A Slipping-Down Life

4

She had cut the letters with a pair of nail scissors. They ran all the way across her forehead, large and ragged and Greek-looking because straight lines were easier to cut: . In the emergency room, after they had swabbed the blood away, there was a silence lasting several seconds. “Backwards?” someone said finally. It looked as if she were staring out at the letters from within, from the wrong side of her forehead. Or maybe she had cut them while facing a mirror. Whatever the reason, Evie wasn’t telling. She sat in a white enameled chair beside an instrument case, her shoulders slumped, the lower part of her face round and blank and pale beneath the red slashes. Her pudgy feet in their vinyl sandals were twined around the chair rungs. Beside her stood the policeman who had brought her in, still curious although he had already taken down the necessary information; and opposite her, right alongside the doctor and nurse, was Violet. Oh, it would take more than this to shock Violet. She had ridden with Evie in the back of the squad car, patting her hand absently. “Evie Decker, I declare,” she said, “I wish you would tell me — Goodness, will you listen? Sirens. They’re for you.” Evie only blinked and watched as the headlights scraped the edges of a tobacco field. When they drove up to the hospital door she said, “I left my pocketbook in the ladies’ room.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll call about it.”

“And then what about your car? And I never paid for my last beer.”

“Don’t worry.”

The others treated her as if she were unconscious, resting their hands on her shoulder while they leaned forward to discuss her. “Is she all right?” the nurse said once, and patted Evie’s cheeks sharply, almost slapping her. “Do you think she’s all right?”

The doctor shrugged and filled a hypodermic needle. “Who knows?” he said. “Damn fool teen-agers. Find her a room, will you? I’m keeping her the night till I see her state of mind.” The nurse left, and so did the policeman, still staring backwards over his shoulder as he closed the door. “Should we have tipped him?” Violet said.

“No,” said the doctor. “You might as well call her family. Does she have a family?”

“Only her father.”

“He’ll have to be told about this.”

So Violet left too, rippling the fingers of one hand at Evie. “Just be a minute,” she said. “Take care.”

Evie was the only patient in the emergency room. The doctor worked in silence, snapping threads just above her eyes with gloved, dead-feeling hands while water dripped somewhere behind him. “Casey your boyfriend?” he asked finally.

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“Just a singer.”

“Rock-and-roll, I suppose.”

“That’s right.”

“Mmhmm.” He snapped another thread. “This is nothing dangerous, you understand. First-degree cuts. But they’re ragged. They’ll leave scars. You’ll need a good plastic surgeon to get rid of them for you.”

Evie stared at a crease in his white coat.

“You all right?” he asked her.

“Yes, fine.”

“Well, I can’t think why.”

Violet returned, swinging her purse by its long strap so that it jingled against her shins at every step. “Your father’s on his way,” she said. “I said you had to have a little cut stitched up. Was that what you wanted? I couldn’t see just out and out telling him.” She settled on a stool beside the doctor and arranged her skirt around her. “Would you rather I had?”

Evie shook her head.

“Hold still,” said the doctor.

He worked for what might have been hours, snapping threads endlessly and sometimes letting out a long whistling sigh between his teeth. Beside him, Violet twirled on her stool and hummed. A clock over the exit jerked each minute by with a deep, pointed click. When finally the doctor laid a strip of gauze over the stitches, Evie saw that it was nearly midnight. “This sets some kind of record,” he said. “Aren’t there any singers called Al