The Center of Everything Page 13

  “What did Maude say in the car?” she asked Ned.

  “She said that everything she looks at here, every hill or road, is a dead person.”

  Everyone had a core of hell and doubt and sorrow. Polly wanted to drink more, or much, much less. Helen drew and the wet dogs lay next to them, panting. A couple floated by and Polly could hear giggling before they came into sight, unfurling and possibly en déshabillé. It would have been lovely and funny if she didn’t think of Ariel.

  She flopped back onto the sand one more time and stared up. Tree crowns, beautiful clouds, the gyre of birds downstream near the old diversion station; in the corner of her eye a fast first quiver of bats, probably her bats. The cliff across the river changed color as the light left, and she wondered if it had been daylight or dark when Asta had driven down the road across the river, with someone. In early December, it always seemed dark.

  “Are you all right?” asked Ned.

  “I’m fine. A little woozy,” she said. Woozy, muzzy. She should get T-shirts that labeled the condition of her day.

  Down the beach, Merle called to Ned to play cards, and Helen skittered off with him. Maude was going on about her half-finished list. She hadn’t seen an interesting bird or Harry’s dig, and advice—she’d barely started with the advice. Why was Sam so slow at shuffling and dealing? Had no one trained him?

  Another shadow across the sun, Jane passing with her binoculars up, an expert at work. Quite an act; Polly hadn’t seen such a thing for ten years. Hopefully Maude noticed.

  “What’s so interesting?”

  “Maude claims she saw a black vulture, so I thought I’d check.”

  Polly turned to an astounding sight, no rooks but a murder of crows, a whirl of magpies. What was the word for ravens? An unkindness. “Do you know what a black vulture looks like?”

  “No.”

  “It’ll be a dead deer, and the dogs will follow you and roll in it,” said Polly.

  “We’ll be using your bathtub to wash them,” said Jane.

  “Jesus, Mom.”

  “Jesus, Polly.” Jane was fiddling with the focus on the binoculars, and then she was gone. Polly could already imagine the stink of what the birds were eating, and then, with a shift in the wind, she realized she could already smell it.

  She lurched upright. “Mom, stop!” Polly started to run, not easy on round river rocks and sucking mud, wondering if she was imagining the smell, wondering why she’d thought of a deer and not something far worse. “For fuck’s sake, stop!”

  She could hear Helen’s happiest fuck fuck fuck singsong, Maude’s raucous laughter, Ned calling her name. Polly called back, telling him to hold on to the children. Jane heard nothing and marched, oblivious, toward the spiral of birds, and Polly ran drunk in a carousel of images, her childhood of bodies on beaches. She was within a yard of Jane, both of them zigzagging through willow saplings, when they came into a clearing and saw the white outstretched arms, a back mottled with tentative pecks, thick reddish-gold hair spread over the drying sand.

  Jane screamed.

  Part

  Two

  10

  Summer 1968

  One morning in late June—a steamy, midwestern kind of morning, not normal for a town on Long Island Sound—Dee took Edmund and Polly on errands to Brooklyn in the old car, a big blue 1944 Ford, because Papa had the Volvo. At the Italian market, where they’d stopped for veal cutlet and fontina, the three of them stared down into a full bucket of live squid. The owner had brought them from the Fulton Market; it was the feast day of John the Baptist, and the squid would be stuffed for one dish and sautéed for another. Dee listened to the Italians squabble over recipes, while Polly and Edmund backed away from the bucket.

  “You can’t possibly use all of them,” Dee said, touching the moving water with a finger. “I’ll take three pounds.”

  Everyone always did what Dee wanted. Her hands shook when she took out her money, but you wouldn’t pity her. The shop owner scooped the creatures out, some listless, some wriggling.

  Dee needed a pillow to see over the dash of the Ford. She was not much bigger than the children, an eighty-year age difference but none of them over one hundred pounds.

  “I used to be taller and curvy,” said Dee. “But you can’t keep everything.”

