First You Try Everything

by Jane McCafferty

  “Long time ago. I was a talented boy. Head full of dreams.” He paused to knock himself in the temple and smile. “They all wanted to send me on to Hollywood, but next stop was Vietnam.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad.” So the guy was in his fifties. He looked younger.

  “We all of us have our qualities that don’t get properly developed. I bet you’re no exception.” He raised an eyebrow.

  She turned the sunset over, and on the back, in white letters against a red background, were several quotes from past customers.

  Not only does it work, it returns you to a love as fresh as morning dew. I am grateful, grateful, grateful.

  —SANDRA B.

  Minneapolis

  This is professional match-making on steroids! Reunited and it feels so good!

  —RICHARD AND LEONA FROM PHILLY

  (in our hot tub)

  I’ll tell you one thing. You are in good hands with Rocky and Bruno. They’re magic, they’re professionals, and this works, and just do it.

  —TOM LOVES BETTY IN PITTSBURGH!

  When my husband realized he might really lose me in the grand scheme of things, he said he saw my heart was a perfect rose unfolding and all the chakras were totally vibrating in alignment with what is meant to be. On our journey back home to the casa we built with our own hands, I knew I was having a real mystical vision like in the days of old. And now, now to have the one you love waking up beside you each day is to know you are winning life’s biggest lottery.

  —NAME WITHHELD

  Pittsburgh

  It was Evvie’s stop for real now.

  “You call us,” Rocky said, and lips tight, she nodded, taking the flyer, shoving it into her pocket before she walked home in the dark, the faces of Bruno and Rocky inscribing themselves, shining in the dead center of her mind like the moon.

  She smiled. She couldn’t stop smiling. When had she last smiled like this? What she really wanted was to call Ben and tell him all about it and laugh. He would love the story of these guys. Or she could go over there and tell him about it. And laugh.

  In bed.

  A dark feeling swept through her. She had to get out of this dreamworld. They would not be laughing together in bed, ever again. Ever, she told herself, you stupid bitch, she added. It’s over.

  Unfortunately, on some level, she didn’t believe that for a minute. It began to rain. She was going to get soaked.

  She went home drenched, and even before drying off she e-mailed Celia about the guys. Celia was someone she’d known for two years in high school but had been out of touch with for twenty years. At this point, she hardly knew Celia, but somehow she’d become quite the anchor on e-mail. In high school, they each had had radar for the other, since they were both surviving fairly severe family chaos, and successfully abusing drugs. After smoking Colombian in Celia’s garage, they’d go to South Street together for onion rings and strawberry shakes, and after several of these meetings, Celia had finally confessed how embarrassing it was to have a father who worked as a clown. Everyone hates clowns, she’d explained, fourteen and dying of self-consciousness. “It makes me feel really bad.”

  “I don’t hate clowns,” Evvie lied. “I like them.”

  Celia smiled. “Really?”

  “Yeah. They’re good people.”

  “Well, he’s a clown who’s been in prison.” Because they were high, they fell out of their seats, laughing at this. Then grew silent again, in the booth.

  “I like people who’ve been to prison,” Evvie said, and she’d meant this. Her father the boxer had always said that half of those who should be in prison were walking around free, that serious criminals were ruling the world. The few times prisoners managed to escape, he would follow the story on TV, and root for them. She told Celia this that night at Burger King.

  They’d lost touch until out of the blue, in a surprise e-mail, Celia had reminded Evvie of all this.

  YOU PROBABLY DON’T REMEMBER ME, she’d written, which made Evvie feel as if Celia had never known her at all: had she known her, she would have realized Evvie was incapable of forgetting a girl whose father was a clown/prisoner.

  I THINK I’VE HEARD OF SOMETHING LIKE THAT BEFORE, Celia wrote back the next day, referring to Rocky and Bruno’s business. YOU SHOULD TRY IT. I’M PRETTY SURE THE ROOTS OF THIS KIND OF THING ARE IN ANCIENT GREECE.

  YOU SAY THAT ABOUT EVERYTHING, Evvie wrote back.

