First You Try Everything Read online

  “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.

  Ben’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.

  “Excuse 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.

  The 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 fi
lled 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.

  The 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.

  Evvie wanted to go home. She missed her husband as if he were on a large ship in the Baltic. She would remember this whole day as filled with surrealistic omens, a million miniature crows with human faces filling the air. This was the sky inside her too. Probably she was just getting the flu.

  “Can I borrow your cell?” she said to a kindly-looking thin man whose jaw was wrapped in a red scarf.

  She walked a few steps toward the church wall and called her husband. “I’m protesting,” she said. “Down at the church. Wanna join me?”

  “I’m still doing bills.”

  “Really? Oh. Wow. Well, I have a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you still love me?”

  “Of course I love you.”

  “Is something wrong? You’re so distant.”

  “No. Just come home.”

  “I miss the old days,” she said, and clenched her eyes shut, turning away from the crowd. “I miss our pushcart and the house on Rosewood and even being broke. I miss our old customers and how we used to be.” The words brought with them a gut-roiling torrent of longing.

  “Yeah,” he said, and let go a sigh.

  “Do you too?”

  “I don’t miss being broke. But yeah, maybe sometimes I miss the pushcart.”

  “And all those crazy customers we loved! They were a part of our life for all those years, and just like that they all vanish. We don’t even mention them anymore!”

  “Evvie, come home.”

  “My heart’s going a mile a minute. I think it’s about to explode. Something’s wrong. It isn’t normal.”

  “Don’t be scared. Just come home. You’re just—everything will be all right.”

  “It will?”

  “Yes, I promise, just come home, Ev.”

  She explained to the Bush impersonator that she had to go. He nodded, and she saw some hopeful light flicker in his face that told her all was not lost, he would maybe each day find someone in the world who would befriend him for a little while, and his loneliness would be alleviated occasionally, in small spurts, and his strangeness—whatever it was at his core that made him one of life’s impenetrable outcasts—that too would be pacified little by little, she hoped.

  On the way back she walked to the convenience store, but the saintly clerk (she’d started thinking of him that way) was not working today. The hefty clerk with a crew cut and a Russian accent and small blue eyes told her he usually worked nights, and that his name was Ranjeev. “But we never call him that.” And then the Russian man shook his head, unsmiling. Evvie wasn’t sure what he was attempting to communicate. That Ranjeev was a problem of some kind? A joke? Her face must have looked puzzled, because the Russian man stopped shaking his head, crossed his big arms, and signaled with his eyes that their interaction was over.

  “What do you call him?” she tried.

  The Russian man peered at her. “We call him Apu.”

  “Apu? Like the guy on The Simpsons?” Evvie smiled.

  The Russian man nodded, arms still crossed. “Apu like The Simpsons.”

  Evvie smiled. She wanted the man to smile back. She was fascinated by his tremendous ability to refrain from smiling, and by her own perverse need to stand there smiling at him in spite of this. “Good night,” she finally sang. “Tell Apu I said hello!”

  Ben

  Bitterly cold mornings in Pittsburgh sometimes resemble evenings. People get themselves into cars and go to work, or stand on corners and wait for buses, and just below the surface of their complaints about the brutal cold, they learn to covet their weather, and feel superior to people in sunnier, sillier climates.

  Ben was tired of all that. Not Evvie. She loved Pittsburgh the way the natives did. This after years of wanting out. If Ben complained about the weather, Evvie liked to remind him that an architecture critic from the New Yorker named Pittsburgh, Saint Petersburg, and Paris the three most beautiful cities in the world
.

  But he’d grown up in Erie, and these days felt tired of Western Pennsylvania, architecture and all.

  This morning Ben was grateful for Cedric’s sleepy silence in the car. His brother-in-law was almost always quiet in a car, as long as there was sports talk on the radio. The talk show host rattled on about the coming Steelers game. The low sky looked like a bruise, and Ben drove fast against the feeling that nothing was right.

  “I’m not looking forward to this game,” Cedric mumbled when a commercial came on.

  “Baltimore’s overrated,” Ben answered.

  “I don’t know about that.” Cedric cared so much about his team he had to take nothing for granted and assume they’d be beaten, so as not to be crushed by the possible disappointment.

  Ben pulled the car into the lot of the Aspinwall Giant Eagle.

  “Thanks, man,” Cedric said, before getting out. He looked at Ben with his usual mix of innocence and apprehension. “You all right? You seem a little tense.”

  “It’s my job, I guess.”

  “Being tense is your job?”

  “Seems that way.” He gripped the steering wheel, leaned forward, blew out a stream of air.

  “No real pressure here at the old Giant Eagle. You would make an acceptable cashier. Or you could choose to be a low-rung loser and unload trucks in the back with me.”

  “I just might, someday.”

  Cedric nodded his encouragement, smiled, and got out of the car. Ben watched his brother-in-law head across the parking lot. Cedric had dropped out of college, where he’d been studying electrical engineering, had chosen to work at the Giant Vulture (Evvie’s nickname for the supermarket megastore) because it was low pressure, involved little interaction with a boss or customers, and because, according to Evvie, he had depended on such stores since his childhood in Philadelphia. (Evvie had told Ben so many vivid stories about Cedric as a child that sometimes it seemed he’d been there as witness, an invisible sibling who’d seen Cedric walking on his toes toward Pantry Pride, where apparently every day for years he’d bought red licorice and bottles of iced tea.) Those shopping ventures had been distractions from home life (where nothing was predictable) and school life (where peers considered him the freak to torment). A popular girl had once stuck a dead rodent in his Batman lunch box, for instance. When he was ten, a teacher kept him after class and told him he would never amount to anything if he didn’t find a way to stop being so weird. Did he think it was “cool” to be weird? the teacher had said. Was he looking for attention? Did he practice being weird at home? No doubt Cedric had stared at her, unblinking, able to see her ineptitude but too stunned to name it or know it was cruel. (Ben and Evvie both wished they could walk back into the past and deck the woman.) And then, when Cedric was thirteen, he’d been given a concussion by a boy in gym class, the same boy who, the year before, had started a rumor that Cedric regularly gave the janitor, a portly guy who smoked cigars, blow jobs.