Anne Tyler: A Slipping-Down Life

Evie Decker was not musical. You could tell that just from the way she looked — short and wide, heavy-footed. She listened to marches without beating time, forgot the tune to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and moved soddenly around the high school gym in a bumbling two-step. At noon, while Evie munched a sandwich, boys from the band played Dixieland in a corner of the cafeteria. Sharp brass notes pierced the air above the tables; they darted past like red and yellow arrows. Evie ate on, a plump drab girl in a brown sweater that was running to balls at the elbows.

So when she invited Violet Hayes (her only friend) to a rock show at the Stardust Movie Theater, Violet couldn’t understand it. “What would you go to a thing like that for?” she said. “Are you serious? I don’t believe you even know what a rock show is.”

“Well, I do listen to the radio,” Evie said.

And she did. She listened all the time. With no company but her father and the cleaning girl (and both of them busy doing other things, not really company at all) she had whole hours of silence to fill. She turned her radio on in the early morning and let it run while she stumbled into her clothes and unsnarled her hair. In the afternoons, advertisements for liver pills and fertilizers wove themselves in among her homework assignments. She fell asleep to a program called “Sweetheart Time,” on which a disc jockey named Herbert read off a list of names in twos to dedicate each song. “For Buddy and Jane, for Sally and Carl, for George and Sandra, he loves her very much.…” Herbert was an old man with a splintery voice, the only disc jockey the station had. He read the dedications haltingly, as if they puzzled him. “For Paula and Sam, he hopes she’ll forgive last night …” and there would be the rustle of a paper lowered and a pause for him to stare at it. At the end of a song he said, “That was the Rowing — the Rolling Stones.” His faltering made him sound sad and bewildered, but no more bewildered than Evie.

She listened carefully. She lay on her back in the dark, wearing a great long seersucker nightgown, and frowned at the chinks of light that shone through the radio’s seams. Sometimes the names were familiar to her — couples she had watched floating hand in hand down school corridors in matching shirts, or girls called Zelda-Nell or Shallamoor, so that they couldn’t hope to pass unnoticed. When she knew the names she paid close attention to the songs that followed, ferreting out the words with a kind of possessiveness but ignoring the tunes. Pop songs and hard rock and soul music tumbled out of the cracked brown portable, but the only difference she heard between them was that the words of the pop songs were easier to understand.

One evening in February there was a guest on the program. He came right after the “News of the Hour.” “I have here a Mr. Bertram Casey,” said Herbert. “Better known as, known as Drumstrings.” He coughed and shuffled some papers. “It’s an honor to have you with us, Mr. Drumstrings.”

No one answered.

Evie was sitting on the bed, twisting her hair into scratchy little pincurls. When the silence grew noticeable she took a bobby pin from her mouth and looked at the radio. All she heard was static. Finally Herbert said, “Well. This is the beginning of a new feature on ‘Sweetheart Time’: interviews. May I ask if you are a native North Carolinian, Mr. Drumstrings?”

Someone said, “Not for long I won’t be.”

His voice was cool and motionless, like a stone plunked into a pool. Herbert coughed again.

“Whereabouts in North Carolina?” he asked.

“Farinia.”

“Farinia, yes. Off of Highway—”

“But I’m leaving there,” said Drumstrings Casey.

“All right. Where is it you’re going?”

“A city, some city. It ain’t quite clear yet. I aim to cut records and play night clubs, and if I once wiggle out of here I’m never coming back again, not even for Christmas. If my family gets to missing me they can come to where I’m at, I’ll buy them a house with white telephones and a swimming pool.”

“That’s very nice,” said Herbert. “Have you done much recording yet?”

“No.”

“What are the names of your, um, records?”

“There ain’t none.”

“Oh. Well, your style, then. Would you care to describe it for us?”

“Style?”

“Your style.”

“Style, ain’t no style.”

“Well, what, what do you do , exactly?”

This pause was even longer than the first one. Second after second ticked away in dead air. “If you don’t know what I do,” said Drumstrings finally, “then how come you got me on your program?”

Herbert mumbled something.

“What’s that?”

“Because they told me to, I said. Heavens, boy, just answer the questions. Let’s get this over with.”

“Oh,” Drumstrings said. “All right.”

“Only thing they gave me was a little scrap of paper with your name on it.”

“Well, don’t blame me. I just show up where I’m asked for.”

“All right, all right. Where was I?”

“You want to know what I do. I sing and play guitar. Rock.”

“You have one of those groups,” Herbert said.

“I sing alone. All I got is a drummer, but I don’t know about him.”

“How’s that?”

“He kind of trods the beat.”

“Oh, yes,” said Herbert.

There was a series of tiny explosions; someone was tapping his fingers.

“You could ask me where I get my material,” Drumstrings said.

“Where do you get your material?”

“I make it up.”

“That’s very interesting.”

“Some is other people’s, but most is my own. I make it up in my room. I lie on my bed arguing with the strings, like, and sooner or later something comes out. Then my fingers get to hammering, reason they call me Drumstrings. How many people do you know could carry a set of drums singlehanded with one little old electric guitar? Lots will say you can’t do it. I can. I don’t go along with all them others. Well: how my songs start. Words come out. Things I hear. ‘Oh, Lord, why can’t you ever come home on time like decent people do.…’ ” He was singing now, and his fingers kept a beat upon a hard surface. The suddenness of it surprised Herbert into clearing his throat, but Evie listened without changing expression, chewing absently on the rubber tip of a bobby pin. “Nothing more to it,” said Drumstrings. “Just putting hard rhythm to what floats around in parlors, just hauling in words by their tails. Nothing more.”

“Is that right,” said Herbert.

Drumstrings Casey was silent again.

“Do you think we — well, I guess we covered near about everything now. Folks, say good-bye to—”

“Good-bye,” the cool voice said.

“And give him a nice hand.”

But there was no one to give him a hand, of course — only the Beatles, starting up brokenly in the middle of a line, hurried-sounding, without any list of names to lead them in.

“Do you know a singer named Drumstrings Casey?” Evie asked the boy behind her in algebra class. He was a bongo player. Sometimes she heard him whistling soundlessly at the back of her neck, tapping out the beat on his desk and moving his shoulders in rhythm. But, “Never heard of him,” he said.

“He’s a rock-and-roll singer.”

“Rock-and-roll is out now.”

“Oh, I see,” said Evie.

She walked most places alone. She carried her books clutched to her chest, rounding her shoulders. Her face, which was pudgy and formless, poked itself too far forward. And like most heavy people, she had long ago stopped expecting anything of her clothes. Her coat was old-fashioned, wide-shouldered, falling in voluminous uneven folds around her calves. The white collar she wore to brighten her complexion had a way of twisting sideways and riding up her neck, exposing a strip of skin above the collar of her coat. When classmates met up with her they passed in a hurry, barely noticing her. Evie never spoke to them. She bent to pull up a swallowed sock, or tied the knotted laces of her oxfords. Then she walked on.