The Center of Everything Read online

  The parade was always held July 2, and it signaled the beginning of the three-day rodeo and vast, ebullient public enthusiasm and drunkenness. Maude usually waved a snooty arm at this aspect of the town, but this year she was intent on going, and Ned put chairs out early in front of the restaurant door. Reliable highlights included the Shriners riding toy bikes, bagpipers, and the always-tipsy Statue of Liberty crew, celebrating a hundred years of drapery. In the old days, Clarence Darrow marched and Sally Rand showed up with her husband, rodeo champion Turk Greenough. These days, Livingston usually pulled in the governor, a senator, Montana’s sole House rep, and too many people too proud of their antique cars. The rodeo queen and her court, the high school band, religious groups, Crow dancers, a defiant Planned Parenthood contingent. Josie was a Liberty this year and was surly when Polly didn’t embrace the idea. Polly was a bad sport, but it was her nature. The only time she’d enjoyed dressing up on Halloween, she’d been a voodoo doll.

  Peake’s was at the epicenter of the mess. Ned was sending out food for an afternoon wedding, and at home, Polly made gnocchi and arancini and lamb meatballs studded with pine nuts. It was a day for round things, and she drove carefully, imagining an especially ludicrous accident scene. The clients had requested coleslaw on the side, not some sophisticated Italian version but picnic style. Hers was not to reason why. It was enough that people liked to eat.

  Ned was blasting a wall of punk, confusing the twenty-year-old staff. Polly wanted to help serve the roast pig—the surplus Maude pig—in the alley parking lot, where they put out food and drinks for concerts and mud baths like the parade. Ned wanted her to work in the kitchen with Graham, who so far that morning had talked to Ned about his swimming career without once saying a word about Ariel. Hence the music.

  Polly found Graham staring straight up with his unbandaged eye, watching a fly bash its head against a light fixture. Precision piles of folded napkins, his forte, surrounded him. Polly arranged a grater and three heads of cabbage, a knife and a board. When he gave her a blank look, she explained that he needed to wash the heads and trim them. This resulted only in a pool of water on the board and some tentative hack marks. Polly dried everything and trimmed everything and went off to pull Bolognese and tart dough from the freezer. She returned to see Graham leave his knuckles in the grater. They watched his blood drip onto the vegetables.

  Polly was not squeamish. The squiggle in her mind was something about Graham, and his body, and the idea that he seemed to think this shit show was funny. The idea that he thought anything on the planet was funny right now. “Oh for fuck’s sake. Wrap it up.”

  He shrugged, shoulders rolling, grin fixed, and she realized his own blood upset him. Polly found bandages. It was like dealing with Sam at four—she needed to explain everything. Rinse your hand off, use soap, dry it, hold still. She could feel Graham’s breath on her neck while she wrapped his hand.

  “I didn’t realize your scar was so large.”

  Polly jerked back. “I’m fine.” She finished and scrubbed off the feel of his skin, scraped up the bloody vegetables and threw the board in a sink full of bleach water. She gave him some parsley to chop for something, someday, and worked at another table with her back to him, happy for the wall of noise. Being around Graham made her feel both miserable and competent. When she checked, his mound of parsley was a combination of purée and stems, and she watched his slow, resentful fingers pull the stems out when she said they had to go. He repelled her, and this made her try to be nice.

  “How are you sleeping? Do you wake up all night long?”

  He looked up from his raggedy, slimy project, surprised and blank. “No, I’ve always slept well. I’m not sore any more. The stitches itch.”

  Ariel was nowhere in his mind. Polly stared at Graham’s face and felt the room slow down again, the music moving into her brain. If your world is a monster, she thought.

  “You look like you’re going to throw up,” said Graham.

  Polly added two onions to his cutting board. He would reduce them to horse teeth and slimy mince. He wasn’t a natural talent. “I’ll be right back.”

  She pushed through the kitchen door. The restaurant proper was closed, and on the far side of the dark room, shining as if framed, she saw her family in the bright sunlight of the sidewalk. Maude, in a folding chair, was being greeted by a succession of people, Jane hunched on the curb with the children, drawing something again to keep them amused. The parade never started on time.

