First You Try Everything (11 page)

“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?”

“People think things.”

“Ah, yeah, they do.”

“People like to stand on the sidelines with their theories. I've done it myself. It's mostly bullshit.”

“But sometimes on the sidelines you can see better than if you're playing the game. Sometimes you have a vision of two old happy people canning peaches, and you trust it.”

“I really have to get some work done. Ev.”

“I know. Just came by to give you these.”

She handed the roses over, and backed away, slowly, hoping for a miracle moment to shift the atmosphere, to shift his expression.

He stood there, not looking at her, waiting like someone counting inside their head.

“Enjoy,” she said.

“Thanks. And you should really start eating more.”

“Why don't you lend me your appetite? Nothing tastes good anymore.”

“You're going to disappear if you keep this up.”

“Oh, believe me, I've already disappeared.”

Ben sighed. “Eat some yogurt. Just force-feed yourself! You'll get sick if—”

“Why don't you feed me?”

“Evvie, do you hear yourself? Do you hear what you just said?” He grabbed one of her arms, held it tightly, and looked at her in the eyes, the closest he'd come since he'd left. She froze, relishing the proximity and the fire in his eyes, but also scared of his anger.

“I was just kidding,” she tried. A nervous smile flitted across her face; she couldn't control it.

“You're killing me.” He let go. “There has to be some end to this!”

She turned to leave.

“Evvie?”

She kept on walking. He called her name again. She didn't turn back. This would've felt good, had it not felt so awful.

A
t home, Cedric must have been asleep. She'd wanted to sit at the table and eat ice cream with him. Now she lay in bed, listening to “Living in the Now,” a lecture by a man with a German accent who insisted pain did not exist in the moment. She liked his tortured laugh, which made its way through what he called
the pain body
. He claimed that if you could stay with the moment, there was no pain. Pain came only when people told themselves stories. Well, that was easy to say, Evvie said to Ruth, but wasn't man the so-called storytelling animal?

Last week she'd seen this kid walking down the street yelling, “Hey Morris, your pants is on fire”—to the air—no Morris anywhere to be seen, and no fire, and the kid looked happy. She'd called and tried to leave this story on Ben's answering machine but had stopped herself halfway, saying, “Never mind.”

He didn't like it anymore—the part of her that brought home stories like a cat brings home birds. “Ruth, he doesn't want the bird anymore. Maybe he never did.”

That was the problem with being put in the Dumpster. Your whole history was up for grabs. It turned you into a mad detective combing over the past for clues, trying to figure out when the first time was that Ben said to himself, Maybe I'll leave her. Or, She's so hard to live with. Or, Do I still love her?

She imagined she had at least one clue. Once, half a year before he left, they had sat in a Taco Bell in the Midwest, on the way to his aunt's funeral. She'd torn her burrito into pieces before eating it. She looked up and saw his face. Mild disgust that deepened into something impatient and cold. “What?” she said.

“Why do you attack your burrito that way?”

She had no answer for him. “Uh, because I'm a burrito attacker?” He hadn't laughed, but almost winced. The memory seemed revelatory and shaming. At the time, though a chill had gone through her, she'd paid it no mind, gotten back into the car, and rested her head on his shoulder all the way to the funeral.

S
he turned off the cassette tape, and the room was silent. It was clear that sleep was not coming tonight. She put on a coat and boots and decided to walk Ruth around the block. But when she stepped outside, she decided she couldn't. Ruth didn't seem to care, so they walked up to the attic, but Cedric was snoring the room in half.

In the kitchen, she tried to eat. No appetite. The phone was there on the wall, black and heavy and old-fashioned. She couldn't resist. She called Ben. No answer.

An hour later, tried again.

“So where were you tonight?” she asked him.

After a long hesitation: “That's really none of your business.”

“Oh,” she said. It was like being punched in the stomach so hard she had to sit down and bend over to catch her breath. Her eyes watered, her face blazed. “Did you see the stuff about cluster bombs?” she said. “We're blitzing
residential
areas in Fallujah.”

