The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  “I wouldn’t want to admit anything that goes on in your fucking insect mind,” said Harry. “What happened to her face? What happened earlier? What happened on the island?”

  “We fucked.”

  Harry kicked him, then knelt next to him and whispered in his ear. Graham hissed something back and Harry put his bleeding hand over Graham’s mouth and held it there until Graham started choking, blowing blood out of his nose.

  “I talked to your uncle. You knew that girl you ran over in Seattle, didn’t you? You fucking meant to hit her, didn’t you?”

  Ned wrenched Harry backward.

  “I’ll give you a ride home,” Drake said to Graham.

  “I want a ride to the hospital,” said Graham.

  “Get in my fucking car,” said Drake.

  “What did Ari say to make you angry?” screamed Harry. “‘No’?”

  In the kitchen, Polly helped Josie clean and stitch and wrap Harry’s hand. Josie kept a kit in her truck; she’d been an EMT when Harry met her. Harry said he hoped Maude’s birthday wasn’t ruined. Maude, briefly joining the semicircle around Harry, said he’d made it exciting and sped off again to report on the wound, completely misunderstanding the mood of the kitchen.

  “Please explain,” said Polly, cleaning the oyster knife.

  “He threw the preserver into the brush, and there was blood on it. The injuries on her face—I think she was alive long enough for a bruise and a scab to form,” said Harry. “Her back, too. The lab agrees, informally. Maybe they’ll be able to say for sure with the autopsy.”

  Polly thought of what she’d seen in the willows, all of the stones in the river and all the damage they could do. It stunned her, in hindsight, that anything—Ariel, a cottonwood branch—made it through the river without ripping into pieces. “No one saw her fall before they put in?”

  “No,” said Harry, watching a needle going in and out of his hand. “I think he hit her. Maybe more.” He started to cry.

  Ned opened Champagne and they toasted Maude, who, as everyone joked, had always been bloodthirsty. People were jolly, back to full roar; they all loved a little blood, and they loved Harry, chip off a three-generation block. He had Papa’s middle name and he’d chosen Papa’s profession.

  People crowded around the photo boards and argued, birds talking at a feeder, all at once. At first, there was an annoying sameness to the conversations, braggadocio and lumpen bluster blending with mundanities: the weather then, the weather now, old affairs, unwelcome changes, their own legends. Maude made some things up, early on, which got them rolling, and she introduced everyone to Drake, who was her party trick. He was an excuse, and he embraced it. As far as Drake could tell, the whole family was simultaneously fucked up and mildly glorious. Bored old people debating a truly batshit past, getting a last word in, nattering about roadhouses in the thirties and forties, about younger drunks driving off cliffs and causing fireballs that caused conflagrations, about Italian prisoners of war and derailed trains. They’d fucked and gambled across the country, some of them across Europe, done horrible, memorable things: Polly could shut her eyes and see exploding rattlesnake dens, burning booze warehouses, a half dozen World War II stories, a gambler’s body in a borrow pit. They told these stories while giggling like teenagers, wheezing and wiping their eyes.

  Polly watched Sam listen and work the crowd. He wanted the strangest thing each person could remember—easier as people continued to drink—and he wrote these down as if he were taking orders, moving down the line of picnic tables. Helen followed Sam with colored pens for a while before she disappeared under the tables with the other children. When Ned carved the pig, Polly saw her dart away with some skin.

  Polly hid twice during the party. The first time, she wound up in the garden, looking for aphids on the new tips of the plum tree, sliding back into green privacy. She was peering at the party like a child, like a bird from a bush, when Ned found her. “If you climb it, try not to fall,” he said. “It’s almost over. You don’t need to run.”

  Half an hour later, Polly was laughing with long-suffering Merle, snickering over misbehavior during previous parties, when her glitchy peripheral vision caught Ned moving toward the house, as if on some important task. She found him upstairs, lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Ned had more levels of exhaustion than anyone she knew. He was a mille-feuille, a layered pastry; maybe she’d try baking one for him. Grief, resentment, the isolation of being alone within this large extended family. She took off her dress.

