The Center of the Universe

 

Deno Trakas

The center of the universe barges into the guest bedroom, my office, and says “Dad,” even though the door is mostly closed, even though she can see I’m trying to grade papers.

  I answer without looking up. “What?”

  “You said you’d help me with a story for extra credit, remember?”  When I don’t answer immediately, she adds, “To pull up my grade.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “I’ve kinda got other plans later.”

 “Okay, just a minute.”  She surveys her freckles in the mirror over the dresser while I write a comment on the paper in front of me. When I finish and turn to face her, she looks fuzzy, so I take off my glasses and hold them out to see if they’re dirty or if my sight is getting even worse. Now she looks fuzzy and far away. “Okay, what do you want to write about?”  I put on my glasses and pull a legal pad out of my briefcase on the floor beside me.

 “I don’t know. You’re the writer.”  She sits on the corner of the bed and begins to fidget, rocking, keeping time with the fast music under her teenage skin.

 “I won’t do this by myself, Ruthie.”

 “Okay, but I don’t know how to start.”

 “You need a character and a problem. What’s your character’s name?”

 “Um ... Andrea.”

 “Let’s not write about your best friend.”

 “Okay, Simone.”

 “Simone what?”

 “Jenkins.”

 “Sounds like a French redneck. How about DesChamps?”

 “I can’t even spell DesChamps.”

 “I can.”  I write it down. “What’s her problem?”

 She doesn’t know how to spell her name.”  Leaning back on her elbows, she gives me her look, a tease, a slight squeeze of the eyes, mostly her left eye because her right is hidden behind a wave of red hair. She gives the look without grinning, and it always defeats me.

 I sigh. “What else?”

 “I don’t know.”

 “Boys?”

 “That’s so boring.”

 “Boys are boring?”  I’m about to ask why she spends every waking minute of the day talking to them on the phone if they’re boring, but she says, “Boys aren’t boring. Boy problems are boring.”

 “Oh. What then?”

  She sits up again, tugs at the cuffs of her sweatshirt and presses them to the bed with her arms stiff, as if she’s bracing for takeoff. “Maybe the girl could get kidnapped at the mall.”

  “Who would want her?”

 “Daaad.”

 “Okay, who would kidnap her and why?”

 “She’s rich and these guys want her money.”

 “Oh, I didn’t know that.”  I jot it down.

 “She’s like the daughter of the guy who owns Walmart, and these guys, one of them’s the janitor at her school, it’s a private school.”

 “Sam Walton died.”

 “Jeez. He’s like Sam Walton. He owns Richland Mall, okay?”

 “Okay. But why can’t we write about a normal girl with a normal problem.”

 “Yeah, right. Poor Susie doesn’t have a date for Homecoming.  Wow. Thrills a minute.”

 I sit back and imagine. “Maybe Poor Susie has a younger sister she doesn’t get along with, and because they live in a tiny house, she has to share a room with her, and she can’t stand it so she runs away to live with her best friend.”

 She rolls her eyes and says, “Bor-ing. What’s wrong with a kidnapping?”

 I write KIDNAPPED! across my pad. “It’s too sensational. And you don’t know anything about it. How many kids do you know who’ve been kidnapped?”

 “The same number that’ve run away from their little sister.”

 I sigh again. This time she is grinning, or smirking, it’s hard to tell. “Okay, it’s your story, it’s your grade.”

 “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”  She slouches and pulls a strand of hair in front of her left eye to check for split ends.

 “Don’t give up already, Ruth.”

 “I didn’t know it was going to be this hard. I mean, we haven’t gotten anywhere. How long does it take you to write a story?”

 “Sometimes days, sometimes months.”  I look at my watch.  “I don’t think I’ve ever done one in twelve minutes.”

 “Yeah, but yours are, you know, serious.”

 Yeah, serious. Literary. Paid for with sample copies. Published in journals with circulation in three figures. But Ruth knows and cares nothing about that, so I just say, “We have to be serious about this one too or it won’t be any good.”

 “But I told Andrea I’d go with her to the soccer match.”

