A Slipping-Down Life

11

For twenty-four dollars a month they rented a tar-paper shack on the outskirts of Pulqua. A series of tenant farmers had once lived there. Tobacco fields stretched away from it on all sides, and the gravel road in front was traveled by barefoot children and mule wagons. Evie thought it was a wonderful place to start out in. The tenant farmers had been too poor to leave even a strip of carpeting or a one-eared sugar bowl; the house was blank, waiting for Evie to make her mark. Nothing she could do would hurt it.

She plastered the papery walls with posters advertising the Unicorn. She spent eighteen dollars at the dimestore, entering the amount carefully in a budget book, and lugged home tea towels and cutlery and a set of dishes the bluish color of skim milk. Their furniture came from Evie’s father’s house. They had moved it in a U-Haul-It the afternoon of the wedding, because they couldn’t afford a night in a motel.

First her father said, “Married?” Then he sat down on the porch steps and said, “Married. I don’t believe it.” He was slumped and hollow-faced, exposed before Drum and David and Violet, whom Evie had brought, without thinking, up the front walk with her. They stood in a semicircle around him and frowned at the ground. “Have you ever met Drum?” Evie asked finally.

“No, I don’t believe I have,” her father said. He rose and held his hand out, not quite looking into Drum’s eyes. He could have threatened annulment, but he didn’t. He didn’t seem to have the energy to think it up.

“And this is David Elliott,” Evie told him. “Violet you know.”

But her father wasn’t paying attention.

“Are you the rock singer?” he asked Drum.

“Yes, sir.”

“Casey.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I don’t understand. I was going to take her to a plastic surgeon; none of this was necessary.”

“Sir?”

“Oh, it’s all beyond me,” Evie’s father said.

“Mr. Decker,” said Drum, “Evie and I will need furniture. Do you reckon we could borrow what you have extra?”

“Well,” said her father. He turned and went into the house. Would he lock the door behind him, say he never wanted to set eyes upon them again? But when he was inside he said, “Take what you want, then. Evie will show you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Drum said.

His mother was different. She clutched at Drum’s shoulders and said, “You what? You fool. What would make you go and do a thing like that?” And Evie stood in the doorway, wondering where to put her hands. She hadn’t wanted to come in the first place. “You said you were never going back,” she had told Drum. “Why now? Why drag me with you?”

“Because I want to show her I’m settled and done with her,” Drum said.

He stood motionless in his mother’s grip, although she was trying to shake him. “It was you always telling me I didn’t appreciate her,” he said.

“Well, I didn’t mean marry her.”

“It’s done now. Do we have to get in a swivet over it?”

“In a swivet, you say. My life is broke in pieces and you tell me not to get in a swivet. You, Evie Decker. Don’t you look at me so smug. I’ll get every lawyer in town after you. I’ll annul it, I’ll have your marriage license tore up by the highest judge there is. Oh, where is your father when I need him the most?”

She grabbed the hand of one of Drum’s little tow-headed brothers, who shifted his feet and grinned.

Drum said, “Mom, can I have the record player from my room?”

Who would have thought that Drum Casey would be so homey? He wanted cushions for all the chairs and curtains for the windows, a checkered skirt for the stilt-legged kitchen sink and a frilly bibbed apron for Evie. During the first three days they were married he spent his time installing can openers, toothbrush holders, and towel rods. He directed their settling in as if he had had in mind, for years, a blueprint for a home of his own complete to the last detail. “That easy chair goes in the bedroom, for when I’m making up songs. No more lying around on a bed to play my guitar. The other chair goes in the corner of the living room. We want our furniture in corners. We want to sit snug in corners when we’re home of an evening. Do you know how to make biscuits yet?”

Evie paid a call on Clotelia, choosing nighttime so that she could go to Clotelia’s own house instead of her father’s. “Well, look who’s here,” said Clotelia, kicking open the screen door. “The girl with the peabrain, I declare.”

“I came to see how to make baking-powder biscuits,” Evie said.

“Ain’t you got no cookbook?”

“You know a cookbook wouldn’t do it right. Drum has a special recipe in mind.”

“Sure. Him and his kind use bacon drippings,” said Clotelia. “Nothing special to that. Oh, come on in.”

She led Evie through the darkened living room, where an old woman with powder-puff hair sat nodding on a vinyl couch. In the kitchen, she sat Evie on a step-stool decaled with panda bears. She whipped up a mound of crumbling dough, mixing it with quick, angry fingers and cutting it out with a drinking glass before Evie even realized it was finished. Meanwhile Evie stared around her to see how other people’s kitchens were kept. “What is that china thing on your stove?” she asked.

“Spoon-rest.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Cost me fifteen cents at a rummage sale.”

“Well, that’s the trouble. Fifteen cents here, a quarter there — you don’t know how they add up. I didn’t know.”

“Should have thought of that before you got married,” Clotelia said.

“Why are you talking like this? I thought you had started liking Drum.”

