First You Try Everything

by Jane McCafferty

  And yet, according to Evvie, the Pantry Pride checkers in those days had greeted Cedric as if he were a celebrity. Ceddy! Where you been? And his presence—something so golden and pure about Cedric, and he was beautiful too—had unified them. According to Evvie, his presence had rendered the checkers in an impersonal grocery store as momentarily intimate as the mom-and-pop shop people two blocks down.

  Evvie’s loyalty to her brother was something he’d fallen in love with. He’d absorbed all her stories about Cedric, the ones she’d told when the two of them were holed up in that first tiny third-floor apartment where the fire escape led to the back entrance of a bar where Evvie’s old band had played when she was twenty. Maybe he would drive by that old place later today, look up at the old white door, or even climb those steps and peer in at the kitchen. Maybe whatever devastating love had been born there could be felt like a reviving tonic. He needed some kind of tonic badly.

  Ben watched Cedric walk through the glass doors and disappear for another day. Sometimes Cedric was his favorite person in the world. He did not get involved with others but regarded them from a natural distance made of his sincere inability to comprehend what all the fuss was about. Though he was highly intelligent, he possessed the gift of simplicity that seemed rooted in a radical innocence.

  Sometimes Ben wished this innocence was something he could contract himself. To walk through the world that way seemed a worthy, if unachievable, goal. Other days Ben thought of Cedric as a compulsive and self-absorbed filthy squatter, teetering on the edge of eviction, oblivious to the needs of others. He’d said he needed a place to stay, and they’d said sure, but that was five years ago. He’d slowly trashed their attic. “What does it matter?” Evvie said. “Like we ever go up there.” But Ben felt the chaos over his head like something that itched. “If someone else had made that mess, you’d hate it,” he told Evvie. “Maybe,” she’d admitted. On certain days, the relationship between Evvie and Cedric struck Ben as pathological. She loved his dependence. He loved the routines he’d developed, the crappy little nest he’d made in the attic, the way she made him buttered muffins and gave him money she didn’t have, and called him Cedrico. Lately every time she called him Cedrico, Ben wanted to say, His name is Cedric.

  The attic was probably infested. Evvie said it was a good sign if spiders and mice wanted to hunker down with you. It meant you weren’t too toxic yet. She actually whispered, when she found webs in their cabinets, “Spiders, you’re good. You’re very good.” She refused to kill the moths that overtook their kitchen twice a year. She didn’t mind kitchen moths. “They’re so harmless.” She’d try to cup the moths in her hands and set them free, but after a few egg-hatchings, the kitchen would fill up with great swarming clouds of the white, winged creatures (a neighbor had come in one night, unexpectedly, and seen Evvie eating a plate of noodles as if in blissful ignorance of what the neighbor told Ben “had to be a good hundred of the little bastards”). Finally Ben won the battle of the moths, setting up little cardboard tents that lured them in with sticky black stripes of pheromones that promised sex to the males and instead trapped them in place, their wings protesting until they died. “Imagine that,” Evvie said. One of Ben’s darkest thoughts regarding Evvie was that she was a pheromone trap. That he’d entered the trap fifteen years ago and some part of him had slowly died because of it.

  This morning, out of nowhere, Evvie had given him one of her old hugs, lifting him off his feet though he was fifty pounds heavier than she was, and four inches taller. She’d done that a lot when they were first married, proud of her strength, which seemed to issue forth from a sporadic mania. Now she was doing it again. After years of not doing it. Couldn’t she sense that he wasn’t in the mood?

  He’d broken free.

  He’d turned away, walked to the sink. She’d followed him, putting her arms around his waist, then leaped back, as if he’d burned her.

  “I’m really in a hurry,” he’d explained, and he ran out.

  Traffic was heavy. The sky still dark, clouds packed with snow sailing in from the West, moving slowly across the sky. He put in Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert, something he’d loved in college, and turned it up, driving down the gray highway for work; he worked testing and selling medical equipment now, a job he’d had for almost two years. A friend had recruited him, and it was a decent salaried job, and he found himself enjoying the way it felt to glide down the street in a coat and tie. He looked surprisingly good and sometimes didn’t recognize his reflection when he passed by glass storefronts. A man in his prime with dark wavy hair, his long stride more confident than he felt. He passed others on the street dressed like him, headed to offices, and felt affiliated in a way he’d never imagined possible when he and Evvie had set themselves apart from all this, working the pushcart four hours a day, proud to be out of the mainstream. They’d been like travelers, even though they’d never gone anywhere.

  Now, when he walked down the street in his coat and tie, he was a person among people, fortunate people going to work, accepting the limitations of their jobs, accepting the world and its demands and limits, and none of them, Ben imagined, cultivating the idea that they were somehow special and deserved something other than this. None of them pretending to rage against the machine that fed them.

