The Center of Everything (2 page)

“Exactly, Tina,” he said, laughing now, walking behind her. “I might just be giving you a headache. It’s an old car. It’s got some problems.”

“No, no.” She rolled down the window as soon as she got inside, waving us over. “Come on, both of you. Let’s go for a ride.”

So we did. We drove up and down the highway, the three of us, a Frank Sinatra tape in the stereo. Mr. Mitchell sat in the passenger seat, telling my mother when to shift. When she went too fast, the car would shimmy back and forth, and Mr. Mitchell would turn around and look at me like he was scared, but really I knew he wasn’t.

The Volkswagen is okay from the outside, but on the inside, it’s no good. There’s an alarm that’s supposed to tell us that our seat belts aren’t on, and since there aren’t any seat belts anymore, the alarm stays on all the time. This sound makes me crazy. Also the stereo is broken. The Frank Sinatra tape is stuck inside it, and the off switch doesn’t work, so when the car starts, the stereo comes on automatically, and it can play only that tape. You can’t even turn it down.

“Well,” my mother says. “You get what you get.”

I liked the Frank Sinatra songs at first, but now I’m sick of them. I’m sick of “Love and Marriage,” sick of “Witchcraft,” sick of “Three Coins in the Fountain.” I tell my mother I’m so tired of Frank Sinatra that if I saw him walking down the street, I would turn around and run the other way.

She rolls down her window and asks if I would like some cheese to go with my whine. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says. “We need this car.”

It’s true. We live just off the side of the highway in an apartment complex called Treeline Colonies, four flat-roofed, black-and-brown units of eight apartments each, sixty-three miles from Wichita, three miles from Kerrville. There aren’t any sidewalks, and even if there were, there wouldn’t be anywhere to walk on them.

My mother says the rent is cheap cheap cheap at Treeline Colonies because they were going to put more buildings around it and then somebody lost all their money and that was the end of that. There are four units in Treeline Colonies, A, B, C, and D. We live in Unit C. The people on the upper floors get a balcony, but we don’t. My mother says balconies are just something to fall off of. She says she can see where they get the “Colony” part of Treeline Colonies, because that’s exactly what it feels like, a colony out in the middle of nowhere, waiting for reinforcements. She doesn’t see where they got the “Treeline,” though, because there aren’t any trees except for the two redbuds in front of Unit A that still need to be propped up with string and sticks. But I am starting to see that things get named wrong all the time. Rhode Island, for instance. Indians. There’s a strip mall in Kerrville called Pine Ridge Shopping Plaza, but there aren’t any pines, and there isn’t a ridge.

“See, Evelyn?” my mother asks. She has to yell so I can hear her over Frank Sinatra. “See? You never can tell what your luck is. The bus gets canceled, so then somebody gives us a car. A bad thing turns into a good thing, just like that.”

She snaps her fingers. Just like that.

But the Volkswagen always breaks down, so much that when the tow truck men get out of their trucks now they smile and say, “Hi Tina.” Mr. Mitchell has to give my mother rides home from work in his big red truck, and when I get home from school, he’s still there, standing in back of the Volkswagen, looking down at the engine with his arms crossed. He says that cars are like people, and you have to get to know them before you can fix them. He talks about the Volkswagen as if it is a person, a woman, with feelings that can be hurt. “Let’s see what’s troubling her, squirrel,” he says to me, but really, this is all he does. I think maybe he is afraid to touch the engine, with two of his fingernails already gone. And then my mother makes sandwiches or spaghetti and we all three sit out on the step and eat it, looking at the car.

Mr. Mitchell likes to do tricks for me, like pretending he can pull his thumb off with one hand, then put it back on. I am too old for this. I know his thumb is really tucked behind his hand, that things can look one way and be another, depending on where you’re standing.

On our way to the grocery store one afternoon, the numbers on the dash turn to 250,000 miles. Frank Sinatra is singing “You Make Me Feel So Young,” and my mother says isn’t that a coincidence.

But maybe now, finally, the Volkswagen has had enough. My mother has to use both hands to pull the stick shift, and when we stop at red lights, it takes too long to get it back into first. On a cold and rainy day in late April, the gear sticks for too long, and when people start honking she gets out of the car, her arms straight above her head, and yells, “Shut up! Just shut the fuck up! I’m doing the best I can!” She says “fuck” right in front of me. When she gets back in the car, she looks like a crazy woman, her curly hair flying all around her.

The man at the garage says a new clutch is going to cost three hundred and fifty dollars, and that is just the beginning. There’s also the transmission. At home, she sits at the kitchen table, making long lists of numbers on yellow notebook paper, subtracting and adding, rubbing her eyes.

