A Slipping-Down Life

by Anne Tyler

  “Oh, no.”

  “Well, school will start soon. Summer always drags about this time.”

  He looked so cheerful nowadays. He had made her an appointment with a plastic surgeon for September, and at supper he had grown talkative and sometimes made small jokes. What she should have said was, “No. I don’t like you anymore, I don’t like your music, I don’t want you sleeping on my porch.” Then life would be simple again. No more hanging around waiting and wondering, no more secrets hidden from her whistling, unsuspecting father.

  Drum set up a pattern. He came whenever her father was gone, as if he kept close watch on the house, and he seldom spoke. Conversation was up to Evie. If she was silent he seemed irritable, tapped his fingers or swung his foot, left before he had to. If she talked he seemed not to listen, but kept very still. He rested the back of his head against the wall and watched the ceiling while she searched for any words at all to fill the space. “You mustn’t mind Clotelia. Does she get on your nerves? Once I went home with her when my father was out of town and I met her boyfriend, not the one she has now but another one, who sat around drinking beer all the time and matching pennies, living off her money. She thinks all men do that way. That’s the only reason she acts so snippy. His name was, wait a minute. Not Spencer, no—”

  She had never been given so much time before. No one interrupted her, no one shifted impatiently. She could choose her words as slowly as luxury items in a department store. “Not Steward, not Stengle. It will come to me in a moment. Spindle. I knew it was something peculiar. Have you ever heard of anyone named Spindle? He had a black knitted skull cap on in the middle of summer. His shoes were the big high kind with metal toe-caps.”

  Drum stubbed his cigarette out and passed a hand over his eyes. “Are you tired?” Evie asked him.

  “No.”

  But his face was pinched and tight, and his tan was turning yellow. Sometimes, lost in what she was saying, she forgot that anything was wrong. Then she would look up accidentally and notice how he sat, limp and heavy-limbed, not bothering to protect himself from the net of words she had wound around him. She would break off and say, “Do you want something? Iced tea?”

  “No.”

  “Are you not sleeping nights?”

  “I’m sleeping fine. Go on talking.”

  “How can I talk if I never get an answer? You talk to me. What’s been happening? Have you been back to see your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going?”

  “No.”

  “She can’t still be angry with you.”

  “I don’t care if she’s angry or not, I’m not going.”

  “What, not ever?”

  “I’ve had it,” said Drum. “All this time telling how famous I’m going to be, and then she goes to pieces at one little setback. I’m nineteen years old. I got a right to get fired once, don’t I? Oh, it looks like I will never get anywhere in this life. Never do a thing but bag groceries on Friday nights. A lot she cares.”

  “If you’re not going back,” said Evie, “where are you going?” She was careful about her tone of voice. Even a sudden movement, she felt, might frighten him away. But Drum only shook his head. He didn’t seem to care what she said.

  He spent five days moving between her house and David’s, where he was allowed to visit but was not asked for meals. He shaved in the restroom of an Esso station, borrowed a change of clothes from David, and kept his guitar in David’s tool shed. At Evie’s house he saw only Evie and Clotelia. Once Violet came, pink-cheeked with curiosity after what Evie had told her on the phone, but Drum left immediately. “I believe he doesn’t like me,” Violet said.

  “No, that’s not it. It’s some mood he’s in,” Evie told her. When Violet was there, she could draw back from things and see how strange they were: Evie Decker making excuses for a rock guitarist, protecting a fugitive sitting boldly in her kitchen chair. She said goodbye to Violet as soon as she could and went out back to signal toward the tall grass behind the house.

  On Friday afternoon Drum’s mother called. “This is Mrs. Ora Casey,” she said stiffly. “Is that you, Evie?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Evie.

  “I am trying to get ahold of Bertram. He’s wandered off somewhere. Has he been by your house?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “If you see him, will you say I’m looking for him?”

  “All right.”

  There was a pause.

  “I’ve called David too,” Mrs. Casey said. “He’s not seen him. Now, where would a boy go off to like that?”

