First You Try Everything

by Jane McCafferty

  “Evvie’s not a grown-up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, isn’t she? As grown up as anyone else? Just because she procrastinates doesn’t mean—”

  “I don’t know, Paul. I think she’s turning into an agoraphobic. She barely goes anywhere, and she’s always staying up late writing letters to senators she somehow imagines she can convince to stop the factory farms, or to huge companies like Merck or Johnson and Johnson. I mean, if I read you one of her letters, you might understand. It’s like she has no idea who she’s writing to. No idea what planet she landed on.”

  “I always liked Evvie,” Paul said, simply. “Maybe she’s trying to hold on to integrity or something. She knows the letters are futile, but why give in to futility? I just always liked Evvie.”

  “I like her too!” he protested. “Jesus, Paul. It’s not about not liking her!”

  “Maybe she needs therapy.”

  “She won’t go. She had a bad therapist once and now she distrusts them all.”

  “Well, that’s understandable, I guess.”

  Ben’s temper flared. “Hey, bud, whose friend are you here? I need a little support!”

  Paul was quiet for a moment. “You have my support. I’m just a little sad. You guys have been together for so long. And you’re just following this trend I see where nobody believes in loyalty anymore. I’m just feeling a little bad for Evvie.”

  “Feel bad for me!” Ben shouted. “I’m in hell, Paul! Feel bad for me.”

  “OK,” Paul said. “I feel bad for you!”

  He drove home filled with a simmering rage. Evvie had so skillfully manipulated him with her magnificent vulnerability that he felt like one of her beloved hogs or chickens who could hardly move in their cage. She had made him feel so indispensable, so responsible for her happiness! I can tell you anything. I don’t trust anyone in the world but you.

  Early on, when they’d been young enough to believe their alienation was unique—when Evvie had been recovering from childhood and a year in a punk band whose drummer had been killed in a car accident, when he’d only wanted to hole up with her and make his own music and outsize metal sculptures—he’d loved those declarations. Now, as his therapist explained, “If someone told me I was the only person in the world they could trust, I’d take that as my first warning sign that I was with a fairly troubled person.”

  (He told the therapist that he too was fairly troubled, that he and Evvie had always recognized and respected that trouble in one another, but the therapist had only said, “Hmmm.”)

  “The only therapist I’m interested in, Ben, is God, and unfortunately I don’t believe in God.”

  “And that makes no sense!”

  “Exactly.”

  “Just because one therapist screwed up with you nine hundred years ago doesn’t mean they’re all bad, Evvie.”

  “I agree. It’s not them that can’t be good at therapy, it’s me. I blame myself. I’m afraid of assigning words to feelings. I’m afraid I’ll just make up my memories. I do it all the time, even without a therapist. I’ve told you this a hundred times.”

  But it was like she was proud of being bad at therapy. That was it. She was full of pride, and it had her cornered.

  He was home now. The bricks, the blue door, the statue of Francis of Assisi that Evvie, the proclaimed nonbeliever, insisted on having in the tiny garden, shining in the moonlight. Years ago, when they’d lived in Boston for a year so he could study piano, she’d wanted a whole flock of saints. She used to believe the spirits of the saints literally inhabited the statues, that the saints were powerless to resist the need people had for their presence. “Otherwise they couldn’t be saints. It’s what separates them from us regular humans—they can’t resist love, and we can.” Her Irish grandmother had told her that. In the old days, the remnants of Evvie’s childhood faith had enchanted him, had almost been contagious. But when he’d looked around at the world without the lens of that initial blissful love, whatever faith he’d known vanished.

  It was home but it no longer looked like home. It looked like a memory of a place he had already left behind. The strangeness of this was exhilarating even as it stabbed him hard in the chest. He was headed for what some Buddhist writer called the great longed-for catastrophe. When he’d read that phrase he’d understood immediately how the sheer tedium of having to walk around in your own skin could fill you with the desire to burn it all down and start again. He’d tried to share that understanding with Evvie one night, and she’d bristled. “I’d prefer to dodge catastrophe for the rest of my life. Nothing in me longs for a catastrophe. The fact that everyone I know will die is catastrophe enough.”

  End of conversation.

  The bright moon, almost full, shone on the bedroom window of this rented house where he’d slept for years. If Evvie was awake, she’d be under the covers with a flashlight, reading a book or writing her letters, Ruth beside her with her head between her paws.

