Читать онлайн «The Center of Everything»

RONALD REAGAN IS ON TELEVISION, giving a speech because he wants to be president. He has the voice of a nice person, and something in his hair that makes it shiny under the lights. I change the channel, but it’s still him, just from a different angle.

The people in the audience wear cowboy hats with REAGAN printed on the front, and they clap and blow horns every time he stops talking, so much that sometimes he has to put his hands up so they’ll be quiet and hear what he’s going to say next. Nancy Reagan sits behind him, smiling and wearing a peach-colored dress with a bow on one of the shoulders, no cowboy hat. She claps too, but only after everyone else has started, so it looks like while he is talking, she is maybe thinking about something else.

“She’s a mannequin,” my mother says, pointing a spatula at the television.

My mother is maybe the opposite of Nancy Reagan. I could never imagine her wearing the peach dress with the bow on it because she wears blue jeans and usually her gray sweatshirt. And she always listens to what everyone says, even people sitting in the next booth in restaurants who probably don’t want her to listen. Right now, she’s supposed to be in the kitchen, making us grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, but she came out to the front room when she heard Ronald Reagan’s voice, and now she’s just standing there with the spatula, looking at the television and shaking her head until I can smell smoke coming from the kitchen, the bread starting to burn.

She smells it too, runs back. “Zing!” she says. When she kisses me sometimes she says “Smack!”

The people listening to Ronald Reagan in the audience yell “Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip, hooray!” and wave their cowboy hats at the camera as it moves around the room. Finally Ronald Reagan laughs and says, “I think you’re playing our song. ” And this just makes people yell more.