  “Well, I ‘ll certainly tell him you were looking for him.”

  “Evie, I’ll be honest with you. I been looking for him all week now. Since Sunday. We had a little falling-out. Oh, it was all over nothing—a misunderstanding at the Parisian—but you know how sensitive he is. I told him he had let me down—well, I had my reasons. We may not be college-educated in our family but we are law-abiding, we don’t give no one cause to complain about us. I did speak sharp to him, but only because I was disappointed, nothing permanent. What call did he have to take it to heart so?”

  “Well, if I see him—” Evie said.

  “Yes, yes. All right. Good-bye.”

  Evie hung up and went back to the living room, where Drum and Clotelia were watching soap operas. Drum had grown bolder now. When the television was on he sat watching it as if he were an invited guest, talking back to all the actors. “This here doctor,” Clotelia was telling him, “think he’s the center of the universe. Selfish? Watch.” Drum nodded, probably not listening, concentrating on the screen so hard his eyes had turned to slits. He and Clotelia shared the couch. Clotelia had grown used to him, although she still said he was trash. “Now, here is what I want to know,” she told him. “When that doctor mince in such a stuck-up way, is it his way? Or do he just act like that for the play? Which? Pull your gut in, Evie. Who was that on the phone?”

  “No one,” said Evie.

  “If I don’t get on her tail,” Clotelia told Drum, “she would go around looking like a old bedsheet. What am I going to do? I tell my boyfriend, ‘Brewster,’ I say, ‘you ain’t going to believe it, but I know a white girl seventeen years old need a full-time nursemaid. Maid ain’t enough,’ I say. ‘She need a nursemaid.’ ”

  Drum rolled his head back on the couch and watched Clotelia. During commercials he would listen to anyone. It didn’t have to be Evie.

  “ ‘Why won’t you quit then?’ he say. I tell him I will. Nothing more disgraceful, he say, than me spending my lifetime picking up over Evie Decker.”

  “I wish you would quit,” Evie said.

  “Oh, I will, miss, I will.” She made a face and twisted her watch around sharply. “Week to week I say I will. Only if I could find me something else to do. Factory job. Do you know how long I wasted on her? Four years. Now I got to say it was all for nothing and quit. My land.”

  “Go to some city, why don’t you,” Drum said.

  “Sure. Be glad to.”

  “I would too, if I had the money.”

  Evie stood above him, folding her hands on the back of the couch and looking down at the top of his head. There was no part in his hair, just a dense sheet of black separating into thick strings. Sometimes, watching him sprawled in her house, she felt an unpleasant sense of surprise hit her. There were things about him that kept startling her each time she noticed them: the bony, scraped look of his wrists, the nicotine stain on his middle finger, the straggling hairs that edged his sideburns. He was sunk into the couch cushions as if he were permanent. If her father walked in right now, what would Drum do? Raise his hand no more than an inch, probably, say “Hey” and let the hand drop again.

  “Drum Casey, what do you want from me?” she asked him.

  “Huh?”

  “What do you want, I said. Why are you hanging around here?”

  “Evie, well, I never,” Clotelia said.

  Drum had turned to face
her, with his mouth slightly open. “Well, if that’s the way you feel,” he said.

  “I didn’t say one word about the way I feel. I asked you a question.”

  “Some question.”

  “Well, have you ever been known to answer one? Have you ever had a real conversation, one that goes back and forth like it’s supposed to? I asked you something. I want to know. What do you want out of me?”

  “Watch now,” Clotelia said loudly. “The lady in black going to cry; she’s cried every show. How do you reckon she makes tears spurt that way?”

  “It’s fake, it’s only water,” said Drum. He stood up. “Talk like this just gets me down. If you don’t like me sleeping on your porch, come out and say so. None of this roundaboutness.”

  “Porch! Who said porch? I asked you—”

  “I got ears, I can hear.”

  “I wonder more about that every day,” Evie said.