“Why don’t you ask Eileen for money?” I ask. “She’ll give it to you.”

She looks at me, and now there is nothing funny about her face. She tells me no one ever just gives anyone anything. She tells me to go to bed.

The next time Eileen comes over, she brings a strawberry jelly roll, so buttery and sugary I tell her I am going to pass out from happiness when I take a bite. I pretend to faint, and lie down on the floor, shaking for a moment and then lying still. Eileen thinks this is funny, but my mother is too worried about the three hundred and fifty dollars, and has not laughed at anything all day.

Eileen is almost out the door when my mother finally asks. Instead of answering yes or no she comes back in and sits down at the table across from my mother, her arms folded in her lap.

“He sees my checkbook, Tina.”

“Can’t you just make something up?”

Eileen stares at my mother for a moment, like she is waiting for my mother to laugh or at least smile. When she doesn’t, Eileen looks down at her hands and shakes her head. “If you want his money, you’re going to have to come see him. That’s reasonable. That’s fair.”

They’re talking about my grandfather. He doesn’t visit us. I’ve never met him. My mother takes her plate to the sink and turns on the water. Eileen stares and stares, but still my mother won’t say anything else. It’s mean to do this, to pretend someone isn’t there when they are.

“You know, Tina, most people don’t go giving money to daughters who don’t talk to them.”

My mother comes back over to the table to get my plate, not looking at Eileen.

“You going to ask
her
father for the money, Tina?” Eileen tilts her head at me. “Do you even know where he is?”

My mother says nothing to this either, and she gets a very serious look on her face. She bends down and looks under the table, then up at the ceiling. She peers into the hallway. “No. Now that you mention it…,” she says, scratching her head. She looks at me. “Oh my God, where is he?”

Finally, for the first time all night, she is smiling. It’s just a joke. The sad-eyed man who was my father left two months before I was even born. There’s no way he’s under the table. I laugh, but this time Eileen doesn’t. She stands up to leave again, picking up her keys.

“He’ll give you the money, Tina,” she says. “You just have to ask.”

The only good thing about Treeline Colonies is the flat roof. There’s a stairway in the back of the building and a door that opens to the roof, but my mother says this door is for maintenance men who know what they’re doing and not ten-year-old girls who don’t know what it’s like to fall three stories off a roof and have their heads go
splat
on the pavement. But I like to go up there in the evening, watching the sky turn from blue to pink to violet, seeing the first twinkling stars of night.

I just did a report on Venus at school, so I know where it is in the sky. It’s the closest planet, made up mostly of vaporous gases. Ms. Fairchild says that no one could live on Venus. It’s covered with clouds, but the clouds are poisonous, and the poison would kill you as soon as you breathed it, and anyway it’s too hot. The stars are balls of hydrogen and helium and fire, just like our sun, and no one could live there either.

Ms. Fairchild says people used to think the Earth was flat, with an edge you could fall off of. They thought the sky was just a big dome, and that the sun moved across it every day, pulled by a man with a chariot. It’s easy to look back now and say, “Oh, you dummies,” but when I’m up on the roof, watching the sun disappear behind the fields on the other side of the highway, I can see how they would think that. If everybody I ever met told me the Earth was flat and that somebody pulled the sun across the sky with a chariot and nobody told me anything else, I would have believed them. Or, if no one would have told me anything, and I had to come up with an idea myself, I would have thought that the sun went into a giant slot in the Earth at night, like bread into a toaster.

I watch the cars on the highway, their red taillights getting brighter as the sky grows dark. Two deer move quickly through the corn, just their ears showing over the green stalks. There are more deer out, now that it’s spring. Sometimes they try to cross the highway. I saw one get hit by a car last year. The police came and took the body away, and Eileen said they were going to sell it to people who would eat it. A dark line of blood stayed on the road until it rained.

I hear my mother’s voice from below. “I know you’re up there, Evelyn. You’ve got two minutes to get back in here. Two minutes.”

When I get down, I find her back in her bedroom, lying on her stomach, reading a book. She used to just watch television after dinner, falling asleep on the green couch and then waking up again to ask me what time it was, but now she says she is tired of watching television and letting her brain turn to mush. Last week, she went to the library and checked out a stack of books, and now she falls asleep while she is reading. She is still on the first one,
The Grapes of Wrath
, and she says it isn’t nearly as bad as it was when she had to read it in high school, but of course, then she was busy getting pregnant. She had all the wrath she needed, ha ha.

“I don’t want you on the roof,” she says. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Okay.”

“You could really hurt yourself. You go up there again and I’ll ground you. No TV. No radio.”

“Okay.” I say this in a mean way. She’s bugging me.