  Later, she watched him roll a joint. Polly thought about how good the air felt moving over her body, how lucky she was to be alive and lying naked in a bed next to someone she liked. He was so dark from the days on the river, and his fingers were brown against pink nails. She thought of Papa rolling a cigarette faster than whatever Merle’s friends could roll, everyone laughing at his dexterity, his amusement at their shock.

  “I love you,” said Ned. “What are they doing now?”

  Polly sidled up to the window and peered down. “They’re all fine.”

  “How’s Jane?”

  “Listening. Bemused.”

  “Harry says the wound on Ari’s head could have been made by a paddle,” said Ned.

  “Another rock in the river,” she said. She put her dress back on and headed down.

  But an hour later, she’d mostly stopped noticing what people were doing—drinking, throwing napkins at each other, looking for canes—and began to deflate again, wind down like a drunken toddler.

  “Slow down on the wine,” said Ned, setting up the badminton net.

  Saint Ned. You could watch his face change from a soulful, listening Irishman into a WASP autocrat, a shift in eyebrows and attention and jaw.

  “They aren’t thinking of her,” said Polly. “Everyone’s forgetting Ariel.”

  “No,” he said. “But we haven’t, and it’s almost over.”

  When the cake came out, everyone sang badly, and Maude told more stories. Polly thought she wanted the party not only because she was the queen for the night, but so that these people, survivors and descendants, might understand her glory years before boring decades of good deeds and children, because she loved the way people admired the photos of her laughing and gorgeous and young. A definition of true death was that it happened when the last person who remembered you died, and maybe this is what panicked Maude. With this party she was forcing people to see her disappearing dead, her mother and father, sister and brothers, lovers, world. Maude was the last person to keep her father—dead at forty-four—alive, and with a completely different span, Polly might be the last to keep Papa and Dee alive, just as Helen and Sam might remember Maude.

  What resounded, through the years? Ariel, Asta. All the peripheral shit faded, but it was fun in the meantime. Late in the evening, Maude started telling stories again. She had a funny habit of throwing her chin up when she was fibbing, and most of the family knew the trait.

  “Murderous Swedes!” she yelled.

  Polly wished she’d heard the story. Everyone laughed, but it wasn’t really a joke.

  Polly moved through remnants after everyone went to bed, after almost everything was cleaned up. She collected stray glasses from the lawn, made a pile of sweaters and purses by the door, emptied the dish drain, ate someone’s forgotten serving of tart.

  When she lost steam, she sat at one end of the heaped dining room table and read Sam’s stack of family tree notes. Out of an innate sense of fairness, he’d tried to say something interesting about everyone, but some of the stories were sadder because of their brevity. Asta had been the best dancer, Papa’s little brother had been brain-damaged in a fight but loved to sing. The cousins had all fought or served as nurses, in World War II, if they weren’t home with babies.

  At some point, as people became more incoherent, Sam had veered from biography to the life of the mind and asked people what most scared them. A wrinkled sheet with answers was tucked into the notebook. Jane, whose t
hesis had compared the world’s apocalypse stories, was terrified by floods. Merle, whose paternal grandfather had seen a horse blow into a tree, feared tornados. Jane said Dee had been obsessed with earthquakes, and that Papa had fretted whenever a child was by a high window. Ned was sure insects would inherit the earth, and had nightmares about jellyfish. Harry imagined the ground collapsing under his feet.

  They were all disaster people. Other answers:

  Maude—being blind

  Hans—freezing to death

  Drake—looking in a mirror and seeing no face. Or falling.

  Josie—nurses

  Helen—Dad disappearing

  Mom—deep still water

  Sam—

  He wasn’t sure yet. Not waking up?

