Laura Moriarty
The Center of Everything
Contents
One
RONALD REAGAN IS ON TELEVISION, giving a speech because he…
Two
WHEN I GET HOME FROM school the next day, my…
Three
WE ABANDON THE VOLKSWAGEN, LEAVE it right there on the…
Four
MR. MITCHELL IS GOING TO pick my mother up for work…
Five
I WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT day, when she isn’t so…
Six
WE KNOW SOMETHING IS WRONG when the Rowleys’ is so…
Seven
MY MOTHER KNOWS I DON’T like her anymore. She has…
Eight
IT’S JANUARY, AND LONG, SHARP icicles hang down from the…
Nine
PASTOR DAVE AND SHARON PICK me up every Sunday before…
Ten
I AM NO LONGER ALLOWED to go to the Church…
Eleven
IF I HAD GOTTEN ARRESTED with someone for setting a…
Twelve
IT’S SPRING NOW, AND TRAVIS and Deena are still in…
Thirteen
RONALD REAGAN IS IN A lot of trouble.
Fourteen
TRAVIS WON’T TELL ME EXACTLY what was said between him…
Fifteen
WHEN WE GO BACK TO school the next week, Dr. Queen…
Sixteen
CHRISTMAS BREAK COMES AND GOES, but for Deena, it just…
Seventeen
FOR A WHILE, I AVOID Travis. A lot of our…
Eighteen
WHEN SUMMER COMES, TRAVIS AND Deena get approved for a…
Nineteen
I DON’T HEAR TOO MUCH from them after they have…
Twenty
EILEEN HAS HER OWN MONEY now, from the life insurance…
Readers’ Guide
Acknowledgments
Praise
Copyright
one
RONALD REAGAN IS ON TELEVISION, giving a speech because he wants to be president. He has the voice of a nice person, and something in his hair that makes it shiny under the lights. I change the channel, but it’s still him, just from a different angle.
The people in the audience wear cowboy hats with REAGAN printed on the front, and they clap and blow horns every time he stops talking, so much that sometimes he has to put his hands up so they’ll be quiet and hear what he’s going to say next. Nancy Reagan sits behind him, smiling and wearing a peach-colored dress with a bow on one of the shoulders, no cowboy hat. She claps too, but only after everyone else has started, so it looks like while he is talking, she is maybe thinking about something else.
“She’s a mannequin,” my mother says, pointing a spatula at the television. “She freaks me out.”
My mother is maybe the opposite of Nancy Reagan. I could never imagine her wearing the peach dress with the bow on it because she wears blue jeans and usually her gray sweatshirt. And she always listens to what everyone says, even people sitting in the next booth in restaurants who probably don’t want her to listen. Right now, she’s supposed to be in the kitchen, making us grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, but she came out to the front room when she heard Ronald Reagan’s voice, and now she’s just standing there with the spatula, looking at the television and shaking her head until I can smell smoke coming from the kitchen, the bread starting to burn.
She smells it too, runs back. “Zing!” she says. When she kisses me sometimes she says “Smack!”
The people listening to Ronald Reagan in the audience yell “Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip, hooray!” and wave their cowboy hats at the camera as it moves around the room. Finally Ronald Reagan laughs and says, “I think you’re playing our song.” And this just makes people yell more.
My grandmother Eileen was here last week, and she said she remembered back when Ronald Reagan was an actor in movies, so handsome you’d faint if you ever got the chance to see him up close. She’s worried about him being president, though, because his middle name is Wilson, which means he has six letters in each of his three names, and if you’ve read Revelations, that alone is enough to give you the shivers. But she’s going to vote for him anyway, because she says he’s the one person who can maybe make everything right again and he’s not afraid of the Communists. Really, she says, the grand finale is coming one way or another, through him or through somebody else. The important thing is to be ready.
My mother says not to listen to Eileen about things like this. Six is just a number, she says, bigger than five, smaller than seven, and there are enough real reasons to worry about Ronald Reagan without bringing in imaginary ones.
“What’s he saying now?” she yells. She’s standing on top of a chair, waving a dishtowel in front of the smoke detector.
But I can’t talk and listen at the same time, so I just listen, and Ronald Reagan says God put America between two oceans on purpose, to help the freedom fighters in Afghanistan and the Christians and Jews behind the Iron Curtain. I don’t understand this, how a curtain can be iron. There was a metal fold-out wall between our classrooms last year at school; usually it was shut, but when Mrs. West or Mrs. Blackmore was sick, the one who wasn’t sick could unhook the latch and push it back so it folded up and we would all just be in one big room together.
No, my mother says, “Iron Curtain” is a figure of speech. There’s not really a curtain anywhere.
She brings the grilled cheese sandwiches out on a plate, burned on the edges but still okay to eat, one of her long red hairs in the melted cheese of mine. “Sorry, sorry,” she says, picking it out. “It won’t kill you.”
