The Center of Everything

by Laura Moriarty

  She tries on the yellow dress, the one that she wore to Wichita when the car broke down. It’s tighter than it was. Her whole body looks swollen, puffed up, especially her face. “You’ll need to wear tights today,” she says, fastening the belt. “We have to look nice.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “It’s too hot for tights.”

  “You’ll be fine, Evelyn. I’m wearing panty hose. You can wear tights.”

  I say nothing to this. She’s being stupid. Yesterday it was 102 degrees, and the man on the news said the sidewalks were cracking in the heat, like bread in an oven.

  “Go put them on,” she says. She lies down on her bed by the pile of clothes, pulling her nylons on, her legs kicked up in the air, toes pointed, like the letter V. “No.”

  She gives me a moment, just a moment, to take it back, her right eyebrow high on her forehead. Then she stands up quickly, pulling the nylons up to her waist, a run shooting up to her knee. She looks down at the run and starts counting to ten.

  I watch.

  When she gets to ten she says, “Evelyn, you have to understand something. I am really…” Her voice is shaking, and I can see she is about to cry. “I am at my limit, okay? I don’t care how hot it is. Go put on your goddamn tights.”

  But I don’t want to go where she’s going, and it’s too hot for tights. I’m up and out of her room in a second, sliding on the linoleum of the kitchen, around the corner, into the bathroom. I hear her coming after me, her footsteps heavy, one nylon leg swishing across the other. I lock the door.

  She knocks so hard the mirror rattles against the bathroom wall. “Evelyn! Open the door.” She is crying now. Some of me feels sorry for her, but most of me doesn’t.

  “It’s too hot for tights!” I yell. “Too hot!”

  I hear more crying, then footsteps back to her bedroom, her door slamming. I look at myself in the mirror, at my sleepy eyes and mean little mouth. Ms. Fairchild thinks I’m nice, but if she could see me now, if she really could look into her crystal ball, she would think differently.

  But that’s how it is sometimes. Sometimes you have to be mean.

  There are 368 tiles on the bathroom floor. I am beginning to count the tiles in the shower when I hear her in the kitchen.

  “We have to go now. You win.” Her voice is still breathy, but quieter now. “You’re a brat.”

  “I’m not,” I say. I can see my reflection in the doorknob, my face like a monster’s, upside down. “I don’t have any shoes to wear. I told you that a long time ago. I told you I needed new shoes.”

  She pauses, and for a moment I’m not sure if she’s even still there. “What about the red shoes? You’ve been wearing those.”

  “They’re too small.” This is a lie. They fit perfectly still, but I can’t wear them if we are going into Kerrville. I imagine Traci seeing them on me, pointing at my feet so her mother will see. I would be arrested. I open the door, just a crack, and look up. Her cheeks are tear-stained, her eyes red.

  “Are you coming or not?”

  It is uncomfortable in the apartment, the humid air still and heavy even in our darkened rooms, but outside, under the bright, stinging sun, it’s worse. The sun burns too hot on the top of my head as we walk along the highway to Monroe Street, lined with gas stations and Laundromats. I run my hand along a chain-link fence that keeps in a golf course. We walk past fast-food restaurants and the Pine Ridge Shopping Plaza. I look for Travis in the parking lot, but he isn’t there. Closer to town, on McPhee Street, a man leans out of a car window and yells, “Whoo baby.”

  “I’m thirsty,” I tell her.

  “Me too,” she says, and keeps walking. “What, Evelyn? We’re almost there.”

  “My feet.” I point at my shoes. Tiny spots of blood have soaked through the toes of the canvas.

  “Jesus,” she says, as if this is a surprise, as if I have not told her about my shoes. “Oh honey.” She bends down, and the run in her nylons grows larger, spreading across her knee. Her yellow dress is see-through now, wet with sweat. “Okay,” she says, wiping her forehead. “I have to get these off of you.”

  “I can do it myself, Mom. I know how to take off my shoes.”

  But it’s like she doesn’t hear me, her fingernails already picking at the knots. She has pushed her sunglasses up into her hair, and when she bends down, I can look down and see myself in them, the sun bright behind my head.

  “Oh God, look at your feet,” she says. “Your toes. I’m going to have to carry you.”

  I want to argue with her, to tell her this is a bad idea, that I am almost eleven years old and far too big to be carried. But her arms are already around me, lifting me up. “Hmmph,” she says. I can feel the muscles in her back tighten under her dress. She leans one way and then the other, breathing hard. I keep my arms tight around her neck, feeling her sway a little, hearing the unsteady clicks of her heels on the sidewalk. She walks like this for two more blocks, until we get to a brick building that says KERRVILLE COUNTY WELFARE SERVICES across the top in silver letters.

  We go inside. Welfare. It is happening.

  She sets me down in front of the drinking fountain in the lobby, and my toes curl up when they touch the cool tile. A lady sits behind a desk, her eyes closed, a fan blowing her yellow-orange hair straight back so it looks like she is riding in a convertible car. There are brown chairs against the wall, and my mother and I fall into two of them.

  “You have an appointment?” the lady asks. She has to yell over the sound of the fan.

