The Center of Everything (12 page)

“Déjà vu all over again,” Eileen says. “You’re a piece of work, Tina.”

My mother fingers the silver handle on her door, saying nothing. Eileen pushes a button on the dash that goes
click,
and the lock on my mother’s door goes down.

“Who’s the father? Do you know?”

“Yes I know. God, Mom. God!” She puts her arms back over her head.

“Well, is he going to help out? Maybe even marry you? Try something different this time?”

My mother shakes her head. “Stop talking, okay? Just stop talking.”

“Is he? Does he know?” Eileen looks at my mother, and when she does, the car veers to the right of the road. “Is it the man who gave you the car?”

My mother knocks her head against the window glass, hard enough for it to crack. But it doesn’t. My stomach starts to buckle in on itself, and I work hard to focus on the statue of Jesus, still waving and friendly, steady on the dash.

“He’s married?” Eileen’s voice is strained, panicked.

When my mother doesn’t answer, Eileen slaps the seat in between them, and my mother jumps. She’s in trouble. You’re not supposed to have a baby with someone else’s husband. You’re not even supposed to have a baby without a husband of your own, and she has already done that once before, with me. If you have too many babies without a husband, you’re a welfare queen. Ronald Reagan says he is tired of welfare queens having babies without husbands and driving around in Cadillacs while everyone else has to work hard.

We don’t have a Cadillac. Not yet.

“You and your accidents,” Eileen says, looking at my mother. “That’s great. You thought he would stay and take care of you, maybe leave his wife? You thought you’d just help him along. Well, is he going to now? Is he?”

My mother says she doesn’t want a baby. Her voice is soft, like a little girl’s. She says she can’t have a baby, not now. Eileen says she should have thought about that earlier. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she says. She keeps looking over at my mother, straying out of our lane, and she is still so mad that I think she will slap the seat between them again, or maybe unclick the lock on my mother’s door and let her go rolling out onto the road, her head cracking open on the pavement.

We pass a sign nailed to a fence that reads
WE ARE FARMLAND’S LAYED OFF FAMILIES
. I know it should be “l-a-i-d” instead of “l-a-y-e-d,” but then again, that isn’t really the point of the sign.

seven

M
Y MOTHER KNOWS
I
DON’T
like her anymore. She has stopped trying to get me to smile at her, and when I say I want to eat dinner in front of the television instead of with her at the table, she shrugs and says fine. But she is still my mother, she says, still the boss around here, and when she goes across the highway to get more milk from the Kwikshop, she makes me come with her, holding my hand tight in hers. She has to pay Carlotta with nickels and dimes she has found in the pockets of coats and under the cushions of the couch. The coins have lint on them, dirt, dried gum, and Carlotta touches them only with her nails.

When we get home, she waters down the milk so it will last longer. It tastes bad.

She doesn’t sleep. When I am in bed at night, I can hear her footsteps moving back and forth on the carpet in the hallway, the toilet flushing. She wants to flush the baby, I know. She would if she could.

One morning, the sun already hot and bright in my window at eight o’clock, I wake to her standing over me, saying my name. I open my eyes and we look at each other, but neither of us smiles.

“Get up,” she says. “We need to go on an errand.” She is wearing only her bra, underwear, and a shower cap. Sweat glistens between her eyebrows.

“Where?”

“Downtown. I can’t leave you here by yourself.”

“How will we get there?”

“Walk.”

“It’s too hot.”

But she has already gone back out into the hallway. I get out of bed and follow her to her room. She keeps her window shade down in the daytime now to keep the heat out, the bottom of it tucked against the top of her fan. A pile of clothes lies on the bed, dresses and shirts inside out and tangled over each other, but she is still taking more out of the closet. The fan makes a steady tapping sound, like water dripping from a faucet.

She tries on the yellow dress, the one that she wore to Wichita when the car broke down. It’s tighter than it was. Her whole body looks swollen, puffed up, especially her face. “You’ll need to wear tights today,” she says, fastening the belt. “We have to look nice.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“It’s too hot for tights.”

“You’ll be fine, Evelyn. I’m wearing panty hose. You can wear tights.”

I say nothing to this. She’s being stupid. Yesterday it was 102 degrees, and the man on the news said the sidewalks were cracking in the heat, like bread in an oven.

“Go put them on,” she says. She lies down on her bed by the pile of clothes, pulling her nylons on, her legs kicked up in the air, toes pointed, like the letter
V
. “No.”

She gives me a moment, just a moment, to take it back, her right eyebrow high on her forehead. Then she stands up quickly, pulling the nylons up to her waist, a run shooting up to her knee. She looks down at the run and starts counting to ten.

I watch.

When she gets to ten she says, “Evelyn, you have to understand something. I am really…” Her voice is shaking, and I can see she is about to cry. “I am at my limit, okay? I don’t care how hot it is. Go put on your goddamn tights.”

