The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  On this second night, Polly again noticed Barry’s discomfort when he first entered, when he first looked at her, and she did not know if she should try to surmount it. She brought the dishes out one at a time, wanting to see his expression. The seduction might have seemed feminine, but the whole approach was essentially macho, a boy dare, less a tease (anything placed in a mouth is beyond a tease) than a challenge: Try this, little boy. Try to keep a straight face when you put this in your mouth. Try to say it’s nothing. Try to resist.

  “Open your mouth and shut your eyes,” she said. She was nervous, because there was no one else in the bar, no buffer to awkwardness. She waited, and she fell into love.

  Barry dabbed a finger into the squid and sauce and smiled at her as he put the finger in his mouth. “This is wonderful.”

  He looked different today, better. His hair looked darker and thicker, and the bruiser look to his nose now seemed comforting and lived-in.

  “It was my great-grandmother’s recipe,” Polly said, and then wondered at the way his face closed down. Did he doubt her, too?

  “You were lucky,” he said. The line dangled, but he changed the topic. There was a show at the Met he wanted to see. Would she ever want to meet up on her day off?

  She said she would, and that she would show him some things her great-grandfather had found in Scythia before World War I, still on display.

  The next afternoon, when she had to leave early for a catering, she left a note for Jimmy: Give Barry a slice of focaccia.

  “You mean Berry, as in Berrigan?” said Jimmy. “His real name’s Ned.”

  He didn’t notice when she started calling him Ned. Maybe she’d never called him anything out loud before, but the next night at the bar she asked questions. Why cheese? Why not farming? Pork, bees, apples. Why not law? (She had at some point sussed out the fact that Ned had gone to law school.)

  He made a face and laughed. Jimmy had brought in a bowl of tiny wild strawberries and she popped one in Ned’s mouth. He smiled while he ate it, and she leaned over and kissed him, and he kissed her back and then pulled away.

  His face was flushed, and now Polly flushed, too. She should have waited; she should not have assumed he felt that way. She filled their wineglasses and went back to scribbling down a list of recipes. Why not fishing? she asked, floundering back to the conversation, trying to pretend the kiss hadn’t happened.

  Ned shook his head. He stabbed away at the food—a potpie like no other, a spinach salad with pistachios. “What was the world like, when you were looking for your dead people?” he asked. “What did you see? The daily things.”

  At three, riding on Merle’s young brown back while he swam, looking up at the tops of her grandfather’s tomatoes, the whirring sound of Evie shuffling cards. Or at eight, the green parrot from below, flapping away from the hissing cat, the dogwood tree dropping petals, the map.

  “A map,” she finished.

  “I have always loved maps,” he said, wiping up crumbs with her bar cloth. He had graceful, smooth-muscled arms, with a line of moles above one wrist.

  “What do you remember, from that age?” asked Polly.

  “Everything,” he said. “But let’s start with a girl. I had a friend, a good friend.”

  Something was happening, and she took in the whorl in his hair, the shape of his mouth, her mind slowing down. “You grew up in Ireland?”

  “Not until I was eight. My father died in the war, and my mother was insane.”

  He emptied his wine and fiddled with his napkin. When he looked up Polly’s ears were roaring. She thought of Dee’s hands in Edmund’s hair, Edmund drawing on a sidewalk with the same arm, Edmund ripping at her as she climbed a tree, Edmund under the porch while they listened to Jane’s sad voice, watching each other’s eyes and maybe knowing in that moment that everything might go away.

  “But you knew that,” said Ned. “Polly, I should have told you sooner.”

  Polly was a crumbled, weeping mess. Jimmy let her close early, and she and Ned walked down to Bayard for dumplings, and then to a bar on Crosby Street, and then to more and later food on Varick. He told her that he’d heard her name when friends were talking about a new place that spring, a few months after he’d arrived in the city from Dublin. He’d headed to the restaurant to see her, to confront her about the way they’d all abandoned him, to explain he’d taken his aunt and uncle’s name because he needed to give up everything about his life before the age of ten, to get away from the loss of Rita, Papa and Dee, and, of course, her. He wanted to walk in and witness the moment she recognized him, watch guilt flood over her face, but the shock of seeing her, the shock at realizing he might not have been able to recognize her without some foreknowledge, took him to silence, and dawning familiarity kept him there. His anger cracked off while he watched her move in the chaos behind the bar, and a blast of love followed, something like what he’d felt as a child but also fascination, and lust. If it had seemed like the old longing—Polly as lost family, lost childhood—he might have retreated, creeped out by his own motives. But he felt none of that, or resentment anymore. He just wanted to be with her.

  And so he sold her cheeses, and held his tongue. He was sorry he hadn’t come out with it, but the longer he waited, the harder it was to imagine explaining. He didn’t want to lose her again and he did not know how to get past this moment, this horrible confusion of affections. He called his uncle and told him and said she was always my friend, not my sister. How could it be wrong to feel this way?

