First You Try Everything (2 page)

Not that she didn't absolutely appreciate having to
be somebody. She'd had moments of shocking gratitude for her life—not lately,
but they'd branded her, and even catapulted her into serious trouble. In the
wake of one of those grateful moments just two years ago she'd flown straight
out of a high red tree into a lake she'd imagined was deep. A wild and
celebratory leap in the blinding sun, a leap of gratitude for the sometimes
unbearable mystery of life itself, but she'd broken her leg in two places.

“Can you turn that song
off
?” Ben called. “I'm trying to get things in order.”

She froze. “Order is good!” she called back. “Order
is very good.”

He said nothing more. She went to the dining room
doorway to look at him. He was pinching the bridge of his nose. His
shoulders—beautiful, unpretentious shoulders—were tense.

“Today I feel like I've had a heart transplant and
the new organ isn't taking,” she told him.

Silence.

“You say
nothing
to
that?”

“What do you want me to say, Evvie?”

“Why do you hate this song?”

“Could it have something to do with you having
played it a hundred times?”

“Oh. But don't you see? That's you and me in that
song, Ben! The old couple is
us
. We'll swim naked.
With our dog. We'll stay strong and be best friends and camp out on the beach
with a fire.”

For a moment she was embarrassed, her words had
fallen so flat. She had not been embarrassed in front of him this way for years.
Early on, it had happened frequently, when all she'd wanted to do was impress
him, and now it seemed she'd been returned to that state of extreme
vulnerability. “Ben, I'm—” He didn't look up. Something was dreadfully wrong
here, said the odd, vaguely British documentarian's voice that often resounded
from the deep marrow of her breastbone. The voice had been recurring for days.
She punched herself there, hoping to silence it.

“Are you
angry
at me?
You've been so—”

“I thought you said you were going to do something
today. You said you were living for Saturdays. What about the—”

“So that's why you're acting this way? All distant?
Because I haven't worked on my stuff?” Her “stuff” was a sketchbook where she
was mapping out an idea for a documentary about a guy who worked in a
convenience store on Highland Avenue. She'd made one documentary before, eight
years ago, and two short ones about city garbage for a cable station, so this
wasn't entirely unimaginable. “It's not like I've been sitting around doing
nothing!” she cried. “I was up at five o'clock cleaning cat cages, for one
thing! Not that you'd care about a bunch of caged cats.”

That wasn't fair at all. Ben was tenderhearted
about cats. If it weren't for his allergies, they'd have adopted several.

She went to the banister to retrieve her coat; she
was bundling up. She had to get out of there. Something in the air was like a
thin, gray, long-fingered spirit choking her. Her face was blazing hot. He was
leaving her! For a moment she could feel that.

“Something's wrong with this place! And you are so
. . . so
different
now!” and then she was
out the front door, leaning into the wind as she walked, sudden tears in her
eyes. She was inexplicably happy to discover a red Rome apple in the
flannel-lined pocket of her coat. She stood on the corner of Chislett and Leon
and ate the apple and watched snowflakes hit down on the deep red roundness.
Would he follow? The husband she
knew
would. He
would burst out the front door without a coat and rush to pull her back inside,
generous even when angry. He would yell at her, offended love flashing in his
eyes.
Why do you just walk away? That's so fucking immature
and you know I hate it, so why do you do it?
But this new husband,
this person with this barely controlled
attitude
of exasperation
, desperation, who was he trying to
be?

She listened to the apple crunch inside her mouth,
eyes open but mind attending to a childhood memory that visited in the way of
recurring dreams.

The old milky gray cafeteria from Immaculate
Conception grade school. The mother-daughter luncheon. And Rosemary Bates, three
years older than Evvie, showed up with her father. He was bald and older than
most fathers, he moved awkwardly in a loose brown suit without a smile.
Rosemary's mother, said someone across from Evvie, had died. Isn't that a shame,
someone else said. Evvie's own mother was out of her seat, talking to Sister
John Helen, who was praising Evvie's sister Louise, as all teachers did. Evvie
minded that, but not as much as she would have had she not been fixated on
Rosemary Bates, a sick twisted knot forming in her stomach each time she looked
across the room and saw the pale, frizzy-haired, gangly Rosemary with the
serious bald father.

Evvie kept walking. The apple was so crisp, so deep
dark red, the sky above so gray, shaking free its long mane of snow. She
breathed in the cold silence. Strange. The strangeness of life! This was the
feeling that had permeated all of childhood. At the dinner table, looking at her
brother and sister, or walking through the small backyards of the neighborhood,
or just standing by a window at night, the strangeness of life had often pierced
her, pinned her in place, set her heart pounding.

She would like to see Rosemary Bates right now.
She'd never known her, really, beyond “the motherless girl at the luncheon,” and
yet the girl had taken root inside of her so long ago she had the intimate
weight of an old friend or lover who'd altered her life in mysterious ways. The
memory of that luncheon came to her two or three times a year or more, rolled in
like an unpredicted storm that was itself a harbinger of something.

B
en's
earliest memory—evvie sometimes remembered it as if she'd been there—was sitting
in the sand by Lake Erie on a blanket, playing a bright-colored toy xylophone,
in love with the sounds, which he imagined the water could hear. He'd been a
gentle child, his mother had said, “the kind who liked to sit alone with a pile
of rocks all day long, and just be a happy little guy.” This statement had
astonished Ben, who had no access to childhood memories that weren't burdened by
a sense of isolation.

“E
xcuse me—would you like to protest the war?”

She'd gone all the way down Hampton to Highland
Avenue. It was the nice enough but disturbing guy from the coffee shop whose
dislike of George W. Bush had become a little obsessive. Something sad about
him, as if he'd imagined that gathering all his energies into detesting a figure
that so many others detested at this moment would somehow win him respect, or
friends, or at least company. Meanwhile most people ran when they saw him
coming: Evvie had quietly witnessed this at the café, where he spoke too loudly
and eagerly.

