First You Try Everything (19 page)

“So tell me again how it works. I'm not completely
sure about this yet,” she said.

For one moment, she felt she was looking down from
above, a giant who was contemplating taking her small self by the scruff of the
neck and tossing her body out of the car and into the nearest river, where she
could swim back to the shore of reason, because, she thought, this is insanely
unreasonable, and I know it, but then why does it also somehow feel like
exactly where I
should be
and what I should be doing, right now,
right here, on this rainy afternoon. Ordained.

She took in a slow breath. The silence in the car
was deep and filled with their patience. They'd been right—back when she first
met them they'd said the whole thing was like going to the theater.
Thee-ate-her.
She was on the verge of having front-row
tickets to a show she'd been dying to see forever, and it didn't matter that she
was one of the actors. She had nearly always been one of the actors, and
simultaneously one of the watchful audience members.

“I need all your contact information on the check,”
Rocky said. “I mean, if you plan on writing one.”

“I do think I will.”

“Give Starshine the book to lean on.”

Bruno handed back a large, battered book with Bob
Dylan on the front of it, and no title. She opened the book and saw it was
Dylan's sheet music. The collected works. She opened to “Idiot Wind,” and turned
the page to “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” A song she and Ben had
memorized.

“You guys musicians?”

“That belongs to my son,” Bruno said. “He left it
behind last time he visited. You'd think the kid grew up in the 1960s. Listening
to all the music we grew up on.”

“You grew up in the 1960s?” For reasons she
couldn't explain, she had imagined Bruno singing doo-wop on a corner.

“Graduated high school in 1966.”

“Speak for yourself,” Rocky said.

“I am.” Bruno explained that Rocky was younger than
he, but didn't tell his age.

“I don't even tell myself. Nobody should. I learned
that from the holy Mexicans. The numbers hypnotize you. Far as I'm concerned,
I'm all the numbers in the world, or none of them.”

Evvie saw the wisdom of this and said so. She wrote
the check, signing her name with a flourish that surprised her.

Now they were even nicer. Now she was one of their
customers for real. Now they wanted to know her wishes, in detail, and how she
might want those wishes carried out. It was time, Rocky said, for some dreams to
come true.

Ben

A
s it
turned out, Ramona had a talent for modern dance. At least this is what Lauren
seemed to believe, and Ben tried to believe it too, sitting there on the worn
wooden seats of the auditorium one night in early November. Backstage, Ramona
was dressed up as Autumn, with real leaves pinned to her black leotard, and she
would be dancing with Winter, a friend of hers named Eugene whom they'd never
met but heard a lot about; the kid was so precocious he was reading Noam
Chomsky. Ben had watched Ramona practicing one evening on the grass out front,
in her bare feet, in the cold; he'd stood on the steps and clapped for her,
secretly thinking, Anything but dance, kid. Do anything else
.
She had not inherited a speck of Lauren's grace. She was a
flailer, but unlike many people cut from such a cloth, seemed not to know it.
Her chin was lifted like the proudest ballerina. He supposed she was young
enough to get away with this performance, but he worried for her
nonetheless.

“Good evening, parents, and welcome. Tonight, as
you know, we've asked all the children to interpret one of the seasons. Rumor
has it we'll see ten Summers, nine Springs, five Autumns, three Winters, and a
whole chorus of the seasons all mixed together!” said the woman with
gold-streaked hair onstage. Her pep was forced but emerged from a genuine desire
to rouse the audience out of what often seemed (Ben had been to three of these
events already) like a collective parental stupor; everyone hauling themselves
around with a combination of goodwill, exhaustion, and barely suppressed dread
that the evening, under these harsh and buzzing lights, would go on forever.

“We let the children choose their season, and we
had them write their own script and choose their own music. We couldn't be more
proud of them, and we'd like to thank some people who made this evening
possible, starting with you, the parents!” In her skirt and high heels she
conducted their clapping. The woman was a complicated presence up there on the
stage, black and elegant, beautiful but also tired-looking, and Ben clapped and
watched her with narrowed eyes and imagined she was responsible for too much in
life. She was the sturdy one who took over administrative tasks and then
regretted it, but kept doing them because she felt she was surrounded by flakes
and idiots. (Probably was.) She peered at them over her reading glasses, a warm,
if weary, smile on her face. He had real empathy for these kinds of people,
since he was one of them. At work he'd become that person, even as he'd tried
not to. I'm not the boss, he chanted, off and on throughout the day. Do I look
like the boss? he'd sing. Yes, a woman had answered, you really do. He didn't
know the answers to half of their questions, but he was undeniably the guy who
knew where things were. The man he shared an office with didn't, of course.
Always the people who didn't know where things were ended up right smack beside
Ben. Like Evvie, who'd always been looking for something. “I'm losing my mind!”
she'd holler. “I had my keys right there on the shelf and now—” And until the
last year he'd come running to retrieve whatever it was—the keys, a book, some
crucial document or letter from a senator, a photograph. Too eager to help,
which his therapist had said was a real problem. He'd always thought of it as a
good quality, but the therapist helped him understand that he was always and
everywhere searching for approval.

