The Center of Everything (11 page)

I stand over her. I cannot go away, even just for a minute. I have to go to Topeka. I have been blessed. “My shoes are too small,” I tell her. “I need new shoes.”

She says nothing.

“Did you hear me? I need new shoes. They’re hurting my feet.” I stomp my foot, hard, right next to where her hand is on the floor. She doesn’t move.

“I HATE YOU!”

“Good,” she says. “Good.”

Eileen is the one to drive us to Topeka. Two days before the science fair, my mother and I walk across the highway to use the pay phone at the Kwikshop to call her, and it sounds like my mother is calling to get her hair cut by someone she doesn’t know: “Can you do it? Yes, nine o’clock. We’ll be waiting for you,” her voice flat, her eyes watching the cars on the highway. I won’t let her hold my hand when we go back across the highway, so she grabs me by the arm.

The morning of the science fair, she is sick again; I can hear her throwing up in the bathroom. I knock on the door. “Are you sick again?”

“I’m fine. Is Eileen here yet?”

“No.” I wait. “If you’re sick, you don’t have to go. Eileen can take me.”

She opens the door and looks down at me, trying to smile. She is wearing a dress, and for the first time in over a month, she looks normal, clean. “Get serious, Evelyn. I’m fine. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” But then she cups her hand over her mouth and shuts the door again.

Eileen arrives, wearing a long white dress with little roses all over it, her hair pulled back in a single braid. “How’s my baby?” she asks. She leans down to hug me, and I breathe her in, her cigarette smell. “Oh, I missed you, sweetie. I really did.”

“Mom’s sick,” I tell her. “She’s been throwing up.”

But my mother is already behind me, saying she is fine, just a bit queasy. Eileen’s hand goes to my mother’s forehead. “You sure, Tina?”

“I’m fine. God, Mom, you look so pretty. That’s a great dress.”

“Oh, this is old,” Eileen says. She leans forward and kisses her on the cheek. It’s as if they were never in a fight. As if Wichita never happened.

My mother looks down at my feet, squinting.

“Evelyn, what shoes are those? Since when do you have red shoes? What are those pins all over them?”

I look her in the eye. “Star gave them to me.”

My mother looks confused, and I am worried, because sometimes she can be very smart about things. “My shoes are too small, remember? I’ve been telling you that. I need a new pair.”

She frowns. “Well now you have those, Evelyn. Now you have those.”

Eileen’s Oldsmobile has air-conditioning, and when we pull onto the highway, she cranks it up so high I get goose bumps, even though it’s over a hundred degrees outside, the sky a cloudless blue. A small statue of Jesus in a white robe is glued to her dashboard, one hand raised up like he is waving.

“Are you my lucky lady today?” Eileen asks, catching my eye in the rearview mirror.

“I am,” I tell her, wriggling my toes in Traci’s shoes. I am lucky, but also I have been working hard. I purchased three pieces of poster board for a new triptych, and this one is so large I have to fold it into thirds just to get it into the backseat of Eileen’s car. I have made a new graph as well, this time using different-colored Magic Markers to chart the growth of each plant. And again I have followed Ms. Fairchild’s directions carefully, with neat labels on the required sections.

I am hoping that in Topeka, there will again be the problem of people not following directions, not having their triptychs divided into
HYPOTHESIS, OBJECTIVE, METHOD, OBSERVATIONS
, and
CONCLUSION
. When I meet Ronald Reagan, he will laugh his wonderful laugh and say, “I’m so glad that at least some kids today know how to follow directions.” He will give me jelly beans, and people will take pictures of me shaking his hand in the Oval Office.

Eileen asks my mother if she is feeling better, and she says she is.

Eileen asks my mother if she knows what made her so sick: Did she eat some bad food? My mother shrugs and doesn’t answer. Eileen turns on the radio, Jerry Falwell’s
Old Time Gospel Hour
. The leaves of the lima bean plants tremble in the breeze of the air-conditioning.