  Ned’s uncle said that it depended on Polly, who at this point was next to Ned as they worked through a nightclub crowd on a sidewalk. He touched her shoulder and then her hip to steer her through and she felt like his hand burned her skin.

  They looped around each other for hours, and she waited until he was asleep, facedown and stretched out in the warm apartment, to look at the scars on his shoulder, the kind a cat’s claws might make, the raised scar on the back of his leg, the kind of tear the bent metal of an old boat might make, if a boy had tried to tow it toward a beach and a waiting girl and a dead man.

  She’d put a fan on, and when she heard rustling paper she sat up: On the far wall, a large map of the New York coast, really just shoreline and islands and a world of blue ocean, was missing one tack, and the loose corner shuddered.

  Ned opened one eye.

  “It looks alive,” Polly said.

  “It is alive,” said Ned.

  They were twenty-seven now, but his face was younger with his eyes closed. Nineteen years later, but how could she not have known?

  20

  Sunday, July 7, 2002

  Ned remembered different things than Polly: a fear of burning astronauts, the funeral train, the riots in Chicago, things Polly had somehow lost. The soft suffering sounds Dee made when she thought no one could hear her, the way Jane danced when she did the dishes and didn’t know someone was watching her. He remembered Merle buying the “Hey Jude” single and thinking that the song, with its effort to comfort, was somehow for him. He remembered the things Papa said just to him, those days at the Sound when they went swimming together, about how Ned could live through all of this. He remembered being saved, even though with the loss of Papa and Dee he would be lost again.

  The unknowables, always. Ned thought Tommy had had cold-colored gray eyes, but according to Jane, they were green, like Sam’s. Maybe that part of Ned’s mind had gone to black and white, except for the parrots and the stained glass. The only thing he could remember his father saying, other than “eat your dinner” and “because I said so,” was that yes, Tommy had seen and heard bombs, and he’d told Ned he’d learned that if you screamed during an explosion, it kept your eardrums from blowing.

  Some things neither of them were sure about.

  “Were they magic?” asked Polly.

  “Oh yes,” said Merle.

  “Did the cards move?”

  “Probably. I’d forgotten about you going on about that, Dee m
aking you look at the faces. When you had a fever, you made me shuffle endlessly.”

  “Did the feathers move?”

  “They did after May finally killed Dwight. We managed not to tell you that.”

  “What do you really remember of that time?” she asked Ned, a few months in, when she’d gotten back from Montana and asked if he’d move and he had to decide whether to make that leap of faith. “What is strongest?”

  “I remember love,” he said. “And wonder. So much was so hard afterward, too, but they saved me.”

  Late on the afternoon of the float, after the rain and movie ended, Ned found Polly in the garden. He didn’t ask where she’d been this time.

  “Oh god,” she said. “What time is it? We’re down to Chinese on Maude’s list.”

  He sat down in the next chair and leaned back. Polly knew he was thinking of the last Chinese feast, the toxic cloud of smoke when she walked away from the pan of hot chile oil. Or maybe he was thinking of the previous week, which felt like a lifetime away now: a column of flaming oil, the souls of battered squash blossoms ascending, shrieking their way toward the ceiling. Polly snapped out of it to find Ned lowering the wok lid to snuff the flames.

  “You’ve outdone yourself,” he said. “But why be upset when we like to cook together?”

  The new normal. Tonight, though, he said, “We could just order some fucking pizzas.”

  “What a good idea,” said Polly.

  You never knew when she would just agree. The new, constructive Polly let Ned talk Maude and the others into takeout and stayed in the garden with her notebook to make a list of tasks that she thought she could and could not do well anymore. It was a nice clean feeling. She put an arrow by what might improve and a question mark for things she might be too cocky about.

  Can do: organizing day generally, laying out Drake’s series plot, turning off ovens.

  Not so good: attention while driving, attention while cooking, patience, open flames and hot oil.

  And so on. No longer grace in motion in the kitchen, no longer second nature. Ned said he wouldn’t worry about her if she wouldn’t worry about him. She looked up and could see him through the window, moving around the kitchen, laughing at something Jane or Merle was saying. Her love, her oldest friend.

  They finally cleaned off the dining room table for the meal. Over their heads Maude thumped around, packing for her morning flight. She refused to stay to see a local doctor. Merle and Ned were belatedly taking an interest in the photos that hadn’t been displayed, the ones that weren’t about Maude: their own childhoods and families, the other lives of the house, left behind in the messy boxes. The smiling aunts Inge and Odile, posed in front of the porch—if Polly looked out her bedroom window, they would have been standing directly below, and she’d have seen their coiled silver hair and smelled their lily of the valley perfume. Merle as a bedridden child and a tanned, fit teenager on a dock, the withered arm hidden by a towel. Scrabbly shots of Polly and her toddler sister and brothers, the surprises, sitting on a draft horse. Ned leggy and sixteen next to a tower at Glendalough, Ned and his uncle and Rita, taken the day before she walked into the ocean at Sandymount; Ned and Polly lying on the grass in Prospect Park. When Polly had mailed this last one home to Michigan with the news of their meeting, a bomb went off. Merle opened his first bottle of wine in a decade, and Jane took to her bed. It was all somehow funny in hindsight, but that first visit to Michigan—Merle and Ned arguing, Polly and Jane arguing—had been fraught.

