The Center of Everything

  “If you’ll let me speak,” Ms. Jenkins says, pushing her glasses back up on her face. She looks around the room, at our row of bright blue. I try to lean forward, hiding behind one of the nuns. “Listen, people,” she says. “I’m just trying to teach your children what’s commonly accepted in the larger scientific community, okay? Most scientists agree that Homo sapiens have been walking around on Earth for over half a million years, only after having evolved from simpler mammals through a process of natural selection. That’s it, pure and simple.”

  Mr. Leubbe is sitting with his wife in the third row, and although Ms. Jenkins has said “Homo,” this time he doesn’t even smile. But people start to boo again, and Mrs. Carmichael has to turn around, her fingers to her lips, and say, “Let’s be adults.”

  I feel bad for Ms. Jenkins getting booed up there, dressed like a teacher, in a brown jacket that doesn’t really match her pants, her hair sticking up the way it always does, so you know the people who don’t like her are going to make fun of her for that too. She scans the audience with her small eyes, talking about carbon 14 and the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, not even having to look down at her notes. She speaks slowly, the way you would talk to someone either very young or not very smart, saying “Okay?” after each sentence. Every now and then, Traci’s mother nods her french-twisted head and says, “Exactly.”

  I understand that what Ms. Jenkins is saying makes sense, but if I nod my head, even once, I will be on the same side as the Carmichaels, and on the opposite side of Jesus and Eileen. I try to map it out in my head the way you can do with a story problem in math, hoping to find a space on the same side as Eileen and Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Goldman, but not with Traci and her mother. But there is no space like that. The lines keep crossing over one another. They would have to be curvy to make it work.

  “I’m just giving facts now, people, okay?” Ms. Jenkins says, holding up her hands. “Those are just facts, which is what I’m concerned with, as a science teacher. I don’t barge into your churches Sunday mornings, so please, don’t barge into my classroom.” Dr. Queen waves the white flag then, and Ms. Jenkins walks away from the podium, but she keeps talking on the way back to her chair. “They’ve found fossils, okay? Nobody’s making this stuff up.”

  Pastor Dave goes next. He begins his speech by thanking Ms. Jenkins for her illuminating introduction, but he says “illuminating” in a way that you know he didn’t really think it was. He tells the school board they are making an important decision, that they are standing at a crucial fork in the road.

  “The wisdom of thousands of years and the faith in a higher power is this way,” he says, holding an arm out in one direction, “and some half-baked theory that tells children they come from slime is the other.” He holds his other arm in the other direction, so that both are raised, and he stands just like this for a moment, like he is getting ready to hug someone, or maybe do a back flip. The newspaper photographers take pictures of him like this, and I know it is because his T-shirt says GOD, and he is standing by himself, his arms spread wide like that. Tomorrow people will look at the newspaper and think that Pastor Dave thinks he’s God, not knowing that we’re all down here making up the rest of the sentence.

  Mr. Goldman goes up to the microphone next, and the Carmichaels clap and smile even before he says anything at all. He is wearing a white shirt and a bright green tie, but it’s hard to tell if he tried to dress up or not because he looks exactly the same way he does in algebra, crisp and polished, smiling down at us with his straight white teeth.

  “Good evening, folks,” he says. “Um, I know I’m a newcomer, but still, I have to say right off the bat that the fact that this is even a controversy is…flooring me.” He opens his mouth again to say something else, but for a moment, no words come out. “I’m…I’m having a hard time understanding how there can really be a debate in this day and age.” He looks at us as if there should be some reaction, but there isn’t. Everyone just keeps looking back at him, waiting. They don’t know what side he’s on.

  “Of course we have to teach evolution,” he says. People catch on, start booing. But Traci and her father clap, and Mrs. Carmichael, to my surprise, puts two fingers in her mouth and whistles.

  “Look,” he says, raising his voice, his hand over his heart, “I’m a religious person, too, okay? But you can’t pretend those fossils don’t exist. They do. You can’t tell your children they don’t and call it religion. You can’t call it anything but lying. What about truth? What about intellectual curiosity?”

