First You Try Everything (14 page)

“You don't remember anything?”

“No. Not like that. I remember stuff that doesn't
mean much. Like I remember this lady in a red dress sitting at a table by
herself in a restaurant.”

“Odd.”

“She comes into my mind, and I'm like, oh, you
again. You can leave now, miss! Because I have no idea why she's there! Freaks
me out!”

“Maybe she was beautiful and she smiled at
you?”

“No. I was a few tables away. She didn't even know
I existed. And meanwhile, I don't even know who was sitting at the table with
me! Probably good ole Mom and Dad.”

He gave her leg a squeeze. “That's the way it goes
sometimes.” She rarely mentioned Good ole Mom and Dad. He took this as an
opportunity to ask for more.

“So tell me about how you—”

“Ole Dad was a heroin addict who left me in a
King's Family Restaurant one day.” She turned from the wheel and smiled at him,
but her eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses. “But he's cool now. He's in
Seattle trying to stop smoking.”

“Left you?”

“Strapped in to one of those booster seats, the
story goes. By that time my mom was already out of the picture. The manager of
King's had to call the cops.”

Ramona had gone back to shredding her words in the
wind.

“I think she gets high on this,” Lauren said, and
laughed a little.

Ben sat quiet, a feeling of sorrow and reverence
colliding in his chest. Lauren fiddled with the radio, found a song, turned it
up. “Please don't think too hard about all that stuff,” she told him. “It was a
long, long time ago. Dad lives in Seattle with a woman who looks just like Carol
Burnett.”

Somehow, imagining Lauren as a child abandoned in a
family restaurant set him wondering if he and Lauren would ever have a child, a
girl who might look just like Lauren. He remembered shooting Evvie with needles
of something called Pergonal—was it made from horse piss or did he make that
up?—shooting her in the hip years ago with long sharp needles that supposedly
would make it easier to get pregnant. Nobody could find anything wrong with
Evvie, or with him. It was an unsolved mystery. And he'd not really minded; it
had been Evvie who had wanted a baby.

“You know what's weird?” Lauren said. She had beads
of sweat glistening on the top of her forehead.

“What's weird?”

“Ramona looks more like you than she does her
father.”

He was surprised to feel happy about this, and when
Ramona stopped screaming her words into the shredding wind, and ducked back into
the car for good, flushed and bright eyed, he turned all the way around in his
seat and told her, “I used to do that when I was your age,” which was a lie.

She flashed him an unguarded smile. She had
pigtails sticking out of the sides of her head. And around her neck, a plastic
magnifying glass.

She was a great kid. She could be a great big
sister. Suddenly he wanted that.

How would he push a baby in a stroller and risk
running into Evvie in the park? What would he say, “Hi, how are you?”

Anger cut through his body like a single strike of
lightning. He was tired of the prison of his old affection. The guilt. He would
not live beholden. He turned up the radio. He would not be paralyzed by memory.
Fuck that! If he was supposed to have a baby, he would have one, with Lauren,
and if they needed to move to another city, they could do that too. He squeezed
Lauren's thigh.

He imagined opening his head and hosing out his
brain.

“Can we go to Taco Bell?” Ramona said.

“My treat,” Ben said.

“Yay,” Ramona finally said. “Yay Ben!”

“Yay Ben!” said Lauren.

E
vvie's mother had called him on the phone two nights ago. “Ben?”

He loved his mother-in-law, despite or because of
her brokenness.

“Hi, Mom.” Could he still call her that?

“What do you think about Evvie?”

“Not sure what you mean, Mom.” The last he knew,
Evvie hadn't told her anything.

“I mean, do you think she's going to be OK?”

“I do.”

“Cedric told me there's trouble in paradise.”

“Well—”

“I'm sure it's temporary, Ben.”

He took a breath. “How are you?”

