The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  In any event, there was no warning. A door slammed and Rita’s voice floated upstairs. Dee, stricken, finished rinsing Polly’s hair so quickly that she left bubbles in her ears. Polly and Edmund hurried into their clothes. They could hear Rita’s agent, a big blond pile of a man, explaining that he couldn’t bear Rita’s imprisonment, he couldn’t bear to see beauty smothered. He’d freed her, but she wouldn’t do well in the city. And so here she was, clean in a miniskirt, pretty bangles on her wrists that mostly covered the scars.

  “I’m so tired,” said Rita. “But I’m fine.”

  Everyone said things about that being good. Merle started to offer wine and stopped, and the agent finally left. Rita didn’t move toward Edmund, and he stayed next to Jane.

  When they all walked upstairs, Rita turned her whole body to see the new canvases, the children’s unfinished squiggles. The last bit of paint visible from her rampage was a droopy tree to the left of the window at the head of the stairs. Papa insisted on not scrubbing it off the wall.

  “These are for you,” said Papa, pointing to the canvases. They all knew he was angry. “If you’d like to stay, you must keep your mind busy. You can cover what the children started.”

  “At least I managed one tree,” said Rita.

  “The tree is shit,” he said. “Take a moment or two to plan.”

  The tree was shit—the effort of having to watch Rita’s face while Papa insulted her, very calmly, sprang their brains.

  Lemon the pointer was largely uncontrollable, or at least uncontrolled. No one ever trained her to a leash, and the first time Polly tried to walk her, she was dragged down the sidewalk, shredding her leotard and the skin on her elbows and knees. Merle sometimes said she was Edmund’s dog, though Edmund resented the way Lemon had gone so willingly to the Schusters the summer before. He’d wanted to be given away, too, so how could he fault Lemon for taking advantage of the offer?

  Lemon was Jane and Merle’s problem, and they didn’t do enough. They took her to the beach on a lunge line, and once Papa rowed out to a long sandbar and let her range. Dee let Lemon free in the greenhouse, where she would race the cat in loops around the old potting benches, somehow not breaking anything. Lemon shouldn’t have been in a town or chained in a yard.

  Merle promised he’d get to a fence, but not during a head cold or in the middle of a heat wave or when there’d be a Tigers game on television. Lemon got loose several times—Rita was incapable of shutting a door or a mayonnaise lid—and one morning Lemon was picked up down by the docks, having nearly been killed by several cars. Two nights later, when Rita went out for her nightly session in the greenhouse, Lemon bolted into the darkness. Polly went to bed crying and could hear Edmund crying, too, and Jane and Merle arguing. Jane slept on the couch.

  They got up early the next morning, but Jane and Merle and Papa had no luck finding Lemon before they left for classes. Dee made Edmund and Polly waffles and said she had a plan. They were going to make little Lemons. She dropped lumps of clay in front of them and formed a third into the shape of a dog. “Like this,” she said, pinching until she came up with something that looked like a pointer. “Yours can look like a hippo, Edmund. It doesn’t matter. The point is to believe it’s a dog, and to go out and call for her.”

  Rita came through the kitchen and made a piece of toast without saying a word. She was painting again in the greenhouse, stacks of small oils tilted against every bench, ignoring the new canvases upstairs. Dee did not give ground and kept working there, too, but she said that Rita was at least quiet and the paintings were good. This stage would last about ten days.

  “Now go down to the Sound, and wish for her to run home, and throw them in,” said Dee. “Mine, too. And start calling for her on your way back.”

  Dee didn’t say, This is a spell, this is magic, but what were they to think, and why would they doubt? They set off, feeling jumpy, and Edmund broke into a run.

  “I see the witch,” he said. “She’s standing in the upstairs window, watching us.”

  Polly wouldn’t look.

  “I think she’s my mother as a ghost,” said Edmund.

  Polly gave a shuddering skip and they ran through the skunk cabbage ravine. When they reached the sand, the tide was almost out. They hopped past marooned jellyfish, trying to land on bare sand rather than a mussel or a tiny crab. All this time they held the clay Lemons, and when they reached the water they were left with their errand.

  “Does she know how to do things like this?”

  “I don’t know,” said Polly.