  Eileen touches me on the knee. “Evelyn, honey, what’s that man’s name?”

  I know, right away. I know about last names now. I pretend I don’t hear her, even though she’s right next to me, her nicotine breath warm on my cheek. I keep looking at Mr. Goldman, and I am thinking about Anne Frank, about whether Eileen would say she doesn’t have any eyes and ears either.

  She pokes me again. “What’s his last name?”

  I look at her carefully, watching her eyes. “Goldman.”

  She nods, a little smile on her crooked mouth.

  Mr. Leubbe goes up to the microphone next. People start clapping before he even opens his mouth because everyone, even the people from the television crews, remember that he is the one who pulled the little girl out of the river. He has to hold up his hand to make everyone be quiet so he can talk, and he looks embarrassed. “Thanks,” he says, raising the microphone. “Thanks. Um, since my colleague here said he had some trouble understanding what the controversy was, I’m going to try to clear it up.”

  People go crazy when he says this, clapping, saying, “You tell ’em, Jim!” He can’t talk for a little while because people are so loud, and I don’t know if this counts as part of his five minutes or not. “The controversy,” he says, “for your information, is that a lot of people around here don’t really take to their children being taught that Genesis is all a bunch of lies and in reality we all came from monkeys.” When he says around here, he stretches it out a little, moving his hand in a tiny circle as if he were getting ready to throw a lasso. “Maybe in other places they’re okay with that,” he says. “But not around here.”

  People clap so much when he says this that his five minutes get taken up, and Dr. Queen looks at her watch and says, “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to move on.” Pastor Dave stands up and says, “Wait a minute! That’s not fair,” and as soon as he does this, the photographers start taking pictures of him again.

  Mrs. Carmichael goes up next. When she gets to the microphone, Traci’s father takes a picture. She smiles when the flash goes off, but even when he’s done, his camera back in his lap, she does not turn around and face the school board the way you are supposed to. Instead, she takes the microphone out of the holder, still facing us. The television crews come out from behind the table, moving in front of her quickly.

  “Do you-all realize,” she asks, “that the entire nation is laughing at us right now?” She pauses here, and it’s almost like she’s Pastor Dave in church, waiting for us to answer. “I’ve got friends from college on both coasts, calling me and laughing because Kerrville, Kansas, is on the national news. We look like a bunch of hicks.” She shakes her head, looking directly at our row, at all of us in our blue T-shirts. “Do you know how hard they’re laughing at us in New York?”

  I try to picture it, people in taxicabs going past tall buildings, thinking about me and Eileen, shoulders shaking, their eyes wet with tears. “They’re so stupid,” they would say to one another, eating hot dogs on the sidewalk, watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “I can’t believe they’re so dumb!”

  Mrs. Carmichael steps away from the microphone, silent, her eyes closed. “Look. We all care about our children. That’s why we’re here. I love my daughter, and I want her to be able to apply to the best colleges when she graduates. And I don’t want people laughing at her.”

  I am just sitting there, thinking about how much I don’t like Mrs. Carmi
chael, about how I don’t care about Traci’s college applications at all, when all of a sudden I feel Eileen standing up next to me. I know this won’t be a good thing. My hand moves quickly to her, but she jerks her arm away.

  “Lady,” she says, her voice surprisingly loud, “if you really love your daughters, you won’t let them be led astray.”

  Both television cameras swing around, two dark eyeballs focusing on Eileen. Dr. Queen waves the white flag and tells Eileen to sit down and wait her turn.

  She doesn’t. She holds her arm out straight in front of her, pointing up at Mrs. Carmichael. “You think having people laugh at them on college applications or whatever is bad for them,” she says, her voice wavering now, holding back a sob. “But how bad is it for them to risk spending eternity in hell?”

  I am very still. Everyone else in the room, Mr. Goldman, the nuns, Traci, everyone, is watching us. I look at the cameras and pull on her arm. “Eileen. Please. It’s not your turn.”

