The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  Maude held up a last picture, a young Papa on a sun-blasted burial mound. “He was something,” she said. “All this pretty wild hair, and brown skin from digs, and absolutely no interest in bullshit. Even later, my college friends would come home and stare at him, which I imagine he loved, but it was always all about Mother. He was certainly perfect with me, and it was only when I was older that I wondered just how imperfect he’d been before her.”

  “What do you think?” asked Polly.

  “Quite,” said Maude. “Quite wonderfully imperfect. The letters from the English actresses—Mama would burn them at the dinner table while he smiled. He’d say, ‘All practice for you, dear.’ ”

  Everyone had a hidden life.

  Being a funeral lady gave you a shield: You could always be busy, always run for a tray if your heart burst; you were less likely to say the wrong thing. Usually you needed to attain a certain age, but Polly and Josie and Nora reached this status young, after old-guard training and by repetitive effort, working on vast quantities of food, making sure other people knew what to bring, the when and where and the cleanup.

  This time, there wasn’t much to do. Polly loaded her brisket into the car, picked up Nora (potato salad) and Josie (beans, inevitably underdone). At Josie’s, they had a glass of wine and looked at the dress, wrapped in plastic on a hanger, that Ariel wouldn’t be wearing. This was not a day for sobriety. They talked about the fight between Graham and Vinnie, but Vinnie had told Nora he’d explain later, and Nora, annoyingly, hadn’t pushed. She was sorry she’d be missing the party, but it was good to get Vinnie out of town. Graham’s stay hadn’t been good for their marriage. She wished he’d head off into the sunset.

  Nora always gripped the door handle when Polly was driving.

  They stopped for other hot dishes in the ovens at the Elks Club and brought it all down to the park, where tables were laid out around a gazebo. Part of the mission was to keep people from eating immediately, before everyone arrived. Polly always underestimated the speed and gluttony of people avoiding thoughts of death.

  The Delgados, having to survive the worst thing possible, didn’t care. They hugged people and thanked people and wept. Ariel’s stepfather picked up Helen and whirled her and told her that Ariel said she was the smartest girl on the planet, that she’d grow up and solve all the world’s problems.

  “How can they talk?” said Ned. “I wouldn’t be able to talk. I can’t talk.”

  Drake, who stayed close to them, barely opened his mouth. The phrase at a loss flitted through Polly’s brain. Ned had met her there with the kids and Maude, who had known generations of Ariel’s family. Jane and Merle felt they hadn’t known Ariel well, and they didn’t think it proper to show up. This diffidence didn’t seem to affect most of the people in the park, who were embracing mass mourning with fervor. Polly wondered how many of them had really known Ariel well enough to act this way, though that was an undercurrent for any death. People were possessive, people talked of closeness and remade and recast relationships. Your own version of Ariel mattered the most.

  A string quartet played—Ariel had been a cellist—and people drank beer and wine and sodas. Polly and Nora and Josie refilled and combined trays of food and plucked out drunken bees and bits of leaves.

  Vinnie and Graham arrived late. Vinnie was flushed, and at a distance it was hard to see Graham’s new layer of bruises. He stayed a half step behind his uncle and stopped twenty feet away from the family, marooned, while Vinnie and Nora greeted them. In the family group, everyone but Connie and Ariel’s grandfather looked away. The grandfather followed Vinnie back and spoke to Graham briefly before he turned away cold-faced, shaking his head to the family.

  Polly thought of how little it might bother her if they all circled Graham with rocks. But that wasn’t true; it would bother her immensely.

  The minister spoke, and members of the family read Bible passages and tributes. After Ariel’s stepfather sat down, the microphone was opened to others—Ariel’s friends, some teachers, the people she ran with. Ned spoke, and read notes from Polly and Josie and Drake. When Connie read about forgiveness, the Delgados looked uneasy.

  Graham, through it all, stared at the ground. His face was puffy, maybe from crying. Everyone was stealing looks at him, wondering.

