First You Try Everything Read online

  First You Try Everything

  A Novel

  Jane McCafferty

  Dedication

  For Patrick, Rosey, Anna, Josh, and Jordan

  With special thanks to Charlotte

  Contents

  Dedication

  Evvie

  Ben

  Evvie

  Ben

  Evvie

  Evvie

  Ben

  Ranjeev

  Ben

  Evvie

  Evvie

  Evvie

  Ben

  Evvie

  Ben

  Evvie

  Ben

  Evvie

  Ben and Evvie

  Evvie

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jane McCafferty

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Evvie

  The day was shot through with silver winter light, an almost eerily beautiful light that was unusual for Pittsburgh. It was a light that sent people rushing outside with cameras to capture an old, naked tree, or their bundled, red-cheeked child, or a bike leaning alone against a wall. The small brick houses on Chislett Street in Morningside were flooded with this light, and inside one of these houses, on the corner of Chislett and Gael Way, across from a view that looked down upon the Allegheny River, Evvie Muldoone was listening to music, her dark hair hanging down in a single braid, her brown eyes happier, calmer than she felt, because she liked the song she listened to quite a bit. She was the sort of person who derived consolation from playing the same song over and over again, walking around the dining room table in a trancelike state her husband had once found charming.

  The song was “5 Days in May” and featured an old couple driving toward the sea. She had the sound turned up, too loud for most people’s taste, at least people who were past the age of twenty. Lately she needed an auditory shelter from the storm of her own thoughts.

  You didn’t hear too many songs about old people like this. Old people were sort of embarrassing and becoming even more so these days, and Evvie noticed that even people in their late seventies dressed up like young people on their way to the gym. It was likely a positive sign that people had stopped capitulating to the tyranny of numbers. But more often than not it seemed that geriatric youthfulness was dependent on considerable money, so that only the poor were looking old. Last year, when Evvie Muldoone was in a book club, all the women but one had said they’d get plastic surgery when the time came.

  “In a heartbeat,” a few had said, emphatically, and Evvie, feeling herself step onto a soapbox she couldn’t resist, captivated the room with a little speech about the beauty of old faces, how depressing it was that they were all planning “to erase themselves,” how she didn’t care if she was the last person on earth who looked old, she’d wear her age proudly, like a medal, and wasn’t it really sick, when you thought about it, that people poured all this money into letting some doctor butcher their face—the denial of death was at the heart of almost everything, don’t you think, and wouldn’t it be shaming when only the poor looked worn down, as nature intended? The atmosphere in the room had shifted, not because her protest was original—at least a few of them had this argument with themselves on a regular basis—but because the passion behind it unsettled everyone. Evvie had never been good at self-modulation. “Give that girl a Valium,” good-natured Teresa Moncada finally said, and everyone laughed. Lighten up, sweetie, said the hostess.

  Though Evvie was only forty-one, and looked mostly the same as always—same long dark hair, same dark eyes, slight overbite, too-pale face with circles under her eyes that she tried to hide with makeup these days—the number jarred her lately when she recalled her mother at forty-one, a functioning alcoholic in a housedress and blue Keds, driving to the grocery store with Evvie and her sister and brother. Evvie could see herself and her sister Louise flashing peace signs in red plastic sunglasses, rosary beads and scapulars around their necks, the two of them still close in those days, making too much noise in the back of the car, her mother turning up the radio on the way to hunt down the Salisbury steak and iceberg lettuce and electric orange French dressing.

  Her mother’s life had been full of part-time jobs and friends who were also raising kids, and they were in and out of one another’s houses all the time. Somehow she’d taken care of Evvie, Louise, and Cedric, who were her second batch of kids—the older three were already launched by then.

  Something heroic about the way her mother had shuttled her kids ten miles to the pool at night for all those swim meets out in the suburbs, her back so bad she could find no relief, not even when lying down, not even when she wore a brace. Evvie went to call her, even as she knew the mother she missed did not exist.

  “Ma?”

  “Evvie!”

  “How’s everything?”