  Mrs. Carmichael shakes her head, her hand over her eyes. “Okay, this is exactly what I’m talking about.” She looks at Eileen. “This is a civilized meeting with rules, ma’am, not a tent revival. You’ll have to wait your turn.”

  But now Eileen is really crying, tears on her face. The cameras move closer to our row. “I come all the way up here from Wichita to protect my little granddaughter, who I love so much,” she says. She reaches down and grabs my arm by the wrist, trying to pull me up beside her. I pull back. She lets my hand go before I think she will, and I hit myself in the face with my own hand.

  No one moves. I hear the newspaper cameras clicking, taking pictures. I tug on her arm again. “It’s not your turn,” I whisper. “You have to sit down.”

  She sort of falls back into her chair when I do this, finally silent. Mrs. Carmichael says she should get to start her five minutes again, and Dr. Queen waves the white flag over her head and says it’s only fair. Mrs. Carmichael doesn’t look at Eileen while she talks, and Eileen doesn’t look at her, either. For the rest of the meeting, she just sits next to me, crying quietly, her hand wrapped tightly around mine.

  By the time we are back in the van, going home on the highway, Eileen has fully recovered. She is even smiling, squeezing my hand in her lap. Sharon tells her she admired her courage, and Pastor Dave says she stole the show.

  “Really?” she asks, her hand over her mouth. “I hope so. That lady just made me so darn mad. I had to say something.”

  Pastor Dave agrees, and says he found Mrs. Carmichael’s apparent superiority complex more than a bit ironic. I look out the window, at the dark sky and full, yellow moon. This is all I can do. People will see me hit myself in the face on television, wearing the blue shirt. They will ask me about it tomorrow at school.

  “That one fellow that said he was religious and oh so educated was Jewish,” Eileen says. “Did you notice that?”

  I sit very still, keeping my eyes on the moon.

  Pastor Dave nods and sighs, turning on his blinker to switch lanes. “Not a big surprise. There’s all kinds of religious.” He lowers his voice. “The blood be upon them.”

  The van is too hot all of sudden, too small. I reach over Eileen’s legs, crack open a window. I know what Pastor Dave is saying is from the Bible, the part where Jesus is killed on the cross. But it’s not right. It’s almost funny, trying to picture Mr. Goldman with blood on him, on his hands, on one of his crisp white shirts and colorful ties. What’s this? he would say, looking down at his shirt. What’s this mess?

  “Evelyn, honey,” Eileen asks. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I want to get out of the van, and walk home by myself underneath the yellow moon. There is no blood. It says that in the Bible, but that’s just because somebody wrote it down. I could write something down, and that wouldn’t make it true. I want to say this to Eileen, to Pastor Dave. But if I try to, they will just come up with more quotes. They will just keep quoting and quoting and quoting until there is nothing left to say about anything at all.

  Eileen smiles at me, smoothing my hair off my face with one of her small hands. I look at her hands, and then down at my own. My hands are larger than hers, my fingers longer.

  I watch cars pass us on the highway, their headlights illuminating the inside of the van, shining on our faces. I could just as easily be in any one of those cars, going in the other direction. And then this van would not be anything special to me; it would be just two headlights on the highway, a pulse of light I would not even think about, something else to pass on the road.

  fifteen

  WHEN WE GO BACK TO school the next week, Dr. Queen tells us that if you want to be in Ms. Jenkins’s class, you have to have a permission slip from your parents saying it’s okay. If it isn’t okay, you can just sign up for an extra hour of study hall or gym. This way, Dr. Queen says, everybody can be happy for a change.

  But no one is happy. Both sides have people standing in front of the post office and grocery stores, handing out petitions.

  “It’s better than nothing,” Eileen says. She is finishing the hem of a skirt she made for me, and she keeps the pins she isn’t using clamped in the good side of her mouth, pushing me in slow circles in front of the mirror in my mother’s room. The skirt is very pretty, dark red with purple flowers hand-embroidered at the knee. “At least they can’t force that Jenkins woman down your throats.”