  But Drum was already leaving, stuffing his cigarettes into his shirt pocket as he crossed the hallway. “So long,” he said.

  “Well, wait a minute—”

  She saw his back as he loped down the front steps. Anyone could have seen him. Her father could have run into him on the sidewalk. When he reached the street he paused for a minute and then turned to the right, where he was half hidden by the hedge that bordered the yard. “I don’t see you running after him,” Clotelia told the television.

  “I don’t know if I wanted to,” Evie said.

  9

  She lay awake most of the night, listening for the creak of the swing. It never came. In the morning when she got up she seemed to have returned to the way she was a week ago, brisk and cheerful, willingly sitting on a board while her father sawed it and then humming while she washed the dishes, since it was Clotelia’s day off. But toward noon she grew restless. She followed her father aimlessly while he built shelves in the kitchen. Once she pointed to his work pants and said, “Are you going to wear those all day?”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Well, if you’re going out, I mean. Aren’t you going downtown?”

  “No, I hadn’t planned on it.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday, you know.”

  “Was there something you needed?”

  “Oh, no,” Evie said.

  She went out into the back yard and sat on the steps, looking toward the field of grass where Drum used to wait. Nothing moved. She sat there for hours, for an entire afternoon, without so much as a book in her lap. Her eyes began to sting from staring at one place so steadily.

  After supper she went outside again, this time to the front porch. Neighbors’ televisions blared up and down the street. From the window behind her she heard her father’s shortwave radio flicking rapidly across continents. “Evie, come here, I’ve got Moscow,” he called once. And then, a little later, “There is too much Spanish in this world.” Evie picked up a cushion and set it in her lap. It smelled musty, like the inside of an old summer cottage. If every evening lasted this long, how much time would it take to get her whole life lived? Centuries. She pictured herself growing older and fatter in this airless dark house, turning into a spinster with a pouched face and a zipper of lines across her upper lip, caring for her father until he died and she had no one left but cats or parakeets.

  Her father went to bed with a book. Lights blinked off up and down the street, and chairs were scraped off porches through bright yellow doors that finally closed and darkened. Then someone came up the sidewalk, all alone. She watched him swing over the hedge and cut across the lawn to the front porch steps. “Oh, you know better than anyone, don’t you?” he said.

  “Know what?”

  “How come you’re sitting out here? You’re waiting for me to slink back, nowhere else to go.”

  He climbed the steps and sank down on the swing, at the opposite end from her. “Everybody asked about you,” he said.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “At the Unicorn.”

  “I thought you weren’t going there this week,” Evie said.

  “No call not to, is there? Sure we did. Last night and tonight, same as ever. People said, ‘Where is that girl who cut herself up, has she found her someone else by now?’ I was thinking of saying you had killed yourself. ‘Finished what she started,’ I would say. That would have gone big.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Evie said. “Do you think I would kill myself over the likes of you?”

  “Then I went back home with David and slept in the tool shed. His mother came out in the morning with a broom. Old witch, should have been riding it. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks. I swear if she wasn’t about to sweep me right out.”

  “Well, I don’t blame her,” Evie said. “You just hang on and hang on, Drum Casey. When are you going to leave me alone? As soon as I get used to you being gone, you turn up again. Will you ever just get out and stay out?”

  “Oh, now, don’t make me go,” said Drum. “It’s late. I’m tired.”

  “Well, so am I.”

  She drew in her breath, waiting for him to say something else that she could fire back at him, but he seemed to have given up. He sat slumped against the arm of the swing. All she saw was a black shadow with his T shirt making a triangle of white above his jacket. Finally he said, “You know Joseph Ballew? He says, ‘Where is that plump girl with “Casey” on her forehead? Lost her interest? You’re slipping, man,’ he says.”

  Evie didn’t answer.

  “Have you ever thought of losing some weight?”

  It took a moment for his words to sink in. Then she said, “Well, my God in heaven.”

  “Have you?”