“I was thinking you should come for a backyard
picnic in June. Like last year. Not to push anything. But we did miss you two at
Easter. Next Door came over and cut the ham, then invited himself to the table.
What was I going to say? Cut the ham and go home?” She laughed, and so did Ben.
Next Door was the neighbor, Charlie, an old-school Italian man who still said
things like “I don't believe in the women's lib.” He tried courting Evvie's aunt
after his wife died, but she'd understood that what he wanted was a maid. Next
Door missed home-cooked meals, clean sheets, sparkling linoleum. Those things
were like his wife's attributes, he'd explained to Ben one day. “After some long
years you can't distinguish between what the person does and who the person
is.”

That narrowing of what one was to what one did was
something Ben had always resisted, wanting to believe in a self that could hang
back, like a hovering soul, intact, with qualities that had nothing to do with
its action in the world. Suddenly he'd seen that was absurd.

“So will you come? For a picnic? You know who would
love to see you is Berenice.”

Evvie's morbidly obese aunt with the eyes like
raisins in dough and the bright schnauzer named Hackie, whom she liked to
introduce as her husband. A sweet woman with a good sense of humor, but it hurt
to watch her try to get out of a chair.

“I'd like to see her too.” He would. Evvie's
extended family had been his own. “And Uncle Carl,” he added. Uncle Carl had a
dummy named Augustine.

“I'm afraid he's on my
s-h-i-t
list right now.”

“Oh.”

“Not that I don't feel bad for him. But he and that
dummy of his gambled away Sissy's inheritance, then apologized with roses, and
Sissy wouldn't forgive him. So Carl says, or rather
Augustine
says, ‘Fine, then you won't get the car I bought you
either.' And he drives off into the distance like he's never even worked the
steps.”

“God. That's crazy.”

“That's Carl. He'll be back too. That's the real
problem.”

Ben laughed. It was easier to laugh, now that he
was free of a lifetime of obligations to them.

“Anyhow, maybe some Saturday in June, you'll come.
Just a family thing. I'll make you a steak. And Evvie can eat her oats and hay
like a pony, and we can all have ice cream and toast marshmallows on the grill.
Just come say hello. Because boy, did we miss you at Easter.”

“I missed you too.” He winced. He didn't, couldn't
add,
I can't come in June. This isn't temporary. I'm in
love with somebody else.

“So with any luck, we'll see you in June.”

“I'll definitely try my best.”

T
he
next day he sat through two long meetings in a windowless room. The lights
buzzed and turned everyone green. At least he had lunch breaks where he could
walk on Carson Street, listening to music on his CD player. He had been
listening to Erik Satie, the mystery of simplicity, glancing at the faces of
passersby, amazed to see how each face seemed completely deserving of their own
feature-length film. Each face was the center of the world. He understood that
this perception was a cliché, but that didn't matter. He'd been moved.

He wanted to call Evvie on the phone after that
walk, to tell her this. It was the first time he'd felt an irresistible urge to
do so. But no. He shouldn't. He really should be telling her about his need for
a divorce.

He'd called Lauren instead, to tell her how each
face had looked like the center of the world. She'd listened carefully, as was
her way.

“That's so cool,” she said, yet he felt vaguely
that she hadn't understood.

“I love you,” he told Lauren, missing Evvie,
looking at the sky. It was the end of spring, but the purple clouds looked
autumnal, the kind of weather that sent him back to the pushcart days, and
suddenly he sensed all their old customers, regulars who'd required nicknames.
The Freelance Mortician, Miss Informed, The Man Who Required You Love His Dog as
Much as He Did, Our Lady of the Terrible News, To Sir with Love, Peppermint
Patty, The Laughing Poet, all the customers lining up, waiting for their hummus
and tabbouleh in the autumn, Evvie making the change in her old blue sweater.
. . .

“I love you too,” Lauren said.

Evvie had named one phlegmatic old woman Bubbles,
blurting out, “Thanks, Bubbles,” one day as she handed over her change, and the
old woman walked away in the cloud of knowing there was no explanation for this
moniker, but a smile played upon her lips nonetheless. They called her Bubbles
all the time after that and watched her personality change, as if the name had
called forth hidden joy beneath the surface of her dour face, and eventually
she'd shown up wearing kid sneakers with blinking lights in the soles.