  For years he and Evvie had lived without much money, thought they didn’t care about money, and suddenly, there it was—nothing compared to his friends in law or computers, but enough that now he could entertain thoughts of vacations to places other than New Jersey. He’d paid off their credit card debts, and the last of their college loans. He’d bought a decent guitar. He wanted to go to Greece.

  “You think you’ll do this job forever?” Evvie asked last year.

  “Don’t be judgmental,” he’d snapped. They were walking the dog, but now they stopped. “This money allows you to defend your pigs and ducks.”

  She’d blinked, silenced, reddening.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “I wasn’t even being judgmental,” she said, then called the dog. “Really. I was just being curious.” Her voice was soft, stunned. She pet Ruth and looked down.

  He’d been frightened of himself then, unable to understand why she’d called forth such anger. It was something harder to pinpoint that filled him with restlessness he’d never known before; he just couldn’t admit to himself that his infatuation with a woman who worked in an office across the street from him had anything to do with it.

  They headed down a long street, letting Ruth sniff the world, and Evvie had started telling him a story about an old friend of hers, and he made all the right sounds. Everything in the landscape—ordinary road signs, a white metal chair on someone’s front porch, pigeons on a wire lined up against the blue—seemed to be charged with a strange light, beckoning him. All of it interesting in contrast to the woman who walked beside him, his wife, his best friend.

  To battle this, he’d stopped her in the middle of the street, folded her into his arms, and kissed her hard on the mouth. Then stepped back and told her, “Someday we’ll travel around the world together.” Her dark eyes flashed up at him, beautiful, and for one second, strange again—he could remember in that moment the first time he’d seen her, and his body flooded with love born of all their history.

  Now he called Lauren.

  “Ben!” she said, unfurling the name, stretching it out like a warm blanket. The voice was a little hoarse, always,
and he loved it.

  “Look at the sky,” he told her. “It looks like day is done.”

  “I kind of like that day-is-done look.”

  He laughed and she started singing. “Day is done, gone the sun, from the lakes, from the hills, from the sky, all is well, safely rest, God is nigh.”

  He’d never heard her sing. She was a little off-key. “You have a good voice.”

  “Learned that one in Girl Scout camp. Also learned to hate Girl Scout camp.”

  “So what are you doing now?”

  “Soaking in the bath.” He tried not to imagine this. She was the type to get up extra early in order to start the day with a hot bath. She’d have her coffee in the tub while the sun rose and her daughter slept in the next room. She highly recommended hot morning baths, the tub filled to the brim.

  Evvie would have a problem with that. All that wasted water a crime.

  “I might try it,” he said.

  “I’m getting out now.”

  “OK, you do that.”

  He knew she had a soft white robe with LAUREN on the pocket. He imagined her flushed body, stepping into the robe after the bath, and slammed on the brakes, just avoiding a collision. If he didn’t watch it, he’d start to become the kind of driver he’d always hated.

  “You all right?” Lauren said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So last night I dreamed we were hiking in a foreign country and found a cave in the side of a mountain, Ben. It was so beautiful.”

  “Stalactites, stalagmites?” Ben said.

  “No. It was really strange. It was like van Gogh’s bedroom in there!”

  Ben pulled over to the side of the road. Van Gogh’s bedroom had been Evvie’s dream of the perfect space. Once she’d said, “If you ever left me, I’d go rent a room and turn it into van Gogh’s bedroom. I’d be a hermit with a dog.”

  “You still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sound a little funny.”

  “No, just wishing I’d had more sleep. Better go. I have a meeting way up in Cranberry today.”

  “Cranberry?” she’d said. “OK, have fun up there and don’t take any wooden nickels, kid. And call me later.”

  “OK.”

  “Or sooner.”

  “OK.”

  He drove on. Keith Jarrett was too sad. As was silence. Turned on a talk show. Too manic. News. Worst of all. Went back to silence. It was starting to snow again. He leaned forward and squinted up into low, dark-bottomed clouds so thick they looked permanent.

  January was a problem. It wasn’t just the lack of sunlight, the oppressive skies, the scraping ice from windshields in the bitter morning darkness before work, the landlord refusing to turn up their heat, though all of this was certainly the perfect backdrop of gloom for memories that seemed to return to him every year at this time. This year they were more pressing, and a part of him remained compelled and hopeful that through such memories, a key was being handed over, and all he had to do was take it and open the door and then he might understand his life. How he’d arrived here.