  When she and Ned first slept together, and for the next several months, it shocked Polly, over and over. When he wasn’t in her presence, she’d start feeling woozy and nostalgic, thinking of them as children, thinking of the strangeness of it all. When they were together, he wasn’t that boy, and she wasn’t that girl. They were new.

  It took a long time for Merle and Jane to leave the guilt behind. There were constant small scenes. “Just let us go then,” said Ned, pulling Polly out the door on the third day of their visit. They went swimming and found a place in the dunes in the hot wind, and nothing would ever be that good again, pleasure that ripped at your heart and skin and bones.

  Now Merle and Ned snickered over a photo from that visit, the two of them surly by a barbecue, Polly’s younger siblings circling them, confused by the subtext but waiting for a fight. These days Ned and Merle could handle talking about Rita, they could talk about Tommy, and they could even handle Maude stumping downstairs, demanding a gimlet, saying one last time that it was a wonder that they’d all survived. She looked through the evidence of that survival once Ned delivered her drink: photographs from the wedding, from the trip to Spain, from bleaker moments during renovation. Polly pregnant, Sam as a newborn, the three of them in Ireland with Ned’s aunt and uncle, Helen still screaming in her fourth month of colic, Polly’s sister, Millie, caught sitting on Drake’s lap.

  Drake’s researcher had found footage from Papa’s retirement party in 1968, and he’d printed out some stills for them. Polly could make out the hedge, and it seemed so ratty. No one could lose herself in such a maze. She could see the rowboat down by the shore, closer than she remembered, and it all looked very domesticated. They—Edmund Thomas Ward Berrigan and Apollonia Asta Schuster—were mostly blurs. Polly was visible leaning in behind Dee, whispering in Jane’s ear, Jane with beautiful legs and sandaled painted toes, and Edmund stood behind them, waiting for the answer to whatever question Polly had asked: When will the cake be served, can we let Lemon out of the car again, why do you think it’s too late to swim? Tonight she thought of the brief good moment it had been, rather than disappearance—the beach, the salty stink mixing with the bonfire, the crowd on the lawn moving around beautiful Jane in the turquoise shift, while the doomed man and doomed Rita, the other beauty, walked toward the edge of the water. Borderlands, liminal spaces: Papa had written a great essay on that, too, about the tilting moment in so many stories.

  Polly looked up and Ned was watching her—no message, just watching.

  Maybe the wall had moved, maybe the air in the glass had said something. Maybe that witch really had bitten the dog’s tail off. Love and wonder; everything goes missing but everything lives on, at least for a while, in the small kingdom of your head.

  Things Polly couldn’t know, even with the best mind on the planet: That Thomas Ward really had lain on a garden path in a quiet yard in Hue, with ants marching by as he died; that for some reason he hadn’t felt pain, or fear, and the last thing he saw was a beetle climbing and bending a blade of grass. That Polly would develop a script for Drake that would finally work, and she would make silly money with him and see Italy with her family and get food poisoning in the Rome airport. That Josie and Harry, who would end up eloping to Fort Benton after their third wedding date was derailed, would have thirty years together. That Merle would start writing poetry again, and Jane would like it. That the man and girl Polly had watched in the city when she was little—the people she thought were Frank and Evie—had thought they recognized her somehow, too. That Graham would die a few months later as a passenger in a car accident, lost on a bad turn to the Columbia River. That when Jane, who had always known what Ivor had done to her mother, realized who he was that night at the party, and Papa had asked if she wanted him left alone, she said she wanted him dead. That Maude wouldn’t make the trip the next year or go to the tribute in New York; she would fall and hit her head in late September and die a few hours later without waking up.

  That there was no way around any of this.

  After dinner, Polly went out to the garden. Jane would think she was having a spell but really she was watching the bats as she let herself go back to a moment in Stony Brook. Maybe it had been in June, while Rita was in the bin, maybe a day in July, rainy just like today. They were in the attic, arguing about how to put together Dee’s spinning wheel—Dee had tried to learn weaving during the months after she’d shattered her leg. Jane had taken them to Sleeping Beauty the day before, to get t
hem away from Rita, and watched them sneer at the fear in the faces of the less worldly children around them. This had been one of the stories Jane had tested on them, admittedly not a myth about flood but about another wall of nature, a garden and thorns.

  “Touch it,” said Edmund in the attic. “See if it changes us.”

  The creak of the wheel. “You try,” said Polly.

  “All right,” said Edmund. “Now switch dreams.”

  Rain was thudding down on wet grass, browning dogwood blossoms, discarded toys, the towels Jane had left on the line weighing down the cheap cord so that the laundry dipped to the grass, to the mud and whatever else. The cat darted toward the house, tail like a baseball bat, making for the broken basement window. The witch’s parrot swooped after it, playing hawk.