  When it was Harry’s turn, he talked about Ariel as a child, as they all had, but he moved on to his hopes that she would eat life up, have great loves, give great love. He talked about how badly they had all, always, wanted to protect her.

  Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.

  Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.

  Harry folded his wrinkled piece of paper. Polly focused on plumes of clouds and fought the hot heavy feeling again.

  Many waters cannot quench love,

  no flood can sweep it away.

  When Polly looked again, Graham and Vinnie were gone.

  A half hour later she hustled everyone to the car. Maude was in no hurry; Maude said they had plenty of time before the party, without acknowledging that she was doing nothing to make it happen. The proximate problem was the blue-black wedge of cloud approaching from the west. Polly pointed it out, without making a dent on Maude’s agenda, and in the end Ned and Drake, seeing her panic, left to cover at least the tomatoes.

  Polly decided to be indifferent, in a return of yesterday’s thinking during the rose massacre. Why would she give a flying fuck about her tomatoes when Ariel was dead? Though she did, as she watched the evil black meringue of clouds decide where to open up. The faces around her, odd in the storm lighting, were oblivious to the change in the air, and mostly, she thought, to grief, but the vegetal smell of shrieking chlorophyll from the storm’s progress reached her before the hail did. It didn’t matter anymore: death, a deluge, destruction. She and Josie held trays over Maude’s and Sam’s and Helen’s heads so that they could reach the car in an onslaught of ice, the skies opening up for Ariel.

  They all sat together in the roar, waiting for the windshield to shatter. Maude rattled on about how a hailstorm reliably made her mother say the F word, then did an imitation of Dee yelling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  “Fuck fuck fuck,” said Helen.

  Once the storm stopped, Polly drove on little balls of ice without caring about Helen swearing. Her delivery was perfect. Maude rebounded.

  “What do you think of that boy, the one who lived?”

  “Graham? Not much,” said Polly.

  “I think he’s off. Sociopathic.”

  “Well,” said Polly. “You’re the expert. I’ve only recently become a textbook case.”

  “That’s beneath you,” snapped Maude. “I’m serious.”

  She was right, which made Polly slam the car door and walk inside her house without looking back at her passengers or at the garden. She was staring into her open refrigerator, wondering what to do next, when she realized she’d lost Josie and Maude and her children at the gate. She ran out expecting someone’s tears, or a broken body, but she found Maude talking to Helen and Sam by the brick wall that ran along the alley.

  “When I was little,” said Maude, “I used to climb this wall with my father. When he first met my mother, he’d sneak over it so that the neighbors wouldn’t see that he was spending time with her alone. He’d chiseled these recesses into it, and he showed me how to climb it so that I could sneak in when I felt like being naughty. Which I did do, when I was older, apologizing to him in my head.”

  Sam and Helen waited. “Shall I show you where to put your feet?” said Maude.

  “Let me,” said Polly hurriedly.

  This was the oldest, strongest part of the wall, and she could see four slight recesses. It was kind of wonderful, thinking of a young man sliding his foot in the same shallow slots a hundred years earlier, all for lust and love. Polly hoisted her generous body up to the top of the cold wet bricks and loitered, looking at her hail-blasted yard, imagining Dee at twenty-five, waiting on the porch for a visitor. Wh
y hadn’t Maude brought this up on any earlier trip?

  Polly lost her lettuce and basil and approximately a thousand rose and clematis blossoms. Otherwise the damage was cosmetic, though cosmetic just as dozens of judgmental relatives landed in her yard. When Sam and Helen grew bored of ice piles, Polly gave them a triple allowance to pick up the tattered leaves and branches that covered the grass, the gouged, underripe fruit. The children ate smashed raspberries and strawberries and flopped around, pretending they were drunk. Polly helped Maude up the stairs for her nap, and every place she touched, the bone was clear to fingertips: ulna, scapula, humerus. Polly could remember the same sense with Dee, leaning in for a kiss with fat child hands on old shoulders. Though not with Papa, who never seemed fragile.