But I don’t want to go where she’s going, and it’s too hot for tights. I’m up and out of her room in a second, sliding on the linoleum of the kitchen, around the corner, into the bathroom. I hear her coming after me, her footsteps heavy, one nylon leg swishing across the other. I lock the door.

She knocks so hard the mirror rattles against the bathroom wall. “Evelyn! Open the door.” She is crying now. Some of me feels sorry for her, but most of me doesn’t.

“It’s too hot for tights!” I yell. “Too hot!”

I hear more crying, then footsteps back to her bedroom, her door slamming. I look at myself in the mirror, at my sleepy eyes and mean little mouth. Ms. Fairchild thinks I’m nice, but if she could see me now, if she really could look into her crystal ball, she would think differently.

But that’s how it is sometimes. Sometimes you have to be mean.

There are 368 tiles on the bathroom floor. I am beginning to count the tiles in the shower when I hear her in the kitchen.

“We have to go now. You win.” Her voice is still breathy, but quieter now. “You’re a brat.”

“I’m not,” I say. I can see my reflection in the doorknob, my face like a monster’s, upside down. “I don’t have any shoes to wear. I told you that a long time ago. I told you I needed new shoes.”

She pauses, and for a moment I’m not sure if she’s even still there. “What about the red shoes? You’ve been wearing those.”

“They’re too small.” This is a lie. They fit perfectly still, but I can’t wear them if we are going into Kerrville. I imagine Traci seeing them on me, pointing at my feet so her mother will see. I would be arrested. I open the door, just a crack, and look up. Her cheeks are tear-stained, her eyes red.

“Are you coming or not?”

It is uncomfortable in the apartment, the humid air still and heavy even in our darkened rooms, but outside, under the bright, stinging sun, it’s worse. The sun burns too hot on the top of my head as we walk along the highway to Monroe Street, lined with gas stations and Laundromats. I run my hand along a chain-link fence that keeps in a golf course. We walk past fast-food restaurants and the Pine Ridge Shopping Plaza. I look for Travis in the parking lot, but he isn’t there. Closer to town, on McPhee Street, a man leans out of a car window and yells, “Whoo baby.”

“I’m thirsty,” I tell her.

“Me too,” she says, and keeps walking. “What, Evelyn? We’re almost there.”

“My feet.” I point at my shoes. Tiny spots of blood have soaked through the toes of the canvas.

“Jesus,” she says, as if this is a surprise, as if I have not told her about my shoes. “Oh honey.” She bends down, and the run in her nylons grows larger, spreading across her knee. Her yellow dress is see-through now, wet with sweat. “Okay,” she says, wiping her forehead. “I have to get these off of you.”

“I can do it myself, Mom. I know how to take off my shoes.”

But it’s like she doesn’t hear me, her fingernails already picking at the knots. She has pushed her sunglasses up into her hair, and when she bends down, I can look down and see myself in them, the sun bright behind my head.

“Oh God, look at your feet,” she says. “Your toes. I’m going to have to carry you.”

I want to argue with her, to tell her this is a bad idea, that I am almost eleven years old and far too big to be carried. But her arms are already around me, lifting me up. “Hmmph,” she says. I can feel the muscles in her back tighten under her dress. She leans one way and then the other, breathing hard. I keep my arms tight around her neck, feeling her sway a little, hearing the unsteady clicks of her heels on the sidewalk. She walks like this for two more blocks, until we get to a brick building that says
KERRVILLE COUNTY WELFARE SERVICES
across the top in silver letters.

We go inside. Welfare. It is happening.

She sets me down in front of the drinking fountain in the lobby, and my toes curl up when they touch the cool tile. A lady sits behind a desk, her eyes closed, a fan blowing her yellow-orange hair straight back so it looks like she is riding in a convertible car. There are brown chairs against the wall, and my mother and I fall into two of them.

“You have an appointment?” the lady asks. She has to yell over the sound of the fan.

“Barbara Bell, eleven o’clock.”

“Everyone with an eleven o’clock appointment should be in the audio room to the left,” the lady says, pointing to a white door on one side of her desk. “If your appointment is at eleven, you were instructed to arrive at ten forty-five, so you could listen to the tape in its entirety.”

My mother stares at the lady. I am worried that she is counting to ten in her head, and that maybe both the lady and I should go to the other side of the room. But my mother says nothing. She stands up, holds her hand out to me, and leads me through the door.

There are about a dozen people in the next room, their chairs in a circle. This time the chairs are orange. In the center of this circle is a cassette player, playing a tape of a man speaking very slowly. No one is listening to the tape. Some people are talking, and some people are sleeping, their heads tilted back on the chairs. One woman is trying to lullaby a baby, singing a song in Spanish. We take two seats by the door, and I try to think about how good the air-conditioning feels, my feet set free from the shoes, and not about where we are, what Ronald Reagan would think if he could see us here now.

“How are your feet?” my mother asks.