  NO, I DON’T. THE GREEKS BELIEVED THAT FEAR COULD BE A CATALYST FOR A GREAT AWAKENING. I THINK YOU CAN FIND THIS IN CONFUCIUS TOO. OR WHAT’S HIS NAME MARCUS AURELIUS. FEAR CAN SEND PEOPLE RIGHT ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE.

  MAYBE YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR MIND, CELIA, BUT I’M NOT, Evvie wrote back, then wrote a second message saying the same thing, adding an exclamation point. Celia shot back: THINK ABOUT THAT PHRASE “OUT OF YOUR MIND.” WHY’S THAT A BAD THING? WHY DO WE WANT TO BE STUCK IN OUR MINDS? OF ALL PLACES!

  In good times, Celia felt like a friend. But now she felt like a disembodied voice that was getting stranger every day.

  REMEMBER, AMATEURS BUILT THE ARK. PROFESSIONALS BUILT THE TITANIC, she wrote. Evvie had no idea what this had to do with anything.

  “Ruth?”

  The dog came up the steps. She’d been watching TV. She was so smart she’d leave the room when any kind of violence came on. Ruth stood in the doorway, with her square head cocked to the left. She might as well have said: “You called?”

  “Ruth, if you weren’t here, I couldn’t take it.”

  The dog walked over to her. Sat down.

  “Come with me to brush my teeth,” Evvie said. Ruth was the type of dog who understood this request, and who gladly complied, with a spirit of equanimity that was sometimes, at least before Ben left, supremely contagious. Evvie brushed while looking at Ruth. “You’re so good, Ruth. Thank you for being so good.”

  She slept in her clothes these days. It seemed a waste of energy to put on pajamas, or even to strip down to underwear. She slipped under the blankets in the dark room. She and Ben had always gone to bed at the same time. They’d had their best talks in the darkness. Long and rambling. They’d joked around in the middle of the night sometimes, half awake from some dream, then fallen back to sleep. Even with Ruth, Evvie felt like an amputee, lying there, the best part of her missing.

  After work that day Evvie had spent hours making a vegetable lasagna for Neil and Nora Kline and their kids, then delivered it along with flowers, thinking she would leave both on the front stoop with a card, but Nora had come out the side door with a bag of trash to put on the curb. “Evvie!” she’d said, dropping the trash and rushing to embrace her. Nora had reported that Kline (they all called Neil Kline, even his kids) was doing really well. She had him on this organic diet, all fresh juices, no meat. Really responded well to the chemo with an attitude they should bottle and sell. He was definitely going to beat this. And you, Evvie, how are you?

  “Me? Oh, pretty good.” The brick house was tall and narrow. All the windows were lit. Evvie kept expecting a thin bald Kline to appear in one of them.

  “You don’t have to put on an act with me,” Nora said, and placed her hand on Evvie’s tense shoulder. “I know what it is to be brokenhearted.”

  “You do?” Evvie couldn’t imagine anyone breaking Nora’s heart.

  “Oh yeah. I was catatonic for a year when this Italian guy broke up with me. I would pretty much drive around in my roommate’s car, hoping someone would hit me.” She had lowered her voice to a near whisper. “I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I was like anorexic and calling him every day and feeling suicidal.”

  “Really?”

  “You feel like an infant on the side of the road screaming and all the cars are going past!”

  “Exactly.” Evvie was hugely relieved to hear someone put this into words.

  “Sometime I’ll tel
l you the whole insane Alberto six-and-a-half-year saga.”

  “Alberto.” Evvie was trying to take this in. Nora was in slippers, a nightgown, and a winter coat. It gave her an old-fashioned look. She smiled and said, “Now I think back and see he looked like a lounge singer. What’d you bring?”

  “Lasagna.”

  “Oh my God!” She nearly shouted this. “So did Ben! Yesterday evening. It’s like you guys are still in synch. That’s what I said to Kline, I said, those two will work it out. Those two are peas in a pod. They’re just taking a break.”

  Evvie’s heart pounded and rose up in her chest. “That’s how you see it? Really?” Evvie’s mouth stretched out as wide as it could. Not a smile, but a stretching, as if a great reluctance to believe this thing she wanted most to believe was preventing the real smile.

