Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

Her teachers sent her assignments home with her father. At first her father seemed relieved that she was staying out of school. In the mornings as he left he said, “That’s the girl. You just take it easy a while, I’ll see you tonight.” But it was clear that he expected things to fall into some sort of progression — the blood to be washed from her hair, the gauze removed, bangs cut. Evie took no steps at all. Toward the end of the week she kept an appointment to have her stitches out, but then she came home and got back into her bathrobe. Let’s see you,” her father said that evening. Evie tilted her face up, exposing a naked forehead with “Casey” running across it in dried red dots. “Ah, yes,” said her father. He looked away again.

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.”