First You Try Everything (9 page)

Ben had been black and blue afterward, and stunned,
a different person altogether, and his grandmother had sat him at the kitchen
table while she moved around in heeled slippers humming her denial and baking a
cake. A clock hung high on the wall, and a small totem pole sat on the sill
above the sink next to a glass frog. He couldn't drink his milk. “Go on and
play, then.”

“Your grandpa was just trying to teach you a
lesson,” she'd said later that night, outside of the bedroom door where he lay
awake in the dark, her voice hoarse. “Maybe all that carrying on at the
breakfast table,” she half explained, leaving him to deduce that he shouldn't
have told her riddles, shouldn't have told the story about his friend at school
who went to SeaWorld, should have stayed quiet. She didn't come into the room,
but he felt she'd wanted to, and hated her for those moments, feeling both her
desire to snatch him up and drive him to someplace far away, and her reverent
fear of the man that would allow for almost anything to happen in that
house.

He'd never beaten Ben's mother or her sister Grace.
He didn't believe in beating the weaker sex. He'd beaten the shit out of his own
son, Jimmy, who'd moved to Nevada when he was seventeen years old, never to be
seen again, except for the one time Ben's mother and Grace had taken Ben and the
twins and their cousins on a road trip when Ben was ten. Jimmy was a tall, thin
man with a head that seemed too heavy for his neck, a wide face, slicked-down
black hair, and large hands that held tightly to each other or pulled on the
opposite hand's fingers. He managed a diner and took them there that first night
of the visit. It was late, they were road weary, the diner was decorated for
Christmas in July, but Ben was wide-eyed and fascinated by this uncle who barely
spoke, holding his body stiffly, laughing too loudly when one of the customers,
smoking in a booth, said, “About time you took a day off!” His outburst of
laughter was so awkward his mother and aunt exchanged a long, sad, meaningful
glance. Then they all sat down and ate rice pudding “on the house!,” Uncle Jimmy
boomed, though until then he'd been unusually soft-spoken. He sat up too
straight in the booth, not knowing how to ask the usual adult questions such as
“How's school?” and “How old are you now?” but simply staring at all of them
with widely held hazel eyes, as if he'd never seen children before. Then said to
Ben, “Do you know what Rufus Youngblood, the Secret Service man who fell on
Johnson when Kennedy was shot, said?”

Ben shook his head.

“Rufus Youngblood said had it been Nixon, he
would've fallen the other way.”

Ben's mother and aunt Grace tried to help him. “So,
Jimmy, the kids love your state! Right, kids?” And June said, “Nevada's cool,”
and Russell echoed her, but Ben nodded and sat there thinking about Rufus
Youngblood, whose name would resound in his head, repeating itself for days as
he thought of his uncle's face and how it had looked in the diner.

Before they left the next morning, after an awkward
good-bye that was strange for its brevity, given that his sisters hadn't seen
him in all those years and would probably not see him again for a long, long
time, he ran out to their car—just as they were getting ready to get into it—and
bent down to sob in Ben's arms. Everyone watched this. Why Ben? Why sob in the
arms of a ten-year-old boy? Ben was terrified. He stood there, paralyzed,
waiting for it to end, on the verge of sobbing himself.

“Jesus Christ! Leave the kid alone! You belong in
an institution, Jimmy!”

“Grace! Stop it!” said Ben's mother.

“I think you've done us a favor by pretending we
don't exist!” Grace persisted. Jimmy had let go of Ben, taken a step back, and
put his arm over his eyes. “I don't understand myself anymore,” he said.

“Jimmy, don't listen to Grace. She's a wreck from
traveling,” said Ben's mother, so different from both of her siblings, possessed
of kindness that seemed to him, in those years before the divorce,
unshakeable.

H
e
wondered why he had no urge to tell Lauren this story. Would their lives
together exclude their darkest memories, allowing them to fade? He tried to
imagine that, tried to envision how carefree they might be someday. Maybe he'd
tell her everything eventually, but now, here at the beginning, he'd tell her
what was best.

The story of his grandfather and more lived inside
of Evvie. Evvie who'd
had to know everything
. If he
ever forgot anything, he could consult her, his personal archives.

L
auren
had been raised by a stepmother, an elegant, brainy woman named Lillian Ross who
died six years ago in a car crash while visiting her sister outside of Chicago.
Lauren carried a picture of Lillian Ross in her wallet. Her father lived in
Seattle, but she rarely saw him. She had yet to tell Ben what had happened to
her biological mother. “Oh, someday I'll get into all of that. A bit of a
downer.” It was as if she were talking about somebody else, and yet he'd known
not to press. “Think drugs,” she'd added.