  They made wishes, threw in the clay dogs, and watched them sink and bump in the shallow, calm waves. No Lemon galloped out of the Sound. They made their way back through the ravine and were just short of the witch’s house when a door or a window or some piece of wood on the property slammed. They stopped and waited. Polly felt as if her heart were lifting through her ribs, splitting into slices. A keening sound, a rustle. Edmund put his hand on Polly’s back and pushed her forward, up the hill, and they were almost past the house when they heard the wail again and turned to see Lemon on the witch’s porch. She was sitting there, not running, not looking at them.

  Edmund called and Lemon didn’t move until he walked onto the porch and took her by the collar. For a minute Polly worried they had the wrong dog. They trotted toward their yard, through the gate by Dee’s greenhouse, and there was Dee, gaping at them.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “She was on the witch’s porch,” said Polly. “She acts like she doesn’t know us.”

  But Lemon was waking up. She’d flopped over on the hard, dry mud of the ruined lawn, showing her stomach. Dee walked toward her slowly.

  “Who is Mrs. Maw?” asked Edmund, finally.

  “We’ve never asked,” said Dee. “If people don’t want to be seen, we don’t force them.” She bent down shakily and ran her hand down the dog’s stomach. Dee left the hand there and they all looked: Lemon’s long tail was now a stub, stitches dark against her blond and white fur.

  When Papa came home and saw the dog’s stump and looked at his wife and granddaughter drinking wine early in the day, he walked down the hill, and they all waited on the porch, listening, until he returned.

  They spoke through a crack in the door. Mrs. Maw told Papa she’d found Lemon on the beach, tied to a log below the tidemark, as if someone was trying to drown her. Mrs. Maw hadn’t recognized the dog, or at least known she belonged to Papa’s house. She’d given Lemon a drug for pain, to make her sleep, and finished taking the tail off, and sewed it up.

  “The woman’s name is Mag,” Papa said. A small smile: “Mag Maw, a witch name.” Did he believe her? He wasn’t sure.

  It’s true, it’s true, said the parrot.

  The next day, Merle started a fence around the property, despite a cherry-colored nose from his head cold. He would do it right; he’d grown up in Michigan, knowing how to do things. Knobbed posts, a pretty old-fashioned wire. He praised the chained dog as he worked unless she put her paws up on a post or the wire, and then he beat her.

  Mostly, Lemon watched the witch’s place, and Jane hid upstairs, typing her thesis.

  One Wednesday, a new dog, a male Weimaraner, appeared in their unfinished yard and played with Lemon for hours. Merle worried that Lemon was in heat, and Jane said she would make an appointment with a veterinarian. Later, after some drinks, Merle argued that it might be wonderful to have a litter of game dog puppies. They could sell them. Papa asked him if he was out of his fucking mind and stomped off to his rowboat.

  In heat; ah, the mysteries of the language. They were given a brief, nondramatic explanation from Dee, of all people.

  “Every mammal has a penis or a vagina, and mating is the way a species survives. So they’re compelled, you see. They can’t resist. When Lemon is ready to breed, she’ll put out a special smell, and if a male dog notices it, he’s going to do everything possible to have her. And we don’t need puppies this summer. She’s only a ba
by and she should have a childhood.”

  The visiting dog’s tag read Ham Armstrong. The family must have lost him on vacation, said Jane, dialing the phone. She left a message with a maid. But when the Armstrongs called back, the conversation was confused. They lived in Connecticut, on the far shore of the Sound. It was twenty miles as the crow flew but eighty or so by land, through the city. Edmund measured out the miles, and while they looked at the map, Polly thought for the first time of the shape and enormity of the city.

  Clearly, Ham had hitched a ride. The Armstrongs—eyeing the rundown house, intimidated by Papa—fetched Ham, and Lemon went back to watching Dwight and May and squirrels. Two sections of the fence were unfinished, but Merle planned to deal with them that weekend. He was short on wood and facing the semester’s midterm week.

  On Saturday morning, Merle tied Lemon up when he headed out for lumber. Polly and Edmund went down to the beach a little later, and on their way they passed Ham, dripping wet, all joy. When they returned, the dogs were next to each other, really on top of each other. Merle, parking the Ford, was close to tears.

  “They’re fucking locked up.”

