The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  But mostly Polly had been lucky, and she knew it. Never the wrong person on the stairs, in a car, in a boat, in her bed, someone she’d welcome as sane, someone who would slip his humanity. Instead Polly had sweet boys, randy boys, smart boys, run-of-the-mill feckless boys. There were some shits, but she had good friends, cousins, teachers, brothers, lovers. It wasn’t fair, but it was a relief. She recognized her good fortune.

  Her memories were waking up like her eyes. One bad man brings another to mind. Polly faced west, to where Ariel had been, to where the bridge had been and Asta had last breathed air. It didn’t seem to matter that it had been sixty-one years ago, any more than the thought of Ariel was easier on the sixth rather than the first day.

  She climbed back up to the path. A stroller approached, and Jane’s dog once again barked. It didn’t jar Polly out of her state. Back in the car, on the way home, she wondered how anyone could miss the snakeskin on the road, the thin new screen of smoke in the air from Oregon fires, the man watching from the window across the street when she came to a stop. Why could she see these things and not the car coming from the left?

  She braked in time. No one had to know.

  They set off in a convoy, shuttled the cars, and put in at Loch Leven. They’d brought too much food for a picnic. Polly and Ned and the kids took their drift boat, Jane rode with Maude in Drake’s raft, and Merle paddled defiantly in a single kayak, one arm making up for the other, going faster than anyone else. Josie and Harry used a double kayak, and at one point when they trailed the others, Ned nodded, and Polly looked to see Harry swing his paddle experimentally at Josie, who was tilting, maybe trying to see how far she could lean without losing her balance. They were going to keep breaking their minds and hearts over Graham’s guilt.

  The silence and isolation of the river was a relief. There wasn’t much you could do on the planet more beautiful than riding the surface of the water through this landscape. The water was moving, you were moving, the world had a combined hush and roar. Swallows and a golden eagle, ducks and herons. When they passed an old washing machine jutting out between 1930s cars, Polly pointed to the mangle and tried to explain to Sam and Helen. They followed Drake down a chute to a better channel, pulling to reach a beach on the far end of the island where Graham said he’d stopped with Ariel on that last day. Drake knew his stuff; people from his former life would have been stunned.

  Into the boat, out of the boat. Maude said, “Somewhere inside, I am spring. But I’m never doing this again, except in ash form.”

  They all swam, except for Maude, who sat in a folding chair in shallow water and wiggled her old toes. A sandbar upstream created a wide, calm pool, and Jane and Polly could stand waist-deep and tow the children around by their preservers, though Helen could probably swim better than Polly now. They dipped their faces underwater together and opened their eyes to see Sam swim beneath their arms. The others made for a deeper, larger pool twenty yards away, and Polly watched Drake check the depth and take running jumps.

  Ned followed Drake once, then twice. Polly waited to see his head again, and when she waited too long, her blood began to pound. But there he was, crawling out of the river downstream, dripping, seeing the look on her face and trotting toward her, telling her everything was fine. “See the day, Polly. It’s beautiful.”

  “Where’s Harry?” asked Maude.

  “Looking for things,” said Josie.

  Cornflower-blue shorts, ripped off a girl with Titian red hair, thought Polly. When Harry returned, shaking his head, Drake disappeared. Eventually Polly worried and followed him around the bend of the island.

  She found him sitting near the water, holding a plastic bag with Ariel’s shorts. There was blood at the crotch, and Drake was crying. Polly sat there for a while with him.

  “Finding them won’t make a difference,” said Drake.

  “Probably not,” said Polly.

  When they got back to the others, they tucked the bag into Ned’s dry sack while Maude called for Polly, wondering where on earth she’d hidden the ginger cookies.

  Back on the water, Jane and Maude, at the front of the raft, talked about their mirror memories of traveling, being taken to college, being nursed, being advised, being kept safe. They had duplicate memories, too, of a yearly raging fight between Papa and Dee, usually around the time the garden froze, Papa teasing, reminding Dee that she could do nothing about winter—“Dulce and decorum est. You’re short on decorum, my dear”—and Dee saying he was such an ass.

  “And the stories,” said Maude. “His stories, testing which was real and which was more terrifying. I’m shocked that none of us were bed wetters.”