H
e
wanted to see Lauren happy. Really happy, without the brakes on. Once, when he
was fourteen, he'd found his mother weeping on the phone, but the tears had been
happy ones. He'd stood watching her in the kitchen doorway; she'd been over near
the sink. “Who was that?” he wanted to ask, later. But something had held him
back. It was as if he hadn't wanted the source of those tears to be
particularized. Often he remembered her face as it had looked that day, as if
the memory were an amulet clenched in his hand. She'd wept with a joy—he was
certain of this—that was stranger and deeper than anything he'd known, though
he'd craved it at fourteen and even before that, maybe as long as he'd known
what craving was.

He'd wept with joy like that sometimes with Evvie,
and tonight, suddenly it seemed it was something he'd not know again. This love
was different. This love was solid and of the earth. Was it more reliable
because Lauren wasn't dying to escape the confines of her own body, as Evvie had
been? This calm of Lauren's, what was the source?

“Lauren?” He sat next to her. “Lauren?”

He got back in bed, and her warm body turned toward
him. He felt a keen desire for her that eradicated his fear. Of course he would
weep with joy again. “Lauren?”

“Hmm?” she said.

“I was thinking we could drive to the lake. I think
the moon is full.” This wasn't like him at all. This was him being Evvie in one
of her semi-manic states.

“It's too cold,” she murmured. “Stay here.”

He waited. “You like lakes?”

Lauren nestled her head into the crook of his arm.
“Yes. And I love the ocean. We should go this summer. Or sooner.”

His heart sunk. “I prefer lakes.” He wanted to stay
away from the ocean for a while—Evvie's favorite landscape. For years they'd
rented a room in the Dew Drop Inn, a motel in Wildwood that took dogs. All the
most passionate dog lovers came, and the rooms smelled like shedding dogs and
the people all traded endless dog stories, and everyone loved Ruth and some even
sent her Christmas cards signed with the paw-prints of their own dogs. Evvie had
always brought a boom box on those vacations, mostly so
The
Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
could provide the sound
track for the days. She wanted to believe there might be boys from the casino
dancing like Latin lovers on the shore. She had memorized “Sandy” when she was
thirteen and prided herself on sounding a lot like Springsteen when she sang it
from start to finish. She'd loved the boardwalk—playing games where she'd win
gigantic homely stuffed animals, riding the roller coaster and eating fries
soaked in vinegar, watching the parade of humanity in the night light while a
small train ran back and forth on the boards.
Watch the
tram car, please!
a loud voice said over and over again, as much a
part of the atmosphere as the salt air and screeching gulls. (In the winter, Ben
had sometimes whispered into Evvie's ear,
Watch the tram
car, please!
) Always there seemed to be some skinny, ravaged kid with
a guitar whom Evvie would listen to and befriend, including the heroin addict
who later had come to their room and robbed them.

He'd never felt completely
included
in her enthusiasms, even when he'd most admired them. He'd
had to pretend, but part of him hung back like a chaperone. He was tired of that
role, which seemed, at times, the only role he'd ever known how to play. That
was part of what he'd grown tired of in Jersey, especially those last two years.
Tired of being a spectator to Evvie's excitement while feeling bad about his
secret weariness, and guilty, and unable to talk about it because there was
something inside of Evvie that played like a constant song whose lyrics demanded
that he never hurt her. He heard that song playing even in his dreams. He would
not have to go to Wildwood this year. That was both a source of relief and
surprising pain. He reminded himself now that he'd grown tired of the smell of
mold in the room, the wretched, creaky bed, the painting over the bed of Santa
Claus holding a basket of adorable puppies, the way she lined up ordinary
seashells on the sandy bureau, arranging and rearranging them like a kid, the
way she was perfectly satisfied with their annual return, and said things that
drove him nuts such as “Doesn't get any better than this,” when they were
sitting with cheap beers on itchy beach chairs on the concrete floor outside
their measly room with no view of the water while the sun set and other people's
dogs came by to lick their sunburned feet. Just two years ago he'd suffered a
fit of jealousy because a young history professor with a chocolate lab had
flirted with Evvie, praising her way with dogs.
You're
magnetic
, he'd said.
It's beautiful.
It
was true; all the dogs were crazy about Evvie. Ben had sometimes envied her
this. But last summer he'd watched her with adoring dogs and wondered what it
was they sensed about her that he'd lost track of or couldn't believe
anymore.

Meanwhile their friends were jetting off to the
Canary Islands or Rome or Brazil.

“Lauren?

“Mmmm?”

“Do you like lakes at all?”

