The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  “Add some beasts,” said Papa. “What’s a world without a monster?”

  “It’s a world where children can make it down the hall without being terrified,” said Dee.

  “They’re already having nightmares,” said Papa. “Drawing the teeth might help.”

  Polly and Edmund managed the outline of a sailfish, a single bird over the ocean, and a horse in what was supposed to be the American West. Then they scrubbed the different kinds of black off their fingers and went to bed, all of them sliding easily away into the dark.

  Borderlands: the banister, the fringe of grapes on the porch, the tide’s limit on the Sound, the edge of the woods, bedroom doors. When Jane and Merle came back from visiting Rita, the children could hear most of their story through the grates: Rita was mad, mad, mad as a hatter. She wouldn’t draw, for the first time in her life, and she sat on an iron-barred balcony and yelled at anything that passed below—squirrels, nurses, other loonies. When her mood shifted, she went to bed with her eyes screwed shut. The hospital could keep her for another two weeks, at most. She certainly couldn’t go back to her in-laws’ house.

  “She’s burned her bridges,” said Merle.

  “Really only the garage,” snarked Jane. She sat at the dining room table and wrote many drafts of a note to Rita’s estranged family. Estranged, thought Polly, while Jane struggled with her wording. They watched her address the envelope, seal it, stamp it.

  No one mentioned what the letter meant for Edmund, and he went to his room. Papa had given him an old record player, and now he played his two albums, over and over, right through lunch: Camelot and Sgt. Pepper. Polly’s open bedroom window was next to his, above the crab apple, and she became dizzy with fixing a hole where the rain gets in, and stops my mind from wandering. Or was it wondering? She got things wrong, often. She’d looked for isles at the movie theater before she saw the word aisles one day. You couldn’t ask about everything. Now she made her way outside to the grape-covered porch and watched Papa teach Lemon to sit, stay, lie down. He finally walked into the house, and a few minutes later new music floated down from Edmund’s bedroom window: Vivaldi.

  When Papa brought Edmund downstairs for a sandwich, they all walked out to help Dee in the greenhouse. Papa moved Rita’s paintings to one side and Polly and Edmund arranged Dee’s bowls and water and supplies before they lost track and started poking around. They found a wood wine box that held pieces of broken stained-glass windows Papa brought back from Europe after the war, the first war. Most of the ancient lead solder was gone, and the crate was filled with ragged jewels, a red wedge that might have been a lip or puddle of blood; a gold sliver born as a dagger or an angel’s halo or the tail of Saint George’s dragon.

  Dee lifted a piece and showed them an air bubble. Polly put her face close and saw small cities, dark woods, and wild animals.

  “If you break it, you’ll let the old air out,” said Papa. “Maybe there’s a plague germ in there. Maybe there’s a last breath from someone shot by a longbow.”

  “You’re so full of garbage,” said Jane, who was sweeping.

  “I am, I am replete. And I am splitting my shrinking seams with things they need to know.” Maybe he was a little drunk; maybe the world was already sliding toward ruin.

  “You’re daring us,” said Dee. She smacked the glass with a knife handle, and they all leaned in. It smelled of candles.

  Breakfasts over the summer were almost always the same: a soft-boiled egg, pork belly cured in salt and sugar by Dee, rye or linseed bread and jam or some peaches in syrup, or applesauce, or berries. On weekends, Dee served what Merle called a real Swede spread—sliced meats and soft cheese and herring and sometimes smoked salmon, more jams, special honey—on her fancy china.

  On weekends, no one left for an office or classroom, but Jane would work on her thesis or Papa’s research. She was trying to identify markers that could help determine the evolution of a story, whether the bean or the vine or the lost cow came before a similar story of a starving boy selling his baby brother and coming home with a baby sister or perhaps a frog. She followed them around the house testing out versions of stories. What story sounded right? Which one scared them more?

  The scariest was always the simplest and shortest, and Edmund and Polly usually agreed with each other. Had they gotten the answer right? Jane didn’t always know. That was the point.