  “Definitely!” Nora said. “I’ve actually always admired you guys. I mean, you’ve always been the best-friends type, right?”

  “We have. At least I thought so.”

  “And you crack each other up, right?”

  Evvie thought about this. “We used to.”

  “A lot you used to! I always envied that. Let me tell you a story, Evvie. About three or four years ago, I saw you guys at Kennywood. The kids were babies, and my mother had them on the merry-go-round, and Kline and I sat on a bench together, eating fries in the dark. It was a good enough time, even though we were always exhausted in those days and really didn’t have a lot to say to each other. Anyhow, I saw you and Ben together that night. You probably don’t even remember. But the two of you walked by with your arms around each other, and you’d just been on the Jack Rabbit. You’d been laughing really hard about something. I saw you laughing as you approached us, before you stopped and talked to us—”

  “I remember,” Evvie said. “It was right around the Fourth of July.”

  “And you looked so in love, I felt a serious pang of envy. The way you glowed and the way you looked at each other. All that passion. I mean, it was so obvious that night. And suddenly I was afraid that I didn’t have that kind of love, that I never had, that I never would.”

  Evvie was deeply moved by the surprising confession. “But I think you do,” she said, stupidly. “Have that kind of love.”

  Nora widened her eyes and looked up at the night sky for a moment. “I have something. Some kind of love. And it’s all right. Whatever it is.” Then she looked back at Evvie, leaning in. “What I’m trying to say is I know someday you guys will be cracking each other up again.”

  “You know?” Evvie smiled.

  “Come on, you don’t really think this is for good, do you?”

  “What did Kline say when you said you thought it would work out?”

  “Kline said he wasn’t sure. So I said, close your eyes, can you see them canning peaches together when they’re eighty? Because that’s what his parents do—and they have a great marriage. And he closed his eyes and said he sort of could see you guys canning peaches together when you’re eighty.”

  Evvie swallowed. She was salivating. She could hardly bear this good news. “Do they have peach trees?”

  “Come on inside—it’s cold. They get the peaches from the farmers’ market.”

  “The farmers’ market!” Evvie followed Nora into the house. “I love the farmers’ market!” And I love you, Nora. The front hall was dark, except for a small lit candle on a table underneath a painting one of their children had done of what looked like a huge, deranged moose.

  Upstairs she could hear the voices of the children. That night at Kennywood, Evvie had watched tiny kids in Kiddieland riding the miniature Whip and Ferris wheel, Ben beside her agreeing that when they had their own child, they’d come to Kennywood all the time. But part of me doesn’t want to share you, he’d said. I mean, kids are so demanding they change everything. A ripple of panic rolled through her, a collision of feelings she steeled herself against.

  “Kids, get out of the tub!” Nora called up. “Put on Little Bear, and I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

  “Is Kline here?”

  “Uh, no. He’s not here much these days.”

  “What?”

  “He’s taking classes at night. He’s trying to stay really busy, even though he feels like shit. And he doesn’t like being around the house much for some reason.”

  “Oh. I’m—”

  “It’s OK. It’ll pass. He’s freaking out a little. Stay for tea.”

  “OK.”

  The kitchen was a generous yellow and warmly lit, with a round table in the center, wooden chairs, and white curtains framing a long window above the sink.

  Nora put the teapot on, then a basket on the table filled with apples and grapes. The kids’ art adorned one of the cabinets. The ceiling was low, the teacups the color of raisins, the honey in a little brown pot with a lid that said GET SWEET.

  “It’s decaf,” Nora said, pouring from a flowered pot. She sat down across from Evvie.

  “The prognosis is good,” Evvie said, “right? I mean, Ben said it was good.”

  “Oh yeah. It’s great. But even so, you get cancer, you start to see things differently.” She looked down. “I’m supportive of whatever he wants right now. He wants to take art classes. So fine. His parents gave us a bunch of money to make this time easier.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yeah. They just had their fiftieth anniversary, and all seven of their kids and twenty grandkids came. Kline had tears in his eyes when he watched them dance. And they can actually dance, the way people used to. They somehow still see the mystery in each other. At least that’s how it seems.”