“Okay then. Do you want to get your homework and bring it in here?”

“I did it at school.”

She rolls her eyes. “Of course you did.”

I crawl up on the bed next to her. I am not supposed to read over her shoulder because I read more quickly than she does, and it makes her mad when I get to the end of the page and look up and hum, waiting for her to turn it. “Mom?”

“Yes.”

“Are we going to be able to fix the car?”

She squints, but does not look up from the book. “I don’t know.”

“Are we going to Wichita to get the money from your dad?” I am kicking my feet up and down on the bed. She crosses her leg over mine, makes me stop.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“What happened to Eileen’s mouth?”

“She married my father,” she says, quickly, half smiling, like it’s a joke she just made up. But even as she says it her voice trails off, catches at the end. She looks up from her book, her eyes on mine.

“He hit her?”

She nods. “A long time ago. Yes.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. I wasn’t there.”

She shuts the book with her finger inside it to mark the place, waiting, and I know this means I can ask whatever else I want. I know I want to know something, but I can’t think of how to ask it. I know you’d have to hit someone pretty hard to do that to somebody’s mouth. You’d have to be really mad.

I’ve been that mad. I wanted to hit Brad Browning last week. He was standing right in front of me, smiling, and he wouldn’t stop saying mean things, and I could feel my hand ball up in a fist. It was like electricity, lifting my arm up for me. And then Ms. Fairchild was behind us, calling us in from recess.

Maybe it was like this. Maybe Eileen was saying something bad to my grandfather over and over again, and no one was standing behind him, telling him it was time to go back in.

two

W
HEN
I
GET HOME FROM
school the next day, my mother tells me we’re going to Wichita.

“We’re just going for dinner.” She is brushing her teeth, hard and fast, looking at me in the mirror. She looks right at my eyes, knows where they are even though it’s just a reflection. “We’ll be back by eight.” She spits and rinses, turns around. “Do I look okay?”

I tell her yes, though I’m not sure this is true. She’s wearing a yellow dress with a high collar, a slip underneath it. She isn’t wearing makeup, and her curly hair is pulled back with two of my barrettes. I like her better the other way, in the gray sweatshirt, or, when she’s dressed up, with lipstick that matches her clothes.

She makes me change into a pink dress that I hate, a present from Eileen from last Christmas. It itches, and I know I look stupid. When it’s time to go, I run to the Volkswagen with my head down, my arms in front of my face. Mr. Rowley is outside, sitting in a lawn chair in front of Unit B. Kevin and Travis Rowley stand in front of him. They are playing some kind of game, taking turns throwing a white-handled knife in between each other’s feet, their legs spread wide. Kevin and Travis are usually fighting, and although the knife throwing is just a game, the fighting is real. Yesterday I saw Travis running out the Rowleys’ door, a magazine tucked under his arm, Kevin running right after him yelling,
“You shit! You little shit!,”
and grabbing Travis’s ankle just as he started to jump down the stairs. Travis went flying forward, his ankle still in Kevin’s hand, his head and arms falling on the concrete with a
smack
that I could hear even through my window. They rolled over each other for a while, their hands on each other’s necks, until Mr. Rowley came out and told them to knock it off. When they got up, there was blood on the sidewalk, and Kevin had the magazine.

Today, when they see me, they stop throwing the knife. Both of them look at Mr. Rowley.

“Well hello there, little Evelyn,” Mr. Rowley calls out. “What a nice dress. Where’s your pretty mother?”

Mr. Rowley always wants to know where my mother is. Don’t tell him, she says. Don’t say anything. So I go to the car without saying anything and wait for her to come out.

Mr. Rowley stands up, watching our door. He’s in love with my mother, but not in a good way. He used to be drunk most of the time and sometimes he would fall asleep on our front step instead of in his own house. I would have to step over him in the morning, and even then he would wake up and move his mouth like there was a lemon inside it and say, “Oh. Evelyn. Where’s your pretty mother?”

The Rowleys moved here last year from Wisconsin, and Mr. Rowley said he made steel there, until one day he went to work and there was a padlock on the door. He used to have a T-shirt that said
MEN OF STEEL! WISCONSIN STEEL
! But he doesn’t have it anymore because he set it on fire. I saw him do it. He was barbecuing out on their balcony and all of a sudden he took the shirt off and squirted lighter fluid on it and then got out a match. The shirt went
poof!
into a bright little ball, and he threw it off the balcony down onto the parking lot. No one’s car was there, but he didn’t look to see either way before he threw it.