  There were January days when the essence of childhood returned like thick vapor and he’d feel himself transported, back to a family room with a picture window, the twins, Russell and June, his cousins Murphy and Al, who was deaf, and a few neighbor kids, all of them playing army, climbing on couches, while he stood behind the curtain, peeking out at his mother. That day she’d stood in her brown tweed coat and slippers, arms crossed, snow falling down around her, an expression of intense unhappiness on her face, and he’d slapped the window then, drawing her eye, making a funny face so she’d laugh, though this was out of character for him and only drew a look of puzzlement.

  Memories of Erie. Eerie Erie, his sister, June, used to say. Years ago, she and Ben had discovered that both felt that something bad had happened to them early on that they’d never be able to identify exactly. They knew that they’d been well taken care of, had gone fishing in the summer on a beautiful boat owned by their father’s boss, had wonderful dogs, and had run on the beach together holding hands—Ben kept a photo of that to prove it. Under memory’s assault, even innocent things—the time their mother helped them make a kite, the visits to a pumpkin farm, riding bikes in a yellow-leaf windstorm—seemed undergirded by darkness.

  Ben’s father, as it turned out, had enjoyed quite the string of affairs. Once he’d had the nerve to bring one of his “friends” home for dinner, a college girl (coed, he’d said) named James—James!—who’d broken down in tears before she left, embracing Ben’s mother at the door and saying she was so sorry. “For what, James?” Ben’s mother asked, taking a step back but still patting the poor thing’s back. “For having sex with your father!” the girl had practically shrieked, and all of them heard it: June and Russell and Ben, all of whom had been trying to watch The Partridge Family, and heard too their mother saying to James, “You had sex with my father? He’s dead!”

  “You know what I mean!” the girl cried, as if their mother was being purposefully dense. And maybe she was. They couldn’t have told the difference.

  “Pack your bags,” their mother said to their father, understanding everything. “Get out!”

  James ducked out the door and ran.

  Ben had watched all this from a doorway, the Partridges in the background singing, his father’s lips compressed, as if hiding a smile, as if his mother’s show of drawing this line was merely amusing.

  “I’ll give you three hours,” she said. She was in green pants and a gray shirt printed with pink flowers. Her face was utterly calm.

  He stepped forward. “I’ll give you more than three hours,” he said, and smiled, as if his charm would save the day again. “I’ll give you the rest of my life.”

  “Mom?” Russell cried out. Ben turned. Russell looked small and paralyzed with fear, like an omen of all that was to come.

  His father had stayed in the house. His mother had gone away for two months—an eternity—to Oregon, where she had a cousin, a woman who nobody had ever met but who regularly called the house and said, to whoever answered, “Hiya, kiddo, this is Fat-Cousin-Sue.” His father had confessed the long string of his affairs (describing, his mother later told Ben, each woman’s physicality until it was like listening to a porn show) and after explaining how he had a healthy sex drive that “society” (a big word in 1972) couldn’t and shouldn’t dampen, he invited her into an open marriage. When she refused, he explained to the kids (the twins were only six) that “all was not well with their uptight mom.” While he may have had some academic company in this attitude—he was a great reader of books—he alone, out of all the known fathers in Erie, had taken this public swan dive out of his marriage. Nobody in Ben’s class had divorced parents.

  His mother sent Ben postcards from Oregon that said she loved him and hoped he was holding down the fort. He’d walked around for months feeling like food was spoiling inside of him, though nobody but the closest observer would have known. His aim was to please. He pleased his teachers, his peers, and even the crossing guard, who’d called him “the gentleman.”

  It was hard work, pleasing, but he was no more capable of stopping it than he was of flying away. Inside he was trying to make room for the deep shock of what had become his life—His father? His mother? He’d loved and feared his father—whose muscled form was so impressive two kids could hang on his arm at the same time—who’d been a great base
ball player in high school and had trophies and photographs of himself winding up for the pitch, who’d also been salutatorian and seemed to know everything about everything. The kind of guy who quizzed you at the table to see how many presidents you could name. You’d work hard to memorize them at night, dying to impress him, and he would be impressed. Who cared if sometimes he was frightening, his eyes turning to ice if you disagreed, his bizarre habit of pinching June on the ass even when she begged him not to?

  He could call his mother. She could assure him that falling out of love with Evvie—if that’s what this was—did not make him a philandering ass, arrogant, deluded, or hard-hearted, like his father had been, all those years ago.

  Ben was almost in Cranberry. He was trying a new route to the office complex. Some guy from work had told him he could make new circuits in his brain that way. “We inscribe these maps in our minds when we drive! We need to burn them up and start over! We need to create new dendrites!” The guy was like a preacher about the brain. “Use it or lose it, buddy,” he’d say, twenty-five years old and already passionate about not getting senile. He distributed little puzzle books. “Come on now, do us all a favor and stay sharp!” The guy was nuts.