Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“No, I don’t believe I have,” her father said. He rose and held his hand out, not quite looking into Drum’s eyes. He could have threatened annulment, but he didn’t. He didn’t seem to have the energy to think it up.

“And this is David Elliott,” Evie told him. “Violet you know.”

But her father wasn’t paying attention.

“Are you the rock singer?” he asked Drum.

“Yes, sir.”

“Casey.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I don’t understand. I was going to take her to a plastic surgeon; none of this was necessary.”

“Sir?”

“Oh, it’s all beyond me,” Evie’s father said.

“Mr. Decker,” said Drum, “Evie and I will need furniture. Do you reckon we could borrow what you have extra?”

“Well,” said her father. He turned and went into the house. Would he lock the door behind him, say he never wanted to set eyes upon them again? But when he was inside he said, “Take what you want, then. Evie will show you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Drum said.

His mother was different. She clutched at Drum’s shoulders and said, “You what? You fool. What would make you go and do a thing like that?” And Evie stood in the doorway, wondering where to put her hands. She hadn’t wanted to come in the first place. “You said you were never going back,” she had told Drum. “Why now? Why drag me with you?”

“Because I want to show her I’m settled and done with her,” Drum said.

He stood motionless in his mother’s grip, although she was trying to shake him. “It was you always telling me I didn’t appreciate her,” he said.

“Well, I didn’t mean marry her.”

“It’s done now. Do we have to get in a swivet over it?”

“In a swivet, you say. My life is broke in pieces and you tell me not to get in a swivet. You, Evie Decker. Don’t you look at me so smug. I’ll get every lawyer in town after you. I’ll annul it, I’ll have your marriage license tore up by the highest judge there is. Oh, where is your father when I need him the most?”

She grabbed the hand of one of Drum’s little tow-headed brothers, who shifted his feet and grinned.

Drum said, “Mom, can I have the record player from my room?”

Who would have thought that Drum Casey would be so homey? He wanted cushions for all the chairs and curtains for the windows, a checkered skirt for the stilt-legged kitchen sink and a frilly bibbed apron for Evie. During the first three days they were married he spent his time installing can openers, toothbrush holders, and towel rods. He directed their settling in as if he had had in mind, for years, a blueprint for a home of his own complete to the last detail. “That easy chair goes in the bedroom, for when I’m making up songs. No more lying around on a bed to play my guitar. The other chair goes in the corner of the living room. We want our furniture in corners. We want to sit snug in corners when we’re home of an evening. Do you know how to make biscuits yet?”

Evie paid a call on Clotelia, choosing nighttime so that she could go to Clotelia’s own house instead of her father’s. “Well, look who’s here,” said Clotelia, kicking open the screen door. “The girl with the peabrain, I declare.”

“I came to see how to make baking-powder biscuits,” Evie said.

“Ain’t you got no cookbook?”

“You know a cookbook wouldn’t do it right. Drum has a special recipe in mind.”

“Sure. Him and his kind use bacon drippings,” said Clotelia. “Nothing special to that . Oh, come on in.”

She led Evie through the darkened living room, where an old woman with powder-puff hair sat nodding on a vinyl couch. In the kitchen, she sat Evie on a step-stool decaled with panda bears. She whipped up a mound of crumbling dough, mixing it with quick, angry fingers and cutting it out with a drinking glass before Evie even realized it was finished. Meanwhile Evie stared around her to see how other people’s kitchens were kept. “What is that china thing on your stove?” she asked.

“Spoon-rest.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Cost me fifteen cents at a rummage sale.”

“Well, that’s the trouble. Fifteen cents here, a quarter there — you don’t know how they add up. I didn’t know.”

“Should have thought of that before you got married,” Clotelia said.

“Why are you talking like this? I thought you had started liking Drum.”

“I tell you why: go look at your father. You’ve broke his heart.”

“You never cared before how he felt.”

“Nor don’t now,” said Clotelia, “but it kills me to see somebody’s heart broke. When you going to visit him?”

“Well, maybe in a day or two.”

“All right. You got your recipe; important thing is mix it with your fingers. Now go before Brewster comes. You know he don’t like to see you here.”

She fanned Evie out the door with floury hands. Drum was waiting for her in David’s Jeep, with a crowd of little boys closing in like moths to touch the headlights and run their fingers over the canvas top. “Shoo now,” Drum told them. “You get the recipe?”

“I think so,” Evie said.

He drove her home carefully, as if the recipe were something precious and she the shell that held it.

On Wednesday school began. She went, even though Drum couldn’t see the point. “I never finished, and I ain’t sorry, either,” he said.

“But it’s silly to quit my senior year.”

“All right, suit yourself.”

There was Mr. Harrison to argue with too. He was the principal, a close friend of her father’s, but even so he had to tell her about the rule against married students. “We make exceptions, sure,” he said. “Especially when their grades are as good as yours. But not if you, not if there’s a little one on the way, so to speak.”

“No, of course not,” Evie said.

“And then too, it would depend on your discretion. We have a lot of impressionable young girls here. Knowing you as I do, I’m sure you wouldn’t talk about, well, but still—”

“Of course not,” Evie said again.

Even if she did talk, what would she say? She had overheard more in the girls’ gym than she had yet found out with Drum in the papery bedroom. Their love-making was sudden and awkward, complicated by pitch dark and a twisted nightgown and the welter of sheets and blankets that Evie kept covering herself with. Besides, there weren’t many people she could talk to . She arrived every morning at the last minute, having caught a Trailways bus out on the highway and ridden it in to the drugstore terminal. In class, people stared at her and were too polite. She didn’t mind. She had known that getting married would set her apart. And there was always Violet, who ate at her table in the cafeteria and walked her to the drugstore after school. Violet was full of talk. Witnessing a wedding seemed to have the same effect as being godmother at a christening: she was proprietary, enthusiastic. “Evie! Do you cook , just like that, every night without a single lesson? Does he like what you feed him? Have you had your first quarrel? Oh, I can’t wait till I’m married. Nights when I pass lighted houses I think, ‘All those people, so cozy with someone they belong to, and here I am alone.’ I think you’re the luckiest girl in the senior class.”

Coziness, that must be what the world was all about. It was what Violet wanted, and David, who sank onto their borrowed couch and kicked off his shoes and said, “Oh, man, a place all your own. I might get married myself someday.” And most of all it was what Drum wanted, when he rolled over in bed to watch her dress and said, “Ah, don’t go to school. Stay home and make me pancakes. I’ll do more for you than any schoolhouse will.”