First You Try Everything

by Jane McCafferty

Bruno handed back a large, battered book with Bob Dylan on the front of it, and no title. She opened the book and saw it was Dylan’s sheet music. The collected works. She opened to “Idiot Wind,” and turned the page to “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” A song she and Ben had memorized.

  “You guys musicians?”

  “That belongs to my son,” Bruno said. “He left it behind last time he visited. You’d think the kid grew up in the 1960s. Listening to all the music we grew up on.”

  “You grew up in the 1960s?” For reasons she couldn’t explain, she had imagined Bruno singing doo-wop on a corner.

  “Graduated high school in 1966.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Rocky said.

  “I am.” Bruno explained that Rocky was younger than he, but didn’t tell his age.

  “I don’t even tell myself. Nobody should. I learned that from the holy Mexicans. The numbers hypnotize you. Far as I’m concerned, I’m all the numbers in the world, or none of them.”

  Evvie saw the wisdom of this and said so. She wrote the check, signing her name with a flourish that surprised her.

  Now they were even nicer. Now she was one of their customers for real. Now they wanted to know her wishes, in detail, and how she might want those wishes carried out. It was time, Rocky said, for some dreams to come true.

  Ben

  As it turned out, Ramona had a talent for modern dance. At least this is what Lauren seemed to believe, and Ben tried to believe it too, sitting there on the worn wooden seats of the auditorium one night in early November. Backstage, Ramona was dressed up as Autumn, with real leaves pinned to her black leotard, and she would be dancing with Winter, a friend of hers named Eugene whom they’d never met but heard a lot about; the kid was so precocious he was reading Noam Chomsky. Ben had watched Ramona practicing one evening on the grass out front, in her bare feet, in the cold; he’d stood on the steps and clapped for her, secretly thinking, Anything but dance, kid. Do anything else. She had not inherited a speck of Lauren’s grace. She was a flailer, but unlike many people cut from such a cloth, seemed not to know it. Her chin was lifted like the proudest ballerina. He supposed she was young enough to get away with this performance, but he worried for her nonetheless.

  “Good evening, parents, and welcome. Tonight, as you know, we’ve asked all the children to interpret one of the seasons. Rumor has it we’ll see ten Summers, nine Springs, five Autumns, three Winters, and a whole chorus of the seasons all mixed together!” said the woman with gold-streaked hair onstage. Her pep was forced but emerged from a genuine desire to rouse the audience out of what often seemed (Ben had been to three of these events already) like a collective parental stupor; everyone hauling themselves around with a combination of goodwill, exhaustion, and barely suppressed dread that the evening, under these harsh and buzzing lights, would go on forever.

  “We let the children choose their season, and we had them write their own script and choose their own music. We couldn’t be more proud of them, and we’d like to thank some people who made this evening possible, starting with you, the parents!” In her skirt and high heels she conducted their clapping. The woman was a complicated presence up there on the stage, black and elegant, beautiful but also tired-looking, and Ben clapped and watched her with narrowed eyes and imagined she was responsible for too much in life. She was the sturdy one who took over administrative tasks and then regretted it, but kept doing them because she felt she was surrounded by flakes and idiots. (Probably was.) She peered at them over her reading glasses, a warm, if weary, smile on her face. He had real empathy for these kinds of people, since he was one of them. At work he’d become that person, even as he’d tried not to. I’m not the boss, he chanted, off and on throughout the day. Do I look like the boss? he’d sing. Yes, a woman had answered, you really do. He didn’t know the answers to half of their questions, but he was undeniably the guy who knew where things were. The man he shared an office with didn’t, of course. Always the people who didn’t know where things were ended up right smack beside Ben. Like Evvie, who’d always been looking for something. “I’m losing my mind!” she’d holler. “I had my keys right there on the shelf and now—” And until the last year he’d come running to retrieve whatever it was—the keys, a book, some crucial document or letter from a senator, a photograph. Too eager to help, which his therapist had said was a real problem. He’d always thought of it as a good quality, but the therapist helped him understand that he was always and everywhere searching for approval.

  “Uh, look, Evvie, it’s right there,” he’d say. “Two feet in front of your eyes.” He sometimes thought she had some sort of brain damage. Her mother had told him a story about Evvie at age three trying to fly down concrete steps while playing Batman, and he sometimes thought something might have happened to her then.

  She’d smack herself in the head and thank him too profusely while he’d lap up the praise.

  He’d always been a finder. Even as a boy, if anyone in his family lost something, his mother would holler, “Get Ben! Ben will know where it is!”

  Ben was so grateful, right now, that he sat beside Lauren, who was even more of a finder than he was. This organized woman (probably the most alert of all the parents in this auditorium, and certainly the most beautiful, even in the oversize fisherman sweater—very unlike her to wear something like that, actually) had not once, in all these months, lost her car keys.

  “Our show will begin in just a few minutes. Again, thank you for coming.” She exited the stage in her elegant skirt and blouse, and he was sorry to see her go.

