She finished dressing and quietly began to climb out the window. She was almost nimble. She made her way down the ladder. She’d left the helmet behind.
“Oh my God! She did what?” Lauren said.
“She basically got a ladder and climbed in the window and watched me sleep.” He couldn’t tell her about the naked display, the Lou Reed rendition, the football helmet, the whole performance.
“That’s such an invasion, Ben!”
“I know.”
“I mean, weren’t you shocked?”
“I was really surprised.”
Then, in Lauren’s blue eyes he saw a sense of amazement and appreciation of this so-called invasion. Or was she merely amused? He felt a little wave of protection for Evvie move through him.
“Was she always nuts?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe. Not really. I guess she was a little. Let’s talk about something else.” He pulled her close. Kissed the side of her head. He did not want to further betray Evvie by disclosing what made her unusual. Moreover, he wanted to protect the boundaries of this new life with this beautiful woman, who loved to have sex with him, who was planning to teach him how to garden when summer came. This woman who radiated a calm that seemed rooted in wisdom she’d be too humble to own. He breathed in the scent of her shampoo.
“I could never live with a vegan,” she said. “They all tend to be so judgmental. You must be a really tolerant person.”
He didn’t take the bait except to sigh. “Not really.”
They were walking under a lavender evening sky, down a narrow street in Erie, near where Ben had grown up. They’d come back to visit his father and stepmother, to introduce Lauren to them. His father had been mildly saddened when he told them about his separation, even though both he and his stepmother had never particularly loved Evvie. Both of them had their old-time Protestant (though they were atheists) distrust of Catholics; they knew that Evvie descended from people who played bingo in church basements, drank obscene amounts of liquor, prayed rosaries in front of statues, and crippled people with guilt. Evvie, a supposed agnostic, had one night, years ago, exploded at the dinner table when Ben’s stepmother had said something innocuously offensive about a parade for Saint Anthony where people taped dollars onto the life-size statue of the saint before he was hauled through the streets of Pittsburgh. They’d never seen that explosive side of Evvie, and it eclipsed all the selves she’d displayed to them before and after. She’d become the crazy Catholic, even though she’d apologized, welling up with tears that made things worse. She’d explained that when she was a little girl, parades for Saint Anthony were some of the best times of her life, since she got to be with her grandmother, who was called an honorary Italian by her Italian neighbors because she was so nice and loved to eat the homemade pasta and listen to Luigi Tenco.
“Don’t worry, dear,” his stepmother had said, and his father had winked, but nothing, according to Evvie, was ever the same after this.
Then, two years ago, when Evvie had started preaching about factory farms, she’d lost considerable favor again, not because they loved meat so much, or even because they disagreed that corporate farms were hell-worlds, but her delivery was so off, her voice trembling as it rose, that they both suspected something deeply personal overshadowed her conviction, making it suspect. “She should ask herself when she felt slaughtered. She’s got a deep identification with these animals, which points to something pretty dark,” his father suggested.
So Ben was surprised when his father, hearing the news, said, “I’m so sorry, Ben. I guess I figured you and Evvie would always be together.”
“I did too,” he remembers saying.
“So shall we go meet them?” he said to Lauren. They’d been walking the streets for nearly an hour; his palms were damp with anxiety. It was Sunday, quiet and empty. Dead would be the word. They’d seen only two human beings: a fat-faced child on a bike who shouted “beep beep” and a cop on the corner talking on a cell phone. Lauren wore a snug blue cap, faded jeans, and a dark red jacket, black boots with heels that clicked on the sidewalk. Every so often she did a little step-dance. Her small nose was red with cold, and her eyes brightened each time they met his.
“You doing OK?” he asked her.
“Maybe I’m a little nervous.”
“They’re pretty easygoing,” he said. Unless you know them.
He took her hand and steered her down one street and up another, until they stood on top of a low, stone wall with a view of the lake, a block from the unadorned but newly repointed half-time brick home of his last years of childhood, a place he’d mostly avoided as an adult. He held no serious grievances anymore against any of his parents, just a discomfort in their presence he preferred to avoid.
A green metal chair sat alone on the front porch.
A similar chair used to adorn the back porch; early on with Evvie, the two of them once sat there in the middle of the night, feverishly draped around each other under a blanket. A huge deer, a buck with full antlers, had approached them in the moonlight, and everything went still. The deer had come so close, and this had been so thrilling, that both of them had tears in their eyes by the time the deer turned to walk back to the woods.
“Hey there, look who the wind blew in!”
His stepmother had short dyed red hair now, and bright bluish eyes that seemed never to move in their sockets. If she wished to look to the left or right, she turned her whole head, as if injured. Her smile was broad and inviting as usual, if devoid of intimacy. The fourth-grade teacher she’d once been was nowhere to be seen, even as her face had changed little.
“Hi, Mom, so . . . this is Lauren.”
Mom grasped Lauren’s hands, squeezed once, then let go, as was her habit. “Pleased to meet you, Lauren,” she said. The front hall was beautiful with flowers and shining wood.
“Place looks great,” Ben said.
“That’s because I shined it up for your visit, Ben. Lauren, come sit down. Let me get you kids a Coke.” She looked at him with detached curiosity, as if after all these years, she still couldn’t figure him out.
“Maybe we can all have a beer,” Ben suggested. “Where’s Dad?”
“He was out back tinkering with something. Let me go call him.”
“Dad’s tinkering?” Ben called. “Since when?”
Lauren and Ben sat in the living room, facing each other like schoolchildren suddenly seized by giddiness; Lauren laughed out loud for no reason, then clapped her hand across her mouth. “Is that you?” she said, pointing to a photograph of a strapping six-year-old batter squinting into the sun.