  Polly poured one last glass of wine and looked harder at a box of snapshots Jane had put aside, mostly color from the fifties and sixties, going into the picture one more time to look at the grubby carpets and pretty furniture, the air filled with dust motes and smoke and the smell of long-lost dogs and people who took baths, not showers. Looking at the photos, Polly smelled bleach and vinegar, Ivory soap. Dee had used Murphy Oil Soap, which smelled like waxflower, and Polly did, too. Rita and Jane hugging—Polly had no memory of such a thing happening, but there they were, and it was later in the summer of 1968, because Rita’s arm was bandaged. Lemon and Merle posed by the new fence, Dee at her potting wheel, Jane at her desk. And photos—blurred and tipsy—from a party Jane and Merle had given that summer while Papa and Dee were in the city. Polly studied the profile of a man standing near Rita, who seemed so familiar. He troubled her.

  14

  Summer 1968

  Dee and Papa hoped to go to Europe that spring but canceled because of the student riots. Now they simply planned two nights in the city—the usual trip to the doctor and dinner with friends from London—and Jane and Merle secretly, giddily, decided to have a party. She’d finished her thesis; he’d been offered a good research position at NYU.

  They hid fragile things, bought cheese and salami and gallons of wine, and dragged chairs out of the basement and into the yard. People Polly had never met arrived. Rita showed up after a weeklong disappearance, but she was calm, and her agent brought along a Parisian gallery owner, a stocky American man with a booming voice and light-blue eyes, who reminded Polly of her school’s bust of Beethoven. When people came inside, Polly and Edmund skittered to the banister; when people needed to use the upstairs bathroom, or came up to see the map painting, they hid in their rooms. From their windows, they watched groups walk to the greenhouse to see the other canvases, and through their floor grates they watched the gallery owner talk about Rita’s art and put his arm around her. He looked up as if he knew they were there, and they recoiled.

  Eventually, they climbed onto the grape arbor, something that made them feel as if they’d walked into a spy movie. They stayed there, shaded by the vines, spitting grape skins and seeds at the oblivious drunks, taking in details with Merle’s binoculars. No one noticed them; no one ever looked at the edge of anything.

  By 9:00 or 10:00, the mood waffled. Merle, who was relatively alert, made Edmund and Polly sandwiches and asked them to keep the drunks away from Dee and Papa’s rooms. They grabbed Lemon and May and drew large signs for the bedroom doors: Verboten! They thought this was very funny, but beyond the door, they felt the tenor of the party swing. They played checkers with Dee’s jewelry, rings versus earrings, while arguments began below the open window. The man who looked like Beethoven kept talking to Jane, and Merle didn’t like it; they could hear him ask what the man thought he was doing. The man bellowed for Rita and the agent, and off they went.

  In the morning, a minefield of comatose adults blocked the path to the front door. Someone had thrown up in the bathtub, and incense had burned off a plate and scorched the marble table yellow. Edmund picked up a blue worry-bead roach and put it in his pocket. Rita’s room was empty. Edmund, in a good mood, wondered if she’d ever return.

  Everyone was gone when Dee and Papa got home the next afternoon, and the place was almost clean. Polly watched Dee look around, seeing mostly invisible things. Edmund followed her up the stairs dragging her suitcase, and Jane stuck to the kitchen, destroying the last bits of evidence.

  Papa asked Merle to make him a drink and come outside, and soon Polly saw that Merle was crying. But why? Nothing was broken, and it didn’t seem as if Papa was angry. They sat quietly, Merle wiping at his face, petting the worried dog, and sipping a drink.

  The big party for Papa in late August would be a combination of a birthday and retirement celebration, held at the place with the hedges where they’d gone for Edmund’s birthday. Papa’s brothers and his sister Inge and Perdita’s sister Odile were flying in from Montana. Dee’s children were all coming from California.

  Dee said she was behind on everything—she’d failed to spring clean, and now she was in danger of not summer cleaning. She gave Edmund and Polly each a dollar and they stripped all the bedding; she ran both washers, the old and the new, and bullied Merle into hanging extra lines and hauling a third broken machine with a mangle outside. When the sheets and blankets were all on the line, Polly and Edmund ran between the waving linen as if it were a maze. By the time it dried, they’d lost interest and floated off toward the Sound. Jane made the beds, and for once Rita helped, before she retreated to the greenhouse to paint a hillside of sheets, which would one day sell for $50,000.