Evvie couldn't bear the sight of someone trying so
hard to be loved. She resisted her instinctive recoiling from him, made herself
look him in the eye.

“You mean the protest down at the church,
right?”

He nodded; his face had broken into a mildly
astonished, wavering smile, he was so used to rejection.

Evvie thought of Louise Jacques, the French mystic:
These are two different things: when you
are kind to a soul whom in the bottom of your heart you do
not esteem, or when you use your kindness to seek and find the beauty in a
soul you are not inclined to esteem
.

“My education message will resignate amongst all
parents,” he said, in George Bush's voice. He was actually a good mimic. Maybe
too good. He'd even somehow made his face look like the sorry president. But his
peculiar brand of loneliness drowned out the humor. Besides, Bush wasn't funny
anymore. Those days were gone.

“I know how hard it is to put food on your
family.”

“He said that?” she said.

The guy continued. “I mean, there needs to be a
wholesale effort against racial profiling, which is illiterate children.”

He smiled at her as they walked through the falling
snow; she smiled back.

But her heart was splintering.

She wished she was alone now, that she could veer
off down the street to the gas station to further investigate the nature of a
man who happened to work as a cashier in the convenience store there. She had
overheard a man from the Tazza D'oro café, weeks ago, saying that this clerk had
sustained
him last winter when he'd go there
late at night for a candy bar.

“I didn't even want the candy bar. I just wanted to
see this Indian dude,” the man in the coffee shop had said, leaning forward
toward his confidant, and his face had stilled Evvie, who'd been at the next
table. “I mean, I'm not even
gay
but I felt like I
was falling in
love
with the guy. And all he'd say
is stuff like, ‘Thank you, come again.' ” Evvie, struck by the man's intensity,
had gone to the convenience store herself later that day and found herself
mesmerized by the clerk's face, the bright, black eyes calm and intensely alive.
She felt the man emanated a warm silence. She felt the man knew things he
couldn't put into words. She felt instinctively the man could be, should be, the
subject of a documentary. Guy behind a counter making minimum wage, and all the
difference in the world.

T
he
air was so cold it hurt her lungs and gave a focal point to her psychic pain. On
the corner of Jackson and Highland she saw a tall man who happened also to be
eating an apple in the snow. Evvie recognized him from somewhere. The man had
his eyes closed and his face looked oddly ecstatic. She asked him if he would
like to protest the war, and his eyes opened. She held up her own half-eaten
apple, expecting him to recognize what? The kinship of outdoor apple eaters? The
ecstasy, had it existed, was gone. His gray eyes filled with distance as if the
sky had invaded them.

“No,” he finally answered, and walked off in his
large black shoes.

“It's just me against the world. Good thing half
the world's on my side,” said George Bush, still beside her.

She laughed. “That's like a weird Zen koan. I gotta
tell my husband that one. By the way, did you know Bush's speechwriter is an
animal rights activist?” she said.

The guy shook his head.

“You might want to read
Dominion
by Matthew Scully.”

“I just might do that.”

“Because every day, all day, underneath all of this
plentitude, all of this absurd
abundance
, tortured
animals are screaming to be heard.”

“Yeah. I bet that's true. But aren't tortured
people screaming to be heard too?”

“Yes, but maybe not so consistently.”

Evvie didn't care enough at that moment to explain
about the interconnectedness of all things.

T
he
protest was small. The church flew rainbow flags and had a shelter in the
basement. They joined the thirty or so people, many of whom held signs, but it
was a protest devoid of chant and song, it was thirty-odd people pushing
diligently against the futility that rose around their shivering legs like dark,
polluted American waters. Evvie, who always wanted to believe in the worthiness
of protests but could not today, stood silent. She thought of her husband's new
glasses (worn only on weekdays at his new job), and for a moment they seemed
responsible for her fear. He looked
suave
in those
glasses, one of those executive square jaws in a magazine who might be
photographed in black and white reading Proust and sipping cognac in an
armchair.

An older woman, silver haired and beautiful in
sturdy shoes, the type who Evvie imagined could count the nihilistic moments of
her life on one hand, began to sing, “
This
little light of mine
.”

Evvie deeply admired the woman but also disliked
something she saw in her face, a pride, a willful ignorance inflaming her
solitary, anachronistic voice as it tried so admirably to attach itself to this
spectacularly elusive and brutal historical moment.

I'm gonna let it
shine
.

Not to mention a kind of wretched vulnerability to
death and the specter of meaninglessness that she seemed not to recognize.

Why am I seeing things this
way? It's a corrupt way of seeing.

I'd rather be dead than see
things this way.

Evvie closed her eyes and begged God, who she still
tried, with no success these days, to believe in:

Make me silent as the
tundra.

Make me quiet and present as a
leopard, or a dog.

Get rid of me, God.

This last prayer was imbued with an emotional
violence that was cause for alarm. She took the cold gray air into her lungs.
She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the snow.

A flag-flying car screeched to a halt, and a woman
jumped out of a gold van and screamed, “You assholes! You asinine assholes!”
Then she got back into the flag-plastered golden SUV and sped away. A stunned
silence circled them.

Evvie reached into her inside pocket for pamphlets.
Mercy For Animals had recently targeted rodeos in Ohio. Another pamphlet was
older, but relevant as ever with regard to factory farms.
Even if you like
meat, you can help end this cruelty
, the front of
the pamphlet said. She handed them out now, asking people just to take a look.
One man put his hand up. “Been there, done that,” he said, winking. Others
grabbed and began reading immediately, nodding and thanking her.