“More each day,” Lauren added.

“We're going to have a lot of good years together,”
he said, a pressure in his chest rising into his throat. “A lot of good years.”
He wished they would hurry up, those years, and get behind him and Lauren. A
history to lean on. Filled with memories of rooms where they'd made love, or
cried, or laughed until they cried. They hadn't done that yet—laughed until they
cried. They needed more rooms.

Evvie

E
vvie took a train to Philly, thinking she would visit her parents, but after she disembarked, caught the subway, and walked the long blocks to their house, she began to feel she had no skin. For these visits home, Ben had been her skin. Ben had understood that the house of childhood cast a spell, gave her a form of multiple personality disorder, rendered her all the ages she had ever been inside of its walls. Without him, how was she to navigate the collision of selves? He'd seemed to love those selves, had lifted photographs out of an album and taken them for his own possessions: a picture of her when she was a fat, bald baby; her second-grade school picture where she'd tried to look like she had extreme buckteeth like her friend Kenny Walters, who kept white mice in a Barbie castle; and a photograph of her fourteen-year-old self in black cowboy boots, holding her pet rabbit, Zorro. Ben had framed this last one. Now it seemed to her he'd rejected not just the self she was now, but all those other people too. The ones whose ghosts still haunted the old house. She wasn't sure she could actually make this visit.

He'd loved her old bedroom with the light-switch plate of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the faded flowered wallpaper, the white plastic radio that looked so quaint, it seemed ancient songs like “Hooked on a Feeling” or “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” were about to come out of it. The gray-and-pink flannel sheets printed with poodles from 1970 were his favorites. And he'd known every important story that had taken place in that room, that house.

Now all of it seemed wrong and broken, warped and tedious.

She found herself walking quickly right by her house as if it were any other house on the narrow street.

Then, at the very end of the street, she sat on the curb, put her head down in her hands, and asked herself, “What are you doing?”

She rose and walked the city streets, walked as if in a dream, then circled back to her parents' house in early dusk, sidling up to the side wall like a spy. In the kitchen window her mother was on the phone, seated at the table in a T-shirt that read,
IF THERE'S NO CHOCOLATE IN HEAVEN, THEN I
AIN'T GOIN'
. Her mother laughed and looked up at the ceiling, then got up and started to walk toward the sink, and Evvie ducked out of sight. Her mother was looking good with her strawberry blond hair and extra pounds. Since her father had been to rehab nine years ago, her mother didn't drink either. She'd quit cold turkey, to accompany her husband, just as she'd always accompanied him drinking. Nine years' sobriety had returned a youthful expression to her face that always surprised Evvie.

S
he still hadn't told her parents what had happened. Apparently Cedric had mentioned that she and Ben were “going through a rough patch,” because their mother had asked and Cedric was incapable of outright lying. Evvie had imagined this trip would be an occasion for confession, but now that seemed unlikely. It was not only Evvie's desire to protect her parents from bad news, but how she knew that telling them would make the whole thing suddenly seem too real. And besides, they'd had enough trouble for one lifetime.

Also, she didn't want their AA-slogan-riddled pep talk right now.

Their favorite by far:
If God's far away, who moved?

S
he remembered quoting “Desiderata” to them when she was ten, pacing in that living room like a campaigning politician as they drank themselves into oblivion at night. If she just kept reciting “Desiderata,” things were bound to improve. They had a right to be here. They really weren't less than the trees and the stars. Ben had liked that story above all others. Now the ridiculous child she'd been on those nights seemed for a stark moment, suddenly alive, unsponsored. She could not bear the memory without the refuge of his listening.

She turned from the window, from the view of her mother leaving the kitchen, and leaned against the house, then stepped back and looked up at her old bedroom window. It faced what had been the bedroom window of her next-door neighbor Donnie Olivetti, who'd come back from Vietnam without a leg when Evvie was eleven. He would sit in the dark and listen to Motown or the Byrds, and Evvie would listen too, across from him in the dark of her own bedroom, kneeling by the window, imagining they were in communion of some kind. She had loved him since she was six years old. Once that year she'd worked up the nerve to call out to him, in a silence that fell after “Ballad of Easy Rider.”