  A child behind them started to cry, and lots of younger kids were running in the aisles. “Here he comes,” Lauren said. “Watch out for the handshake.” Lauren’s ex-husband was walking toward them. Lauren rarely mentioned him, but Ben had retained every last thing she’d ever said about him: He was a bit of a dolt. He lost his temper every time he watched a football game. He was techno-geek savvy. He was late with child support in a way that was passive-aggressive. He was into terrible sci-fi and horror movies, and his name was Carter.

  Carter had a ponytail? You’d think she would have mentioned that. He had wire-frame glasses and a Hendrix T-shirt and his handshake was so strong it seemed filled with the intention to break a few fingers. You wouldn’t expect it from a thin guy with a ponytail. Oh, but he had muscles. He was an obvious pumper of iron.

  “Nice to finally meet you,” Carter said, his eyes shifting toward the expectantly empty stage, the spotlight shining down on nothing. Ben had a few seconds to study him. He had the extreme good looks of a man who’d be painted in the Renaissance. His eyelashes were disturbingly long. Finally he looked down at Lauren, briefly, and Ben understood there was a story of pain between the two of them that Lauren had never been compelled to allude to, much less tell in full. He was thankful for that peculiar reserve but knew he could easily be seized by a deadly curiosity.

  Carter took his seat down in the first row, and sat slumped, his hands crossed at his crotch, his long legs extended so that they almost reached the foot of the stage.

  “So that’s the ex,” Ben said.

  Lauren nodded, and squeezed his hand, and wouldn’t look him in the eye.

  When it was finally time for Ramona to be Autumn, half the families had gone home. Ben was surprised to feel annoyed by this abandoning of Ramona. We sat through your kids, you should sit through ours.

  Ramona, covered with red leaves, crawled across the stage
moaning, “Time, time, time!” Ben hadn’t expected this at all. He sat up, utterly alert. She crawled into the spotlight, then slowly rose to stand, her sinuous arms reaching out into the air like branches. They moved until they found their perfect shape, and then she stood there, impressively frozen, a bony birch on a windless night. It was easy to imagine snowfall and a cardinal landing in the crook of her elbow.

  Winter, an Asian boy in a white suit a few sizes too small for him and a small policeman’s hat, ran onto the stage and blew a whistle. Then shouted, “Dance, Autumn, dance! Before I come, and you can dance no more!” So this was Eugene the Chomsky reader. His voice was high and clear, but somehow possessed its own authority. He blew the whistle again. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness!” Eugene cried, apropos of nothing. Ben whispered to Lauren, “That’s the beat poet Ginsberg,” and Lauren said, “Get out,” and the boy shouted the line again, then walked around in circles that got progressively quicker and larger while part of an old U2 song began to play. “With or Without You.” The boy circled the dancing red tree of Ramona, and Ben looked over at Lauren. “This is wild,” she whispered, and bit her lower lip. “It is,” he said, watching Ramona, who was still a flailing dancer but was somehow in the process of transcending herself. Having shed all self-consciousness, she was good, in that strange way that anyone is good, when their intentions have been unified into a single desire. He’d seen it before, in college, when a homely young woman had unexpectedly stood up at a party and sung a song about the dignity of coal miners. Nobody even knew where the woman had come from, nobody had ever known a coal miner, and the woman couldn’t sing her way out of a paper bag, but by the end of her song Ben had thought she was the best and most beautiful person in the room.

  Ramona somehow danced fighting, with all her heart, the idea of winter and the idea of all the best minds of her generation being destroyed by madness, while Eugene with his long bangs like a black curtain on his forehead kept repeating Ginsberg and U2 kept crooning, And you give yourself away, and Ben was right there with Ramona as she leaped into the air and spun across the stage while Winter blew his whistle and said, “Your roots, your roots, you have lost your roots.” Ramona stopped in her tracks and tiptoed backward to where she’d started, and tried to attach herself again to that spot where her roots had been torn. The spotlight revealed the surprisingly anguished effort of her face. So, he thought. Ramona was an actor. Ben vowed then that he would find ways to encourage this talent. And find more ways to show this child that he could love her.

  After the show, Ben and Lauren waited in the bright hall for Ramona. Carter was talking to the woman who had introduced the show. He stood with his arms folded over his narrow Jimi Hendrix torso, nodding and smiling. For an instant Ben imagined him as the lover he must have been, leaning down to kiss Lauren, his eyes closing.

  Then Ramona jumped into Carter’s arms. Her thin legs were wrapped around his waist and he spun with her once. It was a display. It was his night to have her sleep at his place, and now he put her down, and the two walked hand in hand out the door. Lauren grabbed Ben’s hand and dragged him after them.

  “Ramona!” she cried, in the November dark. Ramona stopped, her pale face startled.

  Lauren led him over to them on the sidewalk where she stood. Carter looked surprised, and he wasn’t wearing a coat. It was forty degrees and he was in his T-shirt. His eyebrows were raised high.

