First You Try Everything

by Jane McCafferty

  “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.

  He 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.

  Lauren 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.

  He 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 render
ed suspect?

  Always 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

  Evvie 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?”