The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  Nobody mentioned how long Rita and Edmund would stay, though Edmund’s father wouldn’t be home on leave until at least August. Merle spent most of the next day dragging things to the attic: his still-boxed journals, a steamer trunk with Dee’s old dresses, carton after carton of books. Polly was used to spreading her enthusiasms into the spare bedroom Rita now invaded, and spent hours cramming her dollhouse and her easel and a basket of her general mess back into her tiny room, which had been—like Edmund’s new room—a dressing room when people still cared about dressing.

  “Rita could have warned us,” said Merle.

  “She’s clearly not well,” said Dee, carefully.

  Not well had so many possible meanings. After spending a week in the hospital with pneumonia, Polly connected illness with age, as in Dee, or with silence—Polly hadn’t talked much when she’d been in a little tent the fall before, sleeping and dreaming. Rita did not stop.

  Rita’s mother-in-law phoned twice, and hung up on Dee both times when Rita wouldn’t come to the phone.

  Papa called her back. “You know you’ve treated her like something stuck to your shoe, madam. And no, we will not send the boy alone to you.”

  “Small-minded bitch,” he said, when she hung up again. “Horrible bourgeois cow. They should never be allowed to see that child again.”

  “Do they want him or the idea of him?” asked Dee.

  “Thomas will sort it out when he comes home,” said Papa.

  On the trip to Michigan the summer before, the Wards and the Schusters had spent a weekend at a cottage on the beach. Polly and Edmund hadn’t felt compelled to talk to each other, but they slid into it, and they shoveled sand to redirect the creek while the adults sprawled, eating crackers and cheese and drinking from fancy-looking straw-wrapped bottles of wine. They didn’t bother with the children, and the children didn’t bother with them, and the night fell apart only when the six-month-old pointer Lemon jumped into the water and started swimming toward a freighter, Edmund and Polly running up and down the beach after their tipsy, weeping mothers while their fathers laughed.

  The coast guard brought Lemon back. Merle slept in the tub that night and Tommy Ward fell asleep halfway up the stairs to the bedroom. When Polly woke up, she found Edmund in a chair with Lemon. Jane had Polly bring Merle water and ask how he was.

  “I’m fine. Just fucking fine,” said Merle, pulling himself out of the dry bathtub.

  It was Polly’s first crystalline recognition of bullshit. Merle and Tommy were giddy that day, in patches. They went out on a charter boat and both fathers vomited repeatedly over the side, which was funny at the time; Jane’s serene expression would remain one of Polly’s fondest memories. Then the beach again, people drinking again. Polly and Edmund, Jane slathering them with Coppertone, dug one more route for the creek, dozed with the waves tugging their feet, dangled from couches in the house, purple-lipped from sucking grape Popsicles.

  The day, remembered as a whole (though Polly never was good at remembering the whole), was idyllic until they ended up at another beach in the town, near a break wall, to eat a picnic dinner of things from Edmund’s fancy grandparents (Merle’s description). Someone started screaming—the body of a girl had been found in the water near the break wall. Rita began to wail, and Jane and Merle and Tommy dealt with her while Edmund and Polly listened to the ambulance pass and watched the police and harbor men work with grappling hooks in the waves.

  At dinner at a bar in the little town, they ordered fried perch, onion rings, a Roy Rogers and a Shirley Temple with flashy swords in the maraschino cherries. Merle and Tommy said they’d heard the girl’s boyfriend had thrown her off the break wall, as a joke. When they were all in the car again, Rita, who had been uncharacteristically quiet—even then, Rita was not quiet—announced that the dead girl had been her; she’d seen the red of her hair. It was blood, said Thomas. It was me in the water, she whistled. Jane reached into the front to pull Edmund into the back, away from both of them, as Rita punched her husband and the car weaved on the curvy road. Merle, drunk but a mild-mannered man of science, offered that there couldn’t have been much blood left, because there wasn’t much skin left, and the water had washed the girl’s system clean.