  But today, Papa and Dee needed to drive to the city for a doctor appointment, and Merle, having argued with Jane about who most deserved to drop a class, was the one to stay home with Polly and Edmund. He was in a fine mood, unshaven and humming Beach Boys songs with a stuffed-nose midwestern twang. He brought out stale cornflakes and did not suggest they dress. He turned on the television, and they watched one movie about Hawaii and another with Tarzan dodging dinosaurs, headhunters, lava, and pretty girls. Merle claimed to be terrified of everything, equally, and Polly and Edmund agreed this was a scream.

  The villains sank into quicksand.

  “Put that on your map,” said Merle.

  Which was worse, lava or quicksand? Was lava always red, and was quicksand the slime green they guessed? The movie was black and white. A few weeks earlier, they’d seen Ben-Hur, and Edmund wondered about leprosy. What else fell off, besides noses and fingers? Merle said quicksand looked like vomit, and penises fell off, too, and lava darkened to black as it hardened. He made them sit still while he read aloud a long story about freezing to death in Alaska. Was it better to burn or freeze, Merle asked at the end.

  Polly and Edmund picked freezing, but Merle said he’d rather burn. He made hot dogs and canned beans for lunch. He used his left elbow to hold things against his body, to make up for the weaker arm. He told Edmund and Polly to find something to do, so that he could get some work done: He tried to write every day at a desk in the corner of the living room. He was teaching biology, but he wanted to be a poet; back then, he still thought he would be both. They heard him pour liquid in a glass as they left the room. He kept a bottle in one of the desk drawers, like a detective.

  It was raining hard enough to make the stiff green clusters of Concord grapes swing. After the movies, though Tarzan triumphed and not everyone on the island died, it was hard not to see treacherous sucking mud and grasping killer vines lurking everywhere, beaks and tentacles and poison darts, whirlpools and hairy tarantula legs. Polly and Edmund stood on the back porch watching a little river run down the sandy dirt path toward the Sound, listening to the sound of the typewriter behind them, and when the rain stopped, they walked down to the water, forgetting to close the door though they did bring the dog and didn’t quite lose her. Lemon pranced in the waves and ate the mussels they smashed open, Merle having forgotten to feed her.

  When Jane got home in the late afternoon, she saw Edmund and Polly and Lemon walking up the lane without shoes and without a leash. Merle was asleep on the couch. Jane was upset, and they waited under the grapes. At some point, without really hearing the words of the argument inside, a phone ringing and ignored, they crawled under the porch, wary of spiders but distracted by the coins that had fallen through the floorboards. Lemon was down there with them. All this cool freshly dug dirt was her doing, and they lay together and watched the street through a screen of grass. A couple passed on Christian Avenue, and kissed, and Polly and Edmund didn’t comment but they didn’t look away. Sometimes during these plangent moments they almost understood it all, almost felt awkward with each other.

  Jane and Merle stopped screaming at each other, and when the phone rang again, Polly and Edmund heard Jane’s normal voice. A few minutes later she hurried them into the turquoise Ford and took them out for fried scallops and corn and told them that Dee and Papa were spending the night in the city so that they could see a doctor a second time in the morning. Jane started crying, and Polly crawled onto her lap and pushed her face into the tears on her mother’s neck, while Edmund stacked sugar envelopes on the restaurant table.

  They went to part
ies on the Fourth of July, and then it was down to doldrums, dog days, malaise, parlous times. Dee said she spent too much time reading news magazines in doctors’ offices, and that while the entire world was a tragedy, all of life was a pain in the ass. The mood of the house was fretful. It was hot and the kitchen sink was plugged. Merle, overworked and almost always hungover, spent hours apologizing after he sniped at Dee from under the sink.