  My mother looks at me but says nothing. She does not smirk, or even smile, and I am grateful for this. She signed the permission slip I brought home last week.

  Eileen says what they should really do, if they want to be fair about it, is offer a Bible study class for credit, and let us take that instead of sitting an extra hour in study hall, twiddling our so-called opposable thumbs. But she doesn’t think the school is interested in being fair at all. She says you can take one look at that Jenkins woman and know that her idea of fair would be for us to be fed to lions in the middle of the Colosseum.

  “I just hope her monkeys are there to save her at her moment of judgment,” Eileen says, but she says this in a way so you know that, really, she hopes they aren’t.

  It’s summer again, and Oliver North is on television all the time now, wearing his Marine uniform, getting yelled at by senators, his eyes filling up with tears when he talks about how much he loves America. They have canceled a lot of the daytime soap operas so we can see this, but my mother says really Iran-Contra is just another soap opera, going on and on and on, only this one doesn’t have any women in it unless you count Fawn Hall and the mothers in Nicaragua with their arms chopped off.

  But she can’t stop watching it. She folds the laundry in front of the television, throws balled-up socks and underwear at the screen when Oliver North says something she doesn’t like, which is pretty much every time he opens his mouth.

  But not everyone is mad the way she is. Just from walking around I know that someone, somewhere, is making T-shirts that say GOD BLESS OLIVER NORTH, and a lot of people are wearing them.

  We have renamed one of the cats Ollie, because he is on the television all the time too, sitting on top of it, his fluffy orange tail hanging over the screen. Sometimes my mother moves him off so we can see the real Ollie, but then Samuel starts screaming. Just like he likes us to have different things on our heads, he likes the cat up on top of the television set. We don’t know why. Not too much has changed with him. His eyes are still a glassy, brilliant shade of blue, and he still doesn’t look at us with them. We know he can see, because when the television is on, he stares at it, and he cries when we shut it off. He makes his screeching sound when something big happens on television, cars exploding, guns firing, anything loud. But you can stand right next to him, waving your arms and shouting his name, and he won’t even blink. My mother says sometimes he looks at her—at her, not at the glitter hat—but I think she could be imagining it. Or it could have just been a coincidence. She could have been standing where he happened to be looking.

&nb
sp; I know I am supposed to love my brother, but sometimes he is just like a big, limp doll, only he can scream and needs his diaper changed for real. He doesn’t talk. When he’s hungry or tired, he can scream so loud that you think that you’re the one screaming, but that’s it. No words. He’s getting bigger too, not as big as a four-year-old should be, but big enough so that my mother, after carrying him around on her hip for a full day, winces when she sets him down.

  My mother has called back the women from the university. They did not come back themselves, but sent a tall, snub-nosed graduate student to our apartment the next day. Her name is Verranna Hinckle, and she wears only turtlenecks, a different color every day. On her first visit, she looked right at my mother and said there was a chance Samuel would never talk. She said my mother should watch for any attempt he made to communicate, not just by talking, but by his hands or his eyes, even his feet.

  “If he gives you a flick of the wrist,” Verranna Hinckle told us, flicking her own, “assume it’s a wave. Take any inch he gives you and stretch it into a mile. Once he understands that it’s possible to communicate, that you’re out there and listening, that’s half the battle.”

  “Okay,” my mother said, nodding quickly. “That makes sense.”

  So now she pretends that Samuel is pointing at things, even though really he isn’t. His hand is still shaped like E.T.’s, one long finger sticking straight out, and if his arm happens to flail in a certain direction so that this finger is aimed at something—a book, a fork, a potholder, one of the cats—she gets up and brings whatever it is to him right away.

  “This is a potholder, Samuel,” she says, kneeling down beside him. “It’s soft, isn’t it? Is this what you were pointing at? Is this what you wanted?”