  But Jane had done it, too, and she told them she’d tried her scary stories on Rita—a fable about dead babies, an Italian story about paintings waking—until Dee found out and worried about Rita’s reaction and told Jane to stop. But Jane had always wondered if Dee had been doing some of the same thing, making the world wake up in a way that was wonderful only if you could bear it.

  She had, they agreed.

  “You know,” said Maude, “I was so jealous. You had Mother and Hen all to yourselves. I wanted them to go on forever, and it’s only now that I’m beginning to understand why they didn’t mind leaving. Somehow it just starts feeling like the right thing to do.”

  No one said anything for a moment. Ned was in the drift boat with the kids, all of them giggling, and Merle was off alone in the kayak again, letting it spin on a quiet, wide stretch. Drake let the raft drift.

  “Maude,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I am content. I was thinking of your sociopath just now. It’s funny how you keep meeting the same people, decade after decade.”

  “If this was a movie, he’d die,” said Drake. “But I doubt he’s long for this world.”

  “Horrible people live forever,” said Polly.

  “Not always.”

  “Mostly,” said Polly.

  He smiled and she watched his mind go.

  At home, Helen was back to her mud creatures. She’d found a new piece of old glass from the long-lost greenhouse. It was wavy, attached to a blackened piece of glazing, and only then did Polly remember the tiny lump of diamond she’d tucked in the windowsill bowl. There was no explanation for Dee storing diamonds with her tomatoes, but maybe they should look for more, get Harry and his archaeological sifting screens into the garden and all take a trip to Rome or Thailand or something somewhere pricey.

  Helen was writing letters with the hose in the air now, flushing birds. It was supposed to rain and the whole yard would look like Helen’s body, slick pale clay that dried and turned to dust and would eventually coat every surface in Polly’s house. Dee’s Long Island garden and Jane’s garden in Michigan had been built on ancient sand dunes, ground quartz and coral dreaming green ocean thoughts. Polly’s mud dreamed nothing, but in the garden, digging, her bicycle lobotomy was meaningless, icing on the cake. Polly put her water glass down to weed, knowing she would find it again next week. Here you didn’t fret about garter snakes or daddy longlegs; almost nothing survived here, including the hissing hornworms of her memory of Frank’s garden. Polly had seen only one in Montana, crawling across the street as she drove to the grocery. She’d been pregnant with Helen, and Sam had watched quietly as she got out to stare at the thing, backed up, ran over the worm, and climbed out again to check the result.

  Sam would remember that. How Polly loved him, how she would always be ready to die for him. When she was pregnant with Helen she’d worried about having to share him, him having to share her, but how could anyone pick a favorite child? This wasn’t lovers, apples or oranges, favorite novels. It was air or water.

  All the bad men, all the made monsters. Sam wasn’t going to be one, and Helen wasn’t going to fall to one.

  Helen wasn’t going to fall to anything—she was shrieking at the cat for stalking a magpie, dragging the poor animal back onto a blanket to watch more of the mud magic show.
When the rain began, they flipped a coin, and Helen picked the movie: Sleeping Beauty. Sam sneered until Polly said she and Ned had both liked it at the same age. She lay under them on the couch, thinking of spindles, thinking of standing by an old sewing machine, Edmund saying touch your finger. Try it. It might change us.

  Had he meant: Transform? Take us out of this place, make us someone else, make the world go away? She should see if he remembered.

  19

  Her Oldest Friend, 1987

  In 1968, Polly’s first life ended. By the fall she lost the old people, lost her friend, her house, her school, lost almost everything about the way life had been, and she’d begun a different, more hesitant childhood. She and Merle and Jane were alone together in a farmhouse in a small town in Michigan, and by Halloween Polly was waiting for a school bus to a place where she knew no one, guts gone liquid with fear. Utterly lonely.

  The farmhouse they’d rented for $50 a month was surrounded by ponds, barns, orchards. She couldn’t remember anything of that winter but snowdrifts and asking Jane if she’d tried to find Edmund. In the spring new things were everywhere: fresh-hatched toads, strawberries, bird eggs. Polly draped herself over branches, watching the sky or reading horse books; she ran behind the crop duster when it sprayed sweet-smelling DDT. When the cherries were ripe, the pickers showed up in old cars, huge families packing into concrete bungalows, sleeping on thin mattresses covered with stained striped ticking. She followed them as they picked, because all the children did. She didn’t understand the jokes, but the Mexican families, having appraised the renters’ clothes and car with some sympathy, were kind to her.