  “Well, let’s see. I won third place last night at karaoke.”

  “What’d you sing?”

  “Something you’d hate.”

  “Come on, what’d you sing?”

  “ ‘Country Roads.’ Bob Denver.”

  “John Denver. Bob Denver was Gilligan.”

  “Right.”

  “So I was just thinking how you came to our swim meets in the summer. How you’d stand by the fence and watch us, even though your back was killing you.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Yes, you do. The suburban pool. Near Uncle Gus and Aunt Irene’s?”

  “I don’t remember standing by a fence at a suburban pool. I remember you kids at the pool across from our house. How’s Ben?”

  “Fine.”

  “OK, that’s good. And you’re fine too?”

  “Yep.”

  What Evvie wanted to say—and would have had she known how to bridge the gulf—was that it was odd to be forty-one and have no real idea who you were. It had been all right when her husband, Ben, was beside her, not knowing who he was. But now Ben wore a suit. It no longer looked like a costume. He had been told he’d soon be promoted into something called knowledge management at the medical equipment firm. He would rise. He was forgetting their years when they’d worked a pushcart in fresh air, selling Middle Eastern food so they could get home by three and do what they really wanted to do—make art, play music. Not get trapped, as they used to say.

  Ben appeared in the dining room doorway, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, his arms recently gym-sculpted. His dark hair was overgrown the way she liked it. He had deep-set eyes that were both green and brown, and often when he looked at her, or at anyone, he’d squint, as if everyone was just a little too much for him. He hadn’t shaved today, and she liked that too.

  “I need to use the table to do the bills,” he said.

  One vigilant region of her mind heard a quiet contempt in the tone of his request; the other willfully deaf part leaped to battle, squashing any perception that interfered with what had always been the truth. He
loved her, adored her, really, and she adored him too, so all was basically fine. Despite his exasperated sigh, she left the room without a word and began to pace back and forth in the so-called family room, which was really a small storehouse for her animal rights literature and a disarray of icons: owls, Buddhas, pigs, small marble elephants, a framed picture of Virgil Butler, the Arkansas chicken rights factory worker turned activist. She’d meant to hang Virgil Butler up months ago as a reminder that transformation was possible. “Yeah, Ev, you mean to do a lot of things,” Ben would’ve said.

  (Actually, Ben would say no such thing. This was Evvie’s projection.)

  Ben had a point, she told herself, regarding this thing he’d never say that she imagined he would say.

  It was true that she was still not a follow-through person, but rather one of those often befuddled souls who seem paralyzed by the exorbitant weight of their own good intentions.

  Also in the “family room” were hundreds of cans she had collected in an old red wagon for the homeless. She’d gone door to door with Freddy, the cute “Hi, I’m Fweddy!” neighbor child, his presence assuring people she was not crazy—for what grown woman would walk around pulling a red wagon? She did this because Ben had suggested she cared more about animals than humans.

  She’d gone to the suburbs and gathered up a bunch of fur coats to send to Afghanistan after the bombing too, through Animal Amigos. Amazing how many people had handed over their fur coats out in Fox Chapel.

  Ben persisted, unappeased.

  “It’s interesting,” he’d said a few months ago. “Animals light up your face these days and people usually leave it in the dark. Like you don’t expect anything from people anymore.”

  “That’s a horrible thing to say,” she said. “I love people!” But reddened, feeling accused.

  She did love people but didn’t see too much of them these days; her good friends lived far away now, and she’d lost touch with two of them (out of three), not just because time and distance made everything a bit strange but also because she often felt it was challenging enough just to handle the life in front of her.

  Besides, to keep in touch was to resurrect old selves that had their own demands, that collided with new selves who were trying to live out days that were almost impossible to translate.

