Anne Tyler: A Slipping-Down Life

“Maybe it’s too hard to set them up each time. What difference does it make?”

“Well, still,” Evie said.

They played a song called “My Girl Left Home.” All Evie understood were the first four words. Halfway through, the music slowed and Drumstrings frowned.

“Hold on , “he said.

The audience stopped talking.

“She left, you say?”

He hit one note several times over.

“Where were you? Did you see her go?

“The meter man’s coming .

“Buy the tickets. Wait in the lobby .

“Have you noticed all the prices going up?”

“My girl left home!” the drummer called. As if that had reminded him, Casey hit all the strings at once and continued with his song. Here and there conversation picked up again, but a few girls stayed quiet and kept their eyes on the guitar strings.

Fay-Jean danced with a boy chewing bubble gum. At the end of the first song she rested her hand on his shoulder and talked about something, steadily. Then a new piece began and another boy took the first one’s place. She talked to him too, looking out toward the audience as if what she said took no thought. Her feet wove a curved, slithering pattern on the bare floorboards. The music seemed familiar. It was probably the song Drumstrings Casey had played at the rock show; but then when he slowed his guitar and spoke out, where was the man picking berries and the woman emptying trashcans? This time, he told about someone throwing soda-bottle caps at the moon. And then a bicycle.

“Basket on the front. Shiny in the dark .

“If I tell you again, will you listen this time?

“Never mind.”

The song went on. Evie fumbled in her handbag for her camera, and then without allowing herself to think ahead she stood up and aimed it at the platform. Casey looked out beyond her. “Casey!” she called. He turned, still playing, not seeing. When the flashbulb went off he blinked and his eyes snagged on her. “Oho, she lied,” he sang, and studied her white, shaky face. Then she sat down. He looked out beyond her again. Her hands were so tight upon the camera that the circulation seemed to have stopped.

“Evie, I declare,” Violet said.

Evie said nothing.

He sang someone else’s song next, one she had heard before on “Sweetheart Time.” When his guitar slowed, the drummer beat louder, prodding him to hurry, and Drumstrings didn’t speak out after all. At the end he bent his head slightly. It must have been a bow; everyone clapped.

After that he walked off the platform and past Evie’s table. An envelope of cold air traveled with him, as if he had just come in from a winter night. Evie heard his denim jacket brush Violet’s chair, and when she felt that it was safe she turned to look after him. But he had not passed by, after all. He stood behind her with his chin tilted up, his eyes on her beneath half-shut lids.

“You from some newspaper?” he asked.

“No,” said Evie.

“Oh,” he said, and then he walked on out.

“ ‘Oh,’ he said. Was it ‘oh’? Or ‘Well.’ I should have had an answer planned.”

“It’s not something you would have expected, after all,” Violet said. She was spending the night with Evie, up in her flowered bedroom where the radio still spun music out. They were the only ones awake in the house. They had come home late, packed three abreast in the front seat of Fay-Jean’s father’s Studebaker, while a bushel basket full of tools rattled around in the back. Now Violet sat yawning and blinking as she unpinned her hair, but Evie was wide awake. She wandered around the room fully dressed, snapping pictures. “I want to use up the film,” she said.

“Wait till tomorrow, why don’t you?”

“I want to drop it off at the drugstore tomorrow. Is Lowry’s open on Sunday? Do you think that his picture will turn out halfway decent?”

“Oh, I imagine so.” Violet yawned again and reached for her comb.

“Once I was standing up, I couldn’t think what to call him,” Evie said. “Bertram or Drumstrings.” She photographed her bulletin board, hung with programs and newspaper clippings and a hall pass handwritten by a man teacher whom she had liked the year before. Then she said, “It’s those quotes that confuse me. ‘Drumstrings’ in quotation marks. Which does that mean I should call him by?”

“Like Nat ‘King’ Cole.”

“Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten. What did they call him?”

“Nat.”

“Then I should have called him ‘Bertram.’ But I could never do that. I’d feel silly saying ‘Bertram.’ ” She snapped her own picture in the full-length mirror. “I was so scared, I was shaking,” she said.

“I know. I saw.”

“My hands were shaking. You mean it showed?”

“Well, I was right next to you.”

“It wasn’t something I had thought up first, you know. It was spur-of-the-moment. ‘Why not?’ I thought, and did it. Just stood up and did it.” She turned toward Violet, who had lain down on the other side of the bed. “Impulse . That’s what it was.”

“Right,” Violet said with her eyes closed.

“If I’d thought before, I would have fallen on my face. Or dropped the camera. Or lost my voice. Impulse was the clue. Are you listening?”

There was no answer. Evie fitted another flashbulb into her camera and snapped Violet’s sleeping face.

Fay-Jean Lindsay was always dancing, and sometimes going off to huddle in dark cars with boys who only showed up once. She wasn’t the kind to chauffeur two girls around indefinitely. So Evie and Violet started borrowing their fathers’ cars, taking turns at it, and coming to the Unicorn by themselves every Saturday night. They still sat at Fay-Jean’s table, although generally her chair was empty and her purse left spilled open beside her beer mug. They wore skirts and blouses now, and waved when they passed the policeman at the door. Evie’s skirts were dark, to slim her down. Her blouses were white cotton that turned gray and limp halfway through the evening. Violet’s skirts were rose and purple and chartreuse. She seemed to have taken the place over for her own — striding between chairs like a huge, stately queen, serene in the face of whistles and catcalls, ordering draft beer by the pitcher and pouring it expertly down the side of her mug so that there would be no foam. She reminded Evie of the lady chaperones she had learned about in Spanish class, except that Violet did no chaperoning: Fay-Jean returned from long absences with unknown partners, tilting against their shoulders like a solemn rag doll, and Drumstrings Casey slid his hips in easy circles under Violet’s calm gaze. She said she liked this kind of life. “I should be a barmaid,” she said. When a boy at the next table said, “Hey, fat mama,” she threw back her head and laughed.

Only Evie seemed uncomfortable there. It was she who planned ahead for the evenings, rinsed her hair in malt vinegar and mourned a broken fingernail and begged Violet not to disgrace her by wearing her wiglet. Yet in the Unicorn she sat slumped behind her beer, chewing her thumb and scowling. She turned often to study the faces of other customers, especially when Drumstrings Casey was playing. Who was that blond who hushed everyone as soon as Casey came on the platform? Wouldn’t you know that Evie could never have anything for herself without a lot of other people butting in and certain to win in the end? As if her coming here were a mysterious sort of publicity, the audience grew larger every Saturday and the clapping louder. “There, you see. I know what’s what,” she told Violet. “Now everybody’s catching on to him.” But she didn’t look happy about it. She watched with a thoughtful, measuring look on her face when he ruffled a strange girl’s hair on the way up to the platform.