  “Barbara Bell, eleven o’clock.”

  “Everyone with an eleven o’clock appointment should be in the audio room to the left,” the lady says, pointing to a white door on one side of her desk. “If your appointment is at eleven, you were instructed to arrive at ten forty-five, so you could listen to the tape in its entirety.”

  My mother stares at the lady. I am worried that she is counting to ten in her head, and that maybe both the lady and I should go to the other side of the room. But my mother says nothing. She stands up, holds her hand out to me, and leads me through the door.

  There are about a dozen people in the next room, their chairs in a circle. This time the chairs are orange. In the center of this circle is a cassette player, playing a tape of a man speaking very slowly. No one is listening to the tape. Some people are talking, and some people are sleeping, their heads tilted back on the chairs. One woman is trying to lullaby a baby, singing a song in Spanish. We take two seats by the door, and I try to think about how good the air-conditioning feels, my feet set free from the shoes, and not about where we are, what Ronald Reagan would think if he could see us here now.

  “How are your feet?” my mother asks.

  The lady from the first room sticks her head in and says, “Shhh! You-all are supposed to listen to the tape.” She points at her own ear. “No talking!”

  But we can’t hear the tape because people are talking, and two different babies are crying. Someone opens a different door and calls my mother’s name. We walk down a long green hallway to a room with four desks, a woman sitting behind each one. Three of them are busy with other people. The fourth one waves us over. “Helloooo?” she says. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  She wears red-framed glasses that sit on the tip of her nose. The nameplate on her desk says MRS. BARBARA BELL, INTAKE, and when she sees us, she looks me up and down carefully, puffing out her cheeks like a chipmunk. “We’ll have to do something about shoes for you,” she says. She looks at my mother. “Name?”

  “Christina Bucknow,” my mother says. She is all of a sudden using her nice voice, which I have not heard in a while. “Here’s the form they told me to bring. I did the best I could with it.” She smiles. “But some of it was pretty involved. See, this is my first time doing this so—”

  Barbara Bell pushes up her glasses and flips through the booklet. She gets out a calculator, her fingers tapping against the buttons quickly. I think she
looks very smart, wearing red glasses and punching a calculator like this.

  “You’re twenty-seven?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is your daughter?”

  “Yes. This is Evelyn.”

  “From a prior marriage?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Meaning?”

  “No.”

  Barbara Bell nods and looks back down. “And she’s ten?”

  “She’ll be eleven in August.”

  “And you receive no child support from her father?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve entered the father’s name in a search, correct?”

  “Yes. A long time ago. No luck.”

  Barbara Bell leans back in her chair. “And the father of this pregnancy?”

  “This new one?” My mother points at her belly.

  “Yes. This new one.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” My mother smiles.

  “Actually, it does. Ms. Bucknow, I have to exhaust all of your other means of support before the state gives you financial assistance. And really, if we could get some child support mandated, that would help you out more than food stamps.”

  My mother looks around the room, at the people at the other desks. “It was a bad situation,” she says, her voice low now, almost a whisper. “I’d really rather not say. I sort of made a mistake, and I’d rather not make that mistake go any further. You know?” She nods in my direction, the way she might do with Eileen to say, Let’s not talk about this in front of her.

  I get up and go to the other side of the room and look at the pictures on the wall, at a map of Kerrville stuck up with tacks. A little red circle is drawn on the map, and next to it, YOU ARE HERE in red letters. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here.

  My mother is smiling now, trying to look at Barbara Bell as if they are friends, in cahoots. Barbara Bell does not smile back.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to need to be candid with me if I’m going to help you, Ms. Bucknow.”

  My mother shakes her head. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t get too particular. Given the situation, I think this could make things pretty awkward for him and…”

  “His comfort level isn’t really my concern.”

  “He’s gone anyway.”

  “He’s left town?”

  “Yes.”

  “No forwarding address? No number?”

  “No.”

  “Surely you must know someone who…”

  “No.”

  Barbara Bell looks back down at the booklet, her glasses down on her nose, her fingers drumming on the desk. “If you could give me a first and last name, I could enter that in a search.”

  “He’s married, okay?” my mother says.

  “But it’s a different man than the father of your first child, correct?”

  “Yes. That was ten years ago. Jesus.”

  “I’m just trying to get the information I need, okay? No one is judging you. But given that you can’t give me the name of the father, I have to ask you if there is some confusion on your part.”

  “What?” She says this so loud and sharp that everyone else in the room stops talking. “Look,” she says, leaning over Barbara Bell’s desk, knocking over her nameplate, maybe on purpose, maybe not. “Let’s get something straight here. I’m not confused. I know who the father is. I just don’t want to tell you. It’s not your business, okay?” She leans in closer. “It’s not your business.”

  I would be scared, if my mother were that close to my face and yelling like that. But I don’t think Barbara Bell is. She looks bored. “Ms. Bucknow,” she says, her voice still calm, bored even, setting her nameplate straight again. “I couldn’t care less what you want to tell me. In fact, I can assure you my interest in your personal life is negligible at best. But if you want money from the government, you’re going to have to answer these questions to the best of your ability. They’re cutting back our programs; they’re upping our eligibility requirements. We have to be careful.”

