Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“Clotelia isn’t here today.”

“I mean later. For the future. I’m used to having biscuits every morning.”

“Oh. Later,” Evie said. She let out a long breath and laid the spatula on the stove top. “Well, sure, I guess so.”

“That’s the girl,” Drum said.

She left him to eat his breakfast alone while she fried more eggs for herself. She had turned hungry suddenly. While the eggs popped and sputtered in the frying pan, Drum finished everything on his plate, sopping it up with slice after slice of white bread. “I’ve got the Jeep tomorrow,” he said with his mouth full.

“You do?”

“David’s lending it to me. I asked him this morning. We can drive to South Carolina and be back in time for supper.”

“South Carolina?”

Drum looked up from his plate. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Did you forget all about it? Last night you said you would run off with me. I was counting on it.”

“But South Carolina. I can’t go there.”

“Why not?”

“Well, Dillon, you mean. Where everybody goes when they have to get married, all the trash goes. You expect me to run off to Dillon?”

“Well, sure,” said Drum.

“No, we have to go somewhere else.”

“But there ain’t nowhere else. Dillon’s the only place you don’t have to wait for three days.”

“I’m sorry, I just can’t help it,” said Evie. Which was exactly what she meant; she had had no idea that she was going to object to Dillon. Words popped forth ready-made, strung from her mouth like comic-strip balloons. “I would rather wait for the license, even. Anything. Do you think I want to go around the rest of my life with a South Carolina marriage certificate? Oh, you just have no respect , Drum Casey.”

“Well, my Lord,” said Drum.

“Besides, we’d have to lie about my age anyway. Even in Dillon. We might as well do it in Tar City, or Raleigh.”

“We’d have to lie more in Tar City,” said Drum. “I would be underage too, if we went there.”

“I don’t care.”

“They’d ask for proof. Then where would we be?”

“I don’t care.”

She waited to see what she would say next, but nothing more came. And there sat Drum, tapping a cigarette against his thumbnail over and over until the tobacco had settled a good eighth of an inch, but still he didn’t light it. He would be framing a way to say, “All right, then. Stay home. Die an old maid.” He was joined to her by a piece of elastic which she had stretched too far. With Drum, even an inch was too far. “I know what you must be thinking,” she told him. “I’m sorry, I really meant that. But can’t you go along with me this once? I’ll never ask you again.”

“Oh, well. Shoot,” said Drum. Then he finally struck a match, but her father’s car was just driving up. He had to leave by the back door, hunching his shoulders and cupping the match flame as he went.

“Evie,” her father said, “why do I smell smoke?”

“Well, I’ve taken up cigarettes,” Evie said.

“I thought so. Just so you are straightforward about it, then. I know young people have to try these things.”

“All right,” Evie said.

“I was young myself once,” said her father.

It was Violet who helped most with the arrangements. (“Eloping?” she had said. “Evie. Aren’t you excited? Oh, and here I thought this Drum business was all in your head.”) She investigated marriage laws, arranged for the blood tests, chauffeured them to the doctor in her mother’s convertible. “As far as the license goes,” she said, “lie. Don’t bother pulling out phony documents and such, lie through your teeth. You’d be amazed how much you can get away with.” She drove Evie to Tar City to apply for the license, and Evie lied and no one questioned her. All the way home Violet sang “O Promise Me,” causing people to slow down and stare as they passed. Planning things seemed to turn Violet larger and more brightly colored. She took up over half of the car seat, and every time she thought of how they had fooled the clerk she laughed her lazy rich laugh. Meanwhile Evie sat in the corner with her hands between her knees. She pictured Tar City policemen swooping down on them to hand a summons through the window for perjury, or the clerk having second thoughts and alerting all ministers and J.P.’s, or her father coming out front to point at Violet’s car and say, “That’s Tar City dust on those wheels. What have you been up to in Tar City?” But the ride home was smooth and quick, and when she went in Clotelia didn’t even look up from the television.

They had to wait three days after they applied for the license. During that whole time it rained, breaking the heat wave and pulling the town from its stupor. Evie kept finding Drum on the back doorstep, under the eaves, huddled into David’s windbreaker to keep warm. She pulled him in whenever her father wasn’t around, but once they were sitting side by side they had almost nothing to say to each other. Drum discussed houses. He had heard of a cheap one for rent, twenty-four dollars a month. When he had finished with that, Evie went over and over the details of applying for the license, as if that were the one solid link that would hold them together till Thursday. “The clerk said, ‘Date of birth?’ I had it all worked out beforehand, but still I thought I would slip. Where I did slip was your name. ‘Drum Casey,’ I said. ‘No, Bertram.’ I must have sounded half-witted, not knowing the name of my, of the boy.”

“I reckon so,” said Drum.

They were quiet for a minute. He was beside her on the couch, one arm draped across her shoulders and his hand dangling free.

“They wanted to know your mother’s maiden name,” said Evie. “Did I tell you that? I made one up. What was your mother’s maiden name?”

“I don’t know. Parker.”

“I forget what I told them. Maybe Parker, after all. Wouldn’t that be funny? I had to think even for my mother’s maiden name, which shows you how flustered I was. Eve Abbott: my own first two names. It should have been on the tip of my tongue.”

When Clotelia was far enough away Drum would pull Evie closer, choosing the first pause in her speech. Evie had been waiting to be kissed for years. She had rehearsed it in her mind, first with someone faceless and then with Drum, who looked as if he would know all about it; but now she didn’t think it was what it had been built up to be. They stayed pressed together between kisses, looking out over each other’s shoulders like drivers meeting on opposite lanes of a highway. Drum smelled like tobacco and marigolds and the flattened porch cushions, which had turned mustier than ever now that the rain was here.

On Thursday, she got up early and put on a white eyelet dress that she had saved from junior-high graduation. The seams had grayed and it was a little tight, but she had set her heart on white. She filled her purse with absolute necessities, in case her father told her never to darken his door again: make-up, two diaries, all the letters received since fifth grade, a photograph of her parents taken before she was born, and a billfold containing twenty-eight dollars. Then she tiptoed out of the house. Her father was still dressing. Just as she reached the stairs she heard him slam a drawer and say, “Oh, drat.” It surprised her that she could do something so momentous without his sensing it.

She set out for a corner halfway between her house and Violet’s, where Drum and David were going to pick them up. (“If Violet’s coming, then so is David,” Drum said. “I ain’t going to be outnumbered”—as if this were some sort of contest, girls against boys.) The rain had stopped, but the streets still glistened and the lawns were a dark, shiny green. She edged puddles not yet dried by the sun and hopped across flowing gutters, feeling like a star in an old movie with her high heels clacking so importantly and her full skirt swirling around her calves. On the corner where they were to meet, Violet was already waiting. She wore a pink nylon cocktail dress. “I believe this is the most exciting day of my life,” she called out. Evie hushed her. She was certain someone would notice them and guess what was happening.