A Slipping-Down Life

10

She awoke from a dream in which she slipped through slimy clay, trying to escape a reckless woman driver in an army car. It was nearly ten o’clock in the morning. The second hand of her alarm clock spun off circle after circle while she lay watching, unable to move her eyes or gather her thoughts together. A steeple bell rang. The Sunday paper slapped against the screen. Her father passed her door on his way to church, and she wondered if he would find Drum asleep in the swing. But even that was not enough to unfasten her eyes from the clock.

Long after her father’s car had driven off, she heard the front door slam. Drum’s boots crossed the downstairs hall. “You there?” he called.

Evie didn’t answer.

“Evie?”

“All right, I’m coming,” Evie said.

Lying still so long without breakfast had made her dizzy. Black and blue buttons swarmed toward her when she climbed out of bed. As soon as her eyes had cleared she stepped into last night’s clothes and then went to the mirror to unravel her pincurls. How would she curl her hair if she were married? Clotelia’s magazines said no man liked to see his wife in curlers. The word “wife” hit her strangely, stilling her fingers for a moment. It was more definite than “married,” which had merely floated shapelessly in her mind since the night before. She saw herself in a housecoat, mixing orange juice; saying no to a vacuum-cleaner salesman; wondering if it were time to start supper. None of the situations seemed likely. What Drum had come for, she thought, was to tell her he had changed his mind. She would never be a wife, after all. She felt so certain of it that she descended the stairs blank-faced, shut against everything, and when she saw him lounging in the living room doorway she failed to smile.

But all Drum said was, “Could you fix some breakfast?”

“All right,” she said.

She fried eggs and bacon while he leaned on the stove and watched. The shut feeling was still with her, causing a brisk competence which she had never had before. Eggs plopped neatly in the frying pan, and she laid down strips of bacon in exactly parallel lines. Then Drum said, “No biscuits?”

“You’ll have to do without,” she told him. “I don’t know how to make them.”

“Can’t you get Clotelia to show you? Breakfast is not breakfast without no biscuits.”

“Clotelia isn’t here today.”

“I mean later. For the future. I’m used to having biscuits every morning.”

“Oh. Later,” Evie said. She let out a long breath and laid the spatula on the stove top. “Well, sure, I guess so.”

“That’s the girl,” Drum said.

She left him to eat his breakfast alone while she fried more eggs for herself. She had turned hungry suddenly. While the eggs popped and sputtered in the frying pan, Drum finished everything on his plate, sopping it up with slice after slice of white bread. “I’ve got the Jeep tomorrow,” he said with his mouth full.

“You do?”

“David’s lending it to me. I asked him this morning. We can drive to South Carolina and be back in time for supper.”

“South Carolina?”

Drum looked up from his plate. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Did you forget all about it? Last night you said you would run off with me. I was counting on it.”

“But South Carolina. I can’t go there.”

“Why not?”

“Well, Dillon, you mean. Where everybody goes when they have to get married, all the trash goes. You expect me to run off to Dillon?”

“Well, sure,” said Drum.

“No, we have to go somewhere else.”

“But there ain’t nowhere else. Dillon’s the only place you don’t have to wait for three days.”

“I’m sorry, I just can’t help it,” said Evie. Which was exactly what she meant; she had had no idea that she was going to object to Dillon. Words popped forth ready-made, strung from her mouth like comic-strip balloons. “I would rather wait for the license, even. Anything. Do you think I want to go around the rest of my life with a South Carolina marriage certificate? Oh, you just have no respect, Drum Casey.”

“Well, my Lord,” said Drum.

“Besides, we’d have to lie about my age anyway. Even in Dillon. We might as well do it in Tar City, or Raleigh.”

“We’d have to lie more in Tar City,” said Drum. “I would be underage too, if we went there.”

“I don’t care.”

“They’d ask for proof. Then where would we be?”

“I don’t care.”

She waited to see what she would say next, but nothing more came. And there sat Drum, tapping a cigarette against his thumbnail over and over until the tobacco had settled a good eighth of an inch, but still he didn’t light it. He would be framing a way to say, “All right, then. Stay home. Die an old maid.” He was joined to her by a piece of elastic which she had stretched too far. With Drum, even an inch was too far. “I know what you must be thinking,” she told him. “I’m sorry, I really meant that. But can’t you go along with me this once? I’ll never ask you again.”

“Oh, well. Shoot,” said Drum. Then he finally struck a match, but her father’s car was just driving up. He had to leave by the back door, hunching his shoulders and cupping the match flame as he went.

“Evie,” her father said, “why do I smell smoke?”

“Well, I’ve taken up cigarettes,” Evie said.

“I thought so. Just so you are straightforward about it, then. I know young people have to try these things.”

“All right,” Evie said.

“I was young myself once,” said her father.