“Uh, look, Evvie, it's right there,” he'd say. “Two
feet in front of your eyes.” He sometimes thought she had some sort of brain
damage. Her mother had told him a story about Evvie at age three trying to fly
down concrete steps while playing Batman, and he sometimes thought something
might have happened to her then.

She'd smack herself in the head and thank him too
profusely while he'd lap up the praise.

He'd always been a finder. Even as a boy, if anyone
in his family lost something, his mother would holler, “Get Ben! Ben will know
where it is!”

Ben was so grateful, right now, that he sat beside
Lauren, who was even more of a finder than he was. This organized woman
(probably the most alert of all the parents in this auditorium, and certainly
the most beautiful, even in the oversize fisherman sweater—very unlike her to
wear something like that, actually) had not once, in all these months, lost her
car keys.

“Our show will begin in just a few minutes. Again,
thank you for coming.” She exited the stage in her elegant skirt and blouse, and
he was sorry to see her go.

A child behind them started to cry, and lots of
younger kids were running in the aisles. “Here he comes,” Lauren said. “Watch
out for the handshake.” Lauren's ex-husband was walking toward them. Lauren
rarely mentioned him, but Ben had retained every last thing she'd ever said
about him: He was a bit of a dolt. He lost his temper every time he watched a
football game. He was techno-geek savvy. He was late with child support in a way
that was passive-aggressive. He was into terrible sci-fi and horror movies, and
his name was Carter.

Carter had a ponytail? You'd think she would have
mentioned that. He had wire-frame glasses and a Hendrix T-shirt and his
handshake was so strong it seemed filled with the intention to break a few
fingers. You wouldn't expect it from a thin guy with a ponytail. Oh, but he had
muscles. He was an obvious pumper of iron.

“Nice to finally meet you,” Carter said, his eyes
shifting toward the expectantly empty stage, the spotlight shining down on
nothing. Ben had a few seconds to study him. He had the extreme good looks of a
man who'd be painted in the Renaissance. His eyelashes were disturbingly long.
Finally he looked down at Lauren, briefly, and Ben understood there was a story
of pain between the two of them that Lauren had never been compelled to allude
to, much less tell in full. He was thankful for that peculiar reserve but knew
he could easily be seized by a deadly curiosity.

Carter took his seat down in the first row, and sat
slumped, his hands crossed at his crotch, his long legs extended so that they
almost reached the foot of the stage.

“So that's the ex,” Ben said.

Lauren nodded, and squeezed his hand, and wouldn't
look him in the eye.

W
hen
it was finally time for Ramona to be Autumn, half the families had gone home.
Ben was surprised to feel annoyed by this abandoning of Ramona.
We sat through your kids, you should sit through
ours.

Ramona, covered with red leaves, crawled across the
stage moaning, “Time, time, time!” Ben hadn't expected this at all. He sat up,
utterly alert. She crawled into the spotlight, then slowly rose to stand, her
sinuous arms reaching out into the air like branches. They moved until they
found their perfect shape, and then she stood there, impressively frozen, a bony
birch on a windless night. It was easy to imagine snowfall and a cardinal
landing in the crook of her elbow.

Winter, an Asian boy in a white suit a few sizes
too small for him and a small policeman's hat, ran onto the stage and blew a
whistle. Then shouted, “Dance, Autumn, dance! Before I come, and you can dance
no more!” So this was Eugene the Chomsky reader. His voice was high and clear,
but somehow possessed its own authority. He blew the whistle again. “I saw the
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness!” Eugene cried, apropos of
nothing. Ben whispered to Lauren, “That's the beat poet Ginsberg,” and Lauren
said, “Get out,” and the boy shouted the line again, then walked around in
circles that got progressively quicker and larger while part of an old U2 song
began to play. “With or Without You.” The boy circled the dancing red tree of
Ramona, and Ben looked over at Lauren. “This is
wild
,” she whispered, and bit her lower lip. “It
is
,” he said, watching Ramona, who was still a flailing dancer but
was somehow in the process of transcending herself. Having shed all
self-consciousness, she was good, in that strange way that anyone is good, when
their intentions have been unified into a single desire. He'd seen it before, in
college, when a homely young woman had unexpectedly stood up at a party and sung
a song about the dignity of coal miners. Nobody even knew where the woman had
come from, nobody had ever known a coal miner, and the woman couldn't sing her
way out of a paper bag, but by the end of her song Ben had thought she was the
best and most beautiful person in the room.