Ronald Reagan says he wants everyone to begin this crusade joined together in a moment of silence, and really you know he means praying to God. The people in cowboy hats take them off and bow their heads, but my mother keeps eating her sandwich. She doesn’t like Ronald Reagan because she thinks he’ll get us all blown up with nuclear bombs. She says all somebody has to do is get mad and push a button and we’ll all be dead within half an hour, all the houses melted, the whales cooked in the sea, and Eileen can think she’ll hear angels singing all she wants, but really she won’t be able to hear a damn thing because she’ll be just as dead as everybody else. She says she used to not worry so much about things like this, but now she has me, and the idea of somebody pushing this button makes her crazy, makes her scared when she hears even an airplane in the sky.
I tell her if we had half an hour, we could go downstairs the way we do when the tornado sirens go off. We don’t have our own basement, but there’s a storage space underneath our apartment building, and my mother has a key. There would even be enough time to go outside and wave people down on the highway, tell them they better get inside. I would stay outside until I could see the missiles, and then I would run back and have my mother shut the door behind me.
My mother says no, Evelyn, it wouldn’t work like that. A nuclear bomb would blow up the basement too. Just one bomb in Wichita or even Kansas City would be enough to get us, even all the way out here. If the bombs start going off, they’ll get everyone, she says. It’ll be curtains for us all.
But the next time Eileen is here she says yes, Evelyn, sometimes it does work like that. Whenever a lot of people get killed, there are always a few people who don’t.
We are sitting at the kitchen table, Eileen and I, eating the barbecued ribs she brought with her from Wichita. She says when she was a little girl in Alabama, a tornado came, and her family lived while other families died. She’d been standing outside looking up at the sky as it got darker, feeling the raindrops turn into tiny balls of hail that stung when they landed on the backs of her arms, and then she looked up and saw
a cloud turning over on itself and filling up the sky, like smoke coming out the windows of a burning building. And then a man not wearing any shoes blew right past her, his feet not touching the ground, his legs moving like he was riding a bicycle.
“He looked at me,” Eileen says. “He looked right into my eyes.”
She turned and saw the funnel then, dark and thin like a snake. Her father grabbed her around the waist and carried her down to the cellar, and he kept his arms tight around her and her mother while the house rattled and shook over their heads.
“It sounded like a train,” Eileen says. “Just like a train going right over us.”
My mother rolls her eyes and says that’s what everyone always says about tornados. She’s standing behind Eileen, doing dishes. She won’t eat the ribs with us. She doesn’t eat meat since she started working at Peterson’s.
Eileen says maybe because that’s exactly what tornados sound like, and when it was over, she and her father and mother came out to nothing but quiet, and already the sun was shining through the clouds. The air was pale green, she says, the color of the ocean, and she could see the flying man’s shoeless feet sticking straight up out of the ground, as if he had dived into the earth.
Eileen’s neighbors died too. They had two daughters. Before the tornado, Eileen played with one of the daughters, but not the other one because she was special and couldn’t walk. When the tornado came, they went down to their basement too, carried the special daughter with them, but even so the whole family, even the chickens they kept in the yard if you want to count them, ended up dead, sucked up into the funnel or crushed under the ceiling of their cellar with their hands on top of their heads.
Eileen cries when she gets to this part of the story.
“The Gates were on the right,” she says, her small hands pressed together, pointing to her right. “And the Braggs were on the left.” She points to her left. “But when we came out, it was just us. Our house wasn’t…even…touched.”
I try to imagine it, a tornado hopping over her house at just the right moment, like a skip in a record. “You were lucky, Eileen.”
She shakes her head, wiping her eyes. “Not lucky, Evelyn. We were spared.”
My mother turns around so only I can see her face and puts her soapy hands around her own throat, sticking her tongue out to one side like she is choking. Eileen is somehow able to see her doing this, though she does not turn her head.
“Think what you like, Tina,” she says, picking her rib back up, her eyes already dry again. “Think what you like.”
My mother doesn’t like cigarettes, so Eileen has to go outside and sit on the front step when she wants to smoke. She smokes Virginia Slims out of the right side of her mouth because the left side doesn’t move. Something’s wrong with it. When she’s happy, only the right side of her mouth goes up and it looks as if she’s making a funny face. She is only forty-five, and she says as much as she loves me, she doesn’t feel like a grandmother yet. This is why I call her Eileen.
I go outside with her sometimes, and she tells me that the real problem with my mother is that she believes everything she sees, but really, Eileen says, they can put anything on television these days. There are pictures of astronauts standing on the moon, but they have been faked by the government, and if you look closely, you can tell. There aren’t even any stars in the background, but people are just too stupid to notice. The scientists want us to think that they know more than they really do, but really, the stars are where the angels live and also a way for God to see you, even at night. If you do something wrong, or even think it, he’ll know.
She wants us to come visit her in Wichita sometime, to come with her to her church. But we have never gone, and when Eileen isn’t there to listen, my mother says it’s because one crazy person in my life is enough. I don’t need to meet the people from Eileen’s church.
