First You Try Everything

by Jane McCafferty

  “I know. But I feel like there’s a phantom in here.”

  “What time this protest start and where it be at, yo?” Cedric worked with some black guys; sometimes he drifted into black dialect.

  “Uh, down on Bryant Street, yo. At five in the evening, so we can catch rush hour traffic along with early-bird diners.”

  “I watch my show at five, son.”

  “So skip it one day, son.”

  “I think not.”

  “Skip it one day for me, please? I need you to skip one stupid television show for me today and I won’t ask you for anything else for the next ten years!”

  Cedric looked at her. Her fear had registered.

  “So you’ll come with me?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And what about the Latvian shoe repair guy? The cobbler? Did you call him back?”

  “Yeah. He changed his mind. He wants to work alone.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Ced.” She wasn’t at all. Only Cedric would think that a career in shoe repair in 2004 was the way to go.

  “Don’t be sorry! Be sorry for people who starve or get their legs blown off in Iraq, or get shut up in asylums! Don’t be sorry for me!”

  This was his usual response to anyone’s pity, including any trace of self-pity he noticed in himself. Sometimes when he showered he lectured himself at the top of his lungs. This had been hard to explain to Ben early on. “I guess it’s a Catholic guilt thing or something,” she’d tried.

  Evvie smiled. Cedric was right. They were both so lucky, brother and sister, warm in an attic while it snowed, neither of them suffering terminal illness, hunger, unemployment, or even the ordinary abuses that every other person you met seemed to be enduring. She had to learn to breathe deep and calm down, and stop her brain from running amok.

  “Let’s go.”

  Snow danced in the pitch-black of five o’clock, and the usual duck liberators were already gathered on the corner before La Foret, peacefully picketing. The air of these protests was always charged with a distinct sense of purpose, a practical solemnity, and the confidence that came with knowing they’d already convinced two other restaurants to stop serving foie gras. Evvie and Cedric walked up to the little crowd of five and were warmly greeted. It was a real act of love for Cedric to accompany her; he didn’t like crowds, even small crowds; he didn’t like the cold, and he didn’t get many days off where he could stay in the attic with the TV. Plus, he hated thinking about the ducks and geese with the metal pipes jammed down their throats, the two pounds of grain gunned into their guts, their livers so enlarged they couldn’t even walk, much less care for their plumage and their families. Evvie could feel Cedric trying to block all of this out as she spoke with a tall woman in a blue coat about boycotting the restaurant. “You can go home now, Ced. I’m all right.” Cedric didn’t hesitate to run down the street. He could be a graceful runner, but tonight he ran like Forrest Gump, and Evvie stared after him in wonder.

  The woman in the blue coat said, “Isn’t the so-called delicacy of despair really big in France?”

  “It is.”

  “And aren’t the French like heads and tails above us in terms of cuisine?”

  “In some respects, that’s true, but—”

  “I’m sorry, but I won’t apologize for being here at the top of the food chain.” Evvie felt for the millionth time that she would really like to get out of the world immediately, then remembered that she actually loved the world, and drew in a deep breath. “We don’t need you to apologize for anything of the sort, but you might want to consider what our responsibility is to those who have no voice.”

  Now a balding man in a long tweed coat stood beside her. They made a handsome pair, but handsome in a way that was so dependent on money it just looked depressingly ephemeral.

  “I do admire your conviction,” the woman said. “Really.”

  And she had such a sincere expression in her eyes.

  The man said, with probable tongue in cheek, “We really appreciate you educating us”—steering the woman inside the restaurant—“but maybe you should care about all the starving people first, huh?”

  “But we’re all connected, everything and everyone,” Evvie said, but quietly. “Best thing you can do for starving people is stop eating meat,” she added, almost whispering. She knew when to give up. She knew when to stand still and take a deep breath.

  “Hey, Evvie?”

  Ben was standing across the street in his long dark coat with a newspaper tucked under his arm. For a moment the image of him seemed like something she’d conjured up. She almost felt shy, seeing his beautiful singularity, his form so intensely and deeply known it was painful. She’d been missing him all day and hadn’t even known it.

  “Evvie?” he called again.

  “Ben!” Happiness flooded her body with warmth. She saw him as she sometimes did, especially in autumn or winter, when his memories were with him like ghosts, watching as his father married the fourth-grade phonics teacher, Miss Burns, whom Ben and his siblings had been required to call Mom, even before the divorce was legal. “Mom’s no dummy,” Ben’s father had liked to say about her. “She wears a lot of hats.”

  And that was literally true too, Ben told Evvie. His new “mom” wore berets, and sometimes a cowboy hat, smoked clove cigarettes, and said things like “If I have to teach phonics to fourth-grade dwarves for the rest of my life, can someone please shoot me now?” He’d preferred his mother’s house next to the old-age home, where once he and June had sung Christmas carols, all by themselves, since their friends had not shown up.