Ramona somehow danced fighting, with all her heart,
the idea of winter and the idea of all the best minds of her generation being
destroyed by madness, while Eugene with his long bangs like a black curtain on
his forehead kept repeating Ginsberg and U2 kept crooning,
And you give yourself away
, and Ben was right there with Ramona as
she leaped into the air and spun across the stage while Winter blew his whistle
and said, “Your roots, your roots, you have lost your roots.” Ramona stopped in
her tracks and tiptoed backward to where she'd started, and tried to attach
herself again to that spot where her roots had been torn. The spotlight revealed
the surprisingly anguished effort of her face. So, he thought. Ramona was an
actor. Ben vowed then that he would find ways to encourage this talent. And find
more ways to show this child that he could love her.

A
fter
the show, Ben and Lauren waited in the bright hall for Ramona. Carter was
talking to the woman who had introduced the show. He stood with his arms folded
over his narrow Jimi Hendrix torso, nodding and smiling. For an instant Ben
imagined him as the lover he must have been, leaning down to kiss Lauren, his
eyes closing.

Then Ramona jumped into Carter's arms. Her thin
legs were wrapped around his waist and he spun with her once. It was a display.
It was his night to have her sleep at his place, and now he put her down, and
the two walked hand in hand out the door. Lauren grabbed Ben's hand and dragged
him after them.

“Ramona!” she cried, in the November dark. Ramona
stopped, her pale face startled.

Lauren led him over to them on the sidewalk where
she stood. Carter looked surprised, and he wasn't wearing a coat. It was forty
degrees and he was in his T-shirt. His eyebrows were raised high.

“We wanted to tell you the show was great!” Lauren
said. She had the white hood of her jacket up now.

Ramona smiled, her eyes flashing up once, then
lowering down. “Thanks.” Ben could see she felt awkward. All the feeling he'd
had for her recoiled, replaced by a dull sympathy that she had to endure any of
this.

“You really blew us away,” he said. “Really.”

She nodded. Carter stood there, waiting for this to
be over. Ramona kept smiling and looking down at the sidewalk.

“We love ya, honey,” Lauren said, and pulled Ben
away. She'd never pulled him anywhere before. He was surprised at the force of
this gesture and yanked his arm back away from her. She looked at him,
surprised, and said she was sorry.

“No, no, it's OK,” he said.

As they walked toward the car, he could feel he was
about to see a side of Lauren that he'd often sensed would one day reveal
itself. He'd almost been looking forward to it. So the day was here. The night,
rather. The black night with its bright moon and the sound of a train in the
distance.

“That asshole! I wish he'd fucking move to
Alaska
! He almost did, you know. Five years ago he
almost moved to
Alaska
, and I argued he should stay
here so he could see Ramona. Now he acts like he's Father of the Year. You'd
think he might have steered her over to at least say
hello
to us before absconding with her like that! He's the most
passive-aggressive person walking this earth.”

Lauren was trembling with anger, and tears filled
her eyes. The night itself seemed to be backing away from her.

“She's all I ever wanted, Ben. She's the only real
family I have. And he's trying to take her away.” They stood next to the car
now, under a huge, bare tree.

“I don't think so, Lauren. He's just—he's a bit of
a dolt.” This was an unreasonable attempt to make her laugh, but it didn't work.
He wanted to embrace her, but something held him back. He reached out lamely and
put his hand on her shoulder.

“I almost died giving birth to that kid, Ben. She's
the only kid I'll ever have. You'd think that would count for something. Now she
prefers him since he lets her live on Ramen noodles and Cocoa Puffs and watch
R-rated movies and play video games with him until midnight.”

“Lauren, come on! That's not true. And you never
know, you could have another kid.” She'd never mentioned Ramona as the only kid
she'd ever have.

“Doubtful. Like I said, I almost died.” He
attempted to let this news sink in. Was he disappointed? He didn't even
know.

Maybe having a kid only led to grief, one way or
another, like he'd always thought. Maybe the loss of freedom would be terrible.
Having a kid wasn't what it used to be. He would have Ramona, in a way, and that
could be enough. He looked up at the moon. They got into the car.

It wasn't that what Lauren had said was so bad. It
wasn't that he couldn't understand her high-pitched emotions. What disturbed him
was something subtle that he was trying now to figure out.

“What?” she'd said. “What?”

He'd ducked inside of himself like a creature in a
cave, and she could feel it.

“Nothing.”

She fell silent, moved back; she had her own
cave.

What he'd seen was a kind of revelation, he
thought, or should have been. Lauren was revealing something deep. But oddly, it
hadn't, and didn't, feel intimate. It didn't feel like she was revealing herself
at all. All this emotion, trembling rage and sadness, somehow made her seem more
distant, when it should have brought her closer, and brought them closer. He was
not, by nature, someone who feared the emotions of other people, so that
couldn't be it.