The lady from the first room sticks her head in and says, “Shhh! You-all are supposed to
listen
to the tape.” She points at her own ear. “No talking!”

But we can’t hear the tape because people are talking, and two different babies are crying. Someone opens a different door and calls my mother’s name. We walk down a long green hallway to a room with four desks, a woman sitting behind each one. Three of them are busy with other people. The fourth one waves us over. “Helloooo?” she says. “Come on. Let’s go.”

She wears red-framed glasses that sit on the tip of her nose. The nameplate on her desk says
MRS. BARBARA BELL, INTAKE
, and when she sees us, she looks me up and down carefully, puffing out her cheeks like a chipmunk. “We’ll have to do something about shoes for you,” she says. She looks at my mother. “Name?”

“Christina Bucknow,” my mother says. She is all of a sudden using her nice voice, which I have not heard in a while. “Here’s the form they told me to bring. I did the best I could with it.” She smiles. “But some of it was pretty involved. See, this is my first time doing this so—”

Barbara Bell pushes up her glasses and flips through the booklet. She gets out a calculator, her fingers tapping against the buttons quickly. I think she looks very smart, wearing red glasses and punching a calculator like this.

“You’re twenty-seven?”

“Yes.”

“This is your daughter?”

“Yes. This is Evelyn.”

“From a prior marriage?”

“Not exactly.”

“Meaning?”

“No.”

Barbara Bell nods and looks back down. “And she’s ten?”

“She’ll be eleven in August.”

“And you receive no child support from her father?”

“No.”

“But you’ve entered the father’s name in a search, correct?”

“Yes. A long time ago. No luck.”

Barbara Bell leans back in her chair. “And the father of this pregnancy?”

“This new one?” My mother points at her belly.

“Yes. This new one.”

“It doesn’t matter.” My mother smiles.

“Actually, it does. Ms. Bucknow, I have to exhaust all of your other means of support before the state gives you financial assistance. And really, if we could get some child support mandated, that would help you out more than food stamps.”

My mother looks around the room, at the people at the other desks. “It was a bad situation,” she says, her voice low now, almost a whisper. “I’d really rather not say. I sort of made a mistake, and I’d rather not make that mistake go any further. You know?” She nods in my direction, the way she might do with Eileen to say,
Let’s not talk about this in front of her
.

I get up and go to the other side of the room and look at the pictures on the wall, at a map of Kerrville stuck up with tacks. A little red circle is drawn on the map, and next to it,
YOU ARE HERE
in red letters. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here.

My mother is smiling now, trying to look at Barbara Bell as if they are friends, in cahoots. Barbara Bell does not smile back.

“I’m afraid you’re going to need to be candid with me if I’m going to help you, Ms. Bucknow.”

My mother shakes her head. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t get too particular. Given the situation, I think this could make things pretty awkward for him and…”

“His comfort level isn’t really my concern.”

“He’s gone anyway.”

“He’s left town?”

“Yes.”

“No forwarding address? No number?”

“No.”

“Surely you must know someone who…”

“No.”

Barbara Bell looks back down at the booklet, her glasses down on her nose, her fingers drumming on the desk. “If you could give me a first and last name, I could enter that in a search.”

“He’s married, okay?” my mother says.

“But it’s a different man than the father of your first child, correct?”

“Yes. That was
ten years ago
. Jesus.”

“I’m just trying to get the information I need, okay? No one is judging you. But given that you can’t give me the name of the father, I have to ask you if there is some confusion on your part.”

“What?”
She says this so loud and sharp that everyone else in the room stops talking. “Look,” she says, leaning over Barbara Bell’s desk, knocking over her nameplate, maybe on purpose, maybe not. “Let’s get something straight here. I’m not confused. I know who the father is. I just don’t want to tell you. It’s not your business, okay?” She leans in closer. “It’s not your business.”

I would be scared, if my mother were that close to my face and yelling like that. But I don’t think Barbara Bell is. She looks bored. “Ms. Bucknow,” she says, her voice still calm, bored even, setting her nameplate straight again. “I couldn’t care less what you want to tell me. In fact, I can assure you my interest in your personal life is negligible at best. But if you want money from the government, you’re going to have to answer these questions to the best of your ability. They’re cutting back our programs; they’re upping our eligibility requirements. We have to be careful.”

My mother stands up and tells Barbara Bell she doesn’t give a fuck about eligibility requirements. She says she won’t be talked to this way; she would rather starve. Barbara Bell says that is her prerogative, but she will be glad to speak with her again when she is feeling calmer.

And then it’s like Wichita all over again. She takes my hand and pulls me back out into the long green hallway, past the room full of different people listening to the same scratchy tape, past the receptionist’s desk with the orange-haired lady and the fan, out the door, out of the air-conditioning, into the sharp, stinging heat. I have to run to keep up with her, her hand tight around my arm, and the white sidewalk is like fire under my feet.