  But Polly remembered red. How could she not? Rita crammed the memory deeper later when she showed Polly the tubes of color in her painting box, the smears on her palette. She said that if she painted Polly’s portrait, she would use alizarin inky black for her hair. She told Polly that in the old days black paints had been made with wood soot and burned ivory and burned vines. When Polly said her hair was brown, Rita said, Well, of course. And I’d use a brown for your skin, too. Look at your wrist and my wrist. I’m pink. You’re the color of wood. Very pretty, but you can’t be pink like me.

  That smile—Polly hated it, and later she would hate the memory of it, that beautiful silky red hair, the sandalwood haze on Rita’s skin, the green stripes on her low-cut pants. At some point during the summer, Rita did a painting of Polly and Edmund. It was not, as Dee put it, a good likeness—Rita didn’t make them pose for long—and they were each blurred, moving away from the center, or possibly away from the artist.

  But before all this, at that Michigan beach, during the last week of July, in 1967: The next morning, while Jane scrambled eggs, they watched Rita walk straight into the water like the dog Lemon, moving forward until she was up to her neck and started to disappear. Thomas ran down and jumped in after her. Edmund went back to reading, and Polly, gathering that this was the way to handle such situations, did, too.

  They packed and loaded the car, but when Tommy turned around in the driveway, he backed into a sandy dune, and for the next half hour they dug like dogs, having no shovel, while Tommy and Merle argued and Jane kept Rita from straying, sometimes spinning her in place so that she giggled and forgot where she might have wanted to go. They stopped for fish sandwiches and beer and drove on to Edmund’s grandparents’ huge house in East Lansing. Storm lighting, humid and still, ninety degrees. Rita said the color of the air was viridian and kept saying it until everyone agreed with her. She started on about the color of her hair again, Titian red. When Polly said that this was the color of Nancy Drew’s hair, Rita went on about oxides.

  When they piled out of the car onto the smooth black driveway in the midafternoon, the children were sunburnt, the parents drunk, and everyone was crumpled and filthy. Polly braced for hugs—all of her relatives hugged—and found with relief that none of the Wards were interested in touching anyone. There’d been tornado warnings, and Thomas’s mother, angry from the minute she appeared at the front door, was hysterical about the idea they’d driven through death. She made the children go in the basement—the cleanest basement, still, of Polly’s life—until Tommy convinced her that the warning was over, and the children should be outside.

  Back upstairs, moving through the chilly immensity of the house, Detroit was burning in rare color on a large television. Everyone paused and watched. Tommy argued with his parents, and when he went outside with his father (who said, Let’s get into it then, sonny) and Merle, who tried to make peace, the children and women fell into a horrible quiet as they watched police and crowds give way to footage of Vietnamese jungles on television.

  “Merle is such a steady influence,” said the elder Mrs. Ward, now calm. She had stiff frosted hair and huge diamonds on both hands, and she smoked Pall Malls. “Merle didn’t volunteer for that silly mess. These boys have so many better things to do.”

  Merle probably would have served, like his brother, but for the polio arm. Nevertheless, he thought Tommy should have used his university exemption.

  When the men came inside again, the children were released back into the yellow-green storm air, to a blanket of velvet grass. Polly had seen yards like this—lacking patches and dog piles—only from a distance. She and Edmund rolled on the lawn but there was nothing else to do, not a tool, toy, shrub, climbable tree. Through the fancy sliding screen doors t
hey could hear an argument begin again—war now, and Tommy leaving for it. When they heard more voices raised, and a car engine, Jane came running toward them and scooped them up—Rita and Tommy had roared off without their child—while Merle stowed their bags and they followed in a fancy car borrowed from the Wards.

  They ended up together at a Holiday Inn restaurant with umbrellas in the drinks and Hawaiian music. Later Polly and Edmund were left in a hotel room with peanut butter sandwiches and coins and a Magic Fingers bed, while all four parents drank.