  One night, after a week of rain, they watched Papa’s movies. Arnold, as an early birthday gift for Papa, tracked down better prints of three of the movies they’d made when they were both young men, and the large reels lay on the dining room table while they tried to get the projector working again and argued about which friends were dead or still alive. Merle managed to fix the projector and hang a sheet. By then all the men were a little drunk. They watched a few minutes of The Tempest, the oldest. Papa said it was a snore and no one would possibly believe that was a real donkey’s head. He left the room for Tales of Arabia, because his first wife, Perdita, had died soon after filming, and even Polly and Edmund, amused by the silly magic and the bad makeup of the djinns, were uneasy at the idea of her face disappearing. Dee wouldn’t stay in the room for The Window, about an evil man with a bad conscience, but Arnold and Merle giggled to the point of tears when the villain first appeared—a mustache, eye paint, flaring nostrils.

  “What was his name?” asked Arnold. “The inspiration? I can’t recall.”

  “Hush,” said Dee, from the kitchen. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  The Amber Queen began and everyone quieted down, because Perdita played the queen, too, and the story had given Jane her love of flood stories. Papa had learned the fable as a boy: It was an explanation for the amber trees that formed when a Baltic forest drowned and washed up for millennia, the amber traded as far away as Rome and China. It was an Ice Age story, told when the sea level was lower and people might still have found long chunks that still looked like trees, when the shapes might have been visible in the moment before tsunamis, from a boat on a clear still day. It was a perfect example of man constructing stories to explain mysteries, like creating dragons from the Protoceratops skulls on the Gobi. The queen chose the king of the sun over the king of the ocean, and the ocean sent a flood in revenge. She managed to save her people but gave up her own life to see the sun again.

  Polly, already scared of still, deep water, imagined riding on Papa’s rowboat and looking down at a ghost forest. She liked the part where Perdita’s knights, one played by Papa’s youngest brother, knelt in front of her—Polly could talk Edmund into playing a knight. At the end, when the queen was about to sacrifice herself, Perdita’s face became huge and her teary eyes looked out at them. Her lips moved. Dream me, said the titles.

  “Jesus,” said Merle, who hadn’t seen the movie before.

  Papa left the room. Dee had Edmund pull her out of the soft couch to follow him.

  “Wasn’t my sister something?” said Arnold. “You know, half those knights died in the war, but not your uncle Per. He’s still playing cards in Montana. He’ll be here for the party.”

  In the fall and winter and spring, Papa went out rowing on the Sound two or three times a week. Most mornings in the summer and early fall, he swam. Dee called him a real swimmer, a fish, and Merle’s warnings of pollution annoyed him. Life had polluted him for a full eighty-nine years, and he wouldn’t do without the pleasure of water. In a concession, he used a hose to rinse off in the yard, something that never failed to stun Polly and Edmund: Papa, unflinching, voluntarily covering himself with what felt like ice water. Once he screamed when the water hit to scare them, and they heard the witch’s door slam. He swiveled and stared at her door and put his thumb over the hose, so that it jetted almost to her doorway, flushing the poor green parrot.

  Once a week, Jane and Merle drove Edmund and Polly to the ocean beach across the island. They would pair off by age; Polly and Edmund checked back only for food and small traumas. They built sand kingdoms, not just castles, and Polly had a store of scenarios she wanted them to act out: princesses in towers, dragons, Sleeping Beauty. In return, she played war. Which she didn’t mind—Merle found toy wooden bows with rubber-tipped arrows, and a sword for Polly that wasn’t as nice as Edmund’s but was easier to swing. Sometimes they simply lay half in the water, feeling the tug of the ocean, pretending to be dead soldiers in Normandy. They’d watch the sand form around their bodies and wash away underneath, until the sucking feeling unnerved them. They’d tug each other around in the water, curl up in fake foxholes, pretend to be medics and stitch each other up. They never mentioned Vietnam.

  And then, abruptly, they’d become sick of each other. One day in mid-July, Polly wanted Edmund to stand at the base of the dogwood tree, hold his cavalier’s hat against his chest, and say, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.”

  “No,” said Edmund. “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t.”

  You can’t get away with this, even when you’re eight. Merle, passing by, said, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, push down your hair.”

  Edmund giggled. “You can’t let it down. It’s too frizzy.”

  “Say it,” said Polly.

  “No.”