I look out my window, down at the yellow lines whizzing under us in the middle of the highway. There is nothing but fields of wheat on each side of the road, their feathery tops swirling in the heat. Last year, Ms. Fairchild read some of
My Antonia
to us. She said she wanted us to see Kansas and Nebraska the way it is in the book, beautiful, a breadbasket that feeds so many people. She said Kansas is beautiful if you look at it the right way, and that we shouldn’t believe anything other people try to say about it.
The abundance of it,
she said, spreading her arms in her Wednesday dress, as if she were holding something large.

I like living in Kansas, not just because of the wheat, but because it’s right in the center. If you look at a map of the world, the United States is usually right in the middle, and Kansas is in the middle of that. So right here where we are, maybe this very stretch of highway we are driving on, is the exact center of the whole world, what everything else spirals out from.

Ms. Fairchild said, No, Evelyn, that’s just the way the map is made. She said they just as easily could have put India in the middle, or Africa for that matter. She said she had seen maps that have Australia at the top and Greenland at the bottom, and those maps are also right, just in a different way. She says the map on her wall probably has the United States in the middle because it was made in the United States.

I don’t know. I’ve never seen a map with Greenland at the bottom. I think maybe Ms. Fairchild is wrong, and that the United States really is in the center, not just on maps, but in real life, because we are here on purpose. I feel so lucky to live here, right in the center and on purpose, and Eileen says, Yes, it’s just another of the many ways we’ve been blessed.

At the school in Topeka, we have to wait in line for registration. Eileen starts to talk to the people behind us, the family of a boy in overalls from Hill City. He has two little brothers, and all of them, even his parents, look tired and sunburned. I feel bad for them, the whole family, because I have never even heard of Hill City, and I know it must be in western Kansas, small and far away. The boy tells me he and his parents had to get up at six o’clock in the morning and drive for four hours, and now his older brothers are bringing in his triptych from their truck.

“Can I see yours?” he asks.

I nod and unfold my triptych for him, amazed once again by the orderly perfection of it, so many different colors on the graph. Eileen is holding my box of lima bean plants, and she opens the lid to show him. The boy nods and smiles, tells me good luck.

When we get to the front of the line, I am given a number to put around my neck. I am to set up my triptych on a table with the corresponding number in the gymnasium. I have twenty minutes to set up my experiment and display. The judges will walk around then, and will put a special yellow sticker on those they wish to consider finalists. I glide into the gym, Traci’s shoes on my feet, the new and improved triptych in my arms. I think about God putting on the headphones, tuning in.

But looking around, I start to get worried. The girl on my left has a triptych much larger than even Traci’s, clearly labeled
HYPOTHESIS, OBJECTIVE, METHOD, OBSERVATIONS
, and
CONCLUSION
. It appears to be made out of something metal, the edges lined in black. It stands behind her, at least six feet tall. On the ground in front of her is a small, intricate maze, the walls inside made of what looks like wooden rulers, sawed in half. Just off to the side of the maze are three cages, each with a small white rat inside. One cage has a bright lamp shining into it, and the two others have a navy blue cloth over their lids. Large red letters read
THE EFFECTS OF LIGHT AND DARK ON PROBLEM SOLVING IN RATS
.

My mother’s eyes drift over to the rats. They are nibbling on the metal bars of their cages, looking up at us with pink eyes. “Poor things,” she says.

The boy from Hill City appears, directing his brothers, older and bigger versions of himself, also wearing overalls, as they carry his triptych to the table on my right. The hinges squeak when they unfold it. The boy himself is now holding a large plastic tray of lima bean plants, maybe twelve of them.

I walk up to him slowly.

“You did lima beans too?”

“Yeah,” he says, arranging the plants on the table. “I did it for 4-H, so I already had some done.”

I watch him move his plants from the plastic case to the table. Some of them are even taller, even greener, than my best plant. “You have twelve?”

He looks away. “Twenty-four, actually. I wanted to find the best possible growing environment. You know, how much water in the soil, direct or indirect sunlight. That kind of stuff.”

I look at his chart.
EXPOSED TO SUNLIGHT BETWEEN
10
A.M AND
2
P.M.; FERTILIZER WITH NITROGEN; FERTILIZER WITHOUT NITROGEN; FERTILIZER WITH NITROGEN WITH HEAVY WATERING; FERTILIZER WITHOUT NITROGEN WITH LIGHT WATERING
.

“Yours is good too,” he says.