  She ran back toward Graham, grabbed four glasses and a bottle of Champagne. “Take these to my mother and father.”

  He remembered Ariel now. “I can’t. People hate me.”

  Man up, she thought, but how was Graham supposed to feel, when he was alive and Ariel was dead? Not feeling guilty would be hateful. She looked him over. He was a machine, an athlete with a tapered torso and a sulky mouth. He should have saved Ariel, and she knew, she knew, that Ariel would never have willingly kissed those lips.

  “Just go.”

  His expression barely changed but she felt the hate blowing right through the freckles. She watched him navigate the crowd, pale and gouged. Graham wished he were invisible. Polly wished he were, too. He kept his head down, and no one but her family even looked. Of the ten thousand people watching this parade, a fraction knew a girl was floating in the river. Ariel updates were now tucked inside the paper, on page three.

  A siren a block away, followed by the honk of bagpipes, signaled the beginning of the parade.

  “Remember when Graham was little, and he seemed like a sensitive kid?” she said to Ned, in the alley. He was carving the pig, and he gave her a piece of perfect skin.

  “I imagine he still thinks he is,” said Ned.

  Out on the street, Polly crouched by her children and blinked in the sunlight.

  “You have blood on your apron,” said Sam.

  Polly took it off. Kids milled in the street, craning to see around the corner. The floats and marchers ginned up enthusiasm by hurling candy at the crowds.

  Jane nodded to Helen, who’d scored two suckers and given the parade up to draw in a notebook. “She said she knew where to find Ariel. Have you been talking to her?”

  “Feeding her lines? No.” Polly asked Helen, “What do you have there?”

  “A map of all the places Ari likes that she might be. I have to add the rabbit.”

  Polly reached for the notebook. Helen’s drawing showed their street, with a cat and rectangle houses, several dogs, and a ribbon that Polly guessed was the river. The map portion looked like a macramé plant hanger, but Helen had also drawn clouds and the sun on top of the paper and the river on the bottom. The beginning of hell, thought Polly. Bring on the boat and the ferryman. Bring on the Jabberwock. The big X for Ariel was near the place where they planned to picnic, and Polly felt a little queasy. Helen was looking, and what if she found?

  Polly told Helen her map was beautiful, waved her off to chase candy with Sam. She tapped the notebook. “I want to argue about memory,” she said to Jane. “Evie drew pictures for me.”

  “That was Rita.”

  “I never once sat on Rita’s lap. You drew horses and buildings. Evie drew birds and castles.” Polly could see her teenaged aunt shuffling cards, cross-legged on a blanket outside. She shuffled like Merle, like a rural kid, a handy, competent, smart-ass kid. Polly would study Evie’s big knees and her own small ones while the cards whirred, and she tried not to worry about bugs dropping from the mulberry tree that shaded them.

  Polly might have the short-term memory of a hamster, but the deep past of her brain was just fucking fine. “Think of the things I don’t claim to remember,” she said. “The plane ride.” Polly had been given a ride in the deadly plane with her grandmother Cora and Merle a few weeks before it fell into Lake Michigan with Evie and Frank.

  Jane, watching the cheerleaders’ float pass with a weird combination of glee and disgust, wasn’t impressed. Subsets of people began to quarr
el. Sam wanted Helen to be deferential to his greater age, Ned arrived with sandwiches and argued with Merle about whether the new bookshelves should be solid wood or veneer. Maude, surrounded by a clutch of old—very old—friends, disagreed with everyone about dates and names. Shriners on tiny bicycles rode in spirals and when one man, a retired teacher, tipped over and his friends ignored his plight, Merle pulled him upright, and the crowd cheered.

  “I don’t claim to remember the funeral.”

  “We didn’t take you. We tried to keep you away from it all.”

