The book wasn’t a photograph album, like the seemingly endless number the Apples had. It was covered in tooled brown leather, with golden ornamentation, and it had odd things protruding out of it: photographs, newspaper clippings, ribbons, and faded sheets of paper Babs didn’t recognize. Gramma opened up the book carefully, and she could see one reason it wasn’t opened very often: it leaked. Tissues, pictures, and other memorabilia slid around and threatened to spill out. It also leaked dust, which tickled her nose, and she sneezed so hard that Gramma had to clutch at the book. The cider brown filly and the pale golden mare bent over it, while Poppy stood behind the sofa and leaned over to look. The very first thing in it was a theatrical flyer from the Baltimare Sun.
“And there he is,” said Gramma Seed.
Babs didn’t see what she was supposed to be looking at, and then her father stabbed his hoof downward. “There. Right between the magician and the trained ewe act.”
Pepper Seed, Hoofer.
Babs’ jaw dropped. “Get right out of town.”
“Don’t talk to your gramma like that.”
“I wasn’t talking bad!” Babs shot back, turning to look at Poppy. “I don’t even know what a hoofer is!”
“He was a dancer,” Gramma Seed said, flipping to another page. “A very good dancer.”
“I’ll say he was,” Poppy put in proudly, leaning both front legs against the back of the sofa. “Signature moves, he had. Some of them dancers are out there, still tryin’ to do ‘em, and they can’t even come close.”
A yellowed and cracked sepia photograph slid onto the floor. “Oh, I didn’t realize that was still in there,” exclaimed Gramma. “It must have been one of the things I took with me.”
Babs scrambled off the sofa and peered down at the picture. A row of fillies looked shyly out at the camera, all wearing the same delicate white old-fashioned flower headdress. Under the picture, in faint pencil, were names: Magnolia Blossom. Tulip Tree. Sugar Pear. If you squinted a bit and used your imagination, you could just recognize Sugar Pear as the filly Gramma Seed had been.
“Our cute-ceañera. We all had a big one at Miss Saddlebred’s,” Gramma said casually, peering over the tops of her silver framed spectacles. “That was my entire class. Afterwards, we slipped out and went to the Palace, which of course,” she added sternly, “no nice young filly would have dared to do.”
Babs was tempted to say, “well, you did,” but decided that she’d better not say anything if she wanted to hear this story.
“I’m afraid the magician wasn’t very good. Even we could see exactly how she performed every trick, and she was a unicorn, too, it ought to have been easy for her. Then Pepper was on. Oh, my,” the old mare said. “Oh, MY.”
Gramma was too busy staring at the next picture to notice that Babs couldn’t see it, so she scrambled back on the sofa again. It was a black and white picture of a young stallion with his mane slicked down on one side, wearing a white bowtie and a smile that showed a lot of very good teeth.
“He was only playing Baltimare for a week,” the old mare said, “and he was very worried about what my father would think. He didn’t think sneaking around was right, and I don’t think he meant to tell me when the theatrical engagement was over and he had to leave. I had to pack my schoolbags in a rush because--"
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the filly broke in, waving her hooves, “roll that back. Your schoolbags? And you was what age?”
“As young as . . . no,” Gramma said, ruminating and looking up at the ceiling as though it would help her remember, “I must have been younger than Avocado. Fillies married much younger then,” she explained. “The real reason my father would never have given his approval was because Pepper was a dancer.”
“An’ he was from the neighborhood, don’t forget that,” Poppy broke in. “He spoke all classy-like on account of being onstage, but he never forgot where he was from, and nopony else let him forget about it either. Not that it matters,” he added defensively.
“As I was saying, I had to pack my schoolbags in a rush and gallop to the Baltimare train station. I barely made it. And I never regretted it. Not once.”
Babs cringed slightly, thinking as she did so that Gramma’s story was getting incredibly sappy. It was the sort of story that Sweetie Belle or Apple Bloom might have appreciated, but that she and Scootaloo gagged at. Still, she thought, this wasn’t just some sappy story. It was Gramma, and that made it different. Besides, she could feel that the old mare next to her was sad, so she slid in closer until her pudgy side was comfortingly next to her grandmother’s, then poked her in the ribs with a sharp hoof. “So then what happened?”
“Young fillies did not poke in my day, Nutmeg. I changed my name and we became a double act. Hold the book, will you? Poppy, if you would help me unfold this, please.”
The ladylike mare rose from the sofa. She and Poppy took either side of a large theatrical poster, and carefully unrolled it. The poster was adorned with a silhouette of a dancing mare and stallion. The stallion was wearing a top hat and holding a cane in his teeth.
FELDMAN’S FOALIES PRESENTS
**The Syncopated Seeds **
Pepper and Coco de Mer
In
Chevaux de Paris
Babs blinked at it, and said in a voice not unlike her cousin Apple Bloom’s, “Seriously?”
Poppy hoofed her in the back of the head. “They was considered very sophisticated back in the day. Look at ‘em.”
It was hard not to look at them—theatrical program after theatrical program, publicity shot after publicity shot, all featuring a filly-like young mare and a stallion with a dazzling smile, dancing in the rain with umbrellas or tapping around fireworks. She could not put these pictures together in her mind with the image of her sedate grandmother, making lace, stitching trim, or at the treadle of the sewing machine. Meanwhile, Poppy had raced over to the gramophone and flipped a different record on, while Gramma Coco nudged the rug with her nose until it rolled up. A pleasant baritone and a girlish soprano trilled—
Oh, listen to the rain on the roof
Head over heart, heart over hoof
My darrrrling—
—as her grandmother skittered across the floor, metal shoes clicking. “Buck and a wing, shuffle off to Buffalo, triple time step—you still got it, Ma!” Poppy cheered, as frantic thumps and yells of “Hay, cut that out!” echoed from below.