“I know. It's a nightmare. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said it was none of your business. I'm just—”

“Hundreds of thousands of refugees walking out of there now.” She looked out the kitchen window, as if they might be walking through her backyard. “And where you spend your nights really
is
none of my business.”

She waited for him to disagree, but a silence had fallen.

“Look,” he said, “try to get some sleep.”

“Yeah. You too.”

S
he hardly slept at all for the next three days. Each day she felt a little more unhinged. In certain moments, she was like a tightrope walker, the one who never should've been in that business, the one who falls down and looks back up at the rope and thinks, No way. Never again. I'm staying right here for the rest of my life. And then climbs back up.

Evvie

W
hat was the racket downstairs? Under the electric blanket she slammed her eyes shut against it.

“Evvie?” Cedric stood in the hallway. She got out of bed and opened the door.

“What?”

“I told some guys to come over and have a party and meet you. But then too many came. Like friends of friends of friends.” His jaw trembled the way it did when life was too much. He was still in his green Giant Eagle shirt. “Sorry.”

She got dressed and walked downstairs. Fifteen or twenty people, mostly men but a small cadre of women, one of them old, were crammed into the kitchen. “Jesus!” a woman was practically screaming to a rotund younger woman who appeared to be half asleep on her feet.

Evvie stood in the doorway and watched Cedric move through the crowd to stand by the door that led out to the porch, his face blanching, his hand on the doorknob, as if at any moment he might escape. “Dude!” a sheet-white man in glasses said to Cedric. “Where's the rest of the beer?”

“I'm about to get it!” Cedric lowered his head, pinching his nose. “This is a situation.”

She made her way through the crowd, some of them nodding and smiling to her, and one man saying, “Did you lose some weight?” He was a bubbly and harmless evangelical, and whenever Evvie visited Cedric at work, he'd try to talk with her, saying curious things such as, “God told me to tell you he loves you like you're the only person in the whole world.”

Another man, who had Down syndrome and whom Evvie knew as a bagger from the store, had his usual faraway smile in his eyes, and his arms crossed over his Giant Eagle jacket.

Evvie walked up to Cedric. “What were you thinking?” She couldn't be mad at him when he looked so scared.

“I invited only
four
people. Then I guess maybe they invited some other people who I don't even know. They all like to party, so I—”

“Can you please tell them to leave?”

“What? You can't do that!” He looked off into the room. “Everyone! Quiet! OK, OK. For those who don't know, this is my sister, known as Evvie!”

The cramped kitchen settled a bit and everyone looked at Evvie. A freckled, oddly attractive woman with red hair who had to be six feet tall bent her head to the side in sympathy. “Sorry 'bout the big D,” she said.

“The what?” Evvie looked at Cedric as if he might translate.

“The big D,” the woman repeated. “The
d-i-v-o-r-c-e
.”

“We're not divorced. We're just having a trial separation.” She stared at Cedric again.

“Oh. Then the big S. Sorry about the big S.” She tilted her head to the side.

“Thanks.” Evvie tried to stare a hole through Cedric's head, but his eyes were innocent. “Brianna likes Fine Young Cannibals too,” he explained.

“What?”

“I'm a
huge
Fine Young Cannibals fan,” Brianna said. Evvie hadn't even thought about Fine Young Cannibals in ten years or more and was amazed that they were having this conversation. “You can have a good time and stop being so sad,” Cedric added. He didn't know how to modulate his voice. The whole kitchen had heard this, and someone said, “Aw . . . that's so nice.”

“Cedric sweet,” said a deep voice from the other room.