  Tried and failed. “The garden,” said Polly. This was the oldest argument, the thing that goaded Polly most: Jane refused to believe Polly remembered being with her grandfather Frank, tiny in a forest of tall, staked tomatoes. Frank blew his nose like a trumpet, and whistled, unlike Papa, who’d been a hummer. He led her down rows guarded by garter snakes and daddy longlegs. While Polly was the kind of child who’d throw up if someone forced her to eat a cooked carrot, she’d stand for hours picking raspberries, ignoring the fat buzz of bees, the potential touch of awful things.

  A photo did exist of the big garden to the side of the house, and Polly and Jane both cared deeply about gardens, and Jane liked to joke that her daughter was poaching a memory from The Godfather. Did Frank put an orange in his mouth, give her a plant sprayer? But Polly could see her grandfather rip at a weed hiding on the far side of a green-painted tomato stake. He’d helped her pull at another, but she couldn’t make it budge, and he sighed and swore when he saw a tomato worm, plucking it—writhing—from the half-stripped branch, crushing it with a boot. It hissed.

  “No, it didn’t,” said Jane. “Worms don’t hiss.”

  They do when your ears are three years old and two feet from the ground, thought Polly, watching Helen grub for a Tootsie Pop. Nearer my God than thee. Other things Polly remembered from a low vantage point: an ant crawling over a wild strawberry, spiders in lampshades, hair in grown-up noses, the daunting height of sweet corn. How was it any different than now, this bizarre tendency to look at something until it practically melted? The oddly identical scars on Ned’s and Sam’s legs; the brown flecks in Jane’s right eye; the pale, vulnerable skull under the fluff on Helen’s head.

  Helen lost interest in the parade. “We have a worm that hisses in the garden,” she said. “Near the raspberries. It guards the rabbit.”

  Polly and Jane fell silent on the curb. A second marching band passed, then the rodeo queen and her court. The women wore shiny western gear—turquoise, melon, lime—with jewels on their hats and in their horses’ manes. Sam already looked sarcastic but Helen watched with awe, and Polly snatched her to her lap, just for a minute, just to remind her not to run in front of horses or clowns, just to hold Helen because she felt wonderful, and who knew what Helen would remember tomorrow, or in thirty-eight years.

  The way time mixed: Whenever Maude visited, she looked at Jane or Merle or Polly or Ned and said, “Amazing that you all survived.” She’d said it on her visit the fall before, during that extra week in September when all the flights in the country ceased, and she’d said it at Polly and Ned’s wedding, repeatedly. But the first time Maude gave her survival line in front of an adult Polly, it was 1987, when Maude and Polly and Jane were all in Livingston for the joint memorial for the aunts Inge and Odile, sisters-in-law and lovers for seventy years who’d died within weeks of each other.

  “How dare you,” said Jane.

  “Well, let’s talk about it,” said Maude, who was, after all, a psychiatrist.

  This year, no one took the bait after Maude drank too much wine and tried the line. They’d lived through it, and Maude couldn’t for much longer. Merle next politely declined to discuss the dimming of his hopes as a poet while they ate salmon with green sauce, a salad, and socca before the rodeo. Ned did not wish to examine his abandoned legal career.

  “We are not in a reflective mood, I gather,” said Maude.

  Polly was; Polly was screaming with questions, but she knew the beginning of each trip was always about Maude. She wanted her childhood food, Dee’s food, which was different than other people’s childhood food. The list shifted with the decades—a few foreign entries from travels, posh restaurant items, favorites from previous visits—but it was an ambitious list, haute WASP Continental: soufflés and consommés, the potpie of the night before, a bourride. A potpourri of Szechuan and Spanish and Italian dishes, lapin à la moutarde, lobster thermidor, boeuf bourguignon. Maude was less precise about desserts—a plum tart? “Something” with lemon curd and meringue?

  “Can you manage this?” asked Maude.

  “I’ve always managed,” said Polly.

  “I mean now. How is your head, anyway?” Maude leaned closer.

  Ned left the room. Don’t be angry, thought Polly. “Not bad,” she said. “Helen can follow me around with a timer.”

  “I won’t be asking you for this again,” said Maude.