“Sure. Love lakes. But I'm really an ocean girl.
When I was ten, I was like two feet from a dolphin.”

“Wow. Nice. Well, I love lakes. I really prefer
lakes. Not so much Lake Erie. But Lake Ontario. Lake Michigan. Actually, Erie's
great too. Any lake.”

“OK. Got it. I'm registering your love of
lakes.”

He laughed. “You a good swimmer?”

“I was a lifeguard when I was seventeen.”

“Really. And every boy in the pool pretended to
drown so you'd save him.”

“Not every boy. But one of them did that.
Repeatedly. And he was hilarious. His name was Harvey the Basket Case.” She
laughed. “I kind of miss Harvey the Basket Case.”

“I'll bet you do.”

She fell back to sleep, and he lay there in the
dark, for a long time. He knew, on some level, that his remembering the beach
and boardwalk with Evvie was at least partly false. He'd loved Evvie by the
ocean. He'd loved her on the boardwalk. He hadn't really minded the sunburn and
itchy chairs and dogs that much until last year. And he'd been the one to find
batteries for the boom box so they could hear Springsteen most years. The
pleasure he'd known being with her in salt air, sitting on a bench at night and
watching the parade of humanity—couldn't he let the simple truth of that
survive? Did he have to take the pain of the present and inject it into the past
so that all memory was rendered suspect?

A
lways
with Evvie he'd been the one to fall asleep first, the one to sink down into a
well while she talked on and on like someone on speed. He held a lock of
Lauren's hair between his fingers, his eyes wide open, and something caught
inside his throat, some lump of pain that he tried swallowing down. He breathed
and swallowed and breathed, and imagined, as Evvie had once taught him to do,
that he was an entire field of incredibly harmless cows, dissolving into even
more incredibly harmless particles of light. It struck him how strange this
was—to imagine being not just a cow, but a whole field of cows. On the back of
one of the cows, she'd add, is a crow that can count to six. And if anyone tries
to hurt the cow, the crow knows how to say, fuck off. And the crow has several
thousand night-roosting friends who will join him if need be.

He buried his face in Lauren's hair. Coconut. Soft
curls, color of autumn. He breathed it in as deeply as he could.

Evvie

E
vvie had worked at the Frame Shop for more than a year. She'd learned how to frame just about anything, and also to help the do-it-yourselfers frame whatever they brought in. It was fairly low stress. But sometimes Evvie was unsure how the place managed to stay in business. Hours would go by and nobody would venture in off the street.

Today a grandma in red sneakers and wild white hair who'd brought in her grandson's painting of what appeared to be a mad elf saying, “I am Jesus,” had told Evvie her whole life story. And why not? They both had all the time in the world. But it was such a sad life story Evvie had had to work not to turn away from the woman, who'd been twice widowed, battled breast cancer, and was even homeless for a month back in the early 1990s when she was too proud to knock on her daughter's door. “She had her own problems. Everyone does. So I slept on a bench in the park, and let me tell you something, sister, you don't want to end up there. But if you do end up there, if that's the way life goes for you, just tell yourself
all of this is a dream.
The good and the bad, it's all a dream. And someday we'll wake up and find some peace.”

Afterward Evvie had cried in the bathroom. But then the hours had gone by more quickly, thanks to lots of customers. Near the end of the day, Evvie's coworker Joseph handed her a book called
Time to Marry Yourself
. He eagerly flipped through it with her, up at the counter before they closed shop. The chapters had titles like “Coming Home to You,” and “You're the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You.” The last chapter was all about
the wedding
. It was crazy—you stood up and took vows to stay with yourself in sickness and health, 'til death do you part. You threw a great reception and even, if you wanted, had people pummel you with rice as you ran alone to your honeymoon car. (Evvie could picture this far too vividly.) But you were never really alone, said the book, because you had yourself! The most important relationship of your life.

Joseph said he thought this was a great idea for Evvie. He had been at such a wedding before, at the Nuin Center, and people cried.

Evvie wanted to cry just thinking about this.

But now on the bus she held the book on her lap, and was moved, remembering the love and concern in her coworker's face.

A
man on the bus called from a few seats behind, “Miss, can we ask you a question?” Somehow she knew she was the miss. He had a voice like warm gravel, and she turned around without apprehension. It was as if she'd rehearsed these moments, as if she'd heard the voice before, and her spine tingled. A longer than usual sense of déjà vu consumed her for several moments, and she knew she'd been on this very bus before, that she'd known this particular dim dusk of earliest spring, that she'd long ago ridden beside the very same delicate Indian girl in her red anklet socks and tiny pearl bracelets, a backpack heavy on her narrow lap, and yes, she'd seen the face she turned to now, a face that for a moment made everyone else on the bus a blur.

