A Slipping-Down Life

by Anne Tyler

  She rose every morning just as he left for work, and drank a glass of orange juice in her easy chair. Then she opened a magazine. Her father bought her magazines at a newsstand, carefully choosing those which had nothing to do with rock music, or teen-agers, or even love. If she was not in a reading mood she held one of his selections open on her lap while she stared into space, but when she got bored she dove under the skirt of the chair for what Clotelia read: Jet, Ebony, and Revealing Romances. She chewed a fingernail and raced through vague, hopeful confession stories and smeared advertisements for hair straighteners and bust creams. By then Clotelia would be making passes at the living room with a dirty dustcloth. “What you read that trash for?” she asked Evie. “You know it only snarl your mind.”

  “I want to see where you get your outlook on life,” Evie said.

  Clotelia emptied one wastebasket into another, piece by piece.

  Clotelia’s skin was a pale cocoa, but since she had started dating Brewster Miggs she called herself black and wore her hair in a bush. “Brewster don’t want me doing day-work no more, either,” she told Evie. “Say I got to quit. I tell him I will.” Yet she continued to show up every morning, at nine or nine-thirty or ten, wearing ski pants and an African cape. When she chose to do any cleaning she kept up a running conversation with the dirt. “Come out of there, you. I see you. How come you to bug me this way? That’s all this house is, filth. Filth.”

  “You should know,” said Evie. She felt continually disappointed by Clotelia. Four years, and Clotelia was still an indifferent stranger kicking dust puffs with the toe of a cream suede high-heeled boot. Other people would have turned into members of the family by now. Clotelia carried her purse with her from room to room all day long, and massaged pink lotion into her hands while staring out the kitchen window. When she poked a mop beneath a radiator, Evie felt that the whole house was suffering from some sort of disdain. It was such a leaden, damp-smelling house. The flowered furniture and lacy figurines had sat so long in their places that they seemed to have jelled there, hardening around the edges. Clotelia passed among them scornfully, with earrings as big as slave bands flashing knives of light across the walls.

  At noon, when the soap operas came on, Clotelia always settled before the television with her feet outstretched and a beer between her knees. “Clotelia, where is lunch?” Evie asked.

  “I’m watching the stories now.”

  “Well, I see you are.”

  “Something happen to your feet?”

  “I just did get home from the hospital,” Evie said.

  “What, was it your feet give you trouble? No sir. Your head.” She tapped her temple and went back to watching “Love of Life.” Evie wouldn’t have eaten lunch anyway. She ate chocolates, or the last of a pack of Nabs in Clotelia’s purse. Meanwhile the soap operas toiled on, one after the other. People quarreled and sobbed and flung out of rooms to organ music, and Evie kept saying, “Oh, for—” but watching, anyway, caught up in what was going on. Clotelia talked about the characters as if they were relatives. “I don’t know what she doing. That boy don’t care two flicks for her. You ever seen her mother? Talk about nosy. At Chistmastime she trail that girl all the way to New York, that’s where she went for the holidays, and eagle-eyed? Oh, she give me the creeps. I despise a woman to be that way.”

  “She’s got no sense of privacy,” said Evie, crumpling the Nabs wrapper.

  “Oh, don’t tell me. You remember when her boy got engaged?”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “Well, it was to a sweet girl but I wasn’t easy about her. Something she was hiding. Naturally his mother saw it right off. She don’t miss a trick. Stop wagging your foot, will you? Like to driving me crazy.”

  “It’s all I’ve got to do,” said Evie, but she stilled her foot.

  “Every time I get out of here Brewster say, ‘Honey, why you so evil today? I never seen you so evil.’ I say, ‘It’s that Evie. She driving me crazy,’ I say.”

  “I don’t do one thing to you,” Evie said.

  “Oh, no? Look at you, wherever you sit you just causing a shambles. I already cleaned that space today. Will you look at it?”