 I slap the pencil down, give her my look, the parental disappointment look. “Go then. Forget the whole thing.”

 She hesitates, studying her hands as her red fingernails drum her kneecaps. I want her to say, You’re right, Dad, let’s get back to work. Instead, she rises without saying a word and leaves.

 The story was Ruth’s teacher’s idea, but it was my idea for us to do it together. It’s not a bad idea, really. In the first place, Ruth needs to bring up her grade. You can’t imagine how embarrassing it is for me, a college English teacher and so-called writer, to have a C-in-English daughter. But the more important reason is that I crave to understand the teenage stranger who lives in my house. I know: my friends who have teenagers assure me it’s normal—there’s no more reason for me to understand Ruth than for me to understand a Mid-East terrorist. But I can’t accept that, and I hoped this project would bring us closer. Writing is, after all, the most personal thing I do, except for occasional repartee with my wife.

 My wife. We have our habits of peace, and she has a separate peace with Ruth. She expects Ruth to be moody, rude, egotistical, and worse during adolescence. It’s a phase, she says. I went through it too, she says. Chill, she says. My wife can even talk like our daughter.

 I’m chilling here at my desk, which I refinished with Ruthie’s help, when she was five and into helping. Back then it was me, not her, who thought she was the center of the universe. Staring at the wavy grain in the maple wood, I think of Ruthie and turn her into Poor Susie. Poor Susie lives in a trailer with her mom and sister June near Ft. Jackson, near enough so that they hear artillery practice almost every day. Boom. It drives Susie crazy. Boom. It shakes the Revlon bottles on her dresser. Boom. That and her mother’s nagging and her sister’s pestering drive her crazy. Drive. If she could drive, she’d take the car tonight, after her mother falls asleep, and she’d disappear. Maybe she’d go look for her daddy in North Carolina. Daddy. Four years ago he was transferred to Ft. Bragg and simply refused to take them along. She doesn’t know if she loves him or hates him. Maybe she’d go to Atlanta, lie about her age, get a job.

 I’m in Poor Susie’s head, picking up her thoughts, examining them, putting them back, when my wife comes home from work, still wearing her white lab coat. “Hey,” she says as she passes my door on the way to our bedroom to change. “Where’s Ruthie?  I thought y’all were going to work on a story.”

 “She and Andrea had a prior engagement to ogle the boys at the soccer match.”

 “Hmmm,” is my wife’s response, as if Ruth probably made the right choice.

 

 Maybe her mother spoke to her, or maybe she’s more embarrassed by her grade than I think, but the next night Ruth returns. She doesn’t apologize or grovel. She just nudges the door and appears, one shoulder leaning against the doorjamb.  “Dad, will you help me with the story some more?”

 I put down my copy of Julius Caesar and think about giving in.  “I guess I can spare another twelve minutes,” I say to let her know that if she expects my help, I expect her commitment. She plops down and leans against the headboard of the bed, arms folded over the flat chest that is one of her constant preoccupations, along with her thin lips, ski-jump nose, Biblical name, and so much more. Today she has crimped a two-inch star into her wave of hair, and I remember hearing her mention the instrument of such desecration to her mother, but I don’t remember hearing them say they might actually buy it. I push away my book and pull out the legal pad on which I jotted our notes. “Okay. I thought up some ideas for Poor Susie—do you want to hear them, or do you want to stick with Simone The Kidnapee?”

 “Simone.”

 I’m disappointed, but it’s her story. “Okay. You said her dad owns Richland Mall. What does her mother do?”

 “Nothing. They’re rich.”

 “What about in her free time—does she play tennis at the country club or volunteer for Meals on Wheels?”

 “She plays tennis.”

 “What about mall-magnate Dad, is he ever home, and what’s his relationship with his daughter?”

 “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know all this stuff?  What does it matter, anyway?”

 “This stuff is the background that will make your character believable. But we can get right to her if you think parents aren’t important.”  Pause to let that sink in. “Okay, what does Simone want?”

 Ruth gives her look and says, “She wants to get away from the kidnappers.”

 “I mean besides that, before she gets kidnapped.”

