A Slipping-Down Life

by Anne Tyler

  “I have the baby now,” she said.

  “I don’t see how that changes anything.”

  “No, I know you don’t. That’s why I’m leaving.”

  “Can’t we talk about this?”

  But he had to say that to her back. She was already leaving the room. She went to the bedroom and pulled out a suitcase, which she opened on the bed. Then she began folding the blouses that hung in her closet. Hundreds of times, in movies and on television, she had watched this scene being rehearsed for her. Wives had laid blouses neatly in overnight bags and had given them a brisk little pat, then crossed on clicking heels to collect an armload of dresses still on their hangers. There was no way she could make a mistake. Her motions were prescribed for her, right down to the tucking of rolled stockings into empty corners and the thoughtful look she gave the empty closet.

  Drum came to be her audience, leaning awkwardly in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. “You are moving in too much of a rush,” he told her.

  “What?” said Evie, and she stared down at her hands, overflowing with scarves and headbands.

  “People don’t just take off like this. They think things through. They talk a lot. Like: How will you support that baby, all alone?”

  “I’ll get along.”

  “Yes, well,” Drum said. “That’s for sure.” He picked up a barrette from the floor and studied it, turning it over and over in his hands. Then he said, “How will you explain to strangers, having ‘Casey’ wrote across your face?”

  “I’ll tell them it’s my name,” Evie said. Then she paused, in the middle of rolling up a belt. “It is my name.”

  Drum frowned at the barrette. “Now that you have done all that cutting,” he said, “and endured through bleeding and police cars and stitches, are you going to say it was just for purposes of identification?”

  He tossed the barrette into the open suitcase. Evie dragged an airline bag from under the bed, and filled it with underwear and stray bottles from the medicine cabinet. In the bathroom, holding a tube of toothpaste and watching her smudged face in the mirror, she said, “I didn’t do it.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t cut my forehead. Someone else did.”

  “You don’t make sense,” Drum told her.

  “Well, you were there. You remember how it was. The singing was good and there were fans shouting back at you and lots of people dancing. When I went into the restroom an argument started up. I forget just how. Me and a redhead and some friend of hers. She got mad. She told her friend to hold me down and she slashed your name on my face. ‘I hope you’re satisfied,’ she said. That was how it happened.”

  “Life is getting too cluttered,” Drum said.

  “Didn’t I tell you so?”

  She zipped the airline bag. There were other things of hers all over the house, books and records and pieces of clothing, but all she wanted now was to finish up. In movies the packing did not go on so interminably. She picked up the suitcase, but Drum moved forward to take it away from her. “Evie, don’t go,” he said.

  That was said in movies too. Then the whole scene would end with his changing his mind, saying he would come with her anywhere, but what did Drum know about things like that? “Come with me, then,” she said, and all Drum said was, “No. I can’t.”

  He had never once done what she had expected of him.

  He carried the suitcase, she carried the airline bag. They crossed the cold dirt yard to the car. “Keys,” said Drum, and when she handed them to him he opened the trunk and slid the bags in. He was going to let her go, then. She climbed into the driver’s seat and waited for him to slam the trunk lid down. “Maybe—” he said, when he had come around to her side of the car.

  She rolled the window down. “What?”

  “I said, maybe later you will change your mind. Do you reckon?”

  “I never back down on things,” Evie said.

  He reached in with the keys. He didn’t even say goodbye; just laid the keys in the palm of her hand, leaving her with a trace of his cool, slick surface and a smell of marigolds and a brief tearing sensation that lasted long after she had rolled out of the yard toward town.

  On Saturday night at the Unicorn, Joseph Ballew and Drumstrings Casey played rock music on a wooden dance platform, the same as always. Joseph Ballew sang two new songs and Drumstrings Casey sang old ones, stopping his strumming occasionally to speak out between verses.

  “Where is the circular stairs?” he asked.

  And then, “But the letters was cut backwards.

  “Would you explain?”

  His audience just nodded, accepting what he said. The only person who could have answered him was not present.