“Donnie!” She hadn't meant it to be such an obvious cry of the heart.

He'd come right up to the screen. “Hey, Evvie. How you doing over there?”

She'd hesitated. She'd wanted to tell him something profound that spring night. She'd wanted to speak of a great loneliness. And to somehow tell him nothing else in her life could compare to him. But how impossible that would have been. He might have guessed she'd had a schoolgirl crush, a terrible diminishment of what she'd felt then.

His old window was curtained now, and seemed smaller than she remembered.

It struck her now that the love she'd had for Donnie had somehow paved the way for the love she had for Ben.

S
he started to walk around to her parents' back door. If it was open, she could slip inside and surprise them. She could visit without saying a word about what was going on with Ben. If they mentioned anything, she could wave the subject away as if the trouble had passed. That was the solution. She could sit and have a cup of tea at the table and enjoy some small talk.

The back door was locked. She knocked. She knocked harder. Maybe her mother had gone upstairs. She gave up and walked around to the front door. Knocked and rang the bell. No answer. Rang and rang. Was it broken? She walked around to the other side of the house and looked into the living room. Photographs of her and her siblings all over the walls. Sears portraits. Her mother's collection of ceramic birds. Her father's amateur boxing trophies on the mantel sharing space with a blue-robed Virgin Mary, all of this barely visible in the dim light cast from the dining room. She knocked on the window without hope. Maybe her mother had gone up to sleep and her father was out at a meeting. Maybe they were both home, and losing their hearing. Or they had heard the knock and imagined an unwanted visitor. For a split second she considered that maybe they'd actually seen her approach, and had rushed to hide from her. “What's wrong with me? Am I that far gone that I'd entertain such a thought?” She spoke this to the darkness, and a shiver went through her.

She missed Ruth.

S
he had a problem now. Where to sleep? She could get on a Greyhound and head back to Pittsburgh and sleep all night long with the road rushing beneath her. Or she could go see Frances Trudnack's parents. Frances Trudnack had been her best friend in grade school and was now a surgeon. Her parents still lived two blocks over, as far as Evvie knew. She started walking there. The route was so deeply familiar it felt like walking into the past.

Frances and Evvie had been the sorts to talk about “life” up on top of the jungle gym throughout grade school. What was life? Why was there such a thing as life? Why had they been born? Metaphysical speculation so fresh it was a wound that sent them into a kind of hysterics up there on those bars, under the sky. They'd hang upside down and scream.

She hadn't seen Frances in years, but her parents had always liked Evvie, and Evvie had once considered their house a second home. But the house was dark, she saw now, and closed for the night, or maybe even empty. Or maybe they'd finally moved, like everyone else.

Her long friendship with Frances had seemed indestructible, until a girl named Moira Bangs moved to town in seventh grade with her fishnet stockings and her great idea to have a Little Prince club. Evvie had loved
The Little Prince
, but had not loved how Moira claimed Frances for her best friend, as if Evvie didn't exist. Rather than fight for Frances, Evvie had retreated entirely, reading books about the astronauts. Now she felt a fresh humiliation remembering how badly she'd wanted Frances to drag her away from outer space and back to the world. Why did any of this matter now? Why did old wounds still seem present in the body, in the way that happiness did not? Why couldn't happiness leave the same deep traces? And where was she going to sleep tonight? She sat down on what had been the front stoop of the Trudnack house.

After a while, an old man stood on his front porch next door.

“Hello, sir. Would you mind if I used your phone?” Evvie asked him, standing up.

He didn't answer. He just looked at her.

“Just for a quick moment. I'd like to call my parents.”

“Where you come from?”

“I was raised two blocks from here.”

“Uh-huh. OK. Come on.”

