth. I could see her breathing, just about, but her eyes were not focused. I moved slightly to one side to see if her eyes would follow me, but nothing. I waved my hand in front of her face and called to her, but no joy. Damn, if the woman hadn’t just completely gapped out on me, and just when I thought I’d hooked a good one. Despite the pets or whatever it was she had back there, old houses like these could be treasure troves, filled with vintage electronics, valuable old books, antique furniture, lots of good stuff. I sat back in my chair and cussed quietly under my breath. She was about the right age to have had a checkered youth, when designer drugs like X or Vitamin K had been twisting kids’ brains – it’s quite possible that this was normal for her and she’d come to in a half hour or so with no memory of me or my entire pitch. It was so frustrating! I punched the arm of the chair and swore again. Brother Amir was working the other side of this street and I had seen him one house down from me when I came in here, so he would finish first. Brother Amir and I do not get along and if he finished early, he’d drive off and leave me to take a bus home. I hate buses. They smell weird.

I glanced out of the front window, checking to see if Brother Amir had finished with the house across the way yet, but he was nowhere to be seen. I turned back to the woman and then froze. She was gone. I hadn’t heard her get up or leave the room, but she was no longer sitting across from me. I went to the door of the room and listened. Silence, not even any of that weird banging. I needed to finish with this house and move on, so I made a decision I probably shouldn’t have. I decided to have a quick poke around in her house to see what I could find. If she spotted me, I could always claim to be looking for her. I moved through the doorway into the corridor. It was gloomy and felt airless, sticky; and yet again I caught a whiff of cabbage soup, staple diet of foster kids the world over. I blinked to adjust my vision and then moved down the hallway, trying to decide which of the four doors that opened off it I would try first. The walls were a dingy cream color, with dark wood paneling coming up to about hip height. I listened carefully for noises, then peeked into the first room on the left – just a kitchen. Leaving the door slightly ajar, I moved across to the first door on the right, brought my ear up to the wood. Nothing. Eased it open and saw some kind of sewing room. I slipped inside and did a quick search in the obvious places for anything of value. There wasn’t much except a couple of real ivory buttons and an old -fashioned tape measure, which looked like it could be worth a bit. I slipped them into my pocket and continued my search.

The other rooms seemed to be unused, with yellowing dust-sheets covering huge, puffy settees and crappy Swedish wooden chairs. No drawers to search. I prowled through the whole ground floor, picking up some cash (not much) and the odd trinket or two, but didn’t quite dare to go upstairs. I decided to go back to the sitting room and see if she’d re-appeared. On my way back down the corridor, I spotted something and stopped in my tracks.  Right at the end of the corridor there was a narrow door that I had missed – it looked so much like the paneling and the wall that only the dimness of the corridor helped me to spot the faint line of light that showed at the bottom. 

I pushed and pulled a bit and the door swung inwards silently. A set of narrow wooden stairs led down to a blank wall, with warm golden light welling up from a doorway to the left of that. “This could be the mother-lode!” I thought to myself. Concealed doors with secret cellars behind them are simply made for hiding valuables. Of course, I’m not a complete idiot, so I didn’t go rushing down the stairs whooping with joy. I listened carefully, went down a couple of stairs, waited again. When I was as certain as I could be that there was nobody down there, I eased my way down to the last stair and peeked around the corner. Just a quick peek, enough to show me that the bare-floored room was empty. I stuck my head around the corner and took a really good look, then went round the corner and down the last two stairs. When I said empty, I meant, totally empty. Not a stick of furniture, just a bare wooden floor and a big mirror on the wall. I couldn’t even see where that warm, comfortable light was coming from or the marvelous smell of caramel-roasted apples. I love roasted apples, all sweet and tart at the same time. Reminds me of when I was a kid, maybe 7 or 8, before Mom died and I started bouncing from foster-home to foster-home. Mom used to roast us early fall apples that I stole from the trees in the library gardens and we’d eat them straight out of the pan, burning our mouths and laughing together in the tiny little kitchen of our apartment. I loved that smell! I stood there on that wooden floor for a minute, kind of lost in the memories…