 “She wants to have fun.”

 “What does she think is fun?”

 “Going to the mall with her friends.”

 “That’s her goal in life, to go to the mall with her friends?”

 “Daaad.”

  “That’s what you said.”

 She sulks or thinks. Then, without looking up she says, “She wants to be happy.”

 The way she says it, simply and sincerely, without the usual sneer, trips my heart. She wants to be happy. I see Simone hiding behind a wave of red hair. “But why, honey?”  The term slips out of the past—I used to call her honey all the time but don’t anymore. “Why is Simone unhappy?”  I try to catch her gaze, but she keeps her head down as she tugs at a rhinestone on her T-shirt.

 “She doesn’t know.”

 “Is she ugly?” I ask.

 “No.”

 “Unpopular?”

 “No.”

 “Do you know why she’s unhappy?”

 “How should I know when she doesn’t know.”

 “Exactly,” I say. Ruth doesn’t hear or else ignores me. I press on. “Does she have a boyfriend?”

 “What about the kidnapping, Dad?”

 “Okay, do the kidnappers have boyfriends?”

 “Dad, you’re such a dork.”

 “Is that good or bad?”

  “I can’t handle this, Dad.”  She gets up and walks to the door.  “I’ve got to study math.”

 “Stay, Ruthie. I won’t joke around any more.”

 “I’ve got a test tomorrow, or do you want me to flunk math too?”  She knows I’ll have no smart answer to this.

 “Go then,” I say, and she does.

 I follow Ruthie to the mall on Friday night because I want to see what happiness she thinks she finds there.

 She and her friends spend most of their time in Flickers, the arcade. I can’t go in because they’d see me, but I assume, I hope, they’re playing video games. Finally, as I watch, fifty yards away, from a bench partially hidden behind a planter of schefflera, they emerge, one girl and boy holding hands, another boy chasing and tagging Ruthie. She seems to be complaining, but playfully, and when he isn’t expecting it, she tags him back hard on the shoulder.

 Ruthie’s boy takes a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and offers them around—the other guy and girl accept, but Ruthie, I’m relieved, does not. The other couple drifts to the benches in the center of the aisle, as if smoking is hard work and they need a rest. Ruthie and the boy she tagged hover near the entrance to the arcade. She leans back against the wall—she’s taller than him but leaning back brings her down a few inches. As he moves in close to her, her arms encircle his waist.  They kiss, seriously if clumsily, mashing their bodies, oblivious to the turning heads of shoppers.

 I get up and take a step toward them so I can kill the boy.

 But I stop, knowing that to break them up, even to show myself, would be disastrous for my relationship with my daughter. I sit back down. We can both live with her thinking I’m a dork—I probably am one—but she’d never forgive my being a spy or policeman. Policeman. That’s how I feel, here to make sure there’s no trouble–trouble–this scene looks like trouble, feels like trouble, but why?–because she’s too young--is fourteen too young to kiss?—no, but it will lead to sex—am I sure?—yes, no, not sure but worried--worried--she’s my little girl and if that boy . . . I watch his hands, one of which is down at his side, holding his cigarette—thank God he smokes—but the other is on the side I can’t see. Paralyzed, I watch.

 Although I lose all sense of time, I’m pretty sure the kiss doesn’t last long before Ruthie pushes the boy away. Silently I cheer her on to kick him and gouge his eyes out, but she merely catches his jacket sleeve and drags him across the aisle to the music store.

 I breathe again and wipe my foggy glasses. I feel tired as if I’ve been smoking, or chasing someone for miles. Thrills a minute. Happiness. Is this what she wants: clumsy kisses from a short boy with cigarette breath?

 Go then, I say to her in my head, you can handle this trouble, and you’ll outgrow it soon enough.

 Feeling useless, I turn to leave. As I glance back one last time to check on my daughter and her boyfriend’s hands, I see a door to a storage room and think, that’s where it would happen, that’s where Simone would be kidnapped. On the way home, I plot the story of how Simone’s father arranges a kidnapping to shock his daughter into loving her life again. I wonder if Ruthie will be happy with it.