  My mother stands up and tells Barbara Bell she doesn’t give a fuck about eligibility requirements. She says she won’t be talked to this way; she would rather starve. Barbara Bell says that is her prerogative, but she will be glad to speak with her again when she is feeling calmer.

  And then it’s like Wichita all over again. She takes my hand and pulls me back out into the long green hallway, past the room full of different people listening to the same scratchy tape, past the receptionist’s desk with the orange-haired lady and the fan, out the door, out of the air-conditioning, into the sharp, stinging heat. I have to run to keep up with her, her hand tight around my arm, and the white sidewalk is like fire under my feet.

  “My feet! Mom! My feet!” I twist my arm out of her grip. She stops so quickly that her head goes forward even after her body has stopped moving.

  “Wh—Oh! Oh God, I’m sorry. I forgot. I forgot you had no shoes. How could I forget that?”

  She looks weird, even for her. Her eyebrows are pushed down behind her sunglasses, and she looks as if she is concentrating very hard on something, her forehead wrinkled, her mouth open. I can hear her breathing.

  She bends down and puts her hands under my arms. “Hmmph,” she says. But this time, she can’t get me past her knees. She sets me back on the grass, stumbling backwards. “I’m sorry, Evelyn,” she says. She wipes more sweat off her face, and her hand looks too pink against her white face, like her hand and her face belong to two different bodies. “I just can’t…I just can’t carry you anymore…”

  She is swaying a little now, back and forth. I know I should move forward, maybe take her hand. But I am also worried she could fall down right on top of me. I step back.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she says. Her sunglasses have fallen off one of her ears. They sit crooked across her face, the pink strap hanging around her neck. She does not try to fix them. Instead, she sits down, right there on the grass between the sidewalk and the street. One of her black high-heeled shoes comes off, and the way she is sitting, I can see her underwear.

  “Mom, get up. Let’s go find somewhere to sit. A bench. Let’s get a place in the shade.”

  Instead she lies all the way down, curling her knees up to her chest. “I don’t know what to do.”

  There are cars now, slowing down, people looking out their windows. I try poking her, hard enough to hurt. “You have to get up. Get up now.”

  A man rolls down his window and leans out. “Honey, is your mom okay? Did she fall?”

  “Mom, get up!” I want to kick her.

  She is still on the ground when a police car slows and pulls over to the side of the road, lights on, no sirens. The other cars move around it, people watching us.

  “Hi there,” the policeman says, getting out of his car. “Is this your mother?”

  I nod. He doesn’t look old enough to be a police officer, even in the uniform, so many things swinging off his belt as he jogs toward us—a stick, a gun, a radio. He is wearing a hat, but I can see he has acne, swollen red marks and open scabs on his throat and cheeks, so much that it looks like it hurts. He gives me a bottle of water and tells me to go sit in the shade and drink it.

  “Ma’am?” he says, kneeling beside my mother, his hand on her arm. “Ma’am? Do you need me to call an ambulance?”

  She props herself up on her elbows. “No,” she says. “No, no. I just need to lie here for a minute. I’m okay.”

  “Okay, well, we have to get you someplace where it’s cool. We have to get you out of this sun, get you some water. Do you have any family I can call?”

  She sits up quickly. “Where’s my daughter? Oh my God, where is she?”

  “I’m here,” I say.

  She sees me and lays her hand on top of her heart. If you were just driving by now, seeing her lying on the grass with her hand like this, the policeman kneeling next to her, you might think she’d been shot.

  “She’s fine, ma’am,” the policeman s
ays. “But she needs to get inside, and you do too. You need to stand up and walk with me so we can get your daughter inside where it’s cool.”

  This is what does it. She stands up, leaning on him for just a moment before she waves me over, and we walk to his car together.

  Finally she is embarrassed.

  We are in the police car, both of us sitting in the back. My mother is drinking her second bottle of water. I am on my third. The police officer tells us we have to keep drinking it, that heat-stroke is nothing we want to fool with. His car is magnificently air-conditioned, and I ask him to please turn it all the way up, to make sure it’s on maximum. He laughs and says, “Of course!” and then I can feel it all around me, the coolness filling the air like smoke.

  “It must have been the heat,” my mother says. “I really don’t know what came over me. Thank you so much for the ride.”

  He says that the heat has been making people act crazy all week. People have been fainting in their own homes—sunstroke, heatstroke—dropping like flies, he says. But he keeps asking her questions, looking at her in his mirror: Does she really want him to take us back to our house? Does she want him to take us to Social Services down at the station? Or the hospital, maybe?

  No, she says. No. She’ll be fine if he just takes us home. He asks her if she thinks she can take care of me, and she says yes. She tells him about the shoes, and how we had to take them off because they were too tight. She had tried to carry me, and the heat had just gotten to her. That was all.

  When he pulls up to our house, he gives her his card and tells her she can have him paged if she starts to feel bad again, or if there is anything she needs. We get out of the car, and he rolls down his window, asking her again if she thinks she will be able to look after me.

  “Yes,” she says, her arm cool around my shoulders. “Yes, I’m sure.”