  That was it! She didn’t have stories she could translate to people outside of Pittsburgh. The city was its own universe, somehow. It wrapped around a person’s mind, especially in winter, and Evvie couldn’t explain that particular, persistent gray to a person who didn’t live there, who didn’t walk the long streets day after day, or ride the buses, or circle the Highland Park Reservoir on evenings when snow settled lightly on the dark face of the water. She’d settled into something routine and perfect with Ben, and while she sometimes missed whoever she’d been without this delicious structure, this life composed of work at the Frame Shop and volunteering at the shelter and wildlife center and watching movies and reading books and sometimes getting together with the Klines, she felt—though she was hardly aware of this—that most any other life was both unreachable and somewhat threatening. Her old friend Lorna, a six-footer who taught ESL and was an avid bird-watcher, was always trying to get Evvie and Ben to go white-water rafting. She was a white-water rafting freak, had rafted every river in the East and Midwest. She would handle all the details, she would even come all the way from Michigan, pick them up, and take them down to West Virginia in her old black Mazda blaring the Decemberists. They could sing themselves down to the rapids. And Evvie wanted to go. Badly. But she loved Lorna too much, and thought with even minimal contact Ben would love her too, and then Ben and Lorna would get in the raft together and head downstream, leaving Evvie on the bank saying, “Hey! What about me?” She’d pictured this in exquisite detail several times and knew it to be a crime against her own imagination, not to mention a crime against her marriage and against Lorna. She believed her fear of abandonment was only partly rooted in childhood experience. It was also, as she’d told Ben, “probably just the way I came in to the world.”

  “Yeah,” he’d said, back then. “Me too.”

  And so Lorna and Evvie’s friendship had been reduced to a few phone calls a year and a few e-mails. Mattea, from Wisconsin, e-mailed Evvie about her kids and her job, and Evvie always wrote back, but to be married with kids—that was its own universe, with its own language and incessant demands, and Mattea said as much. A third friend, Declan Moore, was an artist in South Carolina, living in a tiny town he’d transformed with murals. He and Evvie had traveled across the country together when they were eighteen. They’d made friends with everyone on the Greyhound, they’d slept in fields under stars, they’d read Soul on Ice and Slaughterhouse Five out loud to each other, under the North Dakota moon, with flashlights. Now Declan had three kids and a wife whose real name was Elvine Dishes. She was a singer and a glassblower. Evvie visited Declan once, but he could hardly talk with all those kids around, and Elvine Dishes in the bedroom behind a closed door practicing opera in a robe and the slippers the oldest child had crafted out of felt and duct tape.

  In a smaller country, she imagined, life would be more ingrained, textured, rooted. She could hop on a train every other weekend to dine with kindergarten friends into their nineties. “Remember that day eighty-five years ago when we ate paste?” Such seamless continuity would certainly have been her preference.

  Still, sometimes the past could rise up so vividly in Evvie, the present would disappear. She was affected enough by the sweep of memory that she’d been prone to things like car accidents (three in one year) and wearing two different shoes (only once, but very disturbing) or talking to herself in public (regularly, which was OK, since everyone just imagined she was talking on one of those headset phones). But still. She knew she wasn’t. She knew she was alone in T.J.Maxx with words streaming out of her mouth without her consent. She’d catch sight of her talking self in a mirror, soul utterly detached from body, like a strange face peering over her shoulder.

  “Do you talk to yourself in public?” she’d asked Ben.

  “Sure. You know me. I always talk to myself.”

  Just like that. He didn’t second-guess himself at all these days. He was fine with being a guy who talked to himself in public. Big deal.

  The dog, Ruth, watched from various corners while Evvie tried to straighten up, singing “5 Days in May,” picturing the song’s white-haired couple pulling the car up to the edge of the beach and watching the wild waves. The man slings his weary arm around his wife of forty-odd years, she leans into his wiry frame, and they’re thinking about their grown kids, how they all hardly visited more than once a year. You raised them and they took off.

  Evvie, who’d not been able to conceive a child despite years of trying (after one drastic late-term miscarriage) and had finally agreed with Ben to stop trying for adoption, attempted without much success to protect herself with visions of how dismally the child-rearing story often turned out these days. And congratulated herself that at least she’d be doing her part to keep the population down, not to mention saving a brand-new soul from having to endure the pain of having to be somebody.

  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.