  “We wanted to tell you the show was great!” Lauren said. She had the white hood of her jacket up now.

  Ramona smiled, her eyes flashing up once, then lowering down. “Thanks.” Ben could see she felt awkward. All the feeling he’d had for her recoiled, replaced by a dull sympathy that she had to endure any of this.

  “You really blew us away,” he said. “Really.”

  She nodded. Carter stood there, waiting for this to be over. Ramona kept smiling and looking down at the sidewalk.

  “We love ya, honey,” Lauren said, and pulled Ben away. She’d never pulled him anywhere before. He was surprised at the force of this gesture and yanked his arm back away from her. She looked at him, surprised, and said she was sorry.

  “No, no, it’s OK,” he said.

  As they walked toward the car, he could feel he was about to see a side of Lauren that he’d often sensed would one day reveal itself. He’d almost been looking forward to it. So the day was here. The night, rather. The black night with its bright moon and the sound of a train in the distance.

  “That asshole! I wish he’d fucking move to Alaska! He almost did, you know. Five years ago he almost moved to Alaska, and I argued he should stay here so he could see Ramona. Now he acts like he’s Father of the Year. You’d think he might have steered her over to at least say hello to us before absconding with her like that! He’s the most passive-aggressive person walking this earth.”

  Lauren was trembling with anger, and tears filled her eyes. The night itself seemed to be backing away from her.

  “She’s all I ever wanted, Ben. She’s the only real family I have. And he’s trying to take her away.” They stood next to the car now, under a huge, bare tree.

  “I don’t think so, Lauren. He’s just—he’s a bit of a dolt.” This was an unreasonable attempt to make her laugh, but it didn’t work. He wanted to embrace her, but something held him back. He reached out lamely and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I almost died giving birth to that kid, Ben. She’s the only kid I’ll ever have. You’d think that would count for something. Now she prefers him since he lets her live on Ramen noodles and Cocoa Puffs and watch R-rated movies and play video games with him until midnight.”

  “Lauren, come on! That’s not true. And you never know, you could have another kid.” She’d never mentioned Ramona as the only kid she’d ever have.

  “Doubtful. Like I said, I almost died.” He attempted to let this news sink in. Was he disappointed? He didn’t even know.

  Maybe having a kid only led to grief, one way or another, like he’d always thought. Maybe the loss of freedom would be terrible. Having a kid wasn’t what it used to be. He would have Ramona, in a way, and that could be enough. He looked up at the moon. They got into the car.

  It wasn’t that what Lauren had said was so bad. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand her high-pitched emotions. What disturbed him was something subtle that he was trying now to figure out.

  “What?” she’d said. “What?”

  He’d ducked inside of himself like a creature in a cave, and she could feel it.

  “Nothing.”

  She fell silent, moved back; she had her own cave.

  What he’d seen was a kind of revelation, he thought, or should have been. Lauren was revealing something deep. But oddly, it hadn’t, and didn’t, feel intimate. It didn’t feel like she was revealing herself at all. All this emotion, trembling rage and sadness, somehow made her seem more distant, when it should have brought her closer, and brought them closer. He was not, by nature, someone who feared the emotions of other people, so that couldn’t be it.

  They drove in silence.

  “So what, you think I’m over-the-top for freaking out?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh.”

  Another silence fell. They were almost at her house.

  “When you figure it out, please tell me,” she said.

  He
took a breath. “It’s like you were behind thick glass,” he tried.

  “What?”

  “You were so upset, you were shaking and everything, but it was almost like, I don’t know, like you were acting.”

  “Acting? What?”

  “I don’t know, Lauren.”

  “Please talk sense!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I felt you were unreachable.”

  “Maybe it was you who was unreachable.”

  “Possibly.”

  He parked the car. For a brief moment he considered telling her he’d see her tomorrow, but that would be cruel. They didn’t spend every night together, but certainly when Ramona was gone they did, and besides, he began looking forward to her body under the quilts, the warmth of her mouth, her touch, which could simplify anything, at least for a while. The smell of her, always a balm. She had changed in the past few months; she was no longer a cautious, utilitarian lover. And in the darkness, he felt she was present in ways she would never be in the light. Maybe that was true of everyone, he thought now.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m behind thick glass too,” she said. They sat there in the car, staring at the windshield, and he curbed his thought. That’s because you are. We both are.

  “Like I’m a fish in a tank, Ben, and the world is out there, sometimes looking in, sometimes walking by.”

  “Oh, Lauren, I know what you mean. But—”

  “You do?”

  “I do. And it’s all right.”

  They were out of the car, past the lavender door of the fence, and stood on the front porch while Lauren unlocked the door. “I really never wanted you to see that side of me that you saw tonight.”

  “I’m glad I did,” he said, not because it was true, but because he was starting to feel desperate to close the gap between them.

  “I had a dream about Evvie last night,” she said. She took off her white jacket and hung it on the wall hook. She stayed there, her back to him.