A Slipping-Down Life

by Anne Tyler

  The Jeep waited around the corner. Drum was plucking one guitar string over and over. He didn’t stop when she climbed into the front seat, but David looked her over carefully and said, “That’s right. Much better.”

  “Is this what I should wear all the time?”

  “All the time?” said Drum. “How often you figure on doing this?”

  Evie looked at David, who was backing the car up. He didn’t answer. Finally she turned toward the back seat, and without actually meeting Drum’s eyes she said, “If it works out, I’m coming every week.”

  “Ah, David,” Drum said. “You’ve went too far this time.”

  “Will you leave it to me?” said David.

  “You’ve went too far, man.”

  They drove the rest of the way without speaking. David frowned at the road, making some sort of calculations, shaking his head from time to time and then brightening as if an idea had struck. In the back, Drum kept plucking at the guitar string. Whenever the Jeep slowed, Evie could hear the single note repeating itself tinnily in the twilight.

  They pulled in beside a motorcycle in the Unicorn’s parking lot. Not many other cars had arrived yet. After he had shut the motor off, David said, “Now, listen. You’ll sit at a table for one, right up front. I’ve brought you a candle. It’ll stand out. While the other guy’s on, Joseph Ballew, read a newspaper.”

  “By candle?”

  “Oh, shoot now,” Drum said. “Joseph Ballew is a friend of mine. She can’t do that.”

  “Oh, all right. Stare down at your beer, then. What I want is a difference, you follow me? A difference that people will notice when Drum comes on. Sit up. Look close. I was thinking of some other things, but there hasn’t been time to work them out. Sending him flowers, for instance.”

  “I would send them back,” said Drum.

  “I figured you would.”

  “Another thing,” said Drum. “I want you both to listen good, now. I am not for any part of this plan. I don’t approve, I never will approve. It makes me sick. And on top of that it won’t work, because while I am playing, my entire audience will be whispering and pointing at a fat girl with a name on her forehead. I just thought you should know that.”

  Evie said, “Oh, well, I don’t want to—”

  “Got you,” David told Drum. “Then I had thought of having her scream, maybe, but I guess not. She’s not the type for it.”

  He looked at Evie for a minute longer, and then shook his head and climbed out of the Jeep. Evie had to trail behind them all the way across the parking lot.

  The policeman at the door recognized her. He nodded at her and then rested his hands awkwardly on his gunbelt and stared into the distance. The proprietor recognized her too. When she walked in, he stepped out from behind the bar, smoothing his apron and looking worried. “You’re the girl that, uh. Look, I hope you’re not planning to pull something like that again. I had an awful time. Cops were down my neck all night, thinking there had been a cutting.”

  “There had been,” David said.

  “Not that kind.”

  “Well, never mind. She’s here to watch Drum sing, that’s all. Have you got a table for one?”

  “You know I ain’t. People like sitting in groups.”

  “Give me a bar stool then, we’ll use that.”

  He dragged the stool up next to the dance platform, and set a chair beside. It was the right height for a table but much too small, which David said was all for the better. “Ruin everything if someone came and sat with you,” he said. From a brown paper bag he took a tablecloth and a netcovered vase with a candle in it, the kind used in restaurants. Meanwhile Evie stood by awkwardly with her hands across her purse. Drum had disappeared somewhere. From a door behind the dance platform she heard laughter and the twanging of guitars.

  “Sit down,” said David.

  She sat.

  “No, not like that, Straighter. And don’t put your purse on the table. I want you half-turned from the audience, not quite sideways, so that they can get a glimpse of—”

  “I know how,” Evie said. “Leave it to me. I can figure it out for myself.”

  And she did. She sat erect, her hands folded in her lap, an untouched beer in front of her. The candle glimmered more brightly on her face as the room grew darker. People filing in called out greetings to the proprietor, joked with their dates and scraped paths for themselves between the chairs, but when they saw the candle their voices seemed to skip a beat. They glanced at the candle and then at Evie. Evie stared straight ahead at nothing at all.