  The children were alone in the house with Papa and Dee for the week: Merle and Jane were off visiting Rita at a hospital upstate and would stay for a few nights in the city. To be silly, said Dee. To be young. She wiggled her hand in the air as if she were a conductor, as if the knotted fingers were dancers, and talked about John the Baptist, beheaded by a beautiful woman, as saints were, back in the day. There’d always been a festival at this time of the year in most of Europe, because of the solstice, but these days you needed to go all the way up to East Harlem to find a parade. They were better off at home, anyway, getting the house cleaned up in Rita’s absence.

  Salomé, squid, saints. At stop signs, they could hear the lidded container slosh behind their heads. Edmund acted as though he hadn’t heard Dee say his mother’s name.

  “She won’t be out of the hospital for a few weeks,” said Dee, who noticed everything. She stared at the windshield with huge eyes, and her papery eyelids seemed to take up most of her face. “She needs her rest.”

  But they knew Dee was happy—they were all happy—to have Rita gone.

  The main point of the day was to hang canvases on the walls of the long upstairs hall, over the mess Rita made before she was taken to the hospital. When Dee drove into the yard, Papa was overseeing two students who’d arrived with a truck. The canvases, which reached the ceiling, would cover most of the splashes Rita left behind and fill the gaps between the bedroom doors. Normally—the wrong word when discussing Rita—Rita painted shapes that looked like origami or sand seen through a microscope, and both the shapes and the canvases were small and precise and lush in a way that reminded Polly of Dee’s Russian or Turkish carpets. But after a quiet week, they heard her wander up and down the hall. No one came out, all of them holding their breath, and when it was finally light they saw wet red hills that looked like a roller coaster and awkward blue trees lurching across the walls like Matisse dancers. Jagged teeth at the top and the bottom might have been mountains or hell. Rita said that random circles, like blobby polka dots, were the planets, listening to the water.

  “Jesus, Rita,” said Merle.

  “I can’t see real things anymore,” said Rita. She threw one pot of acrylic paint the length of the hall, hit Merle in the head with another, and locked herself in her room. Jane pried Rita out at lunch, but when Rita saw what she’d done she lay on the ruined Persian runner and cried. When she did not stop crying, Merle called her art dealer to see what she might have taken. Jane sat with Rita, and Papa called a doctor, and Dee loaded Edmund and Polly into the car and took them to a matinee—Doctor Zhivago, not childish crap, said Dee. She requested extra butter on the popcorn, whispered explanations of Russian history, and said it was good to leave the others to wait for the little men in white coats. On the way home, Dee thought to explain that this meant doctors, not miniature men.

  Dee and Papa didn’t see the point of repainting the hall or replacing the runner if Rita would be coming back. The only thing Rita liked to do, and usually did well, was paint. Thus the tall, white canvases, touching the spattered ceiling. If she was going to throw paint around, said Papa, they might as well catch it. The students carrying the canvases were nervous, but Papa probably made them that way at the best of times, even when he wasn’t warning them to mind every fragile thing they maneuvered past in the cramped house. He loomed, and evidence of the bizarre was all around them in the other paintings and sculptures in the house, spears and bear skulls, the amused old lady, the green parrot on the grapevine at the entrance, telling them to go home.

  “What will she draw?” asked Polly.

  “I’ve no idea,” said Papa. “Maybe the real things she was upset about. What wo
uld you draw?”

  “A map of the world,” said Edmund, who only ever drew maps.

  “Go practice on the sidewalk,” said Papa. “Make sure you add some live things.”

  They used the stubs of Rita’s pastels, but it was hot, and inchworms dropped from the dogwood. Polly made her continents too large, Edmund too small. He used a squirt gun to clean away their mistakes, which meant a wait—not long at all, because of the heat—while the sidewalk dried. Their minds wandered and they whined their way into the kitchen, where Dee worked on a tomato sauce, rolling back and forth between the table and the stove with the rolling stool she’d begun to use. Polly sensed her lack of patience, but it was so, so hot outside, and Papa finally found a scroll, an actual stretch of uncut soft paper—he had every sort of object in his office—and stretched it out on the bumpy table on the front porch. He showed them drawings in an old bestiary and a children’s atlas with bright trains flying over mountains.