  Jane wrote to Rita’s brother in Boston, and he replied that his sister was hospitalized but improving, Edmund was fine, everyone was eager to forget this unfortunate period. Jane’s next letters were returned, with no forwarding address.

  And so Edmund disappeared. Eight months together; nothing like a brother, but nothing like the boys she liked at school, and nothing left but a blurry photo from that first day at the beach, his face in profile, and Rita’s painting, which showed their minds, not their bodies. It was as if he had never existed, and when she tried to think of him a few months later on his birthday, she could not see his face or hear his voice.

  And then everything about daily life changed again: Jane and Merle produced three more children, and the times before and after New York were divided by a wall of babies, pets, car breakdowns, blizzards. It’s hard to be a self-involved teenager in the midst of a swarm; this sudden bloom was probably the best thing Jane could have done for her daughter. Eventually Polly’s sadness was convenient, a wallow after a lonely day at school, when she’d lie in bed and imagine she could see Dee make her slow evasive way to the greenhouse, or hear Papa moving through the kitchen, humming or whistling, snapping his fingers. The worst moments came from a sense that she was letting go of things she should keep.

  When Polly thought of Edmund in the next few years, he’d become one of the lost people, someone who’d vanished as absolutely as Evie and Frank, Papa and Dee. Edmund wasn’t the only abandoned child of that time, and by high school, many of her friends would be ruined, while others would bounce through.

  After college, Polly moved to New York. She found a job in the pastry department at Dean & DeLuca, then small but glorious on Prince Street; she aspired to a job in cheese or meat. She ate coffee beans and berries all day, trading sweets for slices of pâté and salami, sable and vacherin, and she weighed barely a hundred pounds. Caterings blurred together in a succession of white carpets and cupboards, and larger parties were like going to war. This was at the dawn of actually trying to make food taste good at huge events: vans filled with lilacs and mock orange, vats of cream, always several mental breakdowns to monitor. And it was the dawn of AIDS, Polly moving through the boys who didn’t know they were dying yet, none of them understanding how deeply they’d later wish they’d loved even these low-wage hours, any hour, just one more day.

  After two years, sick of food and drama, she crawled through a series of magazine offices with her English degree clamped in her teeth, pumped up her typing skills with an egg timer, and found a job as an assistant, and then a script editor. She gave up words again when she finally had a good salary and joined her friend Jimmy in opening a place down on Hudson. Polly would handle the bar menu.

  One of their customers was a writer named Mark. She’d met him when he’d been hired to write a piece for one of the magazines, which he turned in late. Neither had been impressed with the other, and he hadn’t asked her out until he’d seen her slide past the line at Great Jones at 2:00 a.m. He made love competently and energetically, but entirely in his own head, watching. She’d seen him peering down his long flat stomach at his erection with more obvious admiration than she managed. In his novels, he made striking observations without real curiosity, and certainly without empathy, and that would eventually leave him without much of a career when the novelty wore off.

  But Polly was unkind. Mark had all the right pieces around a flawed, sulky core. She liked his friends, liked the glow—the second novel was getting advance talk—and she was so bruised by the attempt to open the restaurant that she rolled along, mostly smiling, even when Mark introduced her as Papa’s granddaughter. Great-granddaughter, she’d say, looking the other way, reaching for a glass.

  “Well, he raised you,” Mark would snap. “The Arc of the Mind, you know, Myths and Variations. Dated now, but revolutionary in the day.”

  They, she thought. They raised me. And not really; they were gone before she was nine. Though it was true that they had changed everything in the world.

  She and Jimmy began serving to friends while the kitchen was still Visqueened, wires exposed, drywall not yet taped. On this particular afternoon, an eighteen-year-old actor named Drake had been in for scraps and stayed too long, and now Polly was catching up, moving too quickly between a crap stove and a jerry-rigged hot plate, stirring lemon curd while she told Jimmy a story about the kid’s affair with a producer’s daughter, the hours he’d spent hiding naked in a dumbwaiter at the Dakota.

