Apples Never Fall

These chapters develop the juxtaposition between the easy strategy of escape and the difficult commitment to confrontation. In addition, they juxtapose the competitive world of tennis and the necessarily cooperative dynamic of real life.

The complicated relationship between Joy and Savannah comes into focus in these chapters. They raise the question of why Joy doesn’t exercise any reasonable suspicion about the stranger who appears at their door with a hokey story (that she had the cab driver take her as far as her $20 would take her, which happened to be in front of the Delaney house). The kids are flummoxed—even in the days after their mother disappears—by their mother’s curious generosity of heart. The narrative reveals that Joy’s apparent generosity may be a complex expression of her ego, a futile effort to remake herself into something, or someone, she isn’t.

As the days pass and Savannah becomes a fixture in the house—making meals, cleaning up, and chatting with Joy—Joy “could feel herself becoming more charismatic and cheerful by the day” (150). In sharing an edited version of her life with Savannah, Joy feels as if her life is far more interesting. Savannah knows nothing about their long marriage and its trials and tribulations or about the family’s anger and the emotional showdowns. With Savannah, Joy can revise her life story, to borrow from the memoir motif: “Savannah certainly did not need to know how many times Joy and Stan had fallen in and out of love” (151) or the loneliness she so often felt over the years or the estrangement she still felt with her grown children, as she was unable or unwilling to share with her kids her emotional frustrations, affection, the resentments. Because Savannah doesn’t share her history, Joy can reshape it into a kind of Joy 2.2. Joy sees Savannah as a chance to reboot her life. As Joy moves about the kitchen cheerfully preparing for the family’s Fathers’ Day gathering, she’s blithely unaware of the dangers of that fantasy—even as she peers into a mirror and, with a pair of tweezers, casually, easily plucks a nasty hair from her chin. Her life, she must learn, cannot be so easily tweaked, so casually made closer to fine.

The disturbing figure of Savannah, however, emerges in these same chapters as a character rather than a plot device. Savannah introduces the concept of escape and the dangers of such an evasion strategy. At two different moments, Savannah speaks of the lure of escape: first, when Joy questions her about her odd and decidedly clunky necklace, an old-style door key (which she says represents freedom but is in fact the key to the bedroom where she imprisoned her drugged mother), and later when Troy questions her on the way to pick up her stuff about her elaborate neck tattoo of a beanstalk (which she says is from the fairy tale about Jack the Giant Killer, who climbs a beanstalk as a way to secure financial freedom for him and his mother). As the novel later reveals, Savannah—in her grand revenge fantasy against a family she blames for her unhappy childhood—a paranoia that the narrative questions as preposterous and self-serving, a way to escape the emotional and physical abuse of her childhood. In her skewed perception, by destroying the family who nurtured her gifted brother, she can at last end her pain. Such an escape, however, is a fantasy as dangerous and pointless as Brooke’s homeopathic vitamins, Troy’s fancy cars, Amy’s self-lacerating poetry (which she eats as soon as she writes it), and Logan’s unfurnished apartment he uses to make his emotional drift seem cool.

Stan’s impromptu (and mean-spirited) anatomical account of each of his children’s tennis skills—or lack thereof—during the Fathers’ Day gathering reveals the family’s skewed perception that had they been successful in tennis their lives would have been fuller, richer, and emotionally satisfying. Stan reviews each kid’s liability that made the tennis dream just that—a dream: Troy was too volatile, too given to emotional episodes; Brooke had migraines that crippled her; Logan never charged the net, never cared about winning; and Amy let the game get into her head.

However, as the novel reveals during the three weeks when Joy is missing and each of the siblings in turn comes to terms with the past, what made them weak tennis players makes them better people. What Stan as a frustrated tennis coach finds a problem in his children would, by any metric other than professional athletics, be a virtue: getting in touch with real emotions uncontained by imposed restraints; feeling the great surge of unexpected passion and riding it; understanding the reality of vulnerability and the fragility of any moment; developing a pleasant indifference to winning at all costs; refusing to simplify others as mere foes; being content to appreciate the integrity and purpose of others and not allowing them to define personal integrity and purpose; and not “to see life as a constant power struggle with a cruel and invincible foe” (187). The more Stan talks (and at this point, before the siblings undergo their own sort of three-week rehab, no one counters his assessments), the more aggravated the siblings get, the more heated the conversation grows, until first Brooke and then Troy—unable to allow Stan’s cannibalism of his own family—shatter the dinner by brusquely announcing their relationships have collapsed. The only way to stint the family’s feeding off itself is to create new distractions, to introduce new failures. Even as Joy summarily asks the kids to leave, the family has much to learn.