Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“But we’re getting ready for a test.”

“So what? It’s cold outside. Stay in the house where it’s warm.”

And often she did, more and more as fall set in and the fields were frosted over every morning. Drum worked very little now — just odd jobs at the A & P, and then the two evenings at the Unicorn. If she stayed home their days were unscheduled and almost motionless, with great blocks of time spent on manufactured tasks. Afternoons, Drum practiced his guitar or made up songs. He tested new lyrics in a mumble, almost inaudible— “My girl’s wearing patent leather shoes—” No. “My girl wears—” The guitar strings barely tinkled. At first Evie stayed in the other room, thinking she might get on his nerves, but eventually he would crash down on all the strings at once and say, “Where are you? What are you doing out there , come in and keep me company.” Then she sat on the edge of the bed, watching how the slant of his black hair fell over the guitar just as it had the first night she saw him.

She worried that he would get tired of her. She spent weeks feeling she had to walk on tiptoe and check everything for stupidity before she said it, since she had never imagined that Drum would settle quickly into being married. He would be hard to live with, she had thought. She had seen his moody silences and the way he shrugged off what people said to him. But he turned out to be the easiest person she knew. All he wanted was a wife. He ate what she fed him, kept her company when she washed the dishes, slept with one arm thrown across her chest, and rose in the morning asking for her baking-powder biscuits. Gradually she stopped tiptoeing. She talked about anything that came to mind — a casserole in The Ladies’ Home Journal or a new way to stop runs in stockings — and he kept cheerfully silent and mended chairs. These were the things she was supposed to talk about. Wearing her bibbed apron, tying a scarf over her pincurls, she began to feel as sure and as comfortable as any of the feather-light girls floating down high-school corridors.

“All I saw was a cat, slinking on a fence,” Drum called out at the Unicorn.

“Will he be there tonight?”

“Yeah!” his audience said.

“Will I be there tonight?”

He wore black. He was cool and glittering. Evie sat smiling below him in a baggy brown skirt and a sweater that rode up around her waist.

“My girl is at a hymn-sing .

“What happened to double ferris wheels?”

“Yeah!” they said again.

She still couldn’t understand what that speaking out was about.

She had to darn socks now instead of throwing them away, and she clipped recipes for meatless meals and carried her lunch to school in a brown paper bag. They never paid the rent on time. “There is nothing for it,” said Drum, “but to get me a part-time job. I wish now I hadn’t fallen out with my daddy. Pumping gas was not too enjoyable but the pay was sure good, and where else would they let me work such loose hours?”

“Make peace with him, then,” Evie said.

“I don’t much feel like it.”

“Well, I didn’t say apologize. Just get on speaking terms. We’ll have them to dinner with my father, settle all this family business at one sitting.”

“Nah, it’d never work out,” Drum said.

“We could give it a try, though.”

She set the dinner for the second Sunday in November. That Friday in school she invited her father, choosing one of those moments when they met in the hall and stood awkwardly searching for something to say. Then she telephoned Drum’s mother from the drugstore. “Thank you, but we’ll not trouble you by coming,” Mrs. Casey said, and hung up. Evie dialed again. The receiver was lifted on the first ring. “Mrs. Casey, we were expecting you,” Evie said. That was the only argument she could think of, but it seemed to be enough. “Oh, well, then,” Mrs. Casey said, “I reckon we can fit it in. I don’t believe in letting people down.”

Evie fixed a casserole a full day ahead: tuna fish and canned peas. Early Sunday morning she washed all the ash trays and filmed them with floor wax, the way Good Housekeeping had told her to. She refused to let Drum use them after that; he had to carry around a Mason jar lid. “This is getting on my nerves,” he said. “Can’t you just relax?”

But she couldn’t. She worried that her father might be dismayed by the house, or that Mrs. Casey would start a fight. All these weeks she had been half expecting an annulment to come through (a scroll of parchment, she pictured it, stamped with the state seal and “Esse quam videri,” arriving in a mailing tube to prove that she was nobody’s wife after all) and now she wondered if Mrs. Casey planned to bring it in person. “Here. A little housewarming gift.” She remembered exactly the flowing tone of Mrs. Casey’s voice, soft but pushing steadily forward, and the rhythm it set up with the other voices trying to survive beside it. What if an argument started somehow between Mrs. Casey and Evie’s father? Her father would be beaten to the ground. She straightened the table settings nervously, stood back to squint at them, and then straightened them again.

Her father arrived first. When she opened the door to him he stood folded into his thin overcoat with his hands in his pockets. He entered stooping, as if he were coming to inspect a child’s playhouse. “Well,” he said. “So this is where you live.” Then he smiled and kissed her, looking at the floor.

“Do you like it?” Evie asked him.

“It’s a little cold, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s very comfortable.”

“What do you use for heat?”

“We have a very good oil stove. There, see? Over there.”

“Oh, yes,” said her father. But he still didn’t look.

Then Drum’s parents came, and Drum appeared from the bedroom buttoning his shirt cuffs. He stood still while his mother kissed him on one cheek. Mrs. Casey wore a feathered hat and a rayon dress with a draped bosom; Mr. Casey was in a blue suit and white spectator shoes. He was sharp-boned and whiskery, with very round bright eyes. Nothing like Drum. Evie had never seen him before, but instead of introducing them Mrs. Casey just tipped her head toward him and he nodded gravely. “We like to got lost,” Mrs. Casey said. “Well. I was wondering what kind of house you all had. My, it surely is — I understand you teach, Mr. Decker.” The neckline of her dress pouched outward, framing a V of skin reddened by the constant pinching motion of her fingers. Gardenia perfume powdered the air around her. She carried no documents.

At dinner they all outdid each other in compliments and small courtesies. They circulated serving dishes, spoon side outward; they leapt to pass the butter to whoever asked for it and they filled silences with hopeful questions. Like salesmen, they over-used each other’s names. “Mr. Decker, have you lived in Farinia all your life?” “Evie tells me you run a service station, Mr. Casey.” “Do you bowl, Mr. Decker?” Meanwhile Evie watched anxiously as her food disappeared into people’s mouths, and Drum ate in silence with his face calm and distant.

The only tension was over the contest to be best-behaved. Evie’s father won. He said, “Evie, Drum, I’m giving you a late wedding present. Well, nothing very fancy, but I’m buying myself a new car. Would you like the VW?”

“Boy. Sure would,” said Drum. “We got the devil’s own time getting anywhere.”

“That’s what I thought. I know that Evie isn’t, doesn’t keep a perfect attendance record these days. Not that it’s any of my business, but I figured a car might help.”