First You Try Everything

by Jane McCafferty

  “Maybe I will sometime.”

  “I have to go in now.” He looked at her, then after a long hesitation, stepped into the church.

  She walked to Forbes, thinking of the priest and the dog saint and Basil and Tessie’s Padre Pio devotion, and how it had felt to sit in the church. It was somehow more of a home to her than anywhere else on earth, but could not be home, not really, because she could not abide its bigotries. But could she find a way in again if an old priest like that talked to her every day in the shade of the cathedral? Did the priest even believe? What did he think of the scandal of all those pedophile priests that were suddenly all over the news? Did he walk around feeling guilt by association? She hoped not.

  She was buying a slice of pizza she didn’t want when she spotted Cedric, in the passenger seat of a beat-up car, hanging out the window calling her name. The car pulled over to the curb, and she ran to it, pizza in hand.

  “Get in.”

  Cedric was in the backseat, a young couple was in the front. The seats were brown velour and had the comfort of an old, sunken couch. They were all going to the movies. Cedric almost never went to the movies and rarely went anywhere with other people.

  “How did you three end up together?” she had to know.

  Cedric shrugged. “They nabbed me at Mickey D’s.”

  The girl in the front turned around. “Your brother’s a doll.” She had misty eyes at half-mast, probably stoned out of her mind, and big 1980s Pittsburgh hair. Otherwise she was tiny with bitten-down green nails. Her boyfriend at the wheel was a flabby man in a Black Sabbath T-shirt and sunglasses. “We’re going to see Lord of the Rings,” he said. “You can come if you like a long-ass movie and you’ve got eight bucks.”

  Evvie shrugged. “Sure,” she said. It was a summer night and it would be good to be together with Cedric and these people, and it was always soothing to sit in the dark with strangers and let the screen take over one’s life. She had gone to only one movie since Ben left—The Station Agent, about a dwarf who lives in a train station. Big mistake. She’d sobbed through the film, for the dwarf and his friend—a woman who’d lost a child. Evvie had wanted to walk through the screen, introduce herself, and sit around a table with them.

  In some ways she had never felt so loved as when she’d gone to the movies with Ben, who’d had the habit, up until a year or so ago, of leaning forward in his seat to look over at her face, checking out her reactions, as if her experience of the movie was more important to him than his own. That had touched her deeply, but now she wondered if her very presence had usurped his enjoyment.

  You looked back and all that you’d imagined was so good were things whose meanings now were entirely up for grabs.

  “How do you guys know Cedric?” she said to the young couple.

  “We don’t, really. We live near Giant Eagle. We heard him talking to himself one day out at the Dumpster, right, Ced?” The misty-eyed waif turned and smiled demurely. Evvie wanted to tell her she had cascading hair.

  The car was not a low-rider but felt like one, since the seats were so sunken down.

  “I wish we were going to a drive-in,” Evvie said. “Do they still have drive-ins?”

  Nobody answered this question.

  When Evvie caught sight of the back of Ben by the glass concessions counter at the multiplex, her heart jumped like some small creature atop a skyscraper, then plummeted headfirst down onto the concrete and exploded. He was handing a small bucket of popcorn to a curly-haired woman. Evvie’s face burned and no sound emerged from her parched throat, though her mouth hung open, stupidly, heavily. The curly-haired woman was dressed in tight black straight-legged pants and wore heels.

  “Uh,” Evvie finally managed.

  Cedric’s friend with the big hair was asking her what her favorite candy was. Couldn’t the girl see Evvie’s face was hot enough to cook a meal on? Evvie excused herself and went to the bathroom and almost threw up. Then splashed water on her face. She walked back into the lobby, and across the way, Ben was holding the water fountain for the woman. Like they were in grade school. Wasn’t that cute?

  She lined herself behind a pillar, burning as they passed by (not holding hands, not draped around each other, maybe they were just friends—please, please). She noted that they were going to see Frida, so when Cedric appeared, his arms filled with popcorn and Cokes, she told him she would be seeing that instead of Lord of the Rings.

  She’d always known she was a masochist. Had always just barely kept that streak in check. Not now. Now she was enjoying every fiery masochistic bone in her body, or perhaps what she enjoyed was that feeling of having no choice. When you have no choice, anxiety vanishes. In the throes of necessity, you become undivided. She sat there five rows behind them and watched the back of their heads.

  During the previews she moved up to sit two rows directly behind them, both because she had to make sure she wasn’t seeing things (it appeared that the woman was eating her popcorn with chopsticks), and because Ben pulled Evvie forward like an outsize magnet pulls a tin can. Evvie sat stiff in her seat and strained her eyes in the dark to make positively sure that chopsticks were being used by the small-handed woman. It made no sense, but it was happening: she was gently lifting one popped kernel after another into her mouth.

  That’s really sad, Evvie mouthed to herself. That’s really, really sad.