It was Violet who helped most with the arrangements. (“Eloping?” she had said. “Evie. Aren’t you excited? Oh, and here I thought this Drum business was all in your head.”) She investigated marriage laws, arranged for the blood tests, chauffeured them to the doctor in her mother’s convertible. “As far as the license goes,” she said, “lie. Don’t bother pulling out phony documents and such, lie through your teeth. You’d be amazed how much you can get away with.” She drove Evie to Tar City to apply for the license, and Evie lied and no one questioned her. All the way home Violet sang “O Promise Me,” causing people to slow down and stare as they passed. Planning things seemed to turn Violet larger and more brightly colored. She took up over half of the car seat, and every time she thought of how they had fooled the clerk she laughed her lazy rich laugh. Meanwhile Evie sat in the corner with her hands between her knees. She pictured Tar City policemen swooping down on them to hand a summons through the window for perjury, or the clerk having second thoughts and alerting all ministers and J.P.’s, or her father coming out front to point at Violet’s car and say, “That’s Tar City dust on those wheels. What have you been up to in Tar City?” But the ride home was smooth and quick, and when she went in Clotelia didn’t even look up from the television.

They had to wait three days after they applied for the license. During that whole time it rained, breaking the heat wave and pulling the town from its stupor. Evie kept finding Drum on the back doorstep, under the eaves, huddled into David’s windbreaker to keep warm. She pulled him in whenever her father wasn’t around, but once they were sitting side by side they had almost nothing to say to each other. Drum discussed houses. He had heard of a cheap one for rent, twenty-four dollars a month. When he had finished with that, Evie went over and over the details of applying for the license, as if that were the one solid link that would hold them together till Thursday. “The clerk said, ‘Date of birth?’ I had it all worked out beforehand, but still I thought I would slip. Where I did slip was your name. ‘Drum Casey,’ I said. ‘No, Bertram.’ I must have sounded half-witted, not knowing the name of my, of the boy.”

“I reckon so,” said Drum.

They were quiet for a minute. He was beside her on the couch, one arm draped across her shoulders and his hand dangling free.

“They wanted to know your mother’s maiden name,” said Evie. “Did I tell you that? I made one up. What was your mother’s maiden name?”

“I don’t know. Parker.”

“I forget what I told them. Maybe Parker, after all. Wouldn’t that be funny? I had to think even for my mother’s maiden name, which shows you how flustered I was. Eve Abbott: my own first two names. It should have been on the tip of my tongue.”

When Clotelia was far enough away Drum would pull Evie closer, choosing the first pause in her speech. Evie had been waiting to be kissed for years. She had rehearsed it in her mind, first with someone faceless and then with Drum, who looked as if he would know all about it; but now she didn’t think it was what it had been built up to be. They stayed pressed together between kisses, looking out over each other’s shoulders like drivers meeting on opposite lanes of a highway. Drum smelled like tobacco and marigolds and the flattened porch cushions, which had turned mustier than ever now that the rain was here.

On Thursday, she got up early and put on a white eyelet dress that she had saved from junior-high graduation. The seams had grayed and it was a little tight, but she had set her heart on white. She filled her purse with absolute necessities, in case her father told her never to darken his door again: make-up, two diaries, all the letters received since fifth grade, a photograph of her parents taken before she was born, and a billfold containing twenty-eight dollars. Then she tiptoed out of the house. Her father was still dressing. Just as she reached the stairs she heard him slam a drawer and say, “Oh, drat.” It surprised her that she could do something so momentous without his sensing it.

She set out for a corner halfway between her house and Violet’s, where Drum and David were going to pick them up. (“If Violet’s coming, then so is David,” Drum said. “I ain’t going to be outnumbered”—as if this were some sort of contest, girls against boys.) The rain had stopped, but the streets still glistened and the lawns were a dark, shiny green. She edged puddles not yet dried by the sun and hopped across flowing gutters, feeling like a star in an old movie with her high heels clacking so importantly and her full skirt swirling around her calves. On the corner where they were to meet, Violet was already waiting. She wore a pink nylon cocktail dress. “I believe this is the most exciting day of my life,” she called out. Evie hushed her. She was certain someone would notice them and guess what was happening.

They waited five minutes. Evie stared very hard in a direction away from where the Jeep would be coming. When she heard it pull up behind her, she began smiling widely and couldn’t stop. “Hop in,” David said. Evie climbed into the back, where Violet was already settling herself. She looked steadily eastward so that the smile would be taken for a squint against the sunlight. Up front Drum sat lounging in the corner of her eye, one of his feet resting on the dashboard. He wore a white shirt with his jeans and his hair was slicked down too neatly. David was dressed the same as always — a sign of protest, it turned out. He was against the wedding. In all these days of planning Evie had never thought to ask how David felt, and it took her a minute to understand when he said, “All right, here we go. But it’s against my better judgment, I just want you to know.”

“You already said that,” Drum told him.