I hear a hissing sound from across the room, and then a loud pop. A black boy in a red-and-white striped shirt is dragging a tape measure across the floor to where a small model rocket lies on its side, still smoking. He seems pleased, smiling at the numbers he is reading and then writing down. I glance quickly at the graph on his triptych:
ESTIMATED TRAJECTORIES BASED ON TYPE OF FUEL
.

“Smile, honey!” Eileen aims a camera at me, her middle finger pressed down over one of her eyes. I hear the click, and I see my mother’s eyes catch mine.

“What’s wrong?” she mouths, and I can’t believe this, that she could be so stupid.

“I want to go home.”

Her eyes move around my face. “What? Why?”

The judges are coming down the aisle now, two men and a woman, all of them holding clipboards, looking at the rockets and the triptychs, writing things down. They stop in front of the girl with the rats, and she pushes a button that releases one of the rats into the maze. The judges lean over the maze to see, and I can hear them saying “Ahhhh!” in a very good way. One of them hands the girl a yellow sticker.

They walk past me, their eyes moving over my lima bean plants. One of the men smiles, but that’s it. No yellow sticker.

I will not get to meet Ronald Reagan. I start to pick up my lima bean plants, putting them back in the box. “I want to go home.”

“Honey? Are you sick?” My mother reaches over to feel my forehead.

I pull my head away. “Yes. I want to go home.”

“Okay,” she says. She looks at Eileen and nods. “I guess we’re going to go.” She does not seem too sad about this, and I know that she is ready to go home too. All morning she has kept her hand on her stomach. She is really the one who doesn’t feel well. She wants to go back to Kerrville so she can get back into her nightgown with the stains on it and lie around on the floor.

“We’ll go home right away, kitten,” Eileen says, taking the lima bean plants from me. “Right away.”

We get out to the registration area, and when the woman at the door sees us, she gives me a funny look, her head tilted. “You’re leaving already?”

“I don’t feel well.”

She glances down at my triptych, folded under my arm. “You’re not leaving because you weren’t selected as a finalist, I hope.”

I say nothing. I take the number card off from around my neck and try to hand it to her.

“Because that’s not the point of the fair. You should go around and read what the other kids have done.” She smiles. “Maybe you’ll learn something.”

“She wants to go home,” my mother says, using the voice that makes some people jump. The woman takes my number card and reaches into a box behind her that says
HONORABLE MENTIONS
and takes out a certificate with a blank line in the middle. She writes my name on it and hands it to me.

On the way home, we are quiet. Every now and then, Eileen smiles at me in her rearview mirror and tries to say something nice, like how getting an Honorable Mention is pretty darn good in her opinion. She says she hopes I am proud of myself, and that she is proud of me, and that the girl with the rats and the maze looked like she might be an Oriental and that they should only let real Americans be in it. My mother puts her hand over her eyes and makes a sound like she might be sick again.

I look down at the certificate—swirling calligraphy with an official seal at the bottom, my name written on a blank line in blue ballpoint pen.

I hereby solemnly swear, on the twenty-first day of July, 1982, EVELYN BUCKNOW received an Honorable Mention in the Kansas State Fourth Grade Science Fair

On the highway, we pass a billboard that says
ONE KANSAS FARMER FEEDS
87
PEOPLE
…
AND YOU!!!
The 87 part of the sign is in a different color paint than everything else. You can tell they change it all the time. Eileen says the number gets higher every year, never lower. The poor farmers, she says. They’re having a bad time. It’s the Zionist bankers, she says, pushing the farmers out, making a killing.

She asks my mother what the matter is. My mother says she’s fine. It’s quiet after that, but I watch Eileen’s face in the rearview mirror, the crooked side of her mouth starting to pucker, her eyes moving back and forth.

“You’re pregnant,” she says.

My mother says nothing. I look at the statue of Jesus, still friendly and waving between them, like if they get into a fight, he will try to break it up.

“Are you, Tina? Am I right?”

“Can we discuss this later?”

“If you are, she’ll know about it soon enough.”

My mother moans and puts her arms over her ears. “I don’t want to talk about it. Okay?”

I look back out the window, feeling cold, my forehead pressed against the glass. My mother shouldn’t be pregnant. You’re supposed to have a husband.