  Evie looked. Crumpled cellophane lay beside her chair, and cheese cracker crumbs littered her lap and the rug. “What do you expect?” she said. “I just came out of the hospital.”

  “Hospital is right. And you be right back in, if you don’t rise off that fat butt of yours. You hear what happen if you sit too long?”

  “What.”

  “You bust your skin seams. You pop right open, you leak out the cracks.”

  Clotelia never would act the way she was supposed to.

  After school Violet would stop by. She carried her books and all the odds and ends she had accumulated during the day—someone’s broken looseleaf binder, blank newsprint from the journal office, a tissue flower found in a wastebasket. She saved things. She saved bits of gossip she had heard third-hand, so far removed from the outer circle she and Evie inhabited that sometimes even the names were missing. “You know that real tall cheerleader? The one that does the split after the fight song? She had to get married. Lola Nesbitt has fought with that boy she dates. I saw him send a note into her class and hang around outside waiting for her to read it, but she never did.”

  Pulled from one set of plots into another, Evie frowned at the television set and tried to collect her thoughts. “Is he the one that debates?” she said.

  “I think so. Miss Ogden is back from her honeymoon. She’s Mrs. Bishop now. Has a florentined wedding-ring set with diamond chips. It looks kind of tacky; everybody says so.”

  “What do they say about me?” Evie asked.

  “Oh, well, I don’t know.”

  “They don’t say anything?”

  “Well, bits and pieces. You know.”

  On the television screen a tense married couple sat gingerly circling each other’s feelings, casting significant looks after a simple sentence, causing the music to swell ominously over no more than a phrase and a pair of lowered eyes. Violet watched them and tapped a fingernail against her front teeth.

  “My father thinks I’m going to a plastic surgeon,” Evie said.

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “Ha,” said Clotelia. “You think she got that much sense?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Evie said, “but I doubt if I am.”

  “You could cut bangs.”

  “That would be worse. Showing up at school wearing bangs all of a sudden, everyone knowing why.”

  “Then go to the surgeon.”

  “Watch, now,” Clotelia said. “This man here is some operator. Listen to his sweet-talk. Yesterday he was after that blond, the one before the commercial. Fickle?”

  “I’m not sorry the letters are there” Evie said. “I’m glad. I’m talking about something else.”

  “What, then?”

  “Well, I don’t really know.”

  “School will be out in just a few more weeks anyhow,” said Violet.

  “I keep forgetting.”

  “That’s because you don’t get outdoors. It’s hot now.”

  “Is it?” Evie twisted in her seat, tearing a shank of hair through her fingers. “I just hate summer,” she said.

  “Every year you tell me that.”

  “I mean it. What have I got to look forward to? You know what I thought, Violet: This summer might be different. Now it looks like it won’t be.”

  “Why would it be different?”

  Evie didn’t answer, but Clotelia did. “Ha. Thought that Casey boy would come riding up and spirit her away, once he heard what she done.”

  “You hush,” said Evie.

  “I don’t see him beating down no doors. Do you?”

  “Ignore her,” Evie told Violet.

  Violet sighed and wrapped her hands around each other. “You could take your finals at home,” she said. “Your father could arrange it.”

  “You think I’m scare
d to go back.”

  “Well, Evie, here you sit. What are you staying around home for?”

  “Look. Can’t you tell me what they’re all saying? I won’t care. I promise I won’t. Just tell me what you’ve heard.”

  “I already did,” said Violet. “Just bits and pieces, that’s all. Someone will come up and say, ‘Is it true what I heard about that friend of yours? ’‘What’d you hear?’ I say, and they say, ‘Oh, you know.’ ”

  “But you must have to answer sometime,” Evie said. “What do you tell them?”

  “I tell them yes, I believe there was something like that.”

  “Do they act surprised?”

  “What would they act surprised for? If they asked, they must have already known.”

  “Well, shocked then. Do they laugh? What do they say?”

