Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“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 you 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.

While she waited on the front porch, clutching her books to her chest, disapproval hung like a fog up and down her street. A lady in a gardening hat clipped her hedge, throwing Evie sharp, sidelong looks with every snick of her shears. Blank-faced houses watched her sternly. Behind her, in her own house, Clotelia slammed doors and shoved furniture and muttered to herself, although Evie couldn’t hear what it was she said. Once she came to stand behind the screen with a crane-necked watering pitcher in her hand. “I’ve a good mind to call your daddy,” she told Evie.

“What would you tell him?”

“You know he don’t want you seeing that trash.”

“I’m not doing anything wrong,” said Evie. She straightened, throwing a sudden smile at the gardening lady. Her father had banned Drum Casey as if Drum were storming the front hedge, bearing flowers and a ladder, begging to be let in. She could almost pretend that her father knew something she didn’t. But when finally Drum drove up, in a battered black Dodge with upside-down license plates, all he did was lean out his window and give her a long, unsmiling stare. Evie hugged her books tighter and started toward him.

“You going somewhere?” he asked.

“I have to get to school. I thought you could drive me there while we were talking.”

“Funny time to go to school.”

“I know. I’m late.”

She opened the car door and climbed in beside him. The car had a hot, syrupy smell in the morning sunlight. Instead of the black denim that he sang in, Drum Casey wore blue jeans and a T shirt with sleeves rolled up past his biceps. The soft colors gave him a gentler, faded look. He was leaning on the steering wheel, the shock of hair falling forward over his face. He slid his eyes past her forehead without ever quite looking at it. “I ain’t got much time,” he said.

Evie only smiled. “I thought you might have a motorcycle,” she told him.

“Me, a bike?”

“A motorcycle.”

“Naw, they’re too dangerous.”

“Oh, I see,” said Evie. She watched Drum set the car into motion, steering easily with his forearms resting on the wheel. He wore a wristwatch with a silver expansion band, which gave her a smaller version of the shock she had felt when she heard him call his mother. Did he wind his watch every morning, check its accuracy, try to be places on time like ordinary people? “How old are you?” she asked him.

“Nineteen.”

“I’m seventeen.”

Drum said nothing.

“If you’re nineteen,” said Evie, “do you go to school?”

“No.”

“What, then.”

“I don’t do much of nothing.”

“Oh.”

The car turned onto Main Street. They passed a clutter of small shops and cafés, the bowling alley and the Christian Science Reading Room. Evie pressed tight against the window, but there was nobody to see her.

“What was it you wanted to tell me?” Drum asked.

“Well, I had an idea this morning.”

“Is this where I turn?”

“No, one block farther.”

“Only been here once before, but I’m good at directions.”

“We got written up in the paper. Did you see it?” Evie asked.

“Yeah, I saw it. Just a picture, though.”

“Well, it’s better than nothing.”

“Sure.”

“Somebody sent me a copy in the mail.” She rummaged through her notebook until she had found it: a plastic-sealed photograph of her in her hospital room, rising from a wave of strung-out sheets, and Drum scowling beside her. Taped to the plastic was a printed message. “Congratulations on your recent achievement. And when it’s the tops in achievement you want, just think of Sonny Martin, Pulqua Country’s Biggest Real Estate Agent.” “This rightly belongs to you,” Evie said. “Here. Keep it.” Drum took his eyes from the road a minute to glance at it, and then he nodded and put it into his back pocket.

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s good publicity.”

“Sure, I reckon.”

“How do you usually get publicity?” she asked him.

Drum gave a sudden short laugh, as if it had been startled out of him. “Well, not that way,” he said.

“Do you put in ads?”

“I got a manager.”

“Oh. I thought only fighters had managers.”

“Well, no,” said Drum. “Well, them too, of course.” He had drawn up before the school by now but sat frowning, tapping one finger on the wheel, as if he were no longer sure that a manager was what he had. “Of course, he’s only my drummer,” he said finally.

“Does he put in ads?”

“Sometimes. Or talks around, mostly. Goes to see people.”

“Wouldn’t he like it if you got more publicity?”

“What you getting at?”

“I was thinking if I started coming to all your shows, where people could see me. Wearing my hair off my face. Wouldn’t it cause talk? They’d say, ‘You see what she did for him. There must be something to him, then.’ Wouldn’t they?”