“Oops,” Gramma said, as she bumped into the Hearth’s Warming tree. Babs lunged to catch falling ornaments as her father raced over to grab the tree itself. “In any case,” she said, blowing with effort, “we were rather popular. I had hoped that your great grandparents would come around, but I tried writing to them from every town and they never wrote back, not even when Poppy and Sesame were born,” she added sadly, as she resumed her seat on the sofa. “I suppose they must have told the entire family that I’d disgraced them, because I never heard from any of the Pears again.”
“Or the Persimmons, or the Oranges,” said the dark stallion, spitting out pine needles from pulling the tree back into place. “They just wrote both of them off. How do ya like –"
“Them Apples?” his daughter finished. “What, the Apples wouldn’t talk to Gramma either?”
“You’ve met ‘em, and you know different,” he said, taking the dance record off the gramophone. “Not Granny Smith, not any of her kids. You know what they’re like. Family’s family to ‘em. But the Pears, the Persimmons, and the Oranges--“
“Pepper was in the theater,” Gramma Coco cut in. “It wasn’t acceptable. You have to understand their point of view, Poppy.”
Poppy shook his head in a blur of brown mane. “No,” he said stubbornly, as he kicked the rug back into place. “No, I don’t gotta understand their point of view. Dad was the best. You know he was.”
“Poppy,” warned his mother, “if you won’t be reasonable, I’ll have to show Nutmeg the photograph.”
“Not that! No, Ma, c’mon!”
The old mare pulled out another photo, and Babs trotted over to look. Two small fillies with long curly golden manes that did not quite go with their dark coats posed, holding hoops in their teeth. “Who’s the fillies?” Babs asked.
Her father covered his muzzle with both of his front hooves. “One of them would be me. That was me an’ your Aunt Sesame. We hadda roll them hoops around and kick ‘em and jump through ‘em. But the audience,” he added proudly, “ate it up. Dad was smart. We played all of the towns on the circuit, big and small. Fillydelphia, Hoofington, Trottingham, even Canterlot. Then we got to Dodge Junction.”
Coco de Mer Seed was still nervous before she went onstage, even though Pepper assured her over and over that she was a natural. She adjusted her pearls, checked her beauty spot, and sprayed another layer of lacquer over her mane. A hoof tapped respectfully on the door. “Yes, I’m decent!” she called.
Her husband poked his head around the door, grinning. “You’re always decent, Coco. You’re almost too respectable to be married to a show stallion like me.”
“Oh, stop,” she protested. “Careful!” she added and batted him on the nose with a powder puff as he leaned in for a kiss. “I just finished making up.”
Pepper sneezed. “I noticed,” he said, after he finished coughing. “I just thought you’d like to see this.” He dropped a letter on the dressing table. “Guess who liked our screen test?”
Coco squealed, dropping the powder puff and knocking over the manespray. “No!” she shrieked. “Not the Goldhooves! Oh, Pepper!”
“I’ve been telling you all along that the flickers would need song and dance teams. Hay!” he added, as she flung her front legs around him, “I thought you just finished making up!”
“Oh, Pepper, I can’t believe it! They really want us?”
“They want us in Applewood as soon as the run is over. We’ll be on our way to Los Pegasus before the end of the month. Whoa, whoa, whoa, Sugar, your mane is coming down. We’ll have plenty of time to celebrate later. I’m on in ten and you’re on in less than fifteen.”
She turned back to the dressing table to repair the damage as Pepper trotted to the door. The last she saw of him was the view in the mirror as he leaned against the doorframe. “I gotta say,” he said, with the trace of Broncs accent kicking in, “I gotta be da luckiest stallion in da world.”
“Babs,” Poppy said firmly, “you ain’t never been in a theater, have you?”
“No, Poppy,” the plump brown filly said, shaking her pink mane. “Not a real theater theater, just a movie theater.”
“That’s right, honey, and you ain't never gonna be if I got anything to say about it,” he said, green eye to green eye. “And if you do go, you stay in the audience, you don’t go backstage, got that?” he added, poking her in the chest. “And if you still gotta be so stupid, and you gotta promise me you won’t be, remember that there’s a reason for every superstition in the theater. You don’t have real flowers, you don’t wish other ponies luck, and you never, ever, ever whistle on the stage.”
“I still don’t believe he was the one who whistled,” said Gramma Seed, suddenly sounding very old. “Pepper knew better than that. He knew that was a signal to lower—to lower scenery.”
“In front of a paying audience, too,” Poppy said, shuddering, “but who knows, that prob’ly was the way he’d of wanted to go.” He kicked at the rug, bitterly reflecting on the tragic accident that had ruined his childhood, and the accompanying headline, “Pepper Jelly At Dodge Junction Opera House.”
“Pepper wouldn’t have wanted us to brood about it,” his mother said, briskly putting the pictures and clippings back into the book. “He spent his whole life making other ponies happy.”
“And that was that, Babs,” her father said, settling back into his chair. “We left Dodge Junction and we left Dad there. And the Pears and the Persimmons and the Oranges—they didn’t bother coming to the memorial service, or sending flowers, and they didn’t even write.” His voice shook. “They never even asked.”
“They didn’t have no time for us then,” Poppy added, swinging his hooves up on the ottoman and picking up the paper, “and I ain’t got no time for ‘em now.”