  Locked up—the words of love didn’t always fit. A hazy horror filtered in. “You can’t get them apart?” asked Polly.

  “It takes a while,” said Jane, doing laundry. “I’ll need to take her to the vet now.”

  Ham was retrieved that evening. There was no other explanation: He’d swum across the Sound. His owner wouldn’t pay the bill for Lemon’s spaying, but they would build a stockade.

  “The dog swam for love,” said Dee at dinner.

  “I did that,” said Papa. “The first time we were alone near water.”

  Dee put down her fork. She started to laugh—tears. “Oh, the vision,” she said.

  “We don’t need to tell them everything, dear,” he said. “The phrase will do.”

  The next afternoon, while Polly played solitaire on the dining room table and Dee and Jane cut Edmund’s hair in the greenhouse and Merle, still short of wood to finish the fence, wrestled with the television, trying to get a boxing match to tune in, Papa lifted a book on Merle’s desk and found a framed photo of Rita. “Why is this here?”

  Merle said, “I didn’t think it would help Eddie to see it.”

  Rita was the only other person who said Eddie, and Edmund hated her for this, too.

  “And yet you needed to?” Papa watched Merle. “A boy should see his mother, even if the distance must be safe. And a man shouldn’t keep his best friend’s wife on his desk.”

  “I have my best friend on the desk, too,” said Merle, pointing. Merle was in the photo next to Tommy, both of them wearing tuxedos at one of their weddings.

  Papa ignored him and propped Rita’s photo up on the mantel, next to the silver-framed photo of Asta. What was similar beyond the image of two women, one a redhead, one much darker? As an adult, Polly would have said a cloud of hair, soft eyes, full lips, and a big dose of doom, the frozen straying expression in the dead girl’s photograph and Rita’s eyes. Mad, mad, mad as a hatter, mad as some of the people who’d smelled the air inside the splinters of stained glass before it was contained.

  Merle left the house, slamming the door, slamming the car door. Hours later Polly heard the car return, but instead of coming in, Merle lay down on the grass just inside the half-finished fence. When she went to bed she looked from Dee’s window, and in the light from the porch she saw him still under the honeysuckle bush, petals falling on his face. But in the morning, when Polly went out with coffee, Merle said he was fine, just fucking fine, like he’d claimed the summer before with Tommy. Polly and Edmund giggled off and on for hours, and eventually both moments became funny in Polly’s memory.

  Rita moved between the greenhouse and her room. She didn’t have dinner with them, a standing joke with the rest of the house, given the quality of Dee’s cooking. Rita barely talked to Edmund, but it wasn’t so much that she rejected her child as that she rejected everyone. She would sit on the couch at the end of the night, eating leftovers while they tried to talk, weighing all of them down.

  Another trip with Dee, to Arnold’s cottage in Port Jefferson, to climb his apricot tree with baskets, because Dee’s greengages wouldn’t be ready until September. They took the highway back to the Italian market and on to a Syrian market in Brooklyn. It was Jane’s birthday, and Jane wanted a meal from North Africa, where they’d spent a winter when she was young.

  “When you fell,” said Edmund, who paid attention to all stories involving travel.

  “Yes,” said Dee. “It was a nice place to get over a broken leg.” She bought shrimp and clams and tiny fish, a hard salami that Edmund swung like a baton, strange objects: pomegranates, long mulberry strands, dough as thin as silk. Back at the quiet house, Dee cut open the small fish and showed them the roe. When she found a magnifying glass Polly saw tiny fish inside the eggs, a skeleton seed inside the wet kernels of the split pomegranate, a tiny hair on each jewel of a mulberry. Years later, when she tried to sort her current life from the blooming past, Polly guessed Dee had found fresh anchovies, and was sure that one of the pomegranates was pale, like the ones Polly would see twenty years later in Seville on her honeymoon. Dee used a razor to slice a seed in half, but when she wanted to do the same things with the roe, Edmund screamed at her to stop.

  They were breaking the pomegranates apart in a bowl of water when Rita came down and announced that she needed food. Dee told her to look in the refrigerator and the pantry, and eventually Rita retreated upstairs, where they could hear her voice from Papa’s study. When he came downstairs, he said Rita wanted bread and cheese. Dee, goosing the children through what felt like hours of pitting apricots, ignored him, and he marched off, annoyed.