  “Oh, they just think a while. Like when—but no, not exactly—”

  “Like when.”

  “Like when the cheerleader had to get married, I was going to say.”

  “They think I did something evil, then.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. Good Lord. Like when someone has crossed over where the rest of them haven’t been. Getting pregnant, or dying, or that boy in the band who shot himself. Remember that? You think, ‘Why, I saw him in the hallway, often. And sat behind him in algebra. But I never knew, and now he has gone and done it.’ That’s what they sound like.”

  “Ah,” said Evie.

  At suppertime, Evie and her father sat opposite each other at the tiny kitchen table. Clotelia would have set out the food and left by then, slamming the front door behind her and clicking away down the sidewalk. She rarely said good-bye. The silence she left behind seemed an angry one, as if she had said, “Now, you’ve done it. See? I’m leaving. I’ve had all I can take.” The two of them looked guilty and awkward as they sat poking their baked beans. “Well, now,” her father would say finally. “Tell me what you’ve done with yourself today. Talked to anyone? Been out much?” But all Evie ever answered was, “I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t go anywhere.”

  “Violet come over?”

  “Yes.”

  “How was she?”

  “Oh, fine.”

  His impatience was controlled, showing up only in the way he fidgeted with a fork or drank water in deep, hasty gulps. He did no reading at the table nowadays. He concentrated solely on Evie, as if he had made some sort of resolution. When Evie tried to keep on reading herself, she felt his eyes on her and his premeditated smile, burdening her mind until she had to give up and shove the magazine aside. “All right,” she would tell him.

  “What?”

  “Was there something you wanted to say?”

  “Why, no. Not that I can think of.”

  They finished the meal without speaking, every clink of fork against plate sounding as loud and as artificial as a sound effect. Food she didn’t enjoy, Evie thought, was not fattening. She waded through her mound of baked beans and frankfurters, lukewarm rings of canned pineapple and instant mashed potatoes, and everything sank heavily to her stomach and left her feeling uncomfortable but virtuous. When her father brought sherbet glasses full of Jello from the refrigerator, she ate every last mouthful and set her spoon down neatly beside her knife. Then they were free. They could go off to opposite ends of the house and do whatever kept them busy.

  She no longer listened to the radio. She lay on her bed filing her fingernails or leafing through more magazines, and sometimes she fell into daydreams that involved one-sided, whispered conversations. “Aren’t you Drum Casey? I thought you were. I heard you sing once, years ago. Yes, I’m Evie Decker. I was fat back then, I didn’t think you would recognize me.” She would toss her hair back, exposing a smooth white forehead. But not surgically smooth. She pictured the effects of plastic surgery as being just that, plastic, a white poreless rectangle like a blank label surrounded on four sides by a thin border of scar tissue. In her daydream, the smoothness was natural and the ragged letters spelling “Casey” would have been only a joke, something she had written in red ink as a prank or, better yet, just something Casey had made up. “Letters, you say? I never cut letters. Where did you get that idea? Do you think I go around cutting strange names in my face?”

  But she always ended up feeling hopeless and betrayed. Rising to fetch a Kleenex or an emery board, she would catch sight of her reflection whispering in the bureau mirror and she would clamp her lips shut and lie down again. Then by nine o’clock she would have started trying to sleep. All her muscles lay coiled from a day of sitting. She turned from one side to another, tightening her sheet over and over in order to erase the untidy feeling that followed her even to bed.

  On Tuesday morning, ten days after she had returned from the hospital, her father said, “Evie, honey, I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Hmm?” said Evie. She was already in her easy chair, a bag of marshmallows beside her.

  “I was wondering about school. Don’t you feel like going back now?”

  “Oh. Well, no, I don’t,” Evie said. She looked up at her father, who stood rocking gently above her. The morning sunlight bleached the tips of his lashes. “I’m not really up to it yet,” she told him.

  “Up to it? What do you mean?”

