Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“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.

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.