  They all knew Rita’s habit of picking a favorite for the day, the person forced to help her, but she’d never before picked Papa. As Dee basted the thin strips of dough with butter, she told them stories about times Papa had been truly angry, though not whole stories, not even full reasons. But he came down in the middle of it.

  “Why would you not be generous to her?” he said. “No one is ever always at their best.”

  “Because she’ll be happier when she starts doing things for herself,” said Dee.

  “If I said please?”

  Dee finally put a bowl of leftover shepherd’s pie in the oven to heat, and Papa climbed the stairs again, slower each time up. An hour later, Merle found the bowl untouched in the hall outside of Rita’s door and put it on the kitchen counter. Dee hurled Rita’s full, uneaten portion at Lemon, who was for once too scared to eat. May swept in while the crows gabbled insults, a conversation Polly almost understood.

  That night, Rita emerged for the birthday party, because Jane, her oldest friend, knocked on the bedroom door and asked. She stared at her plate, pretty red hair dangling into her water glass, and finally ate the vinegary fried fish, the salad of mulberries and pomegranates and cucumber, the rice and shrimp and sausage. She handed Jane a drawing just as the caramelized apricots wrapped in pastry were being served with birthday candles. It was a pastel sketch of Asta, with swirls around her head, stars like a crown.

  Jane and Papa left the room.

  “Some people know how to clear a party,” said Dee. “Merle, please make me a martini. And Rita?”

  “Yes?”

  “The drawing is beautiful, but what are you going to do with your life?”

  A flash of venom in the pretty gray eyes. Rita pulled back her red hair, poured a glass of wine, smiled at the people who hadn’t left. “I’m going to be a very, very good painter. You’ll see. And then I’m going to walk into the water and be a ghost.”

  11

  Thursday, July 4, 2002

  Sam and Helen: What things did they see that were as strange as whatever Polly and Edmund had seen? Instead of Long Island Sound or the city, they had rattlesnakes, boiling water pouring up from the ground, rivers that could mangle, cold that could kill. S
harp edges, falling rocks; lions, wolves, bears. Daily, the dozen brown recluse spiders they trapped on sticky paper in the basement and the pit bull at the end of the block. Avalanches, earthquakes. In the mining town of Butte, an adit—a horizontal shaft—opened in a crumbling street, and Polly (tipsy on Ned’s birthday) told Sam that five thousand men had died down there, and a thousand bodies were underground still. She knew, better than most people, that children didn’t forget that kind of thing.

  Polly, in bed but not sleeping, let herself see Sam and Helen’s world, Polly style. No tides, no jellyfish, but the bank of a river where garter snakes sunned and stoneflies molted. The puff of fur at the edge of the willows that meant some small mammal’s death, the varied pellets from grass eaters: rabbit and moose, deer and geese. In the house, the way the cat played with mice while the dogs watched politely; the insect corners Polly never managed to clean. Silver spoons with devil’s heads, a whale tooth, masks. The photographs that meant something half-remembered, the strange and holy significance of objects on the windowsill, which were people to Jane and Polly, ghost stories to Sam and Helen. The way Jane would read a book out loud and wipe her hand down their faces to make them sleep and the way Polly would type fast, roll dough, flick a bandage onto a bloodying hole in the skin so quickly it never quite existed. The way Ned was simply there, swiftly and always, gathering them up and smothering every problem, and the way Merle could name every part of any creature, whether or not it was the truth, and draw it with his good hand while the withered one twirled pencils. The way they felt sympathy and love like a blanket.

  More than anything else, they would have the memory of their mother and grandmother trying to block their view of their dead babysitter near the river.

  Harry, who’d spent his professional life digging up versions of the past, had seen more bad things as a cop than anyone Polly knew. While the others packed people into the cars, he said Polly needed to stay, to give a clear account to Cy and Shari Swenson, the county coroner. They sat upstream and upwind of the body, and Harry told Polly about a way to make an image or memory retreat: Change what you’ve seen to black and white, move it further and further away. They were both being matter-of-fact, but Polly’s whole body was shaking. She had been looking for Ariel, and when she found her, she looked away. After all this effort, Polly was now intent on forgetting. Maybe this was the end of seeing too much, going into the painting.