  Dee had done too much, and the next day, the day before everyone arrived, Polly heard her calling and ran down the hall to the bedroom. Dee said she was just a little weak, and could Polly go find Papa for her? Tell him she needed him.

  Polly ran down to the beach, waving at Papa to come out of the water, and he broke into a run, a stricken look on his gaunt face. A half hour later Jane helped him get Dee into the car, to see the doctor to find medicine to get her through the week. After they drove away, Merle marveled at the fact Dee could move at all. Jane asked him not to talk about it.

  The next morning, Dee was in the kitchen, waiting for her children and other relatives to arrive, saying she felt fine. They came bearing presents—books, puzzles, calligraphy sets—for Edmund, too. The uncles doled out $5 bills. Odile and Inge brought Edmund and Polly small cameras and a roll of film, which was gone within fifteen minutes. Maude brought them fancy chocolates.

  Papa’s brothers visited the city every year to argue and look at art and drink too much—old, skinny, hawk-faced men who were given to silly giggles, who liked to talk about how badly they’d behaved when they were young. Papa was the oldest, and Papa had always been in charge. Merle and Arnold shucked dozens of oysters, and the brothers offered Edmund and Polly money to eat oysters and clams, to suck on crab legs, to try the tomalley in lobster carapaces. They all drank too much wine, even Dee, whom they called the Runaway. She cooked feasts on the first and second nights but got a little snappish, and sometimes she snuck toward her greenhouse, not an easy thing to do these days. Papa bought a tin of caviar by way of apology for the circus of guests, and Dee ate most of it alone in the corner of the kitchen before anyone else knew it existed.

  On the third night, the family went into Manhattan. Polly had just gotten her glasses, and the city became a spiky and glittery hive rather than a gray mound. They stayed in a hotel near the park. Polly was Eloise: She fluffed everything, bounced, peered through open doors and underneath furniture. Edmund was fascinated by the mechanics of the place, the elevator men, the dumbwaiters, the mystery of where all the people in uniform came from. They raced around the halls but at dinner they were seated apart at far corners of the long table, left to watch the waiters and women in fancy dresses, the movement of candlelight on chandeliers.

  Dee was barely able to stand after the meal. Back in the rooms, Polly saw Papa giving her an injection, her arm wrapped around his neck.

  On the morning of the party, Papa and Merle and Dee’s sons left early to pick up the booze and wine and food, t
aking Edmund along. Jane and her aunts argued in the kitchen. Upstairs, Polly heard Maude’s voice in Dee’s room.

  “Time to get out of bed, Mom.”

  Polly walked down the hall. “She needs her coffee,” she said.

  “Well, get it then, please,” said Maude.

  Polly made sure the tray was perfect. She found a vase for nasturtiums from the pot on the porch while Maude told everyone else in the kitchen that they were crazy to be doing their own cooking, that everyone in the family had always been insane. She let Polly carry the tray as they headed upstairs and down the long hall. Nothing moved in Rita’s ocean that morning, and the only thing moving in Dee’s bed was her face, a smile and her eyes looking at the flower and the steaming coffee.

  “Out of bed, Mom,” said Maude, gentle now. “I’ll brush your hair. One more party.”

  “One last party,” said Dee.

  Papa would not wear his suit. He wore what he always wore—gray trousers, a white shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled up. On days at home, his clothes were older or mended. A suit was saved for teaching, for dinner out with Dee, for friends’ funerals, and normally for something like this. But not for something on the beach, he said to Dee.

  They took a first load of food down in the midafternoon and brought Lemon. The wine and Champagne and beer were on ice and the tables were set up, tablecloths bunching in the wind. The children and the aunts and uncles all walked down to the water—it was hot and wavier than usual, almost like an ocean-side beach. Polly and Edmund tagged along with Odile and Inge as they waded in and sat back in the sand, looking at the old ladies’ oddly identical horned feet, brown-gray and white-gray, the crippled hands with matching opal rings.