The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,127
end up just sitting there, looking out the window.
Travis leaves for work early, seven-thirty, wearing a khaki jumpsuit with TRAVIS stitched in red letters on a white patch, carrying coffee in a blue mug that he brings home with him at night to be rinsed out and refilled with coffee again the next morning. His mother bought him a blue Datsun so he could get to work in the morning. It needs a new muffler, and the engine is so loud that the crows fly up from the corn across the highway when he starts it in the morning. My mother asked Mrs. Rowley when she thinks Travis will fix this, and Mrs. Rowley said Travis had enough things to fix right now, and maybe everyone should just leave him alone.
He gets home a little after six, the khaki jumpsuit stained with splotches of oil, walking quickly from the car. He does not look up at my window. Deena goes over around seven, knocking on his window, never the door. He comes out, and the two of them go for long walks together, up and down the highway. They don’t talk, or maybe they wait until no one can see them before they begin. But they walk side by side, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not. She’s cut her hair off, all the way up to her ears. Her neck looks even longer and thinner, like the stem of a flower. Sometimes she looks up at my window quickly, but I don’t know if she sees me or not.
Travis says good-bye to her every night in the parking lot. Sometimes they kiss, and sometimes he just leans forward, bending his knees so that his forehead touches hers.
When Eileen hears about Deena, she says she thinks it’s sad the way young people are going downhill today. She says if this country really wanted to put a stop to teen pregnancy, drug use, AIDS, and rap music, they’d put prayer back in schools and then wonder why we ever took it out.
“Case in point,” she tells my mother, pointing at me. “Two girls, living right next door to each other. They’re the same age. They’re friends. One goes to church, at least when her grandmother can get her there, and the other one doesn’t. One doesn’t get pregnant at fifteen, and the other one does.”
I watch Eileen talk, her crooked mouth forming the words. I would like to believe what she is saying now, that I am not pregnant because I am good. But I know that some of the reason I am not pregnant and Deena is is that she was born with large, dark eyes and a neck like the stem of a flower, and I wasn’t.
“At least they’re getting married,” she says, unwinding her yellow measuring tape. She’s knitting Samuel a sweater, a blue one, she says, to match his eyes. He reaches up for the tape, making his shrieking sound.
“Oh come on,” my mother says. She is sitting on the counter, eating a grape Popsicle, wearing a denim skirt she has had since I was little. “They’re both so young.”
“Come on nothing, Tina. They created a child together. Now they can raise one. Or they can go through the nine months and give it up for adoption. Anyway, they’re not so young. I was seventeen when I married your father. My own grandmother was sixteen on her wedding day, and she and my grandfather went on to have thirteen children.”
Eileen looks proud about this, but my mother makes a face, reeling back in her chair. “Thirteen?” She looks at me. “Your grandmother had thirteen children? That’s insane.”
It’s true, I think. My mother is right—thirteen is too many. Even their own parents would forget their names sometimes.
Eileen shrugs. “They were Catholic.”
My mother rolls her eyes, chewing the end of her Popsicle stick. “Someone needs to give the pope thirteen babies. Just for a week or so. See how he likes no birth control then.”
“People who have self-control don’t need birth control, Tina.”
“Well, apparently your grandmother did.” She laughs, but Eileen doesn’t.
“People need to learn to reap what they sow.”
Reap what you sow. Eileen likes this phrase, this quote. She thinks people with AIDS are reaping what they sow too, getting what they deserve. She has said this to me before. She says, “Do you really think it’s just a coincidence that homosexuals and drug users are getting it? Don’t you see the lesson there?”