“ ’Fraid so.”
“Pretty cute!”
Evvie had held that picture, practically fallen into it, and said, This picture destroys me.
Tell me everything you can remember and I’ll tell you everything I can remember. Even irrelevant stuff, like how you drank a glass of milk one day in front of the window when some guy across the street was cutting the grass and he stopped to wipe his brow with a handkerchief.
“Hey, Ben!”
He got up to embrace his father, who stiffly clapped his son on the back three times in lieu of a hug. His father was completely bald now, and his glasses were thicker, but he was still strong despite a potbelly making itself known under his striped polo shirt. “You’ll stay the night?” he asked, hopefully, and Lauren spoke up and said, “Yes,” before Ben c
ould explain they had to get back in a few hours.
“You must be Lauren,” his father said, smiling, and Lauren stood up.
“So nice to meet you,” Lauren said. And then, strangely, his father and Lauren embraced as if they’d known one another forever, as if his father weren’t suspicious of such displays of unearned affection. Lauren’s direct warmth could be like a high beam of blinding light; a person couldn’t see clearly in that light, basically forgot who they were.
“So do we have beer?” Ben said.
His father had remembered himself, and now looked confused. “Beer?” he said, blinking.
“We always have beer,” said Mom. “Oh yes, we do, can’t live without our beer around here,” she added, in an abrasive singsong that implied perhaps someone liked beer a little too much around here. He guessed his father was drinking more these days.
“I’ll get them,” Ben said. He left the room and first walked into the backyard to shake his head, rid himself of Evvie. When she first loved him, she’d wanted to come to Erie so as to inhabit every childhood haunt he’d known, to draw closer to the boy he’d been. He’d taken her to the tiny house beside the nursing home, and she’d looked into all the windows, a detective working a crucial and endlessly mysterious case. It gave him a pang to remember how young and alive she’d been back then, how seemingly happy, with that walk she used to have, leaning forward on her toes—Evvie walks like someone headed through a parking lot to hear their favorite band in concert, his friend Paul had said. This girl in her twenties, the person she’d been—did she survive inside of the woman who’d broken into his place and said his heart was black ice?
He stood in the kitchen and tried to shake it all out of his head, like a dog shakes water out of its coat, though his resistance to thinking of her, he knew from experience, only intensified the memories. He would drink a beer and make small talk, his parents peppering their conversation with names of friends Ben had never met and couldn’t keep track of.
They would eat roast beef and nobody would really miss Evvie, not exactly, not consciously, though Ben would try to hear the echo of one of her old cow-abuse lectures to remind himself of how her presence could darken a table, to puncture the strange and unwieldy grief rising in him. Evvie had somehow protected him here in this house, with these parents, in a way that Lauren could not. Not yet.
“It’s sad,” Lauren whispered.
“What’s sad?”
“This is your home, and you’re like a stranger here.”
His stepmother had beautifully arranged the guest room for them. She was, on some practical level, a hospitable soul. Because Lauren was this way too, it allowed him a new appreciation for all of it: The quilts on the mahogany sleigh bed were hand-sewn heirlooms beautifully softened with age, the sheer curtains were embroidered with butterflies. She’d arranged fresh blue towels on a rack, and the sheets, they saw now, climbing naked into the old bed, were the softest, whitest dream-sheets, like silk against their skin as they turned to each other in the dim orange glow of the night-light.
“A stranger?” He was immensely grateful for the surprise of her perception. She’d seemed quietly oblivious at the table, and afterward, when they’d all taken a walk to the lake.
“Don’t you think?”
She rubbed his shoulders, introducing him to the tension he must’ve felt all evening long. They made love, quietly, and the silence of the room deepened around them. He squeezed her hand. “That was nice.”
“Nice? You’re amazing,” she said.
“Really?”
“You’re really surprised? Your wife never let you in on that little secret?”
“Don’t call it little.”
She laughed.
He was still not completely at ease with her, which made him feel like a pedestrian lover, too considerate, too careful. He suspected her of flattery.
“So should I never mention her? Like she never existed? If so, that’s cool.”
He considered this for a moment. “You can mention her.”
“Someday I’d like to get to know her.”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“You could meet Carter if you wanted.”
“No, thanks.”
“Really? No curiosity?”
“I think I’ll just let Carter be Carter in Carterville.”
“OK.”
A silence fell. He tried steering his mind to more neutral territory. The morning. They could head to a bakery before leaving town. Eclairs. Espresso. And then a long drive down 79 with some music.
“I’d like to meet your mom.”
“Soon.”
“Are you a stranger there too?”
“No. I mean no more than any grown-up child is a stranger in their parent’s house. My mom knows how to watch football and get high on Pepsi. She lives on a llama farm with a guy who used to be the mayor of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and she takes life as it comes.”
“Wow. A llama farm? And you never bothered to mention this?”
“She’s only been with the mayor for three years.”
“And she’s happy?”
“She can spend ten hours in a tomato garden. Sort of happy no matter what. And I don’t understand it, since her father was horrible.” He could never think of his mother without thinking of his grandfather, but he stopped himself before saying more.
He’d found out who his grandfather was when he was seven years old, staying with his grandparents while his parents went to Niagara Falls for a long weekend. His grandfather had beaten him with a belt one night, in a mudroom where the sound of the whirring dryer muffled the sound of his grandfather’s voice as it ordered him to strip naked. He’d tried to run out of the room, and this had enraged the man. “I have to take you down a peg or two,” he’d confided, twisting Ben’s arm, “for your own sake.”
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 decora
ted 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.
First You Try Everything Page 8