  Drum Casey was the first to play that night. When he came onto the platform Evie looked up; nothing more. David signaled to her silently all through the first piece: “Do something. Move around. Could you stand? Take a drink.” Evie ignored him. “My girl has done and boarded a Carolina Trailways,” Drum sang, “She’s scared to death of planes and she can’t stand railways,” and Evie stared at his face without blinking. Out of all the chattering couples dancing or at least beating time, Evie was the only one motionless. She showed them the white mound of her back disappearing into a scoop of black cotton, the curve of one cheek turned rigidly away. Her dowdy clothes gave her a matronly look; her scars, what could be seen of them, seemed in the candlelight to be mainly vertical, a new kind of age-line or tear track which made her appear experienced and incapable of being surprised. “See that girl?” someone whispered. “I believe it’s the one in the newspaper. No, wait till she turns. Remember when I showed you her picture?” They were careful not to point. Girls indicated her by no more than a glance. “That’s her. No, don’t look now.” In the back of the room, a boy half stood to peer at her before Fay-Jean Lindsay pulled him sharply down.

  “Will you see me to the door?” Casey asked.

  “Don’t come no further.

  “Don’t mind the lights.

  “When you going to leave off that hammering?

  “When they going to let me be?”

  Evie looked down at the table. David had stopped signaling to her by now. His eyes skimmed the roomful of people, who stared from Evie to Drum as if following a dotted line. Then he nodded to himself and turned all his attention to the song.

  7

  She was hired for life, David said, meaning for as long as she could cause any kind of stir, make a ripple cross a room and bounce off the wall to cross back. But how long would that be? She had felt, the first night, a buzz and a whispering at the back of her neck. On the following Saturday it was quieter. “Maybe I shouldn’t be riding with you,” she told David, although she would have fought against giving the rides up. “Won’t it look funny? You and Drum bringing me here just to sit admiring you?”

  “They don’t care,” said David. “It’s like watching a magician. They would like to believe his cards really come from thin air.”

  David had other plans in mind. Now that Evie’s had worked he had grown jittery, impatient to improve on it. He was nervous about the sheer understatement of a single dumpy girl sitting there with a beer. Shouldn’t she drink too much? Cry? Send notes? But Evie said no. She walked a narrow line; it was all right to take money for lifting a scarred face toward a rock player every Saturday night but only if what she did was real, without a single piece of playacting. Her sitting still was real, and so was pinning her eyes on Drum. So were her scars, which turned white in time, raised and shiny, gleaming clean even if the rest of her face became smudged in the heat. “How about a new costume?” David asked. “Blacker and shinier. With a rhinestone necklace.” “No,” said Evie. It was as clear a no as Drum’s when he refused to stop his speaking out. David never brought the subject up again.

  She offered to come to the Unicorn free. It wasn’t as if she needed the money. David said, “Fine,” but Drum, when he heard about it, said, “What is she trying to do to me? She gets paid. Then she can burn it, for all I care. But she gets paid, anyhow.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I am dealing with porcupines,” David said.
>
  School had ended. Evie spent the last few weeks of it feeling blurred and out of focus, with classmates looking carefully to the right and left of her and speaking to the middle button on her blouse. Even Fay-Jean Lindsay seemed to have trouble finding things to say to her. On the final day, they autographed annuals out on the school lawn. They had overlooked Evie other years—reaching across her to pass their annuals to someone else, sending her home with only a few scattered signatures in her own. But this year, everyone wanted her autograph. They shoved their books at her silently, with lowered eyes. “Best wishes, Evie Decker,” she wrote. She felt awkward about trying the clever rhymes that other people used. Then, after signing for the twentieth or thirtieth time, she began marking the forehead of her photograph with and nothing more. When the bell rang, she cleared out her locker and left the building without a backward glance.