  “Are you sick, Maude?” Jane asked. “Do you think you’re dying?”

  “I’m not sick, but of course I’m dying.”

  Despite Ned’s resentment, despite Jane lines like “Stop and think before you say yes,” Polly resolved to cook her brain into submission, vaporize thoughts of Ariel through movement. What, Polly wondered, was the fucking point in thinking? If Polly could avoid doubt and grief and Maude’s clear sense of doom, why the hell not?

  She would, however, no longer ask Maude what she wanted. Back when the large-tent, two-pig version of the party was on, Maude suggested they make “something simple, like fried chicken or some such.” Fried chicken for one hundred would turn their house into a splatter of buttermilk and Tabasco, clods of flour, ribbons of grease. They were already dealing with the gift horse of two hundred oysters ordered by Maude’s children. Everyone would wait for Polly or Ned or Merle or Jane to handle the problem of shucking, but at least they’d finally have a use for Graham, who’d put a good Seattle oyster house on his resume.

  “She’s not delusional,” said Jane, speaking as if Maude were not at the table after she brought the fried chicken idea up again for the picnic. “She doesn’t cook, and so she doesn’t understand.”

  Maude smiled, snatched back her list, and added confit de canard.

  Polly watched through the window as Ned casually threw an empty recycling bin half the length of the yard.

  “Pasta for the picnic, then,” said Maude. “One of my mother’s recipes.”

  “You want me to bring a pot and boil pasta on the riverbank?” said Polly.

  “Lasagna?” Maude asked. “Though I’ve heard it’s bad luck for birthdays.”

  And so it was a plan. Not a hundred layers, or even ninety, but at least twenty. Polly would make a second tray for the Delgados, because they’d lost their daughter, and this was what one did, whether or not the family was ready to accept it yet. After four full days and nights in the river, they had to understand.

  When Polly made the list, she added past days, for the sake of checking them off.

  June 30, Sunday, home: chili

  July 1, Monday, home: potpie

  July 2, Tuesday, home: salmon & socca

  July 3, Wednesday, picnic: lasagna, Caesar, molasses cookies

  July 4, Thursday, home: leftovers? rabbit?

  July 5, Friday, party, home: oysters, pork, etc.

  July 6, Saturday, home: leftovers

  July 7, Sunday, ??

  “It might be nice to go to the restaurant toward the end of the week,” said Jane.

  “Oh, let’s not,” said Maude. “I do love Polly’s cooking.”

  They went to the first night of the three-day rodeo, lest the world go downhill. Ned did not do the rodeo, though he helped with the fireworks. Horses gave him asthma, and the announcer’s jokes about liberals enraged him and gave him an excuse to drink heavily, along with most other elements of the holiday. Polly packed blankets for the rest of them, an inhaler for Sam, an extra coat for Maude and for Merle, who never und
erstood how cold it was at night at this altitude, wads of cash for glow sticks, cotton candy, bad drinks, popcorn. People paid homage to Maude, while Jane, who’d spent summers here as a child, worked the rest of the crowd.

  Everyone stood for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” During the opening ceremony two years earlier, a skydiver’s parachute failed to deploy, and the man hit the arena dead center at a hundred miles an hour. Polly braced herself but tonight the men and women floated down like quieter fireworks. In other ways, the world frayed: A couple argued behind them and an old lady fell and split her face on the metal steps of the stands while nearby children stared with naked, exhausted fascination. Maude looked smug. A bull rider’s rib-cage muscles ripped free from his spine as he was flung against a fence. When the rodeo queen and her court finished circling the arena, there was a minute of silence for Ariel, the riders’ pastel hats held over their breasts, most of the out-of-town crowd not understanding because of the announcer’s garbled voice.

  When Helen fell asleep on Jane’s lap, Polly took Sam behind the stock pens to the clearing at the golf course where the fireworks were launched by a ragtag, mostly sober group of pillars of the community, which included Harry and Ned. The fireworks started while they were passing the stock, steers and broncs milling in fear and dust in the light of every explosion. Polly could see lather on their mouths, the old stains of the saddles.