  She eased Maude into the bed in the office, then plucked a photograph from her bulletin board, one she hadn’t bothered to take downstairs.

  The tables were set before Maude came down again and belatedly insisted on a seating chart. Merle helped Helen and Sam collect dozens of flat rocks by the river and Sam wrote names with Sharpies. The rocks served the dual role of weighing down the tablecloths and helping Sam with the family tree. He followed Maude around, placing them where commanded, scribbling in his book and on the sticky notes Polly gave him for overflows. Polly thought the tree now looked like an image of the brain’s neural pathways, like the bee-on-acid pattern of her own daily path through the house.

  Maude rattled on, linking rock names to the tree. “Who’s fallen, who’s still attached,” she said. “Look at how high I am, and yet I’m holding on.”

  From the corner of her eye, Polly watched Helen look worried.

  “Maude is magic,” Helen said, drawing her version of a tree. It looked like a maze and was covered by red apples, purple plums, yellow pears. She asked Polly what she wanted to be, and Polly said a plum. Helen made Sam a lemon and laughed at her own joke.

  Polly gave Sam a list of helpful questions.

  Ask For:

  1. full name

  2. birthplace and birth and death dates

  3. profession

  4. parents/siblings/children

  Maude, with her first cocktail, added other possibilities, and the tree gradually filled with short, cryptic notes like ask about his second marriage or ask her when she was born and then say are you sure? Maude was careful to go back through and cross out suggestions that would cause suffering or trouble, like Ask about 4F status, and she told Sam that if anyone was offended, he was to blame her, and she’d blame Harry.

  Polly put on a dress, tried another, ripped through the closet for a half hour while her family hid. She rarely managed to look crisp, or gauzy, for that matter, and she knew some of these people would watch her for signs and symptoms. Ned and Jane and Merle would worry that she’d forget names, and she would worry about them worrying about her, but once the party started, none of it would matter, at least as long as she was dealing with food. She could do this, dented head or no.

  It began well. The surviving children of Papa’s brothers arrived early, because this was the sort of people they were. Perhaps they could help set up chairs, chop something, butter the buns, pop the wine? Maude arrayed herself in the best chair, in the right amount of shade, the least wind, for her impressive receiving line, the better to relax and judge. Or maybe it was sweeter than that: Polly saw divorces and slack bodies and a consistent pattern of noses of character. But Maude saw babies, and the beloved dead who’d been their parents and grandparents.

  They’d asked Graham to come an hour before the guests to set up the oyster station and the bar. Polly had a fancy new Kevlar glove, just in case Graham wasn’t truly a dab hand. He came late, landing in the midst of Polly making this first round of drinks—an early run on vodka and gin—but he set up quickly, almost impressively. She peered at his new bruises and showed him the glove and some rags and the bowl with several dozen scrubbed oysters; she gave him his choice of knives and said she’d help him get started with the first platter. And then she watched in horror as he began to hack in all the wrong places.

  “Watch me,” said Polly, wriggling a tip in. Normally she’d have loved nothing more than having the problem of two hundred oysters, to sit in the yard with a knife and a bottle of Sancerre or Muscadet and a bowl of ice and a trash can until she tipped over or vomited. Graham chipped away at a hinge. “Did they have some different method where you worked?”

  “I was a busboy.”

  He managed to open one. Polly ripped it out of his hand and flicked bits of shell off the mangled flesh. “Your resume said you ran the oyster bar.”

  “No,” said Graham. “It didn’t. It’s okay, though. I know your memory isn’t so hot.”

  Huh, thought Polly. “Okay, watch me again,” she said, and then stepped back and let him go. “You’re chewing them up,” she said, “and you’re losing all the liquor. And look at all that shell. That’s why you check each one before you tray.”

  He threw the oyster into the trash can.

  “Never,” said Polly. “You’ll get it. Watch me again.”

  “No.”

  No? Old Polly, who would have said get your fucking ass out of my restaurant, stirred. “Try it again, Graham.”

  He tried again, slowly, resentfully.