  “What do you do with yourself these days?” her father asked.

  “Nothing much.”

  “Are you bored? Have you got a lot of time on your hands?”

  “Oh, no.”

  Time hung in huge, blank sheets, split by Saturday nights. She spent her days bickering with Clotelia or carrying on listless, circular conversations with Violet. In the evenings she sat at her window slapping mosquitoes, gazing into darkness so heavy and still that it seemed something was about to happen, but nothing ever did. She awoke in the mornings feeling faded, with clammy bedclothes twisted around her legs.

  On Saturday nights she took hours to dress. Her hair would be limp from constant re-arranging, her black skirt and blouse shiny at the seams from too much ironing. She held up and threw down endless pieces of costume jewelry. She brushed her black suede pumps until little rubber spots appeared. “Oh,” her father would say, meeting her on the stairs. “Are you going out?”

  “Just to Violet’s.”

  “Have a nice time.”

  Why hadn’t anyone told him where she went? He continued up the stairs, pulling keys and loose change and postage stamps from his pockets and stepping over the turned-up place in the carpet without even seeming to notice it.

  She waited on the corner for the Jeep. Her arms were folded across her chest, as if, in this heat, she were cold. Sometimes her teeth chattered. What held her mind was not the time spent in the Unicorn but the rides there and back, the two half-hour periods in the Jeep. She thought of them as a gift. Someone might have said, “Do you want Drum Casey? Here is a half hour. Here is another. See what you can do.” For while she was at the Unicorn, she never exchanged a word with Drum. He was either performing or off in the back room. Bearing that in mind, she talked non-stop all the way over and all the way back. She went against her own nature, even. She shoved down all her reserve and from her place in the front seat she drilled him with words.

  “Can you read music? Do you believe in drugs? What was it got you started playing?”

  “Course I read music, what do you think I am,” said Drum, following a passing car with his eyes. “Marijuana gives me headaches. I won a talent show, that’s how I started.”

  Oh, questions were the only way to grab his attention. She had tried, at first, declarative sentences: laying her life before him neatly and in chronological order, setting out minute facts about herself as if it were important he should know. Drum seemed not to hear. But she had only to say, “Is all your family musical?” for him to wade up from his silence and start framing an answer. “None of them’s musical, they just admire it a whole lot. My mama said she would give every cent she had into seeing me be a singer.”

  “Doesn’t she come to hear you play?”

  “At the rock show she did. All my family did.”

  “Did I see them? What do they look like?”

  “Nothing extra. Just a parcel of brothers and her and him.”

  “Him? Oh, your father. What does your father do?”

  “What have you got up there,” Drum said, “a questionnaire?” David, taking him literally for a second, glanced sideways into Evie’s lap. But then Drum said, “He works in a filling station. I help him out some.”

  “I bet he’s proud of you. Isn’t he?”

  “Oh, well.”

  “He would have to be,” said Evie. “Anybody that plays like you, his family must just die of pride.”

  His eyes would flick over to her, as sudden and as startling as the appearance of someone in a vacant win dow. If she spoke about his music he would listen all day, but what would he answer?

  “Oh, well, I don’t know.”

  She entered the Unicorn alone and went to her table, keeping her head erect, holding her stomach in. Eyes lit on her back. Whispers flitted across tables. “Oh, it’s you,” the proprietor said. “Budweiser?”

  “Yes, please, Zack. Have you got a match for my candle?”

  She thought of herself as a bait-and-switch ad. People came out of curiosity, bored by the long summer days. They figured they might as well go stare at the girl who had ruined her face. But after two minutes of that, there was nothing left to do but concentrate on the singer who had caused it all. Even Drum had to see that. People who returned came for the music alone; Evie was only a fixed character to be pointed out knowingly to new customers. “Will you be waiting?” Drum called. “Where will you be waiting?” Customers who were used to his speaking out began answering. “Yeah, man! Here!” A reviewer commented on him in the Avalice and Farinia Weekly. “Rock music of his own making, leaning toward a country sound, original at first although he tends to get repetitious.” Evie was not mentioned, any more than the color of his clothes or the brand of his guitar.