It was true. As usual, the purity of Cedric's intention made it impossible to stay angry. He had never thrown a party before, nor had he ever wanted to. He'd never even gone to other people's parties. He endured the family get-togethers, but even they could be too much, and sometimes Evvie would find him hiding out back on a stoop, recovering from the noise and the chaos. Crowds, even small ones, more than challenged him, but this one was all for her. The least she could do was get drunk. Suddenly this seemed like a very good idea. She had a real fondness for alcohol, which was why she mostly refused it, but just for one night, one night here in their own house with all these people, why not opt for partial oblivion. Even the hangover might be nice—the headache a distraction from heartache. She went into the living room and pushed a lot of things into the corner—mostly boxes of pamphlets, and books. She hunted for the Fine Young Cannibals. Ben must have taken them. She put on another old CD, and blared it. It was a Ben favorite, the Talking Heads song called “Creatures of Love,” and Evvie downed two whole beers before it was over.

The old song was making her happy. She loved the phrase “sleep of reason.” She'd like to hear “Burning Down the House” next. She'd like to sing it at the top of her lungs. The music was bringing it all back. David Byrne's big suits and apocalyptic voice. How they'd blared that record in the morning to start the day. She and Ben and their old now-divorced Russian friends had roof parties and shout-sang “Burning Down the House” under the night sky one summer. The young man, Kostya, had worn platform shoes from the seventies and danced wildly. His wife had told them stories about seeing her dead grandfather making sandwiches in the kitchen at night. They'd had almost nothing in common with the couple, who'd pursued them aggressively and provided a lot of humor. The memory filled Evvie with warmth and hope and an urge to call Ben, but she managed to resist.

She walked upstairs and found Ruth on the bed, kissed her, grabbed forty dollars from her money box, and went back down. She gave the cash to the man with the beefy arm, and requested that he go buy some more beer around the corner. “Party 'til you're homeless!” he hollered into the room. He was no more than thirty but wore a plastic necklace around his neck with tiny frames featuring pictures of his three children. He lifted the pictures off of his chest and looked down at the kids and said he hadn't seen them in two years; they'd been
abducted by Mom
, words delivered as if he were just explaining that they'd all gone out for an ice-cream soda.

“God, I'm sorry,” Evvie said.

“Someday the cops will stop eating donuts and find them.”

The tall red-haired woman with the big teeth was standing next to Evvie now, draping a long, heavy arm around her shoulder. “I don't trust anyone,” she said. She had the weight of someone who'd been drinking for hours. She bent down and whispered into Evvie's ear, so that she could feel the woman's hot breath and a tinge of her wet lips, “This is how life should be.” Then backed away and looked at Evvie with bright, beaming eyes. “Well? Am I right?”

“You're right,” Evvie said, opening another beer. In the other room David Byrne had begun to sing about the city in his mind.

Evvie took a long swig of delicious beer and smiled.

N
obody had burned down the house, exactly, though there had been a substantial kitchen fire when a young man named Linwood attempted to cook crepes while his hungry audience rapped along with Tupac. (Evvie had been right by the counter, urging Linwood on until the flames burst.) Linwood's exuberant girlfriend, no more than twenty years old, had called the fire department, and even though the fire was mostly out by the time they arrived, the firemen came in with their hoses and masks and overalls. And everything was nicely soaked, and beer had been spilled all over the hall carpets, and when Frank came in—Frank Grubbs the landlord who'd been a nice enough guy for the past seven years—Evvie was still hungover, two days after the party had ended.

Frank the landlord walked inside, paced around from room to room, and said not a word. “Want a cup of tea?” Evvie asked. He shook his head and grimaced at her boy's striped pajamas, the silence surrounding him dark and portentous. “I'll pay for new carpets,” Evvie said, “and get a professional cleaner in here too, obviously!” She followed him around the rooms. “I'm still interested in the option to buy someday. Aren't you? Interested in getting the place off your back? It's a real headache, isn't it, Frank? A disaster ready to happen? Like you were always saying?”