  Evvie wrote to politicians as if they actually gave a shit about the burden of animals. One letter he happened to see began like this: “Dear Senator, How are you? I’m OK, though it’s been raining for eight days here.” Like a kid at summer camp writing home to Mom and Dad. The letters always a barrage of agonized description about the lives of various brutalized farm animals. Or most recently, she wrote long letters to local politicians about cracking down on dogfights. He found a letter that Evvie had signed:

  Blessings,

  Evangeline Muldoone

  Who the hell was she to give blessings? It would have been so much more honest if she’d sign off,

  I’m fucking nuts,

  Evangeline Muldoone

  He walked upstairs and into their room. She was sleeping, with Ruth beside her, the dog’s head on the pillow Evvie had made. Ruth was the most amazing dog on earth, half pit bull, half retriever, with pink spots on her neck and a sleek brown and gray coat, and a big, square, intelligent head, and eyes that revealed wisdom. Evvie had rescued Ruth from the shelter. He’d once told her that even if that was the only thing she’d ever done in her life, her life would’ve been worth it. If he were to leave, he’d need joint custody. He couldn’t leave. Ruth would hate it. He wouldn’t leave. He’d get through this. People got through times like this. He looked down at Evvie and softened. She was childlike when she slept. Her long black hair pulled back in a single braid that hung down her back, her mouth slightly open, her profile beautiful and so deeply familiar his chest tightened.

  He steeled himself against the sorrow rising in his chest.

  It was easy to freeze whatever feeling might have shattered him. Hardening his heart had become a habit. He took off his clothes and got into bed beside her, crossed his arms on his chest, and stared into the darkness. He let himself fill with sympathy for himself, for all the lonely nights he’d known in this house.

  The bed split in half, a dark river ran between the two sides. He floated downstream.

  Lauren.

  He felt a yearning for her rise out of his chest and hover in the air above him, the great bold spirit of his future. Lauren wore an ankle bracelet; it sparkled in his mind, and he imagined running his finger down her long, smooth leg, then tugging on the bracelet.

  He floated on down the river in his bed, his hands clenched together, his eyes wide open in the dark, sleepless.

  “Is that you?” Evvie mumbled on the far bank, sitting up.

&nb
sp; He looked over at her. “Hey.”

  “I just had the most beautiful dream.”

  “That’s nice.” Please let her drop back to sleep.

  “I dreamed the Dalai Lama was sitting at our kitchen table in the middle of the night, quietly drinking a glass of water in the dark.”

  “That’s a nice dream.”

  “In the dream I didn’t even have to get out of bed to see him. It was enough that he was down there in our kitchen. I could feel he was filling up the whole house with love. Isn’t that strange?”

  She got out of bed and walked to the window. “Not ordinary love, Ben, but real love. It was the best dream I’ve ever had in my life.” She was deeply moved, holding back tears. He wanted to put a pillow over his head. Not the Dalai Lama!

  She turned away from the moon and looked at him. “Everything is going to be beautiful with us,” she said. She walked over and petted the sleeping dog, her eyes downcast, waiting, perhaps for him to say something. But he could think of nothing he wanted to say. She went into the bathroom for some water. “We have to get back in touch with the everyday miracles,” she said, back in their room, holding up a glass of water next to the window. “It’s like we have to stop taking stuff for granted. Like water. Water’s an everyday miracle, right?”

  “I don’t take anything for granted,” he said.

  “So maybe I’m talking to myself.” Her voice trembled. “Maybe I’m just talking to myself. But that’s all right. Sometimes in marriage, a person ends up talking to their self for a little while. While the other person maybe talks to his self. And then, some time passes, and they’re talking to each other again.”

  She left the room. She was going downstairs. “I have to hear this song,” she called. Of course she did.

  If she goes downstairs and puts on any song other than “Fake Plastic Trees” (last week’s insistent redundancy), or the song about the old couple driving to the beach, or Purple Rain, which she’d blared nine hundred times on Wednesday, I will cling to some final straw of hope, Ben told himself. He waited in the dark.

  The music blared. Guitar. His heart surged.

  The Replacements.

  He hadn’t heard them for years.

  “Unsatisfied.”

  The song they’d loved together when they were first together. He remembered a summer evening. They’d gone swimming in the city pool, then drove down the highway toward the land’s last drive-in theater, their dreams intact, the two of them so relieved to have found one another, their joy was nearly unbearable. Certainly it seemed more than enough to fuel their whole lives. He saw Evvie as she’d been that night, barefoot in some oversize Goodwill dress from the 1950s covered with birds. The memory was a splintering ache in his chest. He closed his eyes and listened. Evvie once said the song’s expression of despair was so pure it almost became hope. A crying out so unmediated and necessary, it suggested the presence of a God who was listening.

  He didn’t want this last straw of hope. It didn’t even feel like hope, it felt like pain, but there it was, shining in the darkness.

  This song had played on a mix-tape years ago at a birthday party she’d thrown for him, in rooms she’d filled with hundreds of fresh flowers. She’d cooked excellent chili for two days and invited neighbors, friends, customers, and his family. His mother had come with her dogs, and his brother, Russell, from Chicago with a girl, Gina, who’d tried to kill herself a week before and had the scars to show for it. Gina was small and angular with haunted eyes whose expressions had traveled like dark streams underneath the surface of the party. When this song played, she’d stood by the window, looking into the dark backyard, and soon Evvie had gone to stand next to her, protective, compassionate, and unafraid. She didn’t have to say a word; the girl had ended up laying her head against Evvie’s shoulder. It seemed like a long time ago, even as the image came to him with surprising clarity and resonance.