  “All right,” said Polly. “Go get backup ice, then. Use my car. The other fifty people are going to be here in ten minutes, wanting to eat.”

  “People will see me at the store. People from the memorial.”

  “Yes, and they’re going to stare at you as long as you’re in this town,” said Polly. “Why not go back to Seattle? Don’t your friends miss you?”

  She said this deliberately, cruelly. She believed no one missed him, and that he missed no one. “Learn to shuck a fucking oyster. It’s a simple skill. I’ll go get the ice.”

  “Should you be driving?” Graham asked.

  It was the second time he’d tried that line. His lower lip didn’t move as he said it, and she thought of how odd this was before she leaned toward him. “I’m not the one who hit and killed a girl,” said Polly. “And I know Ariel wasn’t in love with you. I know you made that up. Did you hurt her?”

  “Give it up, Poll,” said Ned, behind her. “Graham, save yourself and do some work.”

  How long had he been there, or Helen, wailing and tugging on her dress, holding the old alarm clock? The potatoes needed to come out. Polly backed away and the party as a whole came into focus, another thirty arrivals generating a large noise. Why should a drowning stop their happiness, when everyone died anyway?

  Jane and Drake helped at the bar and Josie darted around with shrimp and cheeses. Polly dealt with potatoes and poured herself a glass of wine and shucked. Across the yard, Merle tilted his head and smiled patiently at a story from a deaf man. Polly wanted him to live forever.

  Cy stewed all day, right through Ariel’s memorial and two hail-related car accidents, before he drove up to the Poor Farm and unburdened himself to Harry.

  Graham, who had arrived late to help dig—Harry noted his puffy face, and did not inquire—was gone by then, off to help with Maude’s party. Harry, listening to Cy’s story, was perfectly aware that Shane was a dealer. He was aware of other things, too, having talked them over with Shari Swenson, having led Cy through a preliminary talk on speakerphone with the state lab. Harry thought things over as he drove back to town, showered and dressed for his grandmother’s party, and headed for the jail.

  Shane, a local kid, said there was no way the preserver had been left in the thicket to dry. It was at least thirty feet into dense underbrush—he’d scratched himself up getting it. Someone had thrown it, but it wouldn’t have been Ariel, who’d been a year behind him in grade school. She was strong, but not strong enough to throw the jacket that high and far.

  When Harry arrived at the party, a maddening hour late, Polly ran to him through the open gate between the front and back yards, intending to have him help with the whole oyster shit show,
get Maude off gimlets and on to something lighter, run interference in family squabbles. Harry nodded but walked on, and in hindsight, he had the look of a bad fairy arriving in a Brothers Grimm story. He crooked his finger to Graham through the open gate in the six-foot wood fence, and Graham, possibly thinking he was getting sprung, put down a mauled oyster and walked through. The gate swung shut and a moment later shook. Polly ran to open it and they all watched Harry punch Graham a second time and Graham rake at Harry’s hand with the oyster knife. Harry howled and hit Graham again. Blood everywhere, blood flying out of Harry’s hand and Graham’s nose as Harry threw Graham back into the yard, hard. Ned pinned Graham’s arm, and Polly stepped onto Graham’s outstretched hand with the back of her right heel.

  Drake picked the knife up and shut the gate, cocooning them in a private coliseum.

  The crowd was surprised by all of it, attentive and ready for more, but the thrill was gone for Polly, because Harry kept repeating, “You threw her jacket away, you cruel, controlling fuck. Did you hit her? Why was there blood on it?” He stood over Graham. “What happened to her hands?”

  “She caught the kayak rope. I tried to pull her in,” said Graham, climbing to his feet.

  More blood flooded down Harry’s arm as he smacked Graham to the ground again. Harry was no bigger than Graham; it was all coordination, a cat on a drunken rabbit. “How? I thought you were in the fucking water. You said you both fell in.”

  “I went in after I tried to pull her in. I threw her the rope. I tried to pull her in.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Because I wasn’t strong enough. Because I failed. Would you want to admit that?” He spat it out through a bloody mouth.