She tried to get some eye contact out of Frank. But Frank, in his plaid shirt, his thin body except for the long, protruding stomach, his square glasses, and his Steelers cap, had nothing to say. Only his hand in his pocket, jingling coins, made a sound as he walked down the hall toward the front door in black businessman shoes. She'd followed him out through the gently falling rain in her stockinged feet. “Frank, can you just say one word?” and he'd finally looked at her with flat blue eyes and said, “One word,” then opened the car door and drove away while she stood there in the snow with her hands on her hips and her mouth, as they say, agape.

So it should have been no surprise to find they'd been evicted.

“W
e've been late with the rent only once in all these years!” Evvie shouted on the phone. “I offered to pay for the damage! You're just like all the other fat-cat landlords after all, aren't you, Frankie? Even though you pretended to be our friend!” He let her rant some more and then hung up, but not before saying, “I'll give you two weeks.”

She slammed down the phone. Called him back with her heart racing and pounding. She was becoming a certain kind of person, the kind who screams at the landlord. “Are you sure you want to be a complete and total fat-cat
asshole
, Frank?”

“I'm sure.”

B
ut he gave them three months.

Cedric hated the idea of moving even more than Evvie did. His routines were all thrown off. He was a wreck when Evvie told him the news, talking out loud to himself about how he had no right to be a wreck.

“This is all my fault. I'm an idiot,” he added, his face blotchy with nerves.

“No, Cedric, it's my fault for getting so drunk. You were trying to help, and I monitored nothing and nobody, not even myself. I'm the fuck-up here.”

“Maybe we're both the fuck-up.”

“Wonderful.”

They were up in the attic that night, eating caramel corn and watching
Law & Order
on the floor, leaning back against Cedric's unmade bed. It was snowing again, and Evvie kept looking away from the courtroom and into the night. She had called Ben and told him what had happened, more than half expecting him to say, “Just come here, at least until you find a place.” Instead he'd said, “Bummer.”

Bummer?
He'd never said that word in his entire life.

She'd stayed quiet.

“I'm sorry to hear it, Ev, but maybe it's good to get a fresh start somewhere. You told me the memories in that house were hounding you.”

“They are, but it's not like they won't be coming with me. Maybe you can shake them, but I can't.”

“I don't even
want
to shake them, Evvie.”

She'd held the receiver up in the air, shocked. Shocked and grateful beyond words for this. She mouthed to an invisible audience, “Did I hear that right?” And then, pulling the receiver back to her ear, said to Ben, “You don't?” Her heart raced.

“Of course not. I want to remember
everything.
It's a huge chunk of my life.”

Silence. She said nothing. She had this gem, and would not allow it to be tarnished.

“Think maybe I'll go visit my parents. They don't even know we're separated.”

Silence. She refrained from asking him how he could imagine never seeing her parents again. How did a person do that? Just cut themselves off from people they'd visited for all those years of holidays and claimed to have loved? She missed his mother and her llama farm and was plotting a visit.

It struck her that wanting to
remember
their life was really wanting to render it history. Something to preserve, but not something that was still alive.

“I have to go, Evvie. Listen. Good luck. I somehow think moving might be for the best.”

“Yeah. I think so too.”

“And Ruth's good?”

“Yep.”

She slipped on her coat and took Ruth out for a short walk in the cold, taking deep breaths, admiring the moon, the black trees shuddering in the wind, the sound of a train in the distance. She was history. For moments, a person could disappear. A person could turn into what felt like an immaculate spirit of appreciation. It was easy in such moments to see the world pressing in as if it desired to be seen and heard and loved as it really was. Unclouded, untainted, unmarred by the distortions of the mind. All you had to do was leave your mind on the side of the road. Set that burden down. Leave your heart and mind on the side of the road, and walk on without them, looking at the world.

This must be the key to happiness, Evvie thought, walking behind Ruth in the dark. Below her in the lamplight the sidewalk glittered, and when she bent down to pick up a lone gray stone, she was amazed to feel how cold and soft it was. She ran it along the side of her face, closing her eyes, the wind rushing through the trees like dark water.