Evvie followed him into the narrow house, which smelled of split pea soup and newspapers. A loud television was tuned into a rerun of
I Love Lucy.
Evvie stopped and watched for a second. “Love this show,” she said, turning to the man, but he was not in the mood to chat. He pointed her to an old rotary phone on a table by an armchair. “Sit on down and make your call,” he said. She sank into the old chair and picked up the heavy receiver. The old man hovered over her, watching closely as she dialed, as if making sure it wasn't long distance.

The phone rang and rang. Just as she was ready to give up, her father answered.

“Hey, Dad!” Tears of relief filled her eyes.

After a short hesitation, her father said, “Pittsburgh!” He called all of his children by the names of their adopted hometowns, including Louise, who lived in Saint Paul. “What's new with you, Pittsburgh?”

“Actually, I'm in town for business, and I thought I'd spend the night with you guys.”

“Business?”

“You know, animal stuff.”

“Right, right. Well, sure, come right on over!”

“Be there soon.” Evvie smiled and hung up the phone. “Thank you so much,” she told the old man, who followed close behind her as she made her way back to the night. She would be a pleasant guest for her parents, full of small talk. She would eat, sleep, and get back on the train.

H
er father greeted her at the door with what might be called a hug. They hadn't been a family of huggers until Evvie's sister Mary brought a hugging, hippie fiancé into the mix years ago. The hippie hadn't lasted the year; the hugging habit stayed. But it still wasn't all that natural to the family.

Evvie wondered why her father was dangling car keys and why the house was so dark.

Her mother, as it turned out, was out doing karaoke. “She's quite the karaoke junkie,” her father said, smiling at Evvie. “Two, three times a week now. You gotta come hear.”

“OK. Great.”

“How you doing?” he said now, walking her to the car. “Keepin' it simple, are ya?”

“Oh yeah,” she agreed. She loved him and usually softened in his presence, but felt strangely absent now.

“Good, good. Ya keep it simple and you got it in the bag, kid.”

“Easy does it,” Evvie agreed.

“Your mom wishes you'd call home more often these days,” he said, as they got into the car.

“I will, I will. Just really busy.”

“We know all you kids have lives. That's a good thing.”

H
e drove her to the Greek restaurant, where they sat in a high-backed wooden booth drinking Cokes while a guy who looked like Moe from the Three Stooges sang a fascinating version of “You Shook Me All Night Long,” followed by a young woman in eight-inch heels who belted out “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” Evvie's mother was up front with her karaoke friends at a long table. The plan was to wait and surprise her, give her a standing ovation after she sang.

Between the next two songs, both Rolling Stones numbers sung by what appeared to be a biker couple, Evvie's father asked her about the Steelers. Did she think Troy Polamalo would be the backbone again next year?

“Troy and Hines Ward.” Evvie nodded, her eyes on her mother, who was rising from her seat now.

“She's up next,” her father said. “The lady is up and rarin' to go. Watch out, America.”

Evvie's heart quickened. Her mother wore a red dress and had a strange kind of star appeal for a hefty woman in her seventies. Soon she was up there singing “Sweet Caroline” like a pro whose life had placed some salty, scratchy, beautiful resistance in her notes. Evvie, listening, felt both proud and protective. It was easy to love her mother from this distance, as part of a friendly audience in the dark. Evvie looked over at her father, whose face registered a complex mixture of love and fear. It was good to be here, Evvie told herself. Everything's going to work out fine, eventually. Bad times come and bad times go, and people survive and go forward. And now she stood for the standing ovation, and her mother, seeing her there with her father, waved and smiled, her face lighting up, then settling into confusion.

Evvie smiled broadly to let her know that everything was all right, while the audience asked for an encore. “Come on, Gracie, one more! Knock it outta the park!”

Her mother didn't need to be coaxed. She began singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and her friends went wild. Evvie watched her father watching her mother, and for a few stark moments, he looked suddenly old, like a stranger. Then he was himself again. The love in his face, born of the pain and effort of a lifelong marriage, was exquisite. She steeled herself against the sadness rising in her chest, and kept her eyes on her singing mother. Then rose for another standing ovation.