  Evvie froze for a moment—she wanted to rush across the street and embrace Ben the man and Ben the boy, even if he did, as he moved a few steps closer, look like an impatient boss with a bone to pick. Had she left the stove on or something? She finally walked over to him, crossing the dim street. The few remaining duck liberators agreed it was almost time to call it a night, and she bid them farewell.

  “Hi!” She threw her arms around Ben, nuzzled her head into his collarbone, and then stopped. His body was rigid.

  “What’s wrong? Did I do something?”

  “We have to talk.”

  “Did something happen? Did someone die?”

  “No. I have to talk—”

  “Something about Kline?”

  “No, no.”

  He steered her down the street, with what she began to perceive as a terrifying mixture of sadness and distance. She had a feeling in her spine now, electric with ineffable presentiment. But she walked beside him.

  “I have to leave you, Evvie.”

  “Where are you going? Stupid business trip?”

  “I need to be out of this marriage.”

  A wild hiccup of a laugh escaped her and the landscape tilted. She placed her hand over her mouth for a moment. Then she began to talk loudly with great enthusiasm.

  “This fat man tonight got about two inches from my face and started shouting at me that if I loved geese I should go clean up the shit they leave all over the park near his house, and then I should have sex with them if I think they’re as important as humans. He goes, ‘Why don’t you just fuck those geese, lady? You know that’s what you want!’ This guy was amazing, Ben. The worst I’ve seen since Mr. Personality last year. Cedric couldn’t take it, he just walked home alone. That’s because Cedric has good sense. Remember how you loved those imitations of Mr. Personality I used to do? Back
then? Remember how ballistic I—?” She was out of breath.

  She stopped and sat down on the curb, her head bowed down into her hands. She had told him a lie. No man had done that tonight. A man had done that last week to another duck liberator in Omaha, and she’d read about it on the Internet.

  He sat beside her in his fine woolen coat. She despised that coat. She missed his old parka. Green, dill green, with an orange lining, and big pockets twice repaired (by her) where once he’d loved to hold things for her—keys, books, the old lists she used to make, with all those exclamation points.

  1. Get rid of crap!!!!!

  2. Go running!!!!

  3. Buy guinea pig food!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  4. Call Mom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  5. Get rid of more crap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  She had stopped making those lists. Everything got worse after she stopped making those lists.

  His new coat, the long black coat, was alive. It had captured him. She took a gulp of black air and then another and looked up at the dark clouds sailing across the moon.

  “This is just a stage you’re going through, Ben. Some midlife crisis thing. Just don’t panic.” She tried to sling her arm around him, but her arm wouldn’t move. Her arm was now made of iron. She managed to stand up on wobbly legs that were not her own. “Let us go home.”

  Let us go home. It rang in her head.

  The two walked to Ben’s car, somehow, in silence. Evvie watched her black sneakers moving across the cement. She hummed. Let us go home. She sat beside him in silence, watching the darting snow like stitches try to mend the gaping dark.

  When they entered their front hall, Evvie flicked on the light. “Really, Ben, people go through these stages. Whole books are written about it. Apparently it’s human. Obviously.” She swallowed down a thick stone of terror.

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and you dismissing me by calling it a stage, Evvie—you need to hear me. You can stay in the house and I’ll keep paying the rent for a while. You won’t be poor—I’ll see to that. You can go back to teaching. And you should charge Cedric more rent.”

  “Poor? I won’t be poor? Are you insane? Back to teaching? I was never a teacher!”

  “You said you wanted to work with those kids at the wildlife center again.”

  “I did not!”

  “You can have whatever you want. And I’ll move and you’ll stay in the house.”

  “The house,” she said, stupefied so that for a moment she literally saw stars. “But it’s a houseboat. The house turned into a boat. We’re going overboard.” She reached out for his arm. “We’re at sea! We’re out at sea, Ben! You and me! Stop it!”

  “Evvie.”

  “Man overboard!” she cried. Her jaw trembled. She put her forehead against the wall and talked to the floor. “When did you make this decision? And why wasn’t I included? Why did you not bother to include me, Ben? You’re my best friend! You’re all I have!” Her voice was all wrong. She wanted to plug her ears. She couldn’t look at him.

  “That’s part of the problem. Don’t you see? We’ve been strangling each other for years.”

  “No, Ben, I’m sorry! Ben, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry for everything! I’ll calm down, I’ll change, I’ll go on meds, I’ll go to a marriage counselor, a therapist, whatever you want, I promise!”

  “Evvie, please.”

  “I’ll take salsa dancing lessons! We both will! Or go to China! Whatever! Shake things up!”

  “Please, Evvie.” He pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Please what?”