…I stood there on that wooden floor for a minute, lost in the memories. Realizing that I was actually just standing there, staring into space, I gave myself a shake and, with one more quick glance around the empty room, I turned to go. And walked straight into a blank wall. I blinked, trying to focus. Had I gapped out so badly thinking about my mom and those roasted apples that I had gotten mixed up? I turned around, put my back against the wall I’d just walked into and saw an empty room with a bare wooden floor and a big mirror on the wall. I felt a flutter of fear in my stomach and tried to calm myself. Where the heck was the door? Pushing down the acid taste of panic, I turned back and started looking for a seam in the wall. If the upper door had been concealed, maybe the bottom one was, too. But after two or three minutes of careful scrutiny, I had to admit that the wall opposite the mirror was just that – a wall. I turned to check the other walls, and my eye caught my reflection in the mirror. I was white as a sheet (no surprise there), but what brought me up short was the flowery apron I seemed to be wearing. I put a hand up to touch the bow behind my neck, but although I could clearly see in the mirror that it moved when my hand touched it, I felt nothing, only the much-repaired seam of my collecting shirt. A chill ran down my neck and I moved slowly towards the mirror.

With every step I took, more unbelievable and (to my naked eye) invisible details came slowly into focus. A kitchen counter appeared to coalesce out of thin air, blocking my view of my legs and feet. One step more and I started to see bowls and kitchen utensils scattered on the counter, open containers of ingredients flanking them, and then as I took the next step, I smelled it. The roasted apple scent that had so captivated me when I first came in. I looked again at the counter and there it was – a large, battered frying pan, just like the one Mom had pulled out of the garbage when we moved to Chicago. Just over the rim, I could see the rounded, wrinkled shapes of apples, cut in half and laid on the bottom. The smell of melted butter wafted up to meet my nose, bringing with it hints of sugar and cinnamon. My eyes misted up and, despite the panic flailing at the back of my mind, I smiled. She couldn’t cook, my mom. She was useless in a kitchen, which is why we’d had such a tiny one in that apartment, the last time I remember being happy. She could boil pasta or rice, squirt ketchup over it and that was the sum total of her culinary talents. But those apples… those apples had been her crowning achievement. Every time I’d managed to steal a couple, we’d…

My eye wandered over to another dish near the pan. It was a pie dish - creamy, golden pastry lovingly laid out in it, the edges already crimped, blind-baked and waiting for the filling. What was that doing there? Mom never made pies! I could almost feel the resentment bubbling up in my chest, dissolving the dreamy, half-calm feeling that had overlaid my panic. Dissolving them both like vinegar poured into a bowl of baking soda. “How dare you?” I thought to myself, not even knowing who I was addressing. I snapped my eyes back up to the mirror, glaring with raging anger at my reflection in its pretty pastel apron.  

“Mom never made pies!” I yelled, the sour taste of lemons filling my mouth with spit, so that it flew out of me and splattered the mirror. “Liar!” I yelled at my domestically idealized reflection. The young person in the mirror smiled mockingly and flipped me the bird. Without thinking, I grabbed up one of the apples from the pan and threw it at their head as hard as I could. I had barely registered the blistering pain of the piping hot apple-sauce clinging to my palm before I blinked and found myself standing outside the house, the scorching apple becoming a clod of dirt exploding away from Brother Amir’s face. He looked shocked and angry. Really angry.

I stood there, panting, trying to figure out what the heck had just happened. I couldn’t collect my thoughts at all, even when Brother Amir called me a freak, stomped back to the car and drove away. The house behind me was empty, derelict, windows busted in and the porch sagging beneath the weight of its own nails. I backed away from those weather-whitened boards and ran towards the main road, my heart pounding, mind whirling, mouth dry.

I thought about losing Best Collector to Brother Amir while I rode the pungent bus back downtown. I deliberately didn’t think about the painful blisters on my palm or my rumbling stomach. I especially didn’t think about the heavenly tang of roasted apples in a junkyard pan.

Not at all.