He had bright blue eyes, a trace of silver in his brown side-parted hair, a boyish face she liked immediately for its quality of wakefulness. His eyebrows raised up high so that his forehead became a series of lines that recalled to Evvie the I Ching hexagram she liked best. “Well? Are you ready?” he seemed to be saying, and for a moment she couldn't look away. It was not just the almost shocking blue in his eyes, though that was part of it. He wore a dark blue wool jacket with small wooden buttons, the sort of coat her mother had called “a car coat,” for reasons Evvie hadn't bothered to learn. A bus coat, she thought.

The blue-eyed man sat next to a stocky balding man in sunglasses whose pasty complexion and amused smile recalled a man her father had boxed in Philly. He introduced himself as Bruno, and the blue-eyed man beside him as Rocky. Bruno and Rocky? For real?

“Hi, Bruno. Hi, Rocky,” she said, liking the sound of it. She turned back around, leaning her head against the window. The dusk was cold and gray and people hurried down sidewalks, each one with their own full life. Déjà vu vanished, and she felt unprotected in the wake of its mystery.

The next thing she knew, the Indian girl was rising, then stepping down off the bus. Evvie watched her move down the sidewalk on nimble legs that set off a yearning to be that young, a kid whose biggest mistakes were still far off in the future. Bruno was taking the girl's seat, and Evvie stiffened. She watched the girl begin to skip, then finally turned away from the window.

Bruno wore a khaki raincoat, heavy black shoes, and white socks. “We run a business unlike any other business in the world,” he said.

She looked down at her own folded hands. “That's good.” A woman across the aisle talking on her cell told someone,
“You gotta be shittin' me!”
and a man several seats back was having a coughing episode.

“We happen to reunite lovers with a ninety-eight percent success rate.” He spoke confidentially, the voice barely audible.

“Uh-huh.” Why was he telling
her
? Were they computer hackers?

“Ninety-
nine
,” Rocky called.

“No offense, but why should I care?” Was she that obvious? Did brokenhearted people give off a certain scent? She wanted to put her head down in her hands.

“You've got the perfect look, darlin'. The Rock knows how to spot it. And your kind is always the kind we work for. Out of the goodness of our hearts, believe it or not. We work for the ladies and the men, but we prefer the ladies. The good ladies who are
lost unto this world
. Like our own mothers.” He crossed himself. A Catholic?

“Good ones,” Rocky echoed. “The good ones are
often
lost unto this world.”

“What are you talking about? Did you get into my e-mail or something?” Evvie's heart had begun to pound.

“Nobody got into nobody's e-mail. We're not the scum of the earth,” Bruno said, shifting in his seat, offended by her presumption.

He reached into his coat pocket and brought out an impressive-looking flyer. She was drawn to the colors. Deep purple and gold, a sunset, but something odd about it.

“Who took this picture?”

Bruno turned around to Rocky. “Who took the picture of the sun?”

“The Internet.” Rocky crossed his eyes like a clowning kid in school. She laughed in spite of how disconcerting this was, and he winked.

“It's lovely,” she said, using a word she never used. Under the sun were the words “Don't Give Up. Let us help you walk the long and winding road back to Love.”

She couldn't help staring at the sun, the words, the sun, the words, the sun.

The bus stopped and some people got off, allowing Rocky to move up and sit across from Evvie and Bruno. They had the back of the bus to themselves except for one old woman in a raincoat carrying several plastic bags. Evvie kept turning around to look at her.

“My stop is the next stop,” Evvie said, but this was a lie. Rocky smelled like her father's cologne. Aqua Velva. A pang shot through her.

“What we do is, get you and the ex in a room
together
,” Rocky said in his raspy voice (she did love it) that was just above a whisper. “We hold you
pretend-hostage
,” he continued. “We get the two of you in a room, and we have a gun,
no bullets
, nothing dangerous, and your husband, or boyfriend or sig-other or your what-have-you,
he
thinks you might be about to be killed. It's all innocent, since of course you aren't about to be killed. There's nothing dangerous going on at all. All on the up-and-up. It's theater. But what goes down—in ninety-four percent of cases—is the ex begins to feel the love.”

“Ninety-six!” said Bruno.

“OK. Right. And the love comes shining through like what, Bruno? Like a surprise at the track? That horse you bet on all your life and finally there it is, against all the odds, the most unlikely winner of our time. That horse everyone said was too old, too tired. That loser horse that nobody liked but you, since
you're
for the underdog.”

“How do you know what I'm for?” She couldn't help smiling at their strangeness.

