The Center of Everything
Page 35
I can think of nothing to say to this. It’s like when we sat on the steps after his father left, me trying to think of something that was kind as well as true, coming up with nothing.
He flicks the keys on his key chain, still dangling from the ignition. “I wish I were with you and not her.”
I could hit him. I have to hold on to the edge of my seat. He says it again.
“Oh stop it,” I say. “Give me a break. You chose her. You chose her and not me.” And I make myself remember it, the three of us walking home from Ed’s van, back across the snowy field. I am angry, but also, terribly, hopeful. I want him to tell me something now that would take away the sting of that night, to say that really he always loved me, even then, even when he first put his hand over his heart and asked me to repeat her name.
“You chose her,” I say, pressing, waiting. “You act like all of this just happened to you. Poor baby. But it’s not true, Travis. You chose it.”
He puts his hands over his face. “I know.”
“Why?” I am crying now, though I don’t want to. It’s a terrible question, this why.
He looks like he doesn’t understand, squinting at me in the darkness. “I thought she was pretty.”
I feel the muscles in my arms and legs tighten, closing down. “Well, she still is then. You have what you wanted.”
He closes his eyes. “I know, Evelyn. I know.”
“Yes, I know you know. I know you’ve always known.”
He looks confused now, befuddled, and I remember he has been drinking. But what I am saying makes perfect sense to me, even the bitterness in my voice makes sense, though I can see his lovely eyes are turning glassy, rimmed in red. He rests his elbows on the steering wheel, gazing out in front of him, at the shrubs in front of the mailboxes, at the Treeline Colonies parking lot, full of unshiny cars.
There is a chance, I realize, that Travis still does not understand my heart at all, that I am, and have always been, in this alone.
But looking at him, even with the scratching claw inside me, I feel bad for him. Maybe he didn’t really choose this. Maybe he didn’t get to choose at all. It could be that the decision was made for him, the first time he saw her. It’s biology, after all, pushing us into each other, pushing us around. Sitting here, looking at him, I can understand better than anyone how you can be pulled toward someone even when you don’t want to be, just because of the way his voice sounds, the way his skin is stretched across the bones of his face.
I think of dead moths inside of a porch lamp, lemmings jumping to their deaths.
“What?” he says. “What are you thinking about?”
“Dead moths. Lemmings.”
He laughs. He goes to tap himself on his temple and pokes himself in the eye. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I never do. Did you know that? Even when we were little, I just pretended.” He laughs again. “But I like you anyway.” He says this warmly, turning toward me. But all I can think is that he is still saying like and not love. There is so much difference between these two words, a line you have to cross to go from one to the other.
He’s close again, though. His arm rests on the back of the seat, his hand grazing my shoulder. I can smell his minty breath on my cheek, and I know that all I have to do is look up. The air that I am breathing in is air he has just breathed out, warm and dizzying, air I can almost taste.
All I have to do is look up.
I put my hands flat against the dashboard. The stars are still glimmering, still shiny as eyes. They are not eyes, though, just hot balls of gas, far, far away. But on the floor of the car, a baby rattle rests by my feet, bright yellow with a smiley face painted on it, a crescent of Jack’s tiny teeth marks on one side. The car seat, I know, is in the back. I think of Deena, lying on the couch with her mouth open, and I imagine her waking up, yawning, looking around, the television turned off and nobody home.
“I have to go,” I say.
“What? Why?” His fingers run lightly off my shoulder, up my neck.
“I just do. I have to.” I open my door and stand up slowly. “I have to get up early tomorrow. I told my mom I’d watch Sam.”
“Okay.” He squints up at me. “Everything all right?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “Thanks for the ride.”
I shut the door without looking back, and put one foot in front of the other, moving quickly up the walkway. A small swarm of mayflies and moths swirls around the light by our door, and though I pass just beneath them, they are not disturbed.
My mother knocks twice on my door.
“Come in,” I say. Finally. I have trained her.
“What’s the story, morning glory?” She lifts my window shade quick and hard, letting it roll up with a snap. “Zap!” she says. Travis’s sweatshirt hangs on the back of the chair to my desk, and my hair smells like smoke.
I yawn. “What are you doing? What time is it?”
“It’s nine. Remember? You said you’d watch Sam today. Did you forget?” She stands in front of the mirror on my closet door, frowning. “Is this dress too tight?”
She is wearing one of her dresses from before Samuel was born, the flowered one, and the seams on the sides look strained and puckered, the material stretched tight across her hips.
“Mom, that dress is like eight years old. Maybe you should just get a new one.”
“Dammit.” She frowns at her reflection, patting her stomach down. “Dammit dammit dammit.”
She looks nice though, really. She’s not wearing the red glitter hat, and her hair has gotten longer. She’s started wearing lipstick again, even earrings when she goes to work.
“I thought you were just going for a walk,” I say. “What’s the big deal?”
Instead of answering, she runs her hand along the books on my bookshelves. “Three months,” she says. “Three more months and my baby’s gone.”