He stopped drinking last year because of AA, and he doesn’t sleep on our step or set things on fire anymore, but he still always wants to know where my mother is. Sometimes when she walks out to the Volkswagen in the parking lot, he whistles at her or growls like a tiger, limping along beside her, even though she won’t look at him and she is a fast walker, so it’s hard for him to keep up. My mother says we can never, ever, make fun of Mr. Rowley’s limp, even though he’s a pain in the butt, because that happened to him in Vietnam when he was only eighteen years old.

But, she says, we don’t have to talk to him either.

He has a tattoo on his shoulder, a picture of a dancing naked lady with breasts like staring eyeballs,
CARMEN
written underneath in blurring blue letters. Mrs. Rowley’s name is Becky. She’s very thin, and she wears eyeglasses with a gold chain that loops down on each side of her face. She is not a very nice person. I don’t have to see her so much, except when she is walking their poodle, Jackie O, and then she does not say hello but just stands there, watching me like she is a frog and I am a fly and if I get too close to her, that’s it. She will not let me pet Jackie O because she says Jackie has a nervous condition that I will only aggravate. But I think Mrs. Rowley is the one with the nervous condition. She leans her head over their balcony sometimes and says, “Please don’t jump rope on the pavement because I can hear the
skip skip skip,
and it’s very annoying.” I tell my mother when Mrs. Rowley was little, someone must have told her if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, only she got confused, got it backwards. Only talk if you are going to say something mean.

My mother says oh well, Mrs. Rowley has problems of her own.

My mother also says it’s unfortunate the way Mr. Rowley acts toward women, not just because he’s married but because he’s the father of two growing boys, and you can already see where that’s going. Kevin Rowley is in eighth grade and already he tries to whistle at her the way his father does. One time when he did it my mother said, “What a good little parrot. Want a cracker?”

But the younger one, Travis, doesn’t ever whistle. Every time I see him, he’s biting his bottom lip like he’s either mad or trying not to say what he’s thinking. He’s in fifth grade, one grade above me. We ride the same bus, but he has only talked to me one time. Last year there was a contest at school to see who could do multiplication and division tables the fastest. Each teacher picked the best math person out of their class by playing Around the World, which means whoever is sitting in one of the corners in the front row stands up next to the person behind them, and the teacher asks something like “Twelve times eight?” Whoever answers first wins and gets to go on to the next person, and if you beat everybody in the room, one by one, then you’ve gone Around the World and you’re the winner. I won out of my class, but I also got in trouble and Ms. Ferro said I would be disqualified if I kept getting excited and yelling out the answers so loud it hurt her ears. Calm down, Evelyn, she said. It’s math. The right answer is the right answer, whether you yell it or not.

After lunch, I got to go down to the library to do Around the World against all the people who won out of their homerooms, and Travis Rowley was there. I was thinking it wasn’t very fair that I had to go against fourth and fifth graders, but they weren’t as fast as you would think. I got in trouble for yelling again, but I went almost all the way Around the World again until I got to Travis, who you wouldn’t think would be very smart, only reading comic books and throwing knives around with his brother. But he was. We kept tying. He did not yell out the answers the way I did, but he said them very quickly, somehow pushing the right answers out of his mouth while still biting his bottom lip. He kept his thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans and looked down at his shoes the whole time, and I could hear him like a softer echo of my own voice, his voice muffled, hard to hear.

“Sixty-three.”

“One hundred and forty-four.”

“Six.”

“Thirty-two.”

“Seven.”

“Forty-nine.”

After a while, Mr. Leland, the principal, stopped looking down at his cards and just asked us whatever came into his head, his eyes shifting between Travis’s mouth and mine. “Six times twelve. Fifty-four divided by six. Eighty-four divided by twelve. Six times seven. Three times eleven.”

And we just kept going and going and going. Mr. Leland told me that I could hold on to the table in front of me if that would help me not jump or clap every time I answered. He told Travis he would have to speak up, and he told me to be a little more quiet. Calm down, honey, he said. It’s just a game. But by then I couldn’t calm down because, more than anything, I like to win things, and it didn’t seem fair that I could beat everybody else and then still not win just because of one person. If you don’t win things, you lose them, and I think the way I feel when I lose must be the way it feels to be dead.

So I was thinking about winning, how much I wanted to win, clenching my hands so tightly my fingers hurt and that’s when Mr. Leland said, “Thirty-nine divided by three!” and Travis won.

I didn’t know the thirteens at all. We hadn’t even done them yet.

All he got was a piece of paper that said he won and Mr. Leland shaking his hand. He sort of smiled when he got the paper, but then he just went right back to biting his bottom lip. I was mad, looking at the piece of paper I almost got but didn’t.

