Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“No, I was thinking about the rest of the time. People must stare at you a lot. Your friends and them.”

“I don’t have any friends,” said Evie.

“Oh.”

“Only Violet, and she doesn’t stare. And besides, by now I don’t notice. I don’t even see the letters in the mirror, half the time. Sometimes I wonder: Does anybody see them? Or have I just gotten adjusted? Do they come as a shock to strangers still?”

“They do stand out some,” David said.

“A lot?”

“Well, I don’t know—”

“You can tell me, I don’t care. Are they bad?”

“Well, not with bangs they wouldn’t be.”

“I see,” said Evie.

But she still didn’t get around to cutting bangs.

At the end of July a heat wave struck. Crops shriveled, lawn sprinklers ran all day and all night, Clotelia carried a black umbrella to fend off the sun and Violet stopped wearing underwear. “Seems like this summer will just go on forever,” people said. But Evie thought of the heat wave as the peak of the season, a dividing point after which summer would slide rapidly downhill toward fall. And how could she go back to school? She had never planned past August. She had cleaned out her locker with the feeling that she was leaving for good, and the thought of going back to the rigid life of winter smothered her.

Lately her rapid-fire questions to Drum had slackened off, grown easygoing. “I suppose you’ll be playing at a party tomorrow,” she would say, too hot and lazy even to add a question mark. All Drum had to answer was, “Mmm” and lapse into silence again. But the thought of summer’s ending came to her one Friday night at the Unicorn. Drum was speaking out: “Was it you I heard crying?” “Yes!” someone shouted. But Evie hadn’t been listening. She didn’t even know what song he was on. Then she was riding home in the Jeep, picking absently at a seam in his guitar. Drum jerked it away from her. His face was turned to the window, only the smooth line of one cheek showing. What had happened to all her spring plans? Things were no different from the very first night.

She changed her tempo. She concentrated on Drum alone, running a race with time, which she pictured as a hot, dark wind. “Why do you speak out in songs? Oh, you’re going to say you don’t know, but you could tell me what started it. Was it by accident? Did you just want to give a friend a message or something?”

“I forget,” Drum said.

“Think. When was the first time you did it?”

“Oh, well, the picnic song, I reckon. That’s right. It was too short. I tossed in extra lines, speaking out, like, just the pictures in my mind. Then a girl told me it was a good gimmick.”

“What girl? Do I know her?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Nothing you speak out is connected,” Evie said. “How can so many pictures come to your mind at once?”

“I don’t know.”

She noticed that people in the Unicorn had stopped staring at her. No one whispered about her; no one stood up to get a better look. They craned their necks around her in order to see the musicians. Sooner or later David would notice too. She dreaded his firing her. As if she could change anything by beating him to the draw, she came right out with the news herself one evening when they were alone. “People are not whispering when I walk in nowadays,” she told him.

“I saw.”

“Does that mean I should stop coming?”

“Well, let me see what Drum says.”

She knew what Drum would say.

Then next Friday night when David picked her up, she told him the entire plot of a movie without giving him time for a single word. When the plot was finished she analyzed it, and when that was finished she told him Clotelia’s life story. By then they had picked up Drum and arrived at the Unicorn. Neither Drum nor David had had a chance to say she was fired. It will be afterwards, she thought, when we are riding home. All during the show she sat memorizing the cold smell of beer, the texture of her netted candle-vase and the sight of Drum Casey tossing his hair above her as he sang. After that night it would all be lost, a summer wasted.

But on the ride home they had other things to talk about. “You hear the news?” Drum asked her. Evie only stared. Drum never began conversations.

“We’re going to a night club in Tar City. A man came looking for me, all the way to the Unicorn, hired me for a two-week run. I thought it would never happen.”

“This is the beginning, now,” David said. “Didn’t I tell you? A genuine night club where they serve setups. From here on out we’ll be heading straight up.”

“But what about the Unicorn?” Evie asked.

“Oh, we’ll take two weeks off. It’s all set.”

“And may not be back,” said Drum. “I tell you, after this I’m going to buy me some new singing clothes. Spangly.”

“Well, congratulations,” said Evie, but no one heard her. They were discussing lights and money and transportation.

When they reached Farinia, Drum said, “Let’s wake Mom and tell her the news. Tell her we want a celebration.” He might have been speaking only to David; Evie wasn’t sure. The two of them bounded across the darkened service area while Evie followed at a distance, hanging back a little and looking around her and stopping to search in her pocketbook for nothing at all.

Mrs. Casey wore a pink chenille bathrobe, and her hair was set in spindly metal curlers all over her head. When she opened the door her hand flew to the curlers. “Bertram, my land, I thought you was alone,” she said.

“Now, Mom, did you wait up again?” Drum circled her with one arm, nearly pulling her off her feet. “Listen, Mom. We want us a celebration. A man came and hired us to play two weeks at the Parisian.”

“Is that right? Well, now,” she said. When she was pleased her cheeks grew round and shiny, and little tucks appeared at the corners of her mouth. “I was just mixing up hot chocolate. Will you all have some?”

“Nah. Beer.”

She talked even while she was out in the kitchen, freezing the three of them into silence. They sat in a row on the couch and looked toward the doorway. “I just know this is the break you been waiting for,” she called. “Once you’re in the city your name gets around more. Oh, I’ve half a mind to wake your daddy. Won’t he be surprised. ‘Now,’ I’ll say, ‘tell me again who’s wasting time when he should be pumping gas?’ The Parisian is a right famous place, you know. A lot of important people go there. Remember your cousin Emma, Drum? That’s where she had the rehearsal supper, before her wedding. I was there. Well, little did I dream , of course, at the time. Is Evie going too?”

Evie stared at the doorway until it blurred.

“What for?” Drum asked.

“Why, to sit at her little table.”

“Nah,” said Drum.

“Oh, go on, Evie.”

David cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, Evie’s been thinking of quitting,” he said. “Weren’t you, Evie?”

“That’s right.”

“She feels the point has been made, by now. No sense going on with it.”

“Well, no, I suppose not,” said Mrs. Casey.

She appeared in the doorway with three cans of beer on a pizza tin. “She might want to come with your daddy and me and just watch , though,” she said.

“She don’t,” said Drum.

“Will you let her speak for herself?”

Everybody looked at Evie. Evie stared down at her laced fingers and said, “I don’t know. If it was up to me , I mean — I might want to come just once and hear him play.”

“There now. You see?” Mrs. Casey told Drum.

Drum slammed his beer down on the coffee table. “Will you get her off my back?” he said.