“Two months and twenty-one days.” I watch her carefully. “Why are you getting dressed up? Where are you going?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe Kansas City or something. It’s getting ready to storm.” She smiles and turns away, starting down the hallway. I stay in bed, thinking about this. She’s acting stupid. And there’s no reason for her to go to Kansas City.
I get up and go into the front room. Samuel is asleep in his beanbag, already dressed in his shirt and overalls, his hair parted neatly on one side. The television is on, President Bush is giving a speech. My mother stands at the sink, rinsing off the dishes from breakfast. She glances up at me and then down again. She’s wearing mascara.
“Why are you going to Kansas City?”
She rolls her eyes. “I’m going with Franklin. Okay, Miss Nosey?”
Franklin. “DuPaul?”
She nods. She won’t look up.
“Why?”
She shrugs. “Why not?” There’s something in her face I have not seen in a while, a flush, a glisten.
“Are you guys dating?”
“I don’t know.” She squirts dishwashing soap on a sponge. “He wants to take tango lessons.”
“What?”
“Tango,” she says. “You know.” She holds her arms up as if she were dancing with someone, one arm in an embrace, the other stretched out in front of her, still holding the dishwashing scrub.
I’m confused. I can’t imagine this. “Are you going too? Is that where you’re going?”
“I don’t know.” She shuts off the water, drying her hands on the skirt of the dress. “I mean, today, maybe. But I don’t know about every week. I don’t know what I’d do with Sam.”
I am watching her eyes, trying to see if she is joking or not. They’re just a little crossed, the way they always are. She’s serious. But I can’t really picture her dancing the tango, slinking around a ballroom in Kansas City with DuPaul. For so long now, I have only thought of her wearing the red glitter hat, tired and kneeling before Samuel, trying to put on his socks.
“I’ll watch him.”
“I’ll do it,” I say. “Until I have to leave for school. I really will.”
Samuel stirs in his beanbag. We wait to see if he will fall asleep again, but he starts to cry. “I’ll get him,” I say, holding up my hand. “Really. Go get ready.”
She starts to walk back to the bathroom, but then stops and turns around. “Listen, Evelyn. I’d like to take the lessons if I can. If you’re really serious, I’d appreciate it. It would be nice.”
“I said I’d do it. Jeez.” I try to look annoyed, but really, I like how I have surprised her. I have startled her, just by being nice.
“Thank you,” she says. She looks out the window, tugging on her earring. “But don’t say anything to Eileen, okay? I just don’t want to hear that Tribe of Ham bullshit just yet.”
“Okay.”
She smiles, twisting one of her toes on the linoleum. “I like him a lot, if you want to know the truth, and I’ll let her know pretty soon, when I’m up to it. Because I can tell you right now, there’ll be a fight.” She turns around and throws little punches up in the air, walking back into the hallway. “Buy your tickets now.”
When I go to move Samuel, he pulls away from me, pointing vaguely up at the television. I can’t tell what he wants. I start to change the channel and then stop. “Can I try a different channel?” I ask. “See what else is on?”
I wait for him to point to the YES or the NO, but he doesn’t do either. I scan the channels. There is Billy Graham on one station, the weather report on another. On the weather report, a man points to a map of the Midwest, Kansas outlined in black underneath the animated clouds. There are tiny cartoon lightning bolts in the upper corner of the screen, and SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING blinks across the bottom. The weatherman talks about pockets of low pressure, barometer readings, low fronts and cool fronts. Radar blips in the background make things seem urgent, exciting.
But Samuel doesn’t care about the weather report. He’s pointing over my shoulder now, at something behind me. I don’t know what he wants, and I can see he’s getting angry. I try various objects from the counter, placing each on my head, one at a time: the phone book, a mug, a bottle opener, a box of matches. I try one of the cats. He shakes his head and keeps pointing, getting agitated, groaning now, red in the face.
“I don’t know what you want, Sam. I’m sorry.”
He bangs his head on the side of his wheelchair and points again. I look into his glassy blue eyes, hoping for hint, a flicker, something, but I see only blue, and my own reflection.
“Do you want to go outside with me and watch the storm?”
He rocks back and forth a few times before his hand slides to the green circle.
It isn’t raining yet when I wheel him outside. The wind is strong though, and even over the sound of the highway, I can hear it rustling through the corn. The sky is interesting, cut in half. There is a deep, dark thunderhead in the distant west, but directly over our heads the sun is still shining, surrounded by a cloudless blue. The line in the middle of the sky between storm and clear is almost perfectly straight, as if someone drew it along the edge of a ruler.
I know from Mr. Torvik’s class that this is called a wall cloud, and that wall clouds can turn into tornados, warm and cool air pushed sharply together on each side. But not always. Sometimes the two sides just sort of melt into each other, and they don’t turn into anything at all.
A jet flies over our heads, high up in the blue part of the sky, leaving a thick white trail. Samuel points up at it, his eyes wide. I wonder if he thinks I can reach up and place the jet on my head for him, like a tiny toy just out of his reach.