  Polly laughed at her own story and water from the double boiler splashed onto the hot plate wiring. The shock threw her against the industrial shelving five feet away as if the room had tilted and she’d fallen out a window, as if someone had yanked her into a crevasse.

  “Oh, Evie,” she said from the floor. “What a surprise.”

  But it was Barry the cheese seller bending over her with a different kind of soft eyes; he’d just arrived with a delivery of illicit raw milk cheeses. Polly felt slow-muscled but clear, dreamy and lucid, like a flu victim on cool sheets after a fever breaks. From the level of alarm—Jimmy was keening—she wondered if her hair had changed color, if her ears were bleeding, if she’d peed her pants. She wondered if she were dead, but when she started to cry the tears were convulsive, almost ecstatic.

  But Barry was calm.

  “I fall all the time,” said Polly.

  “I’m sure you do,” he said. “But you actually flew this time.”

  She was up and back at the bar by then, after speeding through her prep. She’d never felt better in her life. She loved this combination of serving and cooking, performance art without fussiness. It was a warm day in April, and women outside were forcing summer in short skirts, their pale legs mottled with the effort. Barry, who’d been in twice before, was tall, with curly brown hair and a long, lumpy, Celtic face that would probably droop later in life. He’d been monosyllabic on earlier deliveries until he had a glass of something, and she’d caught him watching her, but he seemed curious, not creepy. He simply seemed to like her, and this was endearing compared to Mark, who now was leaning on a weary arm and lecturing him on psychology. Mark was writing a novel about a shrink, and he’d spent the last month testing his theories on Polly.

  Still, she felt good, clean and strange after the shock. “I’m remembering things I haven’t in years,” she said. “I had a t
heory when I was a kid that people didn’t die, they just found a new life and started over in a different place, as children. My aunt and grandfather were killed in an accident, and I thought I would find them.”

  “A dream, darling,” said Mark. “Not a memory.” He thought her family had encouraged an unhealthy fantasy life. She’d told him very little, but now she wished she’d told him nothing.

  “No,” Polly said. She had a theory, and the whole world was a story, and every story she’d ever heard had a point. “I can track it back. I remember remembering.”

  “What she isn’t mentioning is that her whole family is strange,” Mark said to Barry. “Maybe they reinforced this.”

  “You’ve never met my family, Mark.”

  That snapping sound in the background was a last vestige of affection, puffing away like a dandelion, popping like a lightbulb element, henceforth unfathomable. Polly had been on her way to this point, but now she achieved several stages in a matter of seconds. She couldn’t believe she’d slept with him; she couldn’t believe she’d touched him.

  “Did you ever feel like you’d found them?” Barry asked.

  “Once, in the Village,” she said. She stood still, singed brain seeing Jane ironing with starch, hearing the hiss and crackle and smell while Walter Cronkite or Chet Huntley talked about death. A casket, more weeping, beautiful horses towing a box with a body through crowds. How would magic be done with so many people watching?

  “Tell me about it,” said Barry.

  Back then, when cooking hadn’t accelerated into annual cassoulet parties and a hundred pissy, redundant blog entries on how to make ricotta, you could still stun a human with simple things, real mozzarella or an honest tomato or a good butter crust, fresh sardines at 25 cents a pound from Queens, $1 one-clawed lobsters from Chinatown. The next day, Polly chopped green olives with a not quite Swedish version of cured salmon—cured the way Dee had cured it for Papa, not too sweet—with good olive oil and chives; she made chickpea fritters with red onion and drizzled them with an aioli made with the syrup from preserved lemons. She’d stuffed squid and stewed it in a fresh red sauce, à la Dee; she would slice it and serve it over a pile of orecchiette, topped with chopped basil. For the following day, she planned a duck thigh—soft inside, crackling outside, topped with bread crumbs and a sauce with sharp cider and mustard—and Jane’s anchovy-dosed meatloaf (anchovies had been Dee’s secret ingredient; the past was never quite past), caramelized on the outside and served with ribbons of conserva. Maybe a jarring note of scallops with a lime and red chiles—none of these things necessarily went together. The surviving lemon curd folded with meringue, studded with fresh berries for today, a macaroon with palm sugar tomorrow.