  “Well, I believe I have a low-grade virus. I would go back otherwise, but I think I should stay out till I’m well. My head aches.”

  “But if that’s all—”

  “And my stomach’s upset. My joints are stiff.”

  “Evie, honey, the school has made quite a few allowances for you. With finals so near—”

  “Well, maybe tomorrow,” Evie said.

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Sure.”

  But when he went he paused at the door for a moment, jingling his keys, and the silence behind him left Evie with a suspended feeling.

  She sat very still for a long time, staring into space with her hands in her lap. A clock struck. A lawn-mower started up. Clotelia banged the front door and went straight to the kitchen to make coffee, showing Evie nothing but the back of a swirling cape. “Clotelia!” Evie called.

  Clotelia didn’t answer.

  “Clotelia!”

  But there was only the rattling of cutlery.

  Evie waited a minute longer, and then she heaved herself out of her chair and went over to the hall telephone. Dust outlined the directory beside it. She thumbed through the pages until she came to the listings for Farinia: a page and a half of names, mostly Frazells. There were three people named Casey. The first was Asquith, which didn’t sound likely. Then there was a B.L., and after that an Obed E. If his father’s name were B. for Bertram, wouldn’t Drum have to be called Bertram junior? She dialed the number anyway. A woman answered, out of breath. “Hello,” said Evie. “May I speak to Drum?”

  “Who?”

  “Drumstrings.”

  There was a silence.

  “Bertram?” Evie said.

  “Who?”

  “Well, I must have the wrong number.”

  “I reckon you must.”

  The woman hung up. Evie pressed the dial tone and then called Obed E., where another woman answered. “Yes, hello.”

  “I’d like to speak to Drum, please,” Evie said.

  “To—Oh.” The receiver at the other end clattered against something, and the woman called, “Bertram? Phone.” Evie stood hunched over the tall table, clutching folds of bathrobe to her stomach.

  “Hello,” Drum Casey said.

  “This is Evie Decker.”

  “Huh?”

  “I carved your name on my forehead.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Drum. He seemed to be eating something; he chewed and swallowed.

  “I was wondering if I could see you for a minute.”

  “Oh,” Drum said. “Well.…”

  “It’ll only take a second. There’s something I wanted to discuss with you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll have to tell yo
u when I see you. Will you come over?”

  “I’m in Farinia,” said Drum.

  “I know you are. Don’t you have a car?”

  “Look. What do you think, my wire is tapped? Just tell me on the phone, why don’t you.”

  “It would be to your advantage,” Evie said. Her speech seemed to be turning formal. To make up for it she said, “No skin off my neck.”

  “Well, wait a minute,” said Drum. She heard him farther off, calling, “Mom?” It stunned her to think of Drum Casey as someone’s son, part of a family, possessing even an age which she had never thought to wonder about. When he came back he said, “Okay. Where you at?”

  “I’m at home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Fourteen-twenty Hawthorne.”

  “Now, you sure you can’t say this over the phone.”

  “I’m positive,” said Evie.

  When she hung up she found Clotelia right behind her, holding a cup of coffee and shaking her head. “Oh, Evie,” she said. “What call you got to act so ignorant?”

  Evie turned and went upstairs without answering.

  Nothing was fit to wear. She didn’t have a single dress she could stand, and she went through her closet flailing at skirts and jingling hangers. Finally she settled on a red taffeta party dress. Its hem was far too long for this year or even last year, but at least it was red. She slipped it over her head and tugged until the buttons met the buttonholes. Then she put on her vinyl sandals. In the bathroom, she bent over the sink to wash her hair with a bar of Ivory. It was lucky she had not cut bangs. Her hair lay plastered to her skull in dark wet lines from an almost central part, and coiled into snaky circles at her jaws. Freckles that were usually invisible stood out clearly on her pale skin, more dots of red echoing the dots above. She smiled in the mirror, exposing large square teeth. She frowned and turned away.