  “Why do you feel free to act so rude? I eat less than you do.”

  “I was just asking. You know, in Tar City they got this slenderizing place. Steam baths and exercise machines. You ever been to one?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “Well. This girl was telling about it. Seems they can really slim people down. And make-up, and hair styles—You know, I saw in this magazine once where they decide the shape of your face and then fix your hair to fit it. They had before-and-after pictures; it looked real good.”

  “I wish you would go,” Evie said.

  “What, now?”

  “Nobody makes you sit here. If you can’t stand my looks, find someone else’s porch to sleep on.”

  “Well, wait now,” Drum said. “You got it all wrong. I’m trying to help out.”

  “I didn’t ask for any help.”

  “I just want you to look your best. There’s no reason you should get mad about it.”

  “What business is it of yours if I look my best?”

  “Well, I was thinking we might could get married,” Drum said.

  Evie held still for a minute, not breathing. Then she began to laugh.

  “Did I say something funny?” Drum asked.

  “Yes,” she said. But the laugh, which should have flowed on, suddenly rusted and broke. “I believe you’re out of your head,” she said.

  “Why? Don’t you want to?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Evie.

  “I don’t know what you got to lose. You must like me some or you wouldn’t have, you know, cut the letters. You wouldn’t hang around me all the time. And here I am with no home. And my career’s at a standstill, we could get our pictures in the papers. Human interest. Plus I do like you. I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t.”

  “What do you like about me?” Evie said.

  “Jesus.”

  “Well, go on. Name something.”

  “I don’t know. I like the way you listen to people. Is that enough?”

  “No,” said Evie.

  “Look. I like you. I want to get married. I feel like things are just petering out all around me and I want to get married to someone I like and have me a house and change. Make a change. Isn’t that enough? Don’t you want to change your life around some?”

  Evie held the cushio
n closer to her and breathed in its musty smell. Then she lifted a hand and ran one finger across her forehead, tracing the narrow ridges of the scars, which always felt pleasantly crinkled. In the opposite house, the last of the lights went out. People slept fitfully in hot, rumpled beds hollowed to fit their shapes, in houses they had grown up and grown old in. Beside her, Drum shifted in the swing. He was waiting for her answer, which would be yes, but only after she had taken her time over it. Things moved too fast. She had wanted a courtship, with double dates and dances and matching shirts, but all she got was three minutes of staring at sleeping houses before she said, “Oh, well. Why not?” and Drum slid over to kiss her with cool blank lips.

  10

  She awoke from a dream in which she slipped through slimy clay, trying to escape a reckless woman driver in an army car. It was nearly ten o’clock in the morning. The second hand of her alarm clock spun off circle after circle while she lay watching, unable to move her eyes or gather her thoughts together. A steeple bell rang. The Sunday paper slapped against the screen. Her father passed her door on his way to church, and she wondered if he would find Drum asleep in the swing. But even that was not enough to unfasten her eyes from the clock.

  Long after her father’s car had driven off, she heard the front door slam. Drum’s boots crossed the downstairs hall. “You there?” he called.

  Evie didn’t answer.

  “Evie?”

  “All right, I’m coming,” Evie said.

  Lying still so long without breakfast had made her dizzy. Black and blue buttons swarmed toward her when she climbed out of bed. As soon as her eyes had cleared she stepped into last night’s clothes and then went to the mirror to unravel her pincurls. How would she curl her hair if she were married? Clotelia’s magazines said no man liked to see his wife in curlers. The word “wife” hit her strangely, stilling her fingers for a moment. It was more definite than “married,” which had merely floated shapelessly in her mind since the night before. She saw herself in a housecoat, mixing orange juice; saying no to a vacuum-cleaner salesman; wondering if it were time to start supper. None of the situations seemed likely. What Drum had come for, she thought, was to tell her he had changed his mind. She would never be a wife, after all. She felt so certain of it that she descended the stairs blank-faced, shut against everything, and when she saw him lounging in the living room doorway she failed to smile.