  “Wow.”

  “People forget that another person is a complete mystery.” Nora looked up, her eyes narrowed as she sipped her tea.

  “I guess day after day after day things starts to—”

  “People start figuring each other out, solving them like a puzzle, then getting mad or bored. I mean, people should never be solved. Alberto totally solved me. Or so he thought.”

  “Sounds like an idiot to me,” Evvie said, and Nora laughed, but then sighed, as if suddenly too tired to be having this conversation. She kept going anyway. “Kline’s parents are the types to understand life’s short, even when it feels long. Besides, that generation understood the value of standing by each other. I mean, they didn’t see loyalty as some kind of sentimental imposition. They weren’t so selfish. Want an English muffin or something?”

  “No, thanks. I agree. Loyalty’s just kind of disappeared. It’s not really a value people talk about.”

  “It’s harder now. Our generation’s a bunch of option nuts.”

  “Exactly,” said Evvie. “A bunch of option nuts.” She wished she could do more than echo this back, but what could you say about all this that hadn’t been said before?

  A silence fell. Evvie took a breath.

  “This could all just be a midlife thing, Evvie. They say after a certain age, everyone’s a cliché. I mean, he could just need some time away. It just becomes part of a longer story and one day looks like a blip. I believe that. I can’t stand thinking otherwise. Four couples we know have busted up in the last two years! I really think divorce is contagious and stupid.”

  “That makes sense. I mean, everything’s contagious on some level.”

  “It affects everyone. I mean, how are you supposed to have a community? People break up and move away or get so pissed off they might as well move away. And then you don’t have them over anymore. My parents had the same friends their whole life long. Didn’t yours?”

  Evvie shrugged. “Sort of, yeah.” Those couples her parents had called friends had mostly been alcoholics and addicts, or ex-boxers like her father. Well-meaning, big-spirited people who’d often end up passed out cold in Evvie’s parents’ living room. Catholics, they’d stayed married in that generation. Two
had died before age fifty. A memory came to Evvie. One night, drunk, her mother walked into a bar and somehow got into a fight with a man named Harry Chiakowski, who’d cheated on his wife, Beverly. She’d decked him. “She’s the real boxer in the family!” people said later. She tried to imagine telling Nora some of this, and couldn’t. Few people on earth were the proper kinds of listeners for such stories.

  “Kline’s really lucky, Nora,” Evvie said. “To have you. Is there anything I can do?”

  “You did it. You made a meal so I don’t have to cook.”

  “Anything else I can do, please just call me.”

  Evvie got up to leave. Nora rose too. Evvie hoped she hadn’t overstayed her welcome. They walked down the candlelit hall toward the door and a kid called down, “Mom?”

  “Coming! Look, Evvie. Call me sometime. We’ll have lunch,” Nora said. She said it so easily. Evvie could hear the echo of all the hundreds of times she’d said it before. What must it be like, to move in the world with ultimate ease? She was a person who’d had hundreds of wonderful lunches. Why shouldn’t Evvie have lunch with Nora?

  “I’d love to have lunch,” Evvie said. “Anytime.” Her heart slammed up against her chest. She hoped she deserved this potential lunch with this good person whose face at the door was lit from within by something quiet and mysterious that Evvie wished she could photograph. “Thanks, Nora.”

  She stopped by Ben’s apartment “on her way” home that night, after stopping at the store to buy some yellow roses, along with lipstick, blush, and eye shadow, which she applied in the car after brushing her hair. An omen of a song had come on: Get up offa that thing! She looked good, at least in the dim car light. The yellow rose of friendship, she’d explain. Just staying in touch, bud. Here in the world that’s going to hell we might as well. The window was lit. She stood below that large square of light and hurled pebbles at the glass until he appeared in a blue shirt, scratching the side of his head. She held the yellow roses high in the darkness. He waved her up. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and it was quite possible that he waved her up thinking she was someone else, but so what.

  “Did you know both Kline and Nora think we’ll get back together? Since we’re the best-friend type who crack each other up?” She was out of breath. “And that Nora has always envied us? And can see us canning peaches when we’re eighty?”