  A nasty little boy wanting things his way, his way, his way. Or was she the nasty little girl? Edmund, who had hay fever, wanted only to be left alone. He was sticky and tired, sick of doing what Polly wanted to do. Now she was eating the last of the SweeTarts.

  “I’ll play swords,” he said. “Or kickball. Or I’ll be the one to ask for television.”

  “Say it.”

  “No.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. His eyes itched so badly he wanted to scratch them out.

  “Say it and I won’t eat the last two.”

  “You don’t even have long hair.”

  “You don’t even have a brain cell.”

  Edmund roared and jumped for the tree, swinging up onto the first branch as Polly scuttled higher. He grabbed her foot and she kicked at his face, lost her balance, and started to fall, clutching at branches, following the SweeTarts down to the grass.

  Later, while she felt her bruises, Polly would think of Dee falling, not dropping the ivory moon, not peeing her pants. She hit hard and stared up. Edmund was still dangling from the branch. She would have cried, but he wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were on the battlefield, the candy in the grass next to her. Polly lurched toward the pieces and stuffed them in her mouth as Edmund gave another shriek of rage and jumped down and tried to pull the candy out. She bit down but he found one, scratching her tongue as he pried it out, and shoved it into his own mouth.

  Polly spat at him, blood and bits of sugar. Edmund smiled and chewed, lay down on the grass, and looked up at the sky through the branches.

  “You’re not a princess. No one would rescue you. No one would even lock you up.”

  They didn’t talk for three hours. That evening, they lay in their bedrooms, with matching open windows looking out at the crab apple tree, while May moved back and forth between rooms. Polly, tired with her rage and bored, could hear Edmund murmur to the cat, and then she heard a different voice, like an old woman’s: O little boy O little girl.

  It was the green parrot, calling from the crab apple. They both got out of bed and stuck their heads out the windows.

  O stupid cat.

  Lemon, trapped at ground level on her chain, whimpered. She’d been skunked the night before and she wasn’t allowed into the house until Jane washed her. May watched from Edmund’s windowsill, tail flicking, and flung herself at the bird in the tree. She missed, reached for a branch with her outstretched front paws, and missed that, too. She fell on her feet and looked up at them, tail slashing, and walked away sedately.

  The parrot jumped to a closer branch. O little boy O little girl.

  “Does he want us to jump, too?” asked Edmund.

  Clearly, said Papa when he heard the story later, the wit
ch sent her familiar to put a spell on them.

  “Stop it,” said Dee.

  When Polly woke the next morning and opened her eyes and stretched, May shifted on her stomach, purred, and fell back to sleep. The window was still open a few inches, and Polly heard rain. She dozed, and when she woke again the blanket felt wet against her legs and the cat was cleaning itself next to a blue feather.

  “You’re evil, May,” Polly whispered.

  Being a cat, May ignored her. Polly lifted her knees to boost her off and stared at a huge red bloodstain, a half dozen more feathers, tropical purple and orange and indigo. At the same time, through the open window, Polly heard Edmund begin to howl. May had given him the head.

  Merle roared through the morning. “That fucking cat. That old bag is going to knock at the door, looking for some bird named Alfie or Sailor. Or she’ll poison the dog.”

  At first, no one listened to Polly and Edmund explain that the neighbor’s bird was green, with a little gold on his head. The dead bird with more than a parrot’s worth of blood had been a rainbow. When the green bird reappeared on the grapevine later, alive and warning of storms, they finally heard the old lady calling a name: Dwight.

  Dee collected the feathers and hung some from each of their windows, to warn the bird away from May, who spent most of her time now on their windowsills.

  Rita returned the next night, as if she’d been summoned. Polly was sitting in the bathtub; Dee’s hands, washing her hair, were the strongest things she’d ever felt. Edmund, first up, was now wrapped in a towel, sitting on the floor of the hall just outside of the bathroom door so that he could hear the rest of the story Dee told, about six brothers who were turned into swans (Dee did not want May to kill another parrot). Vivaldi was playing again, because Edmund liked it now, and Dee said it made a perfect soundtrack—storms, rack, and ruin.