“I tell you why: go look at your father. You’ve broke his heart.”

“You never cared before how he felt.”

“Nor don’t now,” said Clotelia, “but it kills me to see somebody’s heart broke. When you going to visit him?”

“Well, maybe in a day or two.”

“All right. You got your recipe; important thing is mix it with your fingers. Now go before Brewster comes. You know he don’t like to see you here.”

She fanned Evie out the door with floury hands. Drum was waiting for her in David’s Jeep, with a crowd of little boys closing in like moths to touch the headlights and run their fingers over the canvas top. “Shoo now,” Drum told them. “You get the recipe?”

“I think so,” Evie said.

He drove her home carefully, as if the recipe were something precious and she the shell that held it.

On Wednesday school began. She went, even though Drum couldn’t see the point. “I never finished, and I ain’t sorry, either,” he said.

“But it’s silly to quit my senior year.”

“All right, suit yourself.”

There was Mr. Harrison to argue with too. He was the principal, a close friend of her father’s, but even so he had to tell her about the rule against married students. “We make exceptions, sure,” he said. “Especially when their grades are as good as yours. But not if you, not if there’s a little one on the way, so to speak.”

“No, of course not,” Evie said.

“And then too, it would depend on your discretion. We have a lot of impressionable young girls here. Knowing you as I do, I’m sure you wouldn’t talk about, well, but still—”

“Of course not,” Evie said again.

Even if she did talk, what would she say? She had overheard more in the girls’ gym than she had yet found out with Drum in the papery bedroom. Their love-making was sudden and awkward, complicated by pitch dark and a twisted nightgown and the welter of sheets and blankets that Evie kept covering herself with. Besides, there weren’t many people she could talk to. She arrived every morning at the last minute, having caught a Trailways bus out on the highway and ridden it in to the drugstore terminal. In class, people stared at her and were too polite. She didn’t mind. She had known that getting married would set her apart. And there was always Violet, who ate at her table in the cafeteria and walked her to the drugstore after school. Violet was full of talk. Witnessing a wedding seemed to have the same effect as being godmother at a christening: she was proprietary, enthusiastic. “Evie! Do you cook, just like that, every night without a single lesson? Does he like what you feed him? Have you had your first quarrel? Oh, I can’t wait till I’m married. Nights when I pass lighted houses I think, ‘All those people, so cozy with someone they belong to, and here I am alone.’ I think you’re the luckiest girl in the senior class.”

Coziness, that must be what the world was all about. It was what Violet wanted, and David, who sank onto their borrowed couch and kicked off his shoes and said, “Oh, man, a place all your own. I might get married myself someday.” And most of all it was what Drum wanted, when he rolled over in bed to watch her dress and said, “Ah, don’t go to school. Stay home and make me pancakes. I’ll do more for you than any schoolhouse will.”

“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.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” Evie said. The afternoon was too perilous to bother arguing about her attendance record. Her father sat with his fingers together, the tip of his nose whitening as it always did under strain. Mrs. Casey was pleating the V of skin again.

“Lord knows we don’t have extra cars to hand out,” she said, “or anything like that; we’re only simple folk. But your daddy here was thinking you might want your old job back, Bertram. Plenty would give their right arms for that job.”

“Well, I could use it, I reckon,” Drum said. “Sure.”

The three parents sat side by side, keeping their backs very straight, as if the couch were something breakable.

At three o’clock they left. Mrs. Casey said, “Well, I surely did — Obed, where is my purse? Now, don’t be a stranger, Bertram. You come by whenever you like — even if you just get lonesome, or hungry for a snack. Thank you for the sweet lunch, Evie.”

“Joyed it,” said Mr. Casey.

Evie’s father carefully buttoned all the buttons of his coat. He kissed Evie on the cheek and shook Drum’s hand. “My car will be coming next Wednesday,” he said. “Thursday I’ll give you the keys to the VW. Won’t you come by and see me sometime?”

“Oh, of course,” said Evie. “It’s just that these last few weeks have been so busy. Getting settled and all.”

“You could come for supper some night. Will you do that?”

“Of course,” Evie said.

She stood beside Drum in the doorway, shivering slightly, watching the two cars grow smaller. “Now,” Drum said. “It’s over and done with.”

She nodded.

“And hot dog, we got us a car. Ain’t that something? I always did like stick-shifts.”

“I believe that’s all you can think about,” Evie said.

“Huh?”

“Well, you could at least have said thank you. Or talked to him more. Oh, I know that car, it smells woolly like his school suit and I will think about that every time I get in it. Couldn’t you just tell him you appreciated it?”

“Nothing wrong with a woolly smell,” said Drum.

“No,” Evie said, giving up. So when he suddenly tightened his arms around her, pulling her close, it came as a surprise.

“Don’t fret, I’m here,” he said.

Beneath his shirt she felt his rib cage, thin and warm, and she heard the steady beating of his heart.