“I'm perceptive verging on psychic,” Rocky said, “but in your case I don't need to be. You wear it all on your sleeve, baby.” Rocky said this softly while peering straight ahead, up the aisle, where passengers were rising to disembark. “You're a babe with your heart on your sleeve,” he said. “And it's killing me.”

“Killing you?”

“I'm an empath.”

“OK, Empath.”

He smiled.

“So there you are, in a locked room, thinking maybe one or both of you will die. It's like going to the movies,” Bruno said, talking out of the side of his mouth.

“No, the theater,” corrected Rocky. He pronounced it
thee-ate-her
. “It's like going to the theater. Believe me. I myself was in the theater a long time ago,” he added. “I was the Lord High Executioner in
The Mikado
.”

Evvie nodded. She tried to imagine this. “When?”

“Long time ago. I was a talented boy. Head full of dreams.” He paused to knock himself in the temple and smile. “They all wanted to send me on to Hollywood, but next stop was Vietnam.”

“Oh. That's too bad.” So the guy was in his fifties. He looked younger.

“We all of us have our qualities that don't get properly developed. I bet you're no exception.” He raised an eyebrow.

She turned the sunset over, and on the back, in white letters against a red background, were several quotes from past customers.

Not only does it work, it returns you to a love as fresh as morning dew. I am grateful, grateful, grateful.

—
SANDRA B.

Minneapolis

This is professional match-making on steroids! Reunited and it feels so good!

—RICHARD AND LEONA FROM PHILLY

(in our hot tub)

I'll tell you one thing. You are in good hands with Rocky and Bruno. They're magic, they're professionals, and this works, and just do it.

—TOM LOVES BETTY IN PITTSBURGH!

When my husband realized he might really lose me in the grand scheme of things, he said he saw my heart was a perfect rose unfolding and all the chakras were totally vibrating in alignment with what is meant to be. On our journey back home to the casa we built with our own hands, I knew I was having a real mystical vision like in the days of old. And now, now to have the one you love waking up beside you each day is to know you are winning life's biggest lottery.

—
NAME WITHHELD

Pittsburgh

It was Evvie's stop for real now.

“You call us,” Rocky said, and lips tight, she nodded, taking the flyer, shoving it into her pocket before she walked home in the dark, the faces of Bruno and Rocky inscribing themselves, shining in the dead center of her mind like the moon.

She smiled. She couldn't stop smiling. When had she last smiled like this? What she really wanted was to call Ben and tell him all about it and laugh. He would
love
the story of these guys. Or she could go over there and tell him about it. And laugh.

In bed.

A dark feeling swept through her. She had to get out of this dreamworld. They would not be laughing together in bed, ever again.
Ever
, she told herself,
you stupid bitch
, she added.
It's over.

Unfortunately, on some level, she didn't believe that for a minute. It began to rain. She was going to get soaked.

She went home drenched, and even before drying off she e-mailed Celia about the guys. Celia was someone she'd known for two years in high school but had been out of touch with for twenty years. At this point, she hardly knew Celia, but somehow she'd become quite the anchor on e-mail. In high school, they each had had radar for the other, since they were both surviving fairly severe family chaos, and successfully abusing drugs. After smoking Colombian in Celia's garage, they'd go to South Street together for onion rings and strawberry shakes, and after several of these meetings, Celia had finally confessed how embarrassing it was to have a father who worked as a clown. Everyone hates clowns, she'd explained, fourteen and dying of self-consciousness. “It makes me feel really bad.”

“I don't hate clowns,” Evvie lied. “I like them.”

Celia smiled. “Really?”

“Yeah. They're good people.”

“Well, he's a clown who's been in
prison
.” Because they were high, they fell out of their seats, laughing at this. Then grew silent again, in the booth.

“I like people who've been to prison,” Evvie said, and she'd meant this. Her father the boxer had always said that half of those who should be in prison were walking around free, that serious criminals were ruling the world. The few times prisoners managed to escape, he would follow the story on TV, and root for them. She told Celia this that night at Burger King.

They'd lost touch until out of the blue, in a surprise e-mail, Celia had reminded Evvie of all this.

YOU PROBABLY DON'T REMEMBER ME,
she'd written, which made Evvie feel as if Celia had never known her at all: had she
known
her, she would have realized Evvie was incapable of forgetting a girl whose father was a clown/prisoner.

I THINK I'VE HEARD OF SOMETHING LIKE THAT BEFORE,
Celia wrote back the next day, referring to Rocky and Bruno's business.
YOU SHOULD TRY IT. I'M PRETTY SURE THE ROOTS OF THIS KIND OF THING ARE IN ANCIENT
GREECE
.