Anne Tyler: A Slipping-Down Life

“Half a beer.”

“But then, why would you do it?”

Evie spread her fingers in front of her and studied them like a deck of cards while she chose her words. “Now, I’m not trying to be rude,” she said finally, “but it was my face. It is. It’s my business how it looks.”

“You’d feel awfully silly with ‘Casey’ across your forehead all your life.”

“I’d feel sillier having it erased the day after I did it,” said Evie.

“Well, that’s the worst of it. You can’t erase it the next day, you have to wait until it heals. Could you maybe cut bangs, meanwhile?”

“No,” said Evie.

Her father rubbed the pouches under his eyes, smoothing and re-pleating them. “Evie, honey,” he said. “There are plenty of nice boys in the world. Just give yourself time. You’re a sweet-looking girl, after all, and when you lose a — when you’re older, boys are going to fall all over themselves for you, take my word. You’re only sixteen now.”

“Seventeen,” said Evie.

“Seventeen. So why should you ruin your life for some singer in a roadhouse? Listen. The doctor’s giving you a tranquilizer. You have a good night’s sleep, and tomorrow I’ll come get you and we’ll talk it over. Things will look different in the morning. You’ll see.”

Evie said nothing. She rolled the strip of gauze into a small cylinder.

“Well, good night, Evie.”

He clicked off the lamp. Then at the door he stopped and turned. “Another thing,” he said. “Tell that Casey boy not to bother coming around again. I won’t allow you to see any more of him.”

Evie looked up, with two small pleased folds beginning at the outer corners of her eyes. But by then he had jammed his hands back in his pockets and walked away.

They gave her some sort of pill but she spent a bad night anyway, tossing beneath a light, frowning sleep. Strange beds bothered her. Splinters of dreams came and went, leaving only echoes of themselves to remember in the morning. And when she awoke, all her muscles ached. She sat up and looked out toward the corridor, where specks of sunlight floated slowly above the polished red floor. “Nurse!” she tried. No one answered.

Somewhere in her waking, the thought of her forehead floated by like yesterday’s surprise, some new possession which would have to be confirmed again today. She slid off the high bed and padded over to the bureau mirror, keeping her nightgown hitched shut behind her.

Her forehead was an angry doll’s, crisscrossed with black stitches. The word “Casey,” reflected right side around, formed itself only after several seconds, during which she stood stunned and motionless with her mouth barely open. Later, maybe, it would be immediately legible. But today the threads turned her forehead first into a jagged design, a grayish-white crazy-quilt covering the space between her hairline and her straight brown eyebrows, which were flaked with dried blood. All her other features seemed to have drained away. Her lips were pale, and her eyes had lightened. Her nose looked flatter. For years she had cherished the few surprises hidden away in her shapelessness: a narrow nose, slender wrists, and perfect oval fingernails. Now, still looking into the mirror, she held up both wrists and turned the blue-veined, glistening insides of them toward the glass. Then she backed away, very slowly. But when she was as far as she could get, pressed against the wall behind her, the letters still stood out ragged and black. “Casey.” A voice inside her read the name out, coolly: “Casey.”

Something on wheels was coming down the hallway. Evie climbed back into bed and sat there, with her wrists still upturned in her lap, while her heart began thudding at an uneven rate. There was no way she could steady it. She breathed deeply, gazed at a blank wall, straightened her back. Her heart kept racing and then pausing, collecting itself to race again.

A nurse wheeled in a cart laid with pills in paper cups and a jarful of thermometers. “Here we are,” she said. She looked over at Evie, with a thermometer in mid-air, and opened her mouth but said nothing. Her face had the same pale, startled look that Evie’s had had in the mirror. But when she spoke again all she said was, “Have a nice night?” She slid the thermometer into Evie’s mouth and reached for a wrist. Evie was too intent on her heartbeat to answer. She went on staring at the wall, keeping her lips conscientiously tight around the thermometer. In a minute, now, the nurse would know from her pulse that something was wrong. She would drop the wrist and run to fetch doctors, oxygen tents, digitalis — taking the responsibility from Evie, letting her rest finally while someone else steadied her heartbeat. But when the minute was up, the nurse had still said nothing. Evie stopped looking at the wall. She found the nurse’s eyes just brushing her, very briefly, and then settling on the thermometer which she plucked out and shook down with no more than a glance at it. “Breakfast’ll be along,” she said. She set the thermometer on a paper napkin and wheeled the cart out.

If she lay still, Evie kept hearing the blood thudding unevenly through her ears. She drowned the sound by struggling out of bed, trailing one sheet halfway across the floor and limping on the foot that was tangled in the sheet’s folds. Her hospital gown bellied out like a sail when she bent to free herself. Her hair fell forward in dark, rigid strings, matted with blood. After she had kicked the door shut she dressed in a flurry of deliberate noises: clicking snaps, shuffling sandals, slamming drawers as she looked through the bureau for a stray comb. All she found were a box of Wipettes and a booklet called “Our Daily Bread.” She shut the final drawer and then raised her head, listening. Her heartbeat was regular again. Or if not regular, at least un-noticeable. In the mirror a steady pulse quivered one point of her collar, and a black-pointed design was plastered above it like a label.

After breakfast, a nurse’s aide appeared in the doorway and folded her hands across her pinafore. “Photographer’s coming,” she said. “You’re going to be famous.”

Evie sat on the foot of her bed, snapping her watchband over and over and waiting for someone to remember she was there. “Famous?” she said. “What? Photographer?”

“They heard what you did,” said the nurse’s aide. She spun out of the room. Just before she disappeared she remembered to say, “That singer guy, too. He’s coming.”

“What singer?”

“Yezac.”

Evie got off the bed. It was better to be standing. No, sitting. But there was no place to sit except the bed, whose sheets were still strung out across the room. She stood in the middle of the floor with her hands clasped behind her, straight-armed, shifting from one foot to another. She felt like a package at a post office, stamped and addressed, and the heel-taps of the addressee were clicking closer and closer down the hall. She could hear him clearly now. She heard how the swing in his walk created silences between his steps: click, space, click, while whoever was with him luff-luffed steadily along in soft-soled shoes. The photographer, a small bald man hung with several strapped objects, arrived in the doorway first. “Paul Ogle, Pulqua Times,” he said. Then he crossed the room to the far corner, holding a light meter to Evie’s chin on the way. And there, finally, came Drumstrings Casey. He wore his black denim and his high leather boots. He had on sunglasses made of a silvery black that mirrored Evie perfectly and turned his own face, what you could see of it, into something as hard and as opaque as the glasses themselves. “Shades off, Casey,” the photographer said. “I want a reaction.”