Laura Moriarty - The Center of Everything

Laura Moriarty

The Center of Everything

Contents

RONALD REAGAN IS ON TELEVISION, giving a speech because he

WHEN I GET HOME FROM school the next day, my

WE ABANDON THE VOLKSWAGEN, LEAVE it right there on the

MR. MITCHELL IS GOING TO pick my mother up for work

I WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT day, when she isnt so

WE KNOW SOMETHING IS WRONG when the Rowleys is so

MY MOTHER KNOWS I DONT like her anymore. She has

ITS JANUARY, AND LONG, SHARP icicles hang down from the

PASTOR DAVE AND SHARON PICK me up every Sunday before

I AM NO LONGER ALLOWED to go to the Church

IF I HAD GOTTEN ARRESTED with someone for setting a

ITS SPRING NOW, AND TRAVIS and Deena are still in

RONALD REAGAN IS IN A lot of trouble.

TRAVIS WONT TELL ME EXACTLY what was said between him

WHEN WE GO BACK TO school the next week, Dr. Queen

CHRISTMAS BREAK COMES AND GOES, but for Deena, it just

FOR A WHILE, I AVOID Travis. A lot of our

WHEN SUMMER COMES, TRAVIS AND Deena get approved for a

I DONT HEAR TOO MUCH from them after they have

EILEEN HAS HER OWN MONEY now, from the life insurance

R ONALD R EAGAN IS ON TELEVISION, giving a speech because he wants to be president. He has the voice of a nice person, and something in his hair that makes it shiny under the lights. I change the channel, but its still him, just from a different angle.

The people in the audience wear cowboy hats with REAGAN printed on the front, and they clap and blow horns every time he stops talking, so much that sometimes he has to put his hands up so theyll be quiet and hear what hes going to say next. Nancy Reagan sits behind him, smiling and wearing a peach-colored dress with a bow on one of the shoulders, no cowboy hat. She claps too, but only after everyone else has started, so it looks like while he is talking, she is maybe thinking about something else.

Shes a mannequin, my mother says, pointing a spatula at the television. She freaks me out.

My mother is maybe the opposite of Nancy Reagan. I could never imagine her wearing the peach dress with the bow on it because she wears blue jeans and usually her gray sweatshirt. And she always listens to what everyone says, even people sitting in the next booth in restaurants who probably dont want her to listen. Right now, shes supposed to be in the kitchen, making us grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, but she came out to the front room when she heard Ronald Reagans voice, and now shes just standing there with the spatula, looking at the television and shaking her head until I can smell smoke coming from the kitchen, the bread starting to burn.

She smells it too, runs back. Zing! she says. When she kisses me sometimes she says Smack!

The people listening to Ronald Reagan in the audience yell Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip, hooray! and wave their cowboy hats at the camera as it moves around the room. Finally Ronald Reagan laughs and says, I think youre playing our song. And this just makes people yell more.

My grandmother Eileen was here last week, and she said she remembered back when Ronald Reagan was an actor in movies, so handsome youd faint if you ever got the chance to see him up close. Shes worried about him being president, though, because his middle name is Wilson, which means he has six letters in each of his three names, and if youve read Revelations, that alone is enough to give you the shivers. But shes going to vote for him anyway, because she says hes the one person who can maybe make everything right again and hes not afraid of the Communists. Really, she says, the grand finale is coming one way or another, through him or through somebody else. The important thing is to be ready.

My mother says not to listen to Eileen about things like this. Six is just a number, she says, bigger than five, smaller than seven, and there are enough real reasons to worry about Ronald Reagan without bringing in imaginary ones.

Whats he saying now? she yells. Shes standing on top of a chair, waving a dishtowel in front of the smoke detector.

But I cant talk and listen at the same time, so I just listen, and Ronald Reagan says God put America between two oceans on purpose, to help the freedom fighters in Afghanistan and the Christians and Jews behind the Iron Curtain. I dont understand this, how a curtain can be iron. There was a metal fold-out wall between our classrooms last year at school; usually it was shut, but when Mrs. West or Mrs. Blackmore was sick, the one who wasnt sick could unhook the latch and push it back so it folded up and we would all just be in one big room together.

No, my mother says, Iron Curtain is a figure of speech. Theres not really a curtain anywhere.

She brings the grilled cheese sandwiches out on a plate, burned on the edges but still okay to eat, one of her long red hairs in the melted cheese of mine. Sorry, sorry, she says, picking it out. It wont kill you.

Ronald Reagan says he wants everyone to begin this crusade joined together in a moment of silence, and really you know he means praying to God. The people in cowboy hats take them off and bow their heads, but my mother keeps eating her sandwich. She doesnt like Ronald Reagan because she thinks hell get us all blown up with nuclear bombs. She says all somebody has to do is get mad and push a button and well all be dead within half an hour, all the houses melted, the whales cooked in the sea, and Eileen can think shell hear angels singing all she wants, but really she wont be able to hear a damn thing because shell be just as dead as everybody else. She says she used to not worry so much about things like this, but now she has me, and the idea of somebody pushing this button makes her crazy, makes her scared when she hears even an airplane in the sky.

I tell her if we had half an hour, we could go downstairs the way we do when the tornado sirens go off. We dont have our own basement, but theres a storage space underneath our apartment building, and my mother has a key. There would even be enough time to go outside and wave people down on the highway, tell them they better get inside. I would stay outside until I could see the missiles, and then I would run back and have my mother shut the door behind me.

My mother says no, Evelyn, it wouldnt work like that. A nuclear bomb would blow up the basement too. Just one bomb in Wichita or even Kansas City would be enough to get us, even all the way out here. If the bombs start going off, theyll get everyone, she says. Itll be curtains for us all.

But the next time Eileen is here she says yes, Evelyn, sometimes it does work like that. Whenever a lot of people get killed, there are always a few people who dont.

We are sitting at the kitchen table, Eileen and I, eating the barbecued ribs she brought with her from Wichita. She says when she was a little girl in Alabama, a tornado came, and her family lived while other families died. Shed been standing outside looking up at the sky as it got darker, feeling the raindrops turn into tiny balls of hail that stung when they landed on the backs of her arms, and then she looked up and saw a cloud turning over on itself and filling up the sky, like smoke coming out the windows of a burning building. And then a man not wearing any shoes blew right past her, his feet not touching the ground, his legs moving like he was riding a bicycle.

He looked at me, Eileen says. He looked right into my eyes.

She turned and saw the funnel then, dark and thin like a snake. Her father grabbed her around the waist and carried her down to the cellar, and he kept his arms tight around her and her mother while the house rattled and shook over their heads.

It sounded like a train, Eileen says. Just like a train going right over us.