  He sat on the bed now, his head in his hands, listening.

  The voice was a raw cry of the heart that became his own. “Come down!” Evvie cried now. “This song is as good as we thought it was! It’s killing me!”

  Evvie

  It was Cedric’s day off, and Evvie decided to call in sick at the Frame Shop so she could hang out with him in the attic and watch movies (sci-fi flicks with robots she didn’t care for) while eating banana muffins and chips and thinking about how she might change her life. For something was seriously wrong. In moments it seemed that someone’s cold hands were suddenly clutching her throat.

  Maybe the house was haunted. She didn’t normally believe in haunted houses, but the atmosphere of every room seemed to be holding its breath.

  And yesterday evening, rearranging sweaters in her closet, listening to a horrific radio show about women in the Congo, she’d felt a presence behind her. But it was nothing. Nothing visible. Still, Evvie had gotten under the covers and hid after that. What am I doing? she’d wondered, eyes shut.

  And then, ten minutes later, Ben and Ruth were back. When she heard them come in she sprang up and walked back to the closet and began folding sweaters again, humming loudly. “Have a nice walk?” she called down. He didn’t answer; she shouted again. “Nice walk?” and then he clomped up the steps, Ruth following behind him on nails they really needed to cut. Click, click, click went Ruth and thump went Ben, his step unusually heavy, she thought, and then he stood in the doorway, saying he’d seen their friend Kline out there, and Kline had told him he’d been diagnosed with lymphoma. In the doorway Ben’s pale face seemed to float. He looked down.

  “Oh no!” Evvie said. “That’s so awful. Was he with Nora?” Evvie’s heart slammed against her chest.

  “Nora was home with the kids. Kline was alone. Just walking alone in the dark.”

  “Prognosis?”

  “He’s got a good shot at recovery, or so they told him. Chemo, radiation. I just want to go to bed,” Ben said, his eyes still lowered. “If that’s OK.”

  “To bed?” For a moment she imagined—though nothing told her so—that this was an invitation.

  “To sleep. If that’s OK.”

  “Of course. Ben, are you—”

  “Tired and sad. About Kline. Obviously. OK?”

  “Did Kline look—”

  “He’s already lost weight he didn’t have to lose.”

  “He must have looked like—oh man. This is terrible.”

  Ben was in bed, on his side, and had turned away from her. He still had his shoes on, under the covers, and she had to bite her tongue to stop herself from asking him to take them off. Not because she cared the sheets would get dirty. She just didn’t like the idea of it. He’d never done anything like this before.

  “Kline will get some good treatment,” Evvie said. “It’s not like we’re in the Belgian Congo.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, it’s not like—”

  “It’s not even called the Belgian Congo anymore, Evvie,” he said.

  “Oh. Excuse me.”

  “Sorry. I’m just—”

  “It’s OK.”

  Kline and Ben had gone to high school together. Kline’s wife was an architect and the mother of two small children. She also volunteered for Amnesty International, and earlier in the year Evvie had stopped wanting to go over there (she did not dare confess this) because Ben seemed to like Kline’s wife a little too much, guffawing over her jokes, which were poorly delivered and which he’d heard b
efore, and once even asking if he could hold the baby while she checked on the dinner, and always complimenting her on whatever she was wearing—some aggressively ordinary shirt—so that the compliment took Kline’s wife by surprise and lit up her face before she dug them into a talk about Indonesian child labor abuses. Evvie worried Kline would die and Ben would move into the house with his auburn-haired beautiful widow and two adorable children, both of whom wore overalls, had big, startled eyes, and could sing Spanish folk songs learned at their nursery school immersion program. Evvie felt sick imagining Ben driving those toddlers and their high self-esteem to school, allowing them animal crackers in Kline’s blue van, which had a TV suspended from the ceiling so the kids wouldn’t have to be bored for one second.

  She saw Kline’s wife naked, spread out on a red bedspread, grief giving a poignant and irrefutable depth to her beauty.

  Evvie tried dislodging all of this, but the images only brightened in the sickening carnival of her mind.

  The alcove window framed another snowfall. She was on her brother’s bed, a quilt gathered around her shoulders, and Cedric was seated on the floor in worn green sweatpants, his curly gold hair a wild frame for his sleepy face. He was engaged in his routine, but not wholly oblivious to his sister’s emotional state. He didn’t understand much about why people seemed so devoted to making life so unnecessarily complex, but his heart was the most reliably tender a person could hope to encounter. Not that this compassion could budge him out of his routine.

  “Yeah, I’m all right, but I need you to come with me to the foie gras protest this afternoon. If you’re with me it’ll be easier to leave the house.”

  “What the heck’s the big deal in leaving the house, yo?”

  “I don’t know. I’m on this superstitious kick. Like if I leave, when I come back it will be completely empty. Or burned down.”

  “Evvie, I hate to tell you this, but that’s something a schizoid would say.”