  “I grew, Evvie. I grew in unexpected ways. I wasn’t even trying to.”

  “Grew? That’s what you call this? Grew?”

  “Yes!”

  “All you have to do is wait, and I’ll grow too. I can grow! I like growing! Whatever you need, whatever you want, just—let me grow! Maybe I just need some help but I can definitely grow!”

  “Please don’t make this harder.”

  How could she possibly make this harder? This was so hard she could not believe it was happening.

  She walked to the closet and searched for his old parka. She put it on. It still smelled faintly of his body. The smell of her real home. The only real home she’d ever had! Didn’t he understand that?

  She ran outside and sat on the front stoop. The skin of her arms was melting. Melting right off the bones. Her face was melting too, like in a horror movie. She buried her hot face in the parka and held the skin of her cheeks tightly to hold it in place. He opened the door and stood there behind her. “I really didn’t want this to be so dramatic,” he said, coolly, a refined stranger with a well-modulated voice. “I wanted to talk like two adults facing down a really difficult situation.”

  What the?

  She was quiet. And then, after a while, she spoke in a thick southern accent. “I don’t know about you, but I want my chicken to be cut in the throat, hung upside down and bled to death, that’s just how we do things here in America.” She was impressed with how authentic she sounded. She started to laugh.

  “Evvie, stop! Come inside. Please.”

  “You goddamn animal rights people are worser terrorists than those goddamn al-Qaeda folks. It’s unbelievable!” She was shouting. A woman across the street, Peg, an ex-cop who had once asked Ben, “Is your wife a little different?” offered a worried wave before slipping into her Chevy.

  He yanked her inside. She resisted for a moment, then went limp. He steered her upstairs, pulling her by the hand. Upstairs he laid her down in bed, covered her up. She shook as if with fever, held her eyes wide open. Besides the shock a strange spirit of inevitability was already making itself known. He sat with her and held her hand, his profile set in anger even as his hands had been soft, and his voice the softest she’d ever heard it.

  “I’m really, really sorry, Evvie.”

  She looked up at him. She wanted a thermometer. She wanted to throw up.

  “It’s because I couldn’t have a baby,” she said. “Admit it.”

  “No! That’s not it.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “I swear to God the baby isn’t it.”

  “We should’ve adopted! A little girl like in my dream. She’d be in first grade now. Or a boy. Or both! We could still have both!”

  “Stop, Evvie, it’s not about that.”

  “Then why? What are you doing? Really, Ben, what are you doing?”

  “We just grew apart. It’s not that unusual.”

  “That’s the problem! You want to be usual? Is that the goal? And what about going to a marriage counselor?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I never planned this.” His eyes were sorry. They terrified her.

  “Aren’t you attracted to me anymore? You just fell out of love?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Maybe it is. Aren’t you? Attracted to me? Anymore?”

  “It has nothing to do with that.”

  “Nothing?”

  His voice was different. He was a different Ben. She faced it now. She had imagined his changes belonged to the world of surfaces—the job demanding a certain attire, a boost to the ego. He had to put behind him the pushcart guy, the musician, the self that had relished being on th
e margins, the perspective this had afforded them, or so she’d imagined. He had stepped into conventional, manly success, and conventional, manly success had stepped into him.

  But she had trusted the soul could survive the changes the personality endured. Trusted the soul.

  And she was right to trust, she saw, looking up at him now. His anger had abandoned him. His face had been left naked. He was Ben and nobody but Ben. In his dark eyes she saw his love, and for a moment she smiled; it didn’t matter that this love was dependent on his sorrow, on his ensuing freedom from her, his guilty relief that he’d finally said the words he must have been carrying inside him for months.

  Her heart was big and opening, breaking in half like a drawbridge.

  She looked at his face. Now that he had crossed this radical, irreparable line, he loved her again, the way you love your old town as the train pulls out of the station.

  She sat up and pressed her head against his as hard as she could, as if she could make their two heads into one. They’d done this when they’d first gotten together.

  “Sleep with me,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to say good-bye to me as a lover or I won’t believe any of this.”

  “I can’t do that. That would be cruel.”

  “It’s terrible! The last time we made love I didn’t even know it was the last time! And you did! You said good-bye without me knowing it was good-bye?”

  She turned on her side, away from him. She curled into a ball.

  “I didn’t know, either,” he said. “I didn’t know anything.” His voice was tired, defeated.

  “Where will you live?” she said.

  “I’ve rented an apartment.”

  “Oh. Did you fall in love with someone else?”

  “No.”

  “There’s nobody else?”

  “No.”

  “Where’s this apartment?”

  “Bloomfield.”

  “Bloomfield? Why Bloomfield? And why are you leaving? Tell me again?”

  “Because I’ve changed. I need different things. I don’t want to drag this out and get bitter.”