And then Travis turned around and said, “Nice job, kiddo,” and even though this is all he has ever said to me and all he probably will ever say to me my entire life, I felt better. I’ve never seen him say that much to anyone.

He shoplifts. A month ago, there was a police cruiser parked outside of Unit B, and I saw him getting out of the back, wearing a sweatshirt hood over his head, but you could still see it was him because he has curly brown hair that my mother calls corkscrews, and no one else I know has it. So now, twice a week, the school bus drops Travis Rowley off at the group home for boys in town instead of at our stop.

He’s still doing it though, shoplifting. Last week I saw him in the Kwikshop when I was with my mother, his hands moving quickly, pushing two comic books into the sleeves of the blue sweatshirt. He reads these comic books on the bus, a ski hat pulled down over his hair. They are mostly comic books with covers of superheroes in masks and colorful body suits, swinging from ropes, shooting lightning out of their fingers, with names like
Dark Avenger
and
Captain Victory
.

My mother calls Travis the little one, even though he isn’t really that little. She looks out the window sometimes and says, “That little one, when he gets older, look out. He’ll be the one getting whistles. He will break hearts.”

When she finally comes out to the car, she has her sunglasses on and so in the yellow dress, she looks like she is in disguise, a movie star trying not to be recognized. She walks quickly, looking straight ahead, but Mr. Rowley has already gotten up from his lawn chair.

“You’re looking good, Tina.”

She keeps walking, so he stays where he is and starts to clap. Kevin and Travis have stopped throwing the knife. They turn around, watching.

“Jesus, Tina,” Mr. Rowley says, scratching his beard. “Your ass looks like a bell ringing, I swear to God.”

She gets in the car and shuts the door.

“Ding dong!” Mr. Rowley yells, still clapping. “Ding dinga dong!”

The engine starts up, no problem, Frank Sinatra on the stereo singing “My Way.” She gives the stick shift a good tug, using both hands. There is a loud, straining sound, like someone turning on a vacuum cleaner, but the stick won’t move. The Rowleys watch.

“Please,” she says, her hand on the dashboard. She’s talking to the car. “Please?”

Mr. Rowley walks closer, leaning on his good leg. Travis and Kevin follow and stand behind him, looking at the Volkswagen with serious faces, Kevin still holding the white-handled knife. They are shirtless, both of them, their chests smooth and already tan. My mother is still trying to move the gearshift. It doesn’t give, and it doesn’t give. Mr. Rowley is still just standing there, waiting for her to let him help.

“I just need to get it into first,” she says finally. She pushes herself up out of her seat. The yellow dress is already wrinkled in the back. “It does this when I start it sometimes.”

Mr. Rowley nods and lowers himself into the car, holding his bad knee with his hand. He steps on the clutch pedal, and the stick moves into first right away even though he is using only one hand, the ball of muscle in his arm sliding down like the bulge of a mouse inside a boa constrictor.

My mother says thank you, not looking at him, but up at the sky. Travis sees me looking at him, and he meets my eyes without smiling before I can look away. “Yup,” Mr. Rowley says, patting the dashboard. “But you need a new clutch. I hope you’re not trying to go far.”

He tells her she will have to put her foot down on the clutch pedal while his foot is still on it so the car won’t stall again, and I can see by her face she is worried this is a trick. She holds on to the door and puts her right foot on the pedal, and Mr. Rowley slides out behind her, using the door as leverage, his hands right next to hers as he pulls himself up. I am waiting for him to say something or even worse, but he doesn’t. He stretches his good leg out of the car, and then the other. My mother slides back into the seat, the engine humming now, ready to go.

We watch Mr. Rowley walk back across the parking lot, Travis and Kevin behind him. He swings his arms, his hands rounded into loose fists. The limp looks like a bounce.

The sky is a bright, bright blue, almost turquoise, with no clouds, the sun still high, and I am excited just to be on the highway, going this fast. I hang my head out the window the way a dog would, the spring breeze blowing hard on my face as we sail along on I-35 past grain elevators and rest stops, clusters of cows behind barbed-wire fences and fields of blue stem grass that look so green I can’t stand it. Frank Sinatra is singing “I’ve Got the World on a String,” for the second time since we left, but it’s so pretty out I don’t care.

“I knew a girl who fell right out of the car hanging her head out the window like that,” my mother says. “She went
splat
.” She pulls me back in the car by my arm. “Listen, you know we’re going to see my father. Your grandfather.”

“Okay,” I say, but I’m still looking out the window, at a red tractor moving slowly along a tan-and-brown-striped field. There are butterflies already, monarchs. Ms. Fairchild said the monarchs come through Kansas every spring, millions of them, moving north with the birds. Or maybe the birds move with them.