  But it wasn’t the most interesting thing. The most interesting thing was how they didn’t touch each other. Their heads didn’t incline toward the other’s. They didn’t whisper or laugh to each other. They didn’t even slouch. They were possessed by a certain formality that made Evvie’s heart race with hope; this could be a young medical equipment salesperson who needed a mentor.

  Until Ben draped his arm around the curly head, and gave her a peck on the cheek.

  “That’s sad,” Evvie said, only this time the words were audible, shot into the dark with considerable force. She saw Ben freeze, and then his head turned, and his eye widened, and she knew he saw her. But he simply turned back around to face the screen. He was playing “this isn’t happening.” He made himself sink like a scuba diver, down into the rich world of his interior life, a world she’d navigated for so many years. She could feel him swimming around, willfully keeping his mask on, the flippers kicking gently, the bubbles of breath a kind of music. He would stay down there forever if he had to.

  “Pathetic!” Evvie nearly shouted, then got up out of her seat and marched up the dark aisle and into the lobby. She was aware that everyone was staring at her. In the lobby she put her face in freezing water at the fountain. Then walked out onto the street.

  She walked and thought about the factory farm in Idaho that produced 1.2 million hogs every year and more waste than the entire city of Los Angeles. She thought about the suffering of those hogs that went on day and night, trapped in concrete and metal, covered in their own excrement with broken legs from trying to escape or just to turn in their cages, covered with festering sores, ulcers, tumors, and most people believing it meant nothing on the grand scale of things, since the hogs didn’t write books of philosophy, though if they did, Evvie thought, crossing at the red light in the dark, the books would do more good than all the books of philosophy produced by the humans, and now the Dutch hogs would possibly end up in enormous sky-scraping hog hotels, since the Dutch were running out of land, and Oh yes, Evvie said, talking quietly to herself as she headed up the hill p
ast the Saturday-night couples and hordes of young bare-legged girls, one of whom practically shouted, “Excuse me, m’am!” when she bumped into her, oh yes, it makes sense to spend several million dollars on a hog hotel, go ahead, Dutchmen, do it, I admit it’s an ingenious improvement, let’s have hog bellboys and hog desk clerks and maintenance hogs and hog maids too, in uniform. Why not?

  She started singing the old song “War.” She was loud, but who cares. This was within the realm of reason. People were entitled to walk in the streets and sing a song they hadn’t thought of in thirty years. A song they’d known in childhood when their neighbor went to war.

  Once a lady was vacationing in Erie with her pet pig, and the lady had a heart attack and fell down in the cottage. The pig went out on the road, lay down, stopped traffic, and made mournful noises, trying to communicate. People just drove around the pig. Then finally someone stopped, and the pig led him back down the driveway and into the cottage. The man took the woman to the hospital, and the pig rode in the car with him, crying. That’s one of the animals we’re torturing, that’s the animal that’s jammed into a metal cage so small it can’t move, the one who doesn’t see sunlight until the day they push her into the truck for the slaughterhouse.

  She found a huge box behind a store where she’d wandered just to catch her breath. A box so huge, she moved in for a while. She sat there, cross-legged, and remembered the boxes of childhood. How at Christmas, a big box was better than the gift that came inside it. She would sit in the box, quietly, and think, holding a stuffed animal and a bowl of water.

  But even then, she’d been herself. No refuge to be taken in memory, because all memory was laced with that old anxiety that apparently came with being herself, Evvie. Chewing on the paw of the stuffed dog, chewing on her hair, on the sleeve of her shirt until it was sopping wet. No wonder she’d been a disappointment to that fucked-up family. No wonder. “Piece of shit kid! Fucking piece of shit!” She was shouting. She took a chunk of her own hair and yanked it like the nuns had yanked it way back when. Then sat back farther in the box. Took a deep breath.

  Once when Cedric was only two they got him an enormous foam dinosaur. The box it came in sat next to the dinosaur in the basement, and she and Cedric slept in the box for a whole week or so. Evvie remembered waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the spindly white dinosaur that Cedric named Roberto, after the great baseball player. She looked out at Roberto that night and he’d seemed alive with a great spirit of protectiveness, a perfectly benign creature who was glad to hover over them forever.

  To be alone in this box behind a string of stores, on a summer night, after leaving the movie theater like that, was different, but the box was a shelter that offered a frame for the sky, that hid her body from the eyes of others, and allowed her to lie down and close her eyes.

  She dreamed she was an old woman in a rocker, looking at someone’s photographs. Every picture was interesting, but they were all strangers. Strangers having birthday parties, strangers wading in creeks, strangers dancing at weddings. She wanted to say she didn’t know any of the people, she wanted to scream and wake herself up, but then a voice said, “This is your life, Evvie,” and she froze in the rocking chair and understood that her life had happened without her. She had somehow lived the life but had not been present for any of it, and now it was over. She rocked in grief that could not be contained by her body. It spread into the landscape of the dream where cows were eating yellow hay against a silver sky. “Where’re Ruth and Ben?” she said, her old neck craning back to ask the invisible person who stood near the window by her chair. “I want Ben when I die,” she explained. And the invisible person began to laugh.