  Tommy’s mother and father weren’t dog people, and the Schusters promised to take care of the pointer Lemon when Tommy shipped out in October. Polly and Jane took the train back. The upper bunk, the sink that folded down, the ceremony of the dining car made Polly insanely happy. Merle drove, taking uppers while Lemon was on downers; at about 2 a.m., he said, they were moving at the same speed. Rita and Edmund lasted at the older Wards’ house until Christmas, when she set their garage on fire.

  Now, in January of 1968, no one made Edmund go to school immediately. Polly needed to go, of course, and when she came home on the second day, she found him on the couch, surrounded by her books. She guessed that he hadn’t done this on his own, that her mother or Dee or Papa ransacked her room, but she minded, and she walked upstairs and slammed her door. When she couldn’t bear it any longer—she was hungry, for one thing, because everyone was too distracted by Edmund and Rita to pack a lunch, and the cafeteria food revolted her—she nearly fell over the stack left outside of her door.

  More stewing, some guilt, though what did you call it at seven or eight? Edmund’s bedroom door was closed, but everyone seemed to be behind a door—Dee napping, Papa on the phone, a low grumble—but Merle and Jane, who were at class. Rita was singing in her room, and her voice was so unnerving that Polly dropped half the books back against Edmund’s door and retreated to her room after grabbing a handful of cookies.

  Neither Polly nor Edmund ever mentioned this later. By the weekend they went in and out of each other’s rooms, and she had read his copies of Bruce and Lad: A Dog. The following week, he was put in a different third-grade classroom, but they saw each other at recess. He was quiet, and careful, and people grew used to him without any of the crap that often dropped on a new kid. When the prettiest girl in Polly’s class teased Edmund, clearly liking him, it gave Polly a borrowed glow.

  Edmund talked in his sleep, on the other side of the wall, and he picked his nose, though no more than a boy she liked in school. Rita talked to herself all night long.

  Papa and Dee were very old, which Polly no longer noticed; they were from another century. When Edmund first arrived, Polly, who’d been living there for half a year, would catch him watching them—a little fear, some wonder, the same look that he gave to all the things in the house: statues and arrowheads and books everywhere. Within a week he no longer seemed to notice Papa or Dee’s tissuey skin, pale as a photographic negative except for during summer, or hear a reedy sound in their voices.

  Papa was the oldest person in the house, but he was also the tallest. He’d been an archaeologist before he taught mythology at Columbia, and had a way of moving through things, of looming without it feeling like a threat. He was a Presence, according to Merle, a Fucking Piece of Work, and he was known for writing about universal stories, the way they’d evolved through cultures, about shamanism and the archaeological evidence behind myth. Dee was tiny, with big arthritic arms below delicate collarbones, and a young woman’s head of hair, still half-brown. She wasn’t shaped like an old lady, and she dressed in slacks or straight skirts instead of what Papa called old ladies’ bags. She was a year younger than Papa, who’d been born in Sweden by the ocean, both of them before cars or planes or plastic. She’d broken a leg in a fall as a child, and again when Jane was a child—one shin below her skirt hem was slender but dented—and she kept a grove of canes with different heads, of different shimmers and substances, like so many magic wands, in a pot at the front door and against a bedroom table that held her jewelry and perfume and medicine bottles. But she and Papa moved quickly, like young people, and their muscles were visible ropes, and they were sometimes drunk and silly and snappish. They did not fret over what the children ate, or whether they’d do something stupid near the road or in the water. They knew Polly and Edmund were terrified of both; why add to the humiliation?

  Jane, who was getting a master’s in history and mythology, planned to write her thesis about natural disasters and legends, though Papa thought she should focus on the universal nature of the flood story, and not get into variations. In the corner of her bedroom, above her typewriter, she’d hung a hand-drawn timeline of floods and volcanoes and earthquakes throughout the world, with bubbles of tiny handwriting for details. Sometimes she helped Papa with his research, tracking down versions of stories through the ages, trying to determine which were earliest, how they’d blended and changed across times and peoples, how they’d lasted.