“He did?” Evie said. She sat forward and looked at the back of David’s neck. “Said what? He thinks we shouldn’t be getting married?”

“Damn right I do,” said David. “There is something too half-baked about this deal. And besides. Here I am. His manager. Aren’t I supposed to know what’s good for him? Careerwise, marriage is suicide. Look at the Beatles.”

“I still like the Beatles,” Violet said.

“But you don’t swoon away when you hear them, now, do you?”

“I never did,” Violet said.

That ended the conversation. For the rest of the ride everyone sat in his own corner, staring out at the scenery. Evie’s smile had faded. She watched tobacco barns zip by, each standing out bare and lonely along the fiat highway. Men in filling stations turned their blank faces slowly to follow the Jeep out of sight. Barefoot children strung across the pavement drew in while they passed and then fanned out again.

When they reached the outskirts of the city, the buildings tightened together. They pressed Evie’s heart out of rhythm; she kept clearing her throat and swallowing. All around them people were busy with humdrum things, waiting for buses or driving the groceries home, bearing loads of children and picnic baskets and diaper bags to some sunny playground. They sped by in small circles of cheerfulness, with Evie watching enviously until they were too tiny to see.

When they were nearly downtown, they stopped for a red light. A very short fat man with a child’s face stepped up to wipe their windshield, using a greasy cloth. He smeared the dirt around and stepped back to wait for a tip, but David only scowled at him. And still the light didn’t change. They were going to wait there forever, eye to eye with a watchful little man. “Oh, I tell you,” David said. “Everything has gone wrong today, everything. I can’t wait to see what’ll happen to me next.”

“Name one thing that has gone wrong,” Violet said. “Other than that man,” she added, for by then the light had changed and they were pulling away.

“Isn’t it enough that we are heading for Drum’s wedding? I’m driving my own hearse wagon, I don’t know why I do it. Inside of a month he’ll be a full-time pump attendant and I’ll be out of a job. And you,” he said, nodding to Evie in the rear-view mirror, “don’t look at me like that. It’s your own good I’m thinking of, partly.”

Evie didn’t argue with him. None of it seemed real anyway. Time was speeding up and slowing down in fits, like her pulse. The argument between David and Violet moved as rapidly as a silent film, jumping so suddenly into anger that Evie felt she must have missed a whole section of it. “Where is your tact?” Violet was asking. “We are here to get my girl friend married, it’s the happiest day of her life, and you sit talking about hearse wagons. Well, stop right here. Let us out. We’ll walk to the wedding.”

“Tact, nothing,” said David. “It’s a free country, ain’t it? I got a right to voice an opinion just like anybody else.”

“Voice it by yourself, then. We three are walking.”

“Go ahead,” David said. “But let me tell you one thing, fat girl. I didn’t like you the moment I set eyes on you. Organize, organize, I know you like a book. Why don’t you get something of your own to organize?” He stopped the car with a jolt and reached across Drum to open the door. “Get out, all that wants to. You won’t hurt my feelings a bit.”

“Fine,” Violet said. “Pick us up at the nearest J.P., in an hour.”

“Minister,” Evie told her. “And anyway—”

“Minister, then. I don’t care. You just go have yourself a beer, David Elliott.”

“What?” said Drum. He had been watching pedestrians all this time, not appearing to listen, but now he turned halfway in his seat and raised his dark glasses. “Minister, what’s that for? What’s wrong with J.P.?”

“Well, nothing,” said Evie. “Only I was always hoping, well, I was counting on a minister. Also a church.”

Violet nodded.

“What next,” David said.

“Things are getting out of hand here,” said Drum. “I had never looked for all this.”

“Well, now’s the time to back out,” David told him.

Violet said, “Will you just hush? Evie, climb out. We’re walking.”

“No, wait,” Evie said.

“Do you want him to ruin your wedding?”

“It’ll be ruined for sure if you walk,” said Drum. “Because I ain’t coming.”

“Wait,” Evie said.

Time slowed to its regular pace. Everyone hushed and stared at her.

“Nobody walks,” she told them. “I plan to have a normal, ordinary wedding, with witnesses who aren’t called in off the street. No fighting. No disapproving. We are going to do this one thing the way it ought to be done, and afterwards we will have a bottle of wine to celebrate. Now, is that too much to ask?”

“Well—” said Violet.

“All right. Shut the door,” Drum said. “Looks like we got to find us a minister.”

“Methodist,” Evie said.

The minister had a face she forgot an hour later. He perched, childlike, on the edge of his seat when they drove him to his church, and he stayed that way forever in Evie’s mind. All she remembered of the wedding itself was the smell of musty swing cushions when Drum stood beside her at the altar. For souvenirs she had a wire-thin ring and a marriage certificate in old English lettering, two engraved doves cuddling at its head and David and Violet’s ball-point signatures on the witness lines.