Anne Tyler - A Slipping-Down Life

“Oh, aren’t you just bored out of your mind?” Violet asked. “I don’t see how you stand it here.”

“It’s all right,” Evie said.

She kept preparing explanations for Drum — how Miss Simmons was desperate, how the job was only temporary — but she didn’t have to use them. Drum asked no questions at all. On Friday he said, “It’s my late night at the A & P. Can you come early so I can have the car?”

“I have to stay at the library till six,” Evie told him.

“Well, I’ll come pick you up and take you home, then. That all right?”

“I guess so.”

At six o’clock she looked up from the desk to find him leaning in the doorway, looking sleepy. “I’m ready any time you are,” he told her. She had never thought it would be so easy. She wondered if he were just waiting till they were alone to say, “Hey. What’s this? I thought I said I didn’t want you working.” But even after they had left the building, he kept quiet. She had him drop her by the bank to cash her paycheck, and when she returned to the car she handed him the money. “Good, I’m out of cigarettes,” he said. She was relieved, but she had a let-down feeling too.

Meanwhile nothing seemed to have been settled with the Unicorn. Friday night David stopped by the house and said, “I wanted Drum, but maybe you could tell me. What am I supposed to do about this Unicorn business? I been letting it ride; I never thought he’d go this far. Now tomorrow is Saturday and we still don’t know if Drum will change his mind and play there.”

“He hasn’t mentioned it,” Evie said.

“Shall I just go on and say we’ll show? I thought of it. But then Drum could always make a liar of me, and that’s bad for business.” He sat down on the edge of the couch. He was still wearing the suit he sold insurance in, gray wool with a pinstripe. It made him look unusually straight-edged and sure of himself. “You’re around him all week,” he said. “And you know he likes the Unicorn. Even I am sure of that much. So what should I do? You must have some idea.”

“David, I don’t. Really.”

“But if you don’t take the decision out of his hands he might just say no from pride. You know how he is.”

“Well,” Evie said.

“Shall I do it?”

“He is proud.”

“So shouldn’t I go and tell Zack he’s coming?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess you could.”

“Good enough,” David said. “It’ll work out. You’ll see.”

And it did. On Saturday night she talked Drum into his singing clothes, polished his boots and set them beside the door, followed him around holding his guitar out level, like a tray, until he grew nervous about its safety and yanked it away from her. “Why are you doing this to me?” he asked.

“I’m not doing anything to you, I’m saving you from making a mistake. You’ll be sorry later if you throw this job away.”

“Don’t you care how I feel about it?”

“Of course I do, that’s why I’m telling you to go.”

“Well, I won’t,” said Drum. He sat down sharply and laid his guitar on the couch. Already he was almost late. Evie kept sliding her eyes toward her watch, on which time seemed to pass with a hurried, grating motion that she could feel against her skin. “Drum,” she said, “I stuck my neck out for you, I and David both. I got him to patch things up with Zack. Now what will Zack say when you don’t show up?”

“Well, you had no business doing that,” said Drum.

“What else could I do? You always used to like the Unicorn.”

“I got a right to change my mind, ain’t I?”

“Not when there’s nothing to change to.”

Drum was quiet. She thought that she had lost, and already her mind was rearranging itself to accept the defeat when Drum said, “All right. All right.”

“You’re going?”

“I don’t see I have much choice.”

At the Unicorn he played heavily, for once overcoming the drums behind him. He did his speaking out without ceasing to twang the guitar strings, so that his voice fought out from beneath the notes like a swimmer beneath the peaks of waves.

“How did it gray?

“When were they pink?

“They’ve made him a major .

“How long did it take?”

His audience kept silent.

School stopped over the Christmas holidays, but Evie hardly noticed. She went less and less often now. When she did go the sharp rhythm of electric bells and the herding from class to class seemed misted and foreign. Her teachers spoke in loud, evenly paced voices, emphasizing the names of authors and the dates of wars; students scribbled frantically in looseleaf notebooks, taking down every word, but what Evie wrote trailed off in mid-sentence. She often stared into space for long periods of time without a thought in her head. When she collected herself, whole minutes might have passed. There was not even an echo of what the teacher had said, and her classmates, still bent over their notebooks, seemed to have ridden away from her on their scurrying ball-point pens. “Please excuse Evie D. Casey,” Drum wrote in his notes to the principal. “She was not feeling well and couldn’t come to school ‘Wednesday,’ ‘Thursday,’ and ‘Friday.’ Sincerely Bertram O. Casey.” Mr. Harrison put on his clear-rimmed glasses and puzzled out the penciled words, bunchy and downward-sloping. The notes were an embarrassment to him. To have her husband write them seemed a mockery, yet her father could not logically be asked to do it instead.

For Christmas, Evie gave her father a pair of gloves and Drum a sweater. Drum gave her a bottle of perfume—“My Sin,” which pleased her. She put up a little tree and they had Christmas dinner at the Caseys. Then the next day she went back to work in the library. Miss Simmons had offered her a week’s vacation, but Evie felt they couldn’t give up the money.

Evenings, when she came home, the house would be filled with the clutter of Drum’s day — overflowing ash trays, empty record jackets, stray dishes in the sink. “Were you practicing?” she asked him, but he rarely had been. “I don’t know, I just can’t get started right,” he said. “Seems like I am messing around all the time. My fingers forget what they was doing.” He talked more now. His voice tugged constantly on the hem of Evie’s mind, so that she almost forgot how it had been in the old days when he never talked at all. “What is the point in me sitting here strumming? I’ll never get anywhere. I ain’t but nineteen years old and already leading a slipping-down life, and hard rock is fading so pretty soon nobody won’t want it.”

“That’s not true,” Evie said.

“Well, it feels like it is. Feels like I have hit my peak and passed it. I was just a fool to ever hope to be famous.”

“Will you stop that?” Evie said.

She wanted to get pregnant. She had latched on to the idea out of the blue, flying in the face of all logical objections: her job, their lack of money, the countless times that Drum had whispered, in the dark, “Is it safe?” The thought of a baby sent a shaft of yellow light through her mind, like a door opening. Yet getting pregnant was turning out to be easier said than done. Drum in this new mood of his often drifted into sleep while listening to the radio, a weighted, formless figure face-down on the living room couch. “Drum,” she would say, “aren’t you coming to bed?” Then he would stagger up and into the bedroom, where he fell asleep again with all his clothes on. She tugged at his boots, working against the dead heaviness of his legs. She put on her nightgown, and in her mirror the bathroom light lit up her silhouette almost as wide as the billowing gown, a blurred stocky figure broadening at the hips and not narrowing below them. She thought of crash diets, exercycles, charm school. When she lay down, Drum would be snoring. She stayed awake for hours with all her muscles tensed, as if she were afraid to trust her weight to the darkness she rested on.