  Papa, surrounded by pens and books and bones at his desk, would let Edmund and Polly flop around on his old velvet sofa. He showed them crows dancing in the yard and pointed out that they seemed to perform for May, the one-eyed cat, who watched from a tree or climbed farther to the roof. He had maps on his walls, a poster of spinning souls, a photo of a tattooed Scythian mummy who’d been buried with her horses. He’d dug her up, and said he wished he’d let her be.

  The bookshelves were topped by photos of Dee’s children, Maude and David and James, taken in Montana and at all the archaeological digs they’d traveled to with Papa after their own father died. In most of the photos they were holding Papa’s daughter Asta, the youngest. When Asta died young, Papa and Dee raised Jane, too, and Polly envied those photos: Jane at Polly’s age on a French beach, in a Greek temple, riding a camel in a desert. And yet she’d had no mother. Polly knew even then she was lucky, that her parents might be half drunk and at odds half the time, but they were alive, and they did essentially love each other, and they certainly loved her, and they weren’t like Rita.

  Everyone told Polly she should help Edmund, but she was already doing so. They moved through their days with an almost British disregard for the chaos around them, barricaded together in one of their rooms or hidden in the arbor or down by the Sound, watching to see what was revealed when the tide moved out. Over the next few months, they were almost always within six feet of each other but never touched, except for two fights. But Polly was fascinated by Edmund’s thick hair, the moles on his forearm, the way his skin would flame in bad moments.

  Polly had friends at school, but she’d been so lonely. She took Edmund up to the attic to show him boxes of strangeness, the broken spinning wheel and treadle sewing machine and old clothes, or to Dee’s greenhouse, with its kiln and wheel, nasturtiums and jasmine, a box of glass bottles that held powders for glazes. They’d watch Dee uncork the bottles, mix potions, spin the potting wheel, light the kiln. In the basement, where Merle kept salamander and frog specimens in an old refrigerator, they’d watch Dee add bleach and soap to the old open washing machine, the water gushing from a sheet when it went through the mangle, which looked like a deadly version of Dee’s pasta-rolling machine. Dee said she’d once been distracted and put her fingers through, but nothing had broken except the tips of her fingers, which exploded and stained the sheets. She laughed, telling them this.

  But mostly Edmund and Polly went down to the water. You could see a sliver of the Sound from the porch, even when the grapevines leafed out, and there was a ravine with skunk cabbage, which Polly liked to pretend was some sort of man-eating Venus flytrap. The house was on a rise off of the main road into town, Christian Avenue, and the lots were irregular and the streets were narrow and dirt, following the hill’s contour, more paths than roads. The witch, whose house was wreathed in grapevines, burned wood (rather than children, as Papa joked) for heat and let out her parrot when the weather was nice. The only times she’d spoken to Dee and Papa over the last twenty-five
years were to threaten to kill their cats if those cats killed the parrot.

  The name on the old woman’s mailbox, in stenciled letters, was Maw.

  Edmund thought Polly was of a piece with the place, all of it so much better than life with Rita and his grandparents. The good part of his past was his father, but Tommy Ward had been around for only a few weeks since Edmund was five. By now, Edmund knew this place might save his life. The old magicians, Polly’s beautiful mother, Merle’s essential kindness, wild Lemon, given away by his parents but glued again to the end of his bed, the acrobatic cat arriving every night to lie on his chest—they all made for comfortable chaos, the people and even the walls buffers against his mother. Upstairs, when Rita muttered, the words echoed in the hall, but people were near, and his door locked.

  He was sure his father would never come back.

  In Edmund’s and Polly’s rooms ventilation grates, usually covered with rugs, opened on the kitchen below. In the morning, they could hear Papa walking down the hall humming, snapping his fingers softly. Next came the smell of coffee and some sort of pork, eventually toast. You could tug the rugs off the grates and see the top of his head, and sometimes he’d look up and smile. He taught at Columbia two days a week now, spending a night in the city at the apartment he and Dee still rented, on Bleecker near the corner of Sullivan.