Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

They waited five minutes. Evie stared very hard in a direction away from where the Jeep would be coming. When she heard it pull up behind her, she began smiling widely and couldn’t stop. “Hop in,” David said. Evie climbed into the back, where Violet was already settling herself. She looked steadily eastward so that the smile would be taken for a squint against the sunlight. Up front Drum sat lounging in the corner of her eye, one of his feet resting on the dashboard. He wore a white shirt with his jeans and his hair was slicked down too neatly. David was dressed the same as always — a sign of protest, it turned out. He was against the wedding. In all these days of planning Evie had never thought to ask how David felt, and it took her a minute to understand when he said, “All right, here we go. But it’s against my better judgment, I just want you to know.”

“You already said that,” Drum told him.

“He did?” Evie said. She sat forward and looked at the back of David’s neck. “Said what? He thinks we shouldn’t be getting married?”

“Damn right I do,” said David. “There is something too half-baked about this deal. And besides. Here I am. His manager. Aren’t I supposed to know what’s good for him? Careerwise, marriage is suicide. Look at the Beatles.”

“ I still like the Beatles,” Violet said.

“But you don’t swoon away when you hear them, now, do you?”

“I never did,” Violet said.

That ended the conversation. For the rest of the ride everyone sat in his own corner, staring out at the scenery. Evie’s smile had faded. She watched tobacco barns zip by, each standing out bare and lonely along the fiat highway. Men in filling stations turned their blank faces slowly to follow the Jeep out of sight. Barefoot children strung across the pavement drew in while they passed and then fanned out again.

When they reached the outskirts of the city, the buildings tightened together. They pressed Evie’s heart out of rhythm; she kept clearing her throat and swallowing. All around them people were busy with humdrum things, waiting for buses or driving the groceries home, bearing loads of children and picnic baskets and diaper bags to some sunny playground. They sped by in small circles of cheerfulness, with Evie watching enviously until they were too tiny to see.

When they were nearly downtown, they stopped for a red light. A very short fat man with a child’s face stepped up to wipe their windshield, using a greasy cloth. He smeared the dirt around and stepped back to wait for a tip, but David only scowled at him. And still the light didn’t change. They were going to wait there forever, eye to eye with a watchful little man. “Oh, I tell you,” David said. “Everything has gone wrong today, everything. I can’t wait to see what’ll happen to me next.”

“Name one thing that has gone wrong,” Violet said. “Other than that man,” she added, for by then the light had changed and they were pulling away.

“Isn’t it enough that we are heading for Drum’s wedding? I’m driving my own hearse wagon, I don’t know why I do it. Inside of a month he’ll be a full-time pump attendant and I’ll be out of a job. And you,” he said, nodding to Evie in the rear-view mirror, “don’t look at me like that. It’s your own good I’m thinking of, partly.”

Evie didn’t argue with him. None of it seemed real anyway. Time was speeding up and slowing down in fits, like her pulse. The argument between David and Violet moved as rapidly as a silent film, jumping so suddenly into anger that Evie felt she must have missed a whole section of it. “Where is your tact?” Violet was asking. “We are here to get my girl friend married, it’s the happiest day of her life, and you sit talking about hearse wagons. Well, stop right here. Let us out. We’ll walk to the wedding.”

“Tact, nothing,” said David. “It’s a free country, ain’t it? I got a right to voice an opinion just like anybody else.”

“Voice it by yourself, then. We three are walking.”

“Go ahead,” David said. “But let me tell you one thing, fat girl. I didn’t like you the moment I set eyes on you. Organize, organize, I know you like a book. Why don’t you get something of your own to organize?” He stopped the car with a jolt and reached across Drum to open the door. “Get out, all that wants to. You won’t hurt my feelings a bit.”

“Fine,” Violet said. “Pick us up at the nearest J.P., in an hour.”

“Minister,” Evie told her. “And anyway—”

“Minister, then. I don’t care. You just go have yourself a beer, David Elliott.”

“What?” said Drum. He had been watching pedestrians all this time, not appearing to listen, but now he turned halfway in his seat and raised his dark glasses. “Minister , what’s that for? What’s wrong with J.P.?”

“Well, nothing,” said Evie. “Only I was always hoping, well, I was counting on a minister. Also a church.”

Violet nodded.

“What next,” David said.

“Things are getting out of hand here,” said Drum. “I had never looked for all this.”

“Well, now’s the time to back out,” David told him.

Violet said, “Will you just hush? Evie, climb out. We’re walking.”

“No, wait,” Evie said.

“Do you want him to ruin your wedding?”

“It’ll be ruined for sure if you walk,” said Drum. “Because I ain’t coming.”

“Wait,” Evie said.

Time slowed to its regular pace. Everyone hushed and stared at her.

“Nobody walks,” she told them. “I plan to have a normal, ordinary wedding, with witnesses who aren’t called in off the street. No fighting. No disapproving. We are going to do this one thing the way it ought to be done, and afterwards we will have a bottle of wine to celebrate. Now, is that too much to ask?”

“Well—” said Violet.

“All right. Shut the door,” Drum said. “Looks like we got to find us a minister.”

“Methodist,” Evie said.

The minister had a face she forgot an hour later. He perched, childlike, on the edge of his seat when they drove him to his church, and he stayed that way forever in Evie’s mind. All she remembered of the wedding itself was the smell of musty swing cushions when Drum stood beside her at the altar. For souvenirs she had a wire-thin ring and a marriage certificate in old English lettering, two engraved doves cuddling at its head and David and Violet’s ball-point signatures on the witness lines.

For twenty-four dollars a month they rented a tar-paper shack on the outskirts of Pulqua. A series of tenant farmers had once lived there. Tobacco fields stretched away from it on all sides, and the gravel road in front was traveled by barefoot children and mule wagons. Evie thought it was a wonderful place to start out in. The tenant farmers had been too poor to leave even a strip of carpeting or a one-eared sugar bowl; the house was blank, waiting for Evie to make her mark. Nothing she could do would hurt it.

She plastered the papery walls with posters advertising the Unicorn. She spent eighteen dollars at the dimestore, entering the amount carefully in a budget book, and lugged home tea towels and cutlery and a set of dishes the bluish color of skim milk. Their furniture came from Evie’s father’s house. They had moved it in a U-Haul-It the afternoon of the wedding, because they couldn’t afford a night in a motel.

First her father said, “Married?” Then he sat down on the porch steps and said, “Married. I don’t believe it.” He was slumped and hollow-faced, exposed before Drum and David and Violet, whom Evie had brought, without thinking, up the front walk with her. They stood in a semicircle around him and frowned at the ground. “Have you ever met Drum?” Evie asked finally.