  Evie always had to hang around for awhile before the ride back. The wait was nerve-wracking. It sometimes stretched on till after one o’clock in the morning, while at home her father might be telephoning Violet at any moment. She watched the customers gather their belongings and leave. The proprietor washed his glass mugs. The dance platform was dark and empty, and all she heard of Drum was fits of music in the back room. “David,” she would say, catching his sleeve as he hurried by, “are we going now? What’s taking so long?”

  “Be just a moment,” David always said. But he would be carrying in a new pitcher of beer and a fistful of mugs. Eventually Evie gave up. She tucked her purse under her arm and left, sidling between vacant chairs and crossing the dim-lit, hollow-sounding floor to the door. Outside, the darkness would be cool and transparent. She took several deep breaths before she curled up in the back seat of the Jeep.

  The slick surface of Drum’s guitar would jog her awake. “Move over,” he would say. “Here we are.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Until she looked at her watch she always had a lost, sinking feeling. Her sleep had been troubled and filled with muddled dreams; it might have lasted for minutes or for hours. Had her father called the police yet? She pressed forward in her seat, as if that would help them get home faster. Every pickup truck dawdling in front of them made her angry. Then she remembered Drum. On the rides home he sat beside her, with only the guitar between them. “Did you think it went well?” she asked him.

  “Mmm.”

  “They liked the Carolina Trailways song.”

  No answer. David took over for him. “I thought so too. Why always that one? The walking song is a hell of a lot harder to do.”

  He was kind-hearted, David was. Or maybe he just wanted to keep Evie’s good will. During Drum’s silences he picked up the tail of the conversation and moved smoothly on with it, rescuing her. For a while they would shoot sentences back and forth—”Oh, well, the walking song takes getting used to.” “Not if they had ears it wouldn’t”—but there was always the consciousness of Drum’s silence, which they played to like actors on a stage. Questions, that was the only way. Questions.

  “What is your favorite song, Drum? Drum?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you have a favorite?”

  “Not for all time
I don’t. The one about the blue jeans, maybe.”

  “Why don’t you have regular titles?”

  “Never had no need for them.”

  “You will when you make a record,” Evie said.

  His eyes flicked over to her again; she felt them in the dark. She moved his guitar slightly so as to speak straight at him. “Someone is going to make a record of you that will sell a million copies,” she told him. “What will they put on that little center label? You’ve got to think up some titles.”

  “She’s right,” David said.

  “What’s so hard about that?” said Drum. “I’ll name them what I call them—’The Walking Song.’ ‘The Blue Jeans Song,’ nothing to it. Wait till they ask me, first.”

  “You think they won’t ask you?”

  “They haven’t yet, have they? I been sitting in that dump for seven months now. Haven’t got nowhere.”

  “You will,” Evie said.

  “How? When? You seen any talent scouts around?”

  After a show he was always like that. She had seen girls clustering around him three deep at the end of a set, paying him compliments and brushing bits of nothing off his shoulder while Evie frowned fiercely into her beer and thought, “Now he’ll find out; they’ll show him he’s too good for Pulqua and the Unicorn and me”—although she had always counted on his becoming famous. But when the girls left he would only seem more uncertain. His proud cold envelope of air temporarily left him. “You sound better than anyone I hear on the radio,” Evie would tell him, and he would stun her by turning on her suddenly and saying, “You think so? Is that what you think? Ah, but what do you know?”

  “I know if it sounds good.”

  “I don’t know that. How do you know?”

  Those were the only times they met face to face. They were the only times Evie lost the feeling that she was tugging at Drum’s sleeve while he stood with his back to her, gazing outwards toward something she couldn’t see.