But when my mother isn’t there to listen, Eileen says yes, actually, I do. When we’re outside on the step, she lowers her voice so my mother can’t hear what she’s saying and tells me I have to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins even before I was around to make them. She says it’s very important that I believe this all the time, every single second of the day, because if I’m a believer when I die, I will go to heaven, but if I die a doubter, I will go to hell and I will be on fire for the rest of everything. If I am walking down the street and I start to doubt just a little, if I just start to wonder if Jesus and heaven is a story that somebody made up and a bus comes around the corner and hits me before I’m a believer again, too bad. She says she loves me so much that she can’t stand to think of this happening to me, so it’s very important that I always believe and never doubt.
“What about my mother?” I ask. “What will happen to her?”
Eileen frowns, taking a drag off her cigarette. “She’ll go to hell, honey, if she keeps making fun. I know it’s sad, but those are the rules.”
Men like my mother. They run after her with socks if she drops them from the laundry basket, and they dig into their pockets and wallets for change when we run short in the checkout line at the store. The bag boys are only in high school, but they found out her name. When we go through the line they smile and say, “Hi Tina.”
She is almost beautiful, her eyes large and blue like Eileen’s, and so many straight, white teeth in her smile. But she’s got a bad nose. It’s thin like Eileen’s but longer, with a bump, like someone tried to pick her up by it before she was done drying. She sometimes looks cross-eyed, both eyes maybe trying to see over the bump. But she also makes herself cross-eyed on purpose when she’s telling a joke, and she does it slowly, so it’s difficult to tell where being cross-eyed for real stops and where the joke starts. And this makes her funny, I think. People laugh more at her jokes than they would if somebody else said the same thing.
I have a normal nose, without the bump, but I have to wear glasses, and underneath them my eyes are brown and turned downward, drooping, so I look like I’m sad or tired even when I’m not. Brad Browning at school has asked me, “Why are you always so sleepy, Evelyn? Why don’t you just take a nap?” But my mother says she thinks sad sleepy eyes are pretty. She crosses her eyes and says, “Let’s just say if your father didn’t have sad brown eyes you probably wouldn’t be here today.”
But I don’t think most people think sad-looking eyes are pretty. Brad Browning says I look like the plastic basset hounds at grocery stores that you can put quarters in to give money to the Humane Society. There is a chance I could grow up to be ugly, and this is one of many things I worry about.
My mother works at Peterson’s Pet Food, right across from the slaughterhouse on Highway 59. Her boss at Peterson’s is Mr. Mitchell, and he’s also her friend, even though he’s old. My mother says his hair is salt and pepper, not gray, and she thinks he’s still handsome. Don’t call him old, she says.
Two of Mr. Mitchell’s fingernails are purple, with some of the nail missing and yellow where the white should be. My mother says this happened when Denise Fishbone the knucklehead got her hair caught in the grinder, and Mr. Mitchell reached in and yanked it out, just in time.
“He saved her,” she says. “Saved her life. Two more seconds and she would have been a goner.” She drags a red fingernail across her neck, making a slicing sound, her eyes bulging.
Mr. Mitchell saved us too. When the bus service got canceled, he gave us a car. Just like that. He said it was just sitting there anyway, making his yard look trashy and his wife mad. But when he first drove it over to give to us, my mother didn’t believe it. She stood in the doorway, watching his face.
“You’re going to give me a car? For free?”
He smiled, first at her, and then down at me. “I’ve got the new truck now, so I don’t really need it.” He held out the key in one of his big hands. “It’s the trickle-down theory, Tina. Embrace it.”
For a moment my mother did not move. She only looked at him, as if she were waiting f
or something else, some more information. And then she leaned forward quickly and kissed him on his forehead, her hands in his salt-and-pepper hair. “This is unbelievable!” she yelled, running to the Volkswagen. “Too good to be true!”
“Exactly, Tina,” he said, laughing now, walking behind her. “I might just be giving you a headache. It’s an old car. It’s got some problems.”
“No, no.” She rolled down the window as soon as she got inside, waving us over. “Come on, both of you. Let’s go for a ride.”
So we did. We drove up and down the highway, the three of us, a Frank Sinatra tape in the stereo. Mr. Mitchell sat in the passenger seat, telling my mother when to shift. When she went too fast, the car would shimmy back and forth, and Mr. Mitchell would turn around and look at me like he was scared, but really I knew he wasn’t.
The Volkswagen is okay from the outside, but on the inside, it’s no good. There’s an alarm that’s supposed to tell us that our seat belts aren’t on, and since there aren’t any seat belts anymore, the alarm stays on all the time. This sound makes me crazy. Also the stereo is broken. The Frank Sinatra tape is stuck inside it, and the off switch doesn’t work, so when the car starts, the stereo comes on automatically, and it can play only that tape. You can’t even turn it down.
“Well,” my mother says. “You get what you get.”
I liked the Frank Sinatra songs at first, but now I’m sick of them. I’m sick of “Love and Marriage,” sick of “Witchcraft,” sick of “Three Coins in the Fountain.” I tell my mother I’m so tired of Frank Sinatra that if I saw him walking down the street, I would turn around and run the other way.
She rolls down her window and asks if I would like some cheese to go with my whine. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says. “We need this car.”