  Polly and Edmund ridiculed the atlas, but they were doing the same childish thing. How could they show the north and south poles, the sky and the water and the stuff boiling under the rocks, all on the same page? The bestiary showed creatures that had never existed, leopard women and sea monsters and single-eyed men. Papa said to try their best and disappeared with Dee for their daily nap in the bedroom at the end of the hall. When Merle and Jane were away, and Polly ran down to Dee and Papa’s room after a nightmare, she would watch them for a moment before she woke them, and wonder why they looked so young in the dark, until they opened their eyes and let her climb in. We’ll give you a good dream, they’d say. Don’t worry anymore.

  Most days in the summer were like this, as long as Rita was away or quiet: Jane and Merle would go to classes and work, and the very young and the very old, left in the house together, would swim around each other. For Dee, Polly and Edmund would pull weeds from the brick path, soften her clay with their small, hot hands, drift down the path toward the Sound during the daily nap. They took turns holding Lemon, who was strong enough to drag them. After Edmund first moved in, he spent weeks bringing creatures and plants up for identification: sea lettuce, knotted wrack, stone hair, periwinkles, surf clams, bloodworms. He did not try to catch willets and yellowlegs. He would ask questions—why was crab blood blue, how did clams mate—and return the animals to their exact place. Merle gave intricate explanations and would sometimes try to keep a sample for his classes, which bothered Edmund. Papa, who had grown up near a northern ocean, gave more convincing answers. Dee said he made most of it up, but Polly couldn’t imagine that face lying.

  Today was windy, and it was cooler down by the water, almost low tide. They popped jellyfish and seaweed pods, smacked mussels open for pearls. They waded for a while before losing the point again. They poked skunk cabbage until they caught the smell and saved a broken mussel with a shell bluer than most. But back up at the house, when they tried painting, the colors weren’t right—the olive brown they used for kelp didn’t shine, and the great curling water, green and blue and white, defeated their best attempt at translucence. They resorted to the bestiary, but their blue whale looked like a deflated balloon, ribbed with stretch marks, and the other sea creatures they tried to draw were all a flat gray, blobs that looked deader than rocks. In frustration, Polly veered toward the blues of the sky, and tried to draw the witch’s green parrot, the one that May the cat wanted to kill. But this parrot’s existence meant that somewhere there should be a tree to land on, tigers and snakes and elephants that would need grass and rivers and mountains to cross.

  The whole wayward notion of time, usually pleasant or invisible, became oppressive.

  “My mother will know how to do it,” said Edmund, for the first time in his life.

  They wandered away from the scroll, ate the sandwiches Dee left for them, and headed toward different corners of the house. It didn’t do to spend too much time together.

  By late afternoon, the squid stopped moving. Their bodies were about six inches long, the two tentacles almost the same length, and the eight arms were much shorter. Dee let Edmund and Polly stand on chairs at the sink while she showed them how to pull on the head so that the gloppy mess inside emerged. Dee wanted them to save the ink, and they found the sacs—silver beans in the head—and put them in a half-pint jar. They pried out the soft backbones, which were clear and iridescent: Polly held one up in front of her eyes and looked toward a lamp with a stained-glass shade. It was like looking through a soap bubble.

  When Merle came home two days later he would draw a squid’s body precisely, explain the why and how of shooting ink, propulsion, the three hearts, the invisible gills, each with its own heart. He would label each body part: mouth and beak; the third, central, systemic heart; the penis or the ovaries; the siphon the animal used for everything from shit to eggs. No one knew yet that squid saw light with their skin, or that they hunted in packs and their arms had a mind of their own, or that their beaks could punch through bone.

  Dee saved the arms and tentacles, but she trimmed away the eyes, and the round cross sections with pupils on the sides shone up from a pillow of guts at the bottom of the sink, making Polly’s skin shimmy. Dee scooped the mess into a bowl and let Edmund hurl it into the yard, and within a few minutes a crow and May were fighting over the bits, while Lemon, chained just out of reach, watched in despair. A flash of green, the parrot—male? female?—jeering from the fence, saying poor doggy stupid doggy.