  She sprung up. She took her shoe off and rubbed her foot, her heart pounding.

  The moon looked so far away and incidental, someone’s tossed hat. She used her cell phone to call Celia.

  “Your voice is all shaky. I really think you need an antidepressant.”

  “You were right about—”

  “About what?”

  “Ben’s seeing someone.”

  “Of course he is. I told you that.”

  “I never thought he would lie. It feels like I’m being repeatedly stabbed.”

  “Yes, that’s the way it feels.”

  “He’s seeing someone who eats popcorn at the movies with chopsticks.”

  “What does she look like? Is she young?”

  “I don’t know, Celia. And I don’t even know who you are. Good-bye.”

  Then called right back to apologize.

  “Why did you do that?” Celia said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe because it doesn’t matter what she looks like. Maybe that seems like idle curiosity to me. And who cares if she’s young!”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right,” Celia said. “Maybe you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Maybe this whole relationship we have is a fraud.”

  “No! No, it’s not! Please, Celia, I’m sorry.”

  “Fine. But you better pull yourself together. I’m worried about you, Ev! If I was rich, I’d hop on a plane.”

  This stilled Evvie; tears came to her eyes.

  “Don’t you know what they say about living well is the best revenge? Make yourself look like a million bucks and go out with some rich, handsome dude and walk by Ben on the street like you never saw him before! Take up some cool new hobby, like rowing—it makes you buff.”

  Celia’s saying “buff” made Evvie want to curl up and go to sleep again.

  “Seriously, Evvie, lots of guys would go for you. Just date someone who looks good, and make sure you run into Ben.”

  Bad advice, but offered in a voice filled with love.

  “Thanks, Celia.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “Thanks, Celia.”

  She went home and grabbed her camera and walked down to the convenience store. Even though the summer thunder was rolling in.

  The gas pumps were packed. Loud rap blared from a red Jeep. A beautiful woman stood by an old mustard-colored Mustang, pumping gas in jeweled sunglasses, dressed like a fashion model, staring off into the distance and emanating a disdainful, full-throttle tolerance, as if nothing about the present scene could interest her. Evvie slipped by her quietly, glancing at her face. She had the same curly hair as Ben’s chopstick person.

  Evvie walked to the door of the convenience store and saw Ranjeev’s face light up for his customer. She walked in and nodded to him, and he returned the nod, but this was a far more restrained welcome than he usually gave her. Was something wrong?

  She pretended to look at some gum. It humbled her to hear his sincere thank you, or Many thanks spoken as if the words came from the very center of his heart, Thank you, dear one, for being my perfect customer this very evening that will never come again, he might have said.

  Now, way back in the corner of the store, she pretended to look at magazines, peering over the top of Newsweek. She saw him look at her once, then look away. No smile. Something told her not to pull out the camera tonight.

  “Why they out of Juicy Fruit?” said a black girl in a yellow sweater. She stood on one elegant leg in a flamingo pose, speaking to the row of gum as if one of the packs might answer. Then she walked over and asked Ranjeev.

  “Is Juicy Fruit your favorite?” he said.

  When the girl answered him after a long pause, her voice had changed dramatically. The accusation
in it was gone. It was soft and musical. “It’s not my favorite—it’s my mom’s favorite.”

  “Oh, so you come here and get your mother’s favorite gum, and then take it back home to her.” The way he said this made it seem like the little favor had its source in a splendid, even heroic divinity.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s very good.” Pronounced veddy good.

  “I also get her favorite chips,” the girl said, slowly, trying to prolong this contact, the way Evvie noticed so many did.

  “And do you get something for yourself?”

  “Sometime.”

  “That’s veddy good too.” The bright smile, soft, arresting, and strange, as if it didn’t quite belong to his face tonight. As if it might hover there in the air without him were he suddenly to vanish.

  The girl stood there, saying nothing. She pulled on the sleeve of her yellow sweater; she began to hum; she kept looking at him and looking at him until a customer came up and said, “Excuse me. I’d like three lottery tickets, please.”

  “Three lottery tickets are coming right up, sir,” he said.

  “I like the way you say that,” the old man said. “Where are you from?”

  “I live on Flotilla Way.”

  “ Flotilla Way. What country?”

  “Right here. Pittsburgh, America.”

  “Before that?”

  “Goa.”

  “Goa?”

  “That’s right.”

  The man nodded.

  Just like the girl, the man in the red cap stood hesitating before the window.

  Flotilla Way. Twenty years ago, Evvie cleaned a duplex on Flotilla Way every Thursday for a year. At the end of Flotilla Way sat the aluminum-sided three-story home of Norm the playboy dentist. She and her coworker, a girl named Bonnie Rent, who never left town but wanted everything to be like On the Road, had sucked in nitrous oxide from a tank after making the place shine one day, and the playboy dentist had come home to find them laughing on the floor.