Home > The Center of Everything(6)

The Center of Everything(6)
Author: Jamie Harrison

Ned wondered if Harry—who’d gone from being a social worker to an archaeologist to a cop and back to an archaeologist—had begun to wish he were still a cop, so that he had more say in the search. The whole family bounced around between professions, but Polly, in particular, had excelled at not making up her mind. In grade school and high school, she’d wanted to be a veterinarian and a historian, a horse trainer and a botanist and an architect. She’d waitressed and worked on a grounds crew, babysat and sold tourist trinkets. As an adult, she kept zigging—cook to script girl to editorial assistant. She’d always minded the idea that she should stick to one thing. She’d loved drawing floor plans but hadn’t taken the physics that would have allowed her to become an architect; she’d toyed with the idea of graduate school but never applied. Though she’d loved science as a child, she failed Merle, a biology teacher, by taking English and history and art history because she thought of them as her family line. But Merle himself had wanted to be a poet.

Back when Polly had had two-year plans, instead of daily swivels, Jane had said, “You’ll be a late starter like me. And like Papa. A late second start, anyway.”

Or third. There were so many ways to count Polly’s forays. Despite having emigrated from Sweden with little money or formal education, Papa, Polly’s great-grandfather, managed a whole mysterious life before going to university in his late twenties, producing movies in his thirties, publishing books in his forties, and becoming a legend in mythology. He worked as an archaeologist throughout, chased by war after war, and taught at Columbia until his death at ninety. His life was all about telling echoing stories, whether he was digging them up or filming them or writing about them. He didn’t cash in like Joseph Campbell, but he was first and everyone knew it. Polly feared she hadn’t inherited enough of him.

And Jane was rare simply because she’d returned to school for a master’s in mythology and religion from NYU after Polly was born. She taught history for twenty years before abruptly producing a manuscript on the eternal nature of stories (The Inherited Dream) and another on ethnic and religious conflict (Ages of Rage) that somehow managed to give coherence to varieties of hatred. Both sold well and made the Times end-of-the-year lists.

Because she came from a family of writers, friends and family assumed Polly would write. She never wanted that—she liked to fix problems, not create them. Polly liked doing what she did. Editing recipes gave her both the anal, geometric satisfaction of quantities and process and the zen of variables. She liked the puzzle of scripts and mysteries, the who knows what when and why; she liked dreaming up solutions. The writhing, errant world was filled with good ideas that needed only a little air and discipline. Once a book or script was rolling, she stuck with it like a meth-addled Jack Russell on a large, juicy rat. She was a technician, with no interest in creating her own stories; she didn’t mind that an idea wasn’t hers in the beginning. She came from a family of special and strange, but she wasn’t special, not special at all.

Though privately, she believed that the ability to turn a turd of a manuscript into a diamond was nothing short of magic.

“I thought, Why Polly?” said her internist after her accident.

“Why not?” asked Polly. She guessed the doctor meant that they knew each other and liked each other. They were almost friends, and he would rather misfortunes happen to people he didn’t know. Polly wanted to pat his arm, but he might take it the wrong way. Just an accident, just a shame. It would be easier to bear if the damage had a plot, if she knew the point to this part of the story, or whether she’d ever make a living from her brain again.

 


Everyone had different acts. Montana had begun for Polly and Ned in 1987, when she talked him into driving out with her. He’d never been west of the Mississippi. They arrived in November, grimmest of months, and moved into the rundown house Jane had inherited from her great-aunts. Ned passed the Montana bar and got a job with Vinnie Susak. Polly edited freelance and tried to get catering work. They spent what they made and more fixing up the house: new plumbing, new wiring, a roof. It had four tiny bedrooms, one of which Polly used as an office. They put new countertops in the kitchen but kept the old white subway tile, so dated that it was new again, installed a commercial range and double oven, patched the plaster rather than putting in modern drywall. Ned rebuilt the battered sections of brick wall around the garden, and they pruned the surviving fruit trees and vines, fiddled with old terraced beds (peonies, rhubarb, roses) that looked out over Sacajawea Park, soccer nets and tennis courts and a playground in what had been, back when the house was first built—long before the Yellowstone had been rerouted during the Depression and the park had been created by the WPA—marshy cottonwood lowlands buffering the river.

They mail-ordered olive oil and fancy perennials. They bought a lot of midrange wine and novels they never read. These sorts of decisions and expenditures set a pattern, and they danced in and out of debt. Their friends all loved food and wine and the occasional joint, memories of hallucinogens, music. They shared books, teacher tips, pink-eye medication, Ariel as an employee. They trusted each other without confiding too much, and when Polly had her accident, all these people helped.

Mostly, though, Ned and Polly worked. When they bought the businesses on the ground floor of the Elite Hotel, they leased the larger bar, which faced the brunt of the town and its tourists, but kept the restaurant and its small entry bar. Until the accident, Ned cooked three days and two nights and worked two bartending shifts, a Monday to mop up from the weekend, a Friday to start it right. Polly had helped on heavy nights, handled most of the specials prep, and dealt with the accounting.

But no more. Polly’s problem after the accident, really one of her largest problems, was an inability to prune what she saw and what she thought, to stop her brain. She was both too easily distracted and too attentive. When she’d gotten out of the hospital, she’d gone on a looking binge. Ned brought her photography and gardening books, stacks of Sotheby’s catalogues he found at the local Goodwill store, piling them everywhere as a hedge against her glitches in language. Polly spent one unnerving afternoon flat on her back in the yard, watching trees encroach on clouds. There hadn’t been much to do but observe.

But she had always looked too hard at things. When she was little, in a decade of assassination and riot and war, people couldn’t always scuttle her away from the news, but everything—books and records and magazines and calendars—played into some grand theory in her brain about lost people. Her dead aunt Evie gradually looked more and more like the woman on the cover of Durrell’s Justine, and her dead grandfather Frank became a doctor in LIFE magazine. Jane had framed an image of a phoenix, a Persian fresco, from a magazine, and hung it in the bathroom—a golden bird, rising in front of a black sun. It didn’t look reborn, it looked as if it wanted to scorch the world, and it became another tile in her mind, so that later when a neighbor had a parrot, she suspected it was a phoenix in disguise. Bird books, art books—the world was filled with strangeness. Gorillas playing flutes on the cover of terrifying Stravinsky albums, Chinese horses and Ray Charles, soldiers dead in the Southeast Asian mud, corteges on television instead of parades or cartoons.

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