  Edmund and Polly didn’t know how to cook yet. They didn’t know how to do anything. Dee made dough, and showed them how to roll pici noodles, no different than rolling little clay worms while she threw pots in the greenhouse. She fried a few of the tentacles in a batter and they ate them with salt and a lemon from her window tree. Dee chopped garlic and some of the tentacles and mixed in parsley and an egg and bread crumbs she’d buttered and toasted in a skillet. Edmund and Polly helped her stuff the mess in the squid bodies but did not try to sew the slippery flesh closed. Dee’s fingers were huge and crooked—she slammed around a pan Polly could barely lift—but the real problem was her eyes: She needed to bring the bodies up to nose level to insert the needle, over and over, as she stood on one foot and rested her other knee—the one attached to the bumpy shin that had broken so badly in a fall—on the stool.

  The where and how of the fall had become a game. Polly loved to track versions: Dee had tumbled down a hill in Granada, she’d fallen out of a barn loft in Montana, she’d been looking at a man on a street and rear-ended another car in Los Angeles. Everything, always, was about having Polly and Edmund look at a map, having them know where the world was. The children would touch a shark tooth on Papa’s sill, and he’d say Crete, or Cape May, and they’d add a pin to the map in Papa’s study. A bone whistle: Persia. A piece of pottery: Lesbos. All your life long, said Dee, you must love your home but see the world. Papa claimed that the accident happened when Dee lifted a rock and fell into a tomb, that a slab cracked as she stood on it, and she’d fallen into time and onto bones. Don’t look under rocks, he said, as they pried pill bugs from hiding places. A whole world might open up underneath you.

  But the truth was probably the story Jane told them: In a cave in Morocco, during one of Papa’s digs, Dee stepped into the wrong direction of darkness and fell a long way. As she dropped, she held tight to a small ivory moon she’d just discovered. Merle snorted at this detail in the story, but Polly and Edmund didn’t have a problem believing it—if they imagined falling in the dark into some unknown place, they squinted their eyes and clenched their hands, so why wouldn’t a person do it if they were truly falling?

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” said Papa. “She’d gone off to pee and stepped into thin air. When I reached her she was proud she hadn’t pissed her pants.”

  In both versions, Dee never made a peep until they got her into the truck and bounced into town.

  Now she rolled the stuffed squid around in a hot pan until the bundles browned and shrank and bulged, the
n let them bubble with wine and tomato before she sliced them into rounds, dressed the pasta, and arranged them on top. Edmund and Polly ate everything; they were not fussy. Disdain had cured them—Papa wouldn’t punish them for not eating, but he would ridicule their cowardice. Tonight he was in a good mood. He and Dee always drank wine, and Polly and Edmund were each given a shot glass while they heard about the color Dee would glaze a new bowl, the chapter Papa was writing on bird gods, the general stupidity of the world at large. During dinner, through the open window, they all watched the crows continue to taunt poor chained Lemon (Merle, in lieu of rent, was supposed to build a fence). Papa told the children that crows held funerals, but no weddings: They should put that in their hopper. He said they should use the squid ink to sketch out their map on the canvas upstairs. If Rita wanted to paint over the ink later, she could.

  “Using what?” asked Dee, on her way to saying no. Dee did this often; she was the person who said no to him, and their arguments were rich and quiet and dense.

  “Goose quills,” said Papa. He laughed at her face. “I suppose brushes and inkwells, though their fingertips would work best. The carpet’s already ruined, right?”

  Dee planned it out—the door to her quarters at the far end would split the Pacific Ocean, so that Edmund would not have to face Southeast Asia every time he came out of his bedroom. Rita could paint over the lines later, or she could use them. It would be like a toast, good luck.

  The children quickly gave up on the ink, and Dee used it to draw a perfect giant squid near the bathroom door. They sketched coastlines with charcoal pencils: it was night over their heads, a hot day in Asia, and the moon looked like the one Dee clutched in her hand while she fell. Edmund tried the Nile and did a good job: It looked like a snake or a lock of hair, but the mountains on either side looked like tents until Dee suggested he turn them into volcanoes.