First You Try Everything (16 page)

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.

W
hen
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
.

S
he'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.

S
he
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 past 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.

T
he
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.

T
he
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.