Verranna Hinckle has been telling my mother more stories, filling her head with more distant miracles. She brought over a VCR and a videotape of a little girl with autism in Korea who didn’t speak and didn’t seem to know her own mother was sitting beside her, but she could hear Beethoven once and then play it on the piano. My mother got excited and bought Samuel a toy keyboard. She got it out of the box and placed it in front of him, pressing his hands against the keys. He just sat there, not even looking at it, his hand in his mouth, and then finally my mother got quiet and put the keyboard away.
Nothing.
Nothing yet, my mother said. It may be something else for him.
Thunder rumbles again, closer now, and both Samuel and I gaze up at the darkening sky. It’s beautiful to look at, the clouds rolling into one another, lightning crackling on the horizon. But it’s frightening too. Times like this especially, I hate to think that the Earth is just a rock spinning in space, and that if it ever stopped or even slowed down, that would be the end for everybody. The clouds, the cars, even the buildings would go flying, burning up or flying out into nothing at all.
But Mr. Torvik said there was no reason to think that this would happen anytime soon. If we don’t mess it up, he said, the Earth should just keep spinning, all the plants and animals and people turning right along with it, safely tucked beneath the clouds.
He had stood on a chair one day and moved the little Earth in his classroom around the electric sun, his hand clutching the bottom like he was changing a lightbulb. He kept it tilted on its axis, so we could see how sometimes, depending on where the Earth was in its orbit, the light and heat of the sun would shine more brightly on the Northern Hemisphere, and then later, more on the Southern. If the Earth weren’t tilted like this, he said, there wouldn’t be seasons. He made the earth straight up and down and moved it around the sun to show us what this would look like, the band of light around the equator unchanging as he moved around the room. But this way, he said, tilting it back, everybody gets some light.
There is more lightning, a flash of brightness tearing across the sky. Samuel shrieks and points up, his eyes wide.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?”
He doesn’t answer, doesn’t point to the YES or the NO. After a while, I feel the first drops of rain, cool and soft on my face. Already the clouds are moving toward us, spreading out across the entire sky, our shadows on the concrete disappearing.
Readers’ Guide
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The following questions are intended to provide individual readers and book groups with a starting place for reflection or discussion. We hope they will suggest a variety of perspectives from which you might approach The Center of Everything.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Who is narrating? What historic or other signposts are available to the reader so that the story can be located in time and place? To whom or what does the title refer?
What do you think of Evelyn, Tina, and Eileen? What about Tina’s father? What kind of people are they? What do they look like? What is Sam’s role in the family and in the story? Share your impressions of other characters that stand out, and why.
When do you learn the narrator’s name? What is going on in the story when this occurs? What, if any, is the significance of the scene where the narrator’s name is revealed?
How does Moriarty use language to reflect the experiences and thoughts of the characters? Examine and discuss whether or not Evelyn’s thoughts and spoken words are reflective of a child’s point of view, and why. Share some examples that you find effective and/or moving.
How do Evelyn’s feelings about her mother affect your feelings about Tina? Explore whether or not you are sympathetic or disgusted by Tina, and why. At the end of Chapter 11, why does Evelyn not wipe her mother’s kiss off her forehead? Share some examples of how Moriarty brings out the mother/daughter relationship and whether or not you can relate to it, and why.
Why do you believe Tina doesn’t speak to her father? How do you respond when you learn that he told the family that a “little horse” is coming to dinner? Discuss this scene and its implications. Consider how such a small phrase can reveal so much.
The car that doesn’t shift
is one of the many symbols Moriarty uses. What is its symbolism? Share some of the other symbols used throughout the story and how they are utilized.
Discuss the whole school milieu that Moriarty evokes in The Center of Everything. What are the roles of friendship pins and particular pieces of clothing in the lives of grade-school kids? What are your memories and experiences of these years? Share whether or not you think Moriarty successfully conveys these school experiences and why.
Discuss the use of religion as a recurring theme throughout the book. As a storytelling device, what purpose does it serve? Why would a man as “religious” as Tina’s father shun his daughter and be so unforgiving? How does Eileen live her beliefs? How does religion affect Evelyn? What happens at the church meeting with the healer? Why do people believe in healers? Share whether or not Tina comes to believe in some sort of religion, and why.
Why does Moriarty use the struggle between evolution and creationism in the story? What makes it particularly useful here? Why do people have this debate? Examine whether or not the characters’ positions ring true, and why. What would you say to those who have different beliefs than yours?
Do you believe Deena’s pregnancy is motivated by Travis’s change of plans? Should Evelyn have shared this with Deena? What position does Evelyn put herself in by doing this?
How does the car accident that kills Traci affect Evelyn? What motivates Evelyn to initially keep Traci’s belongings hidden? Examine the significance and possible symbolism of Evelyn hanging on to Traci’s clothes and locket into high school, and what they represent to Evelyn after Traci’s death.
Discuss the underlying theme throughout the novel of being chosen or not being chosen.
Discuss Moriarty’s use of foreshadowing throughout The Center of Everything. How does it influence your reading?
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I want to thank Elias Kulukundis and Phillips Exeter Academy for creating the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing. The Fellowship allowed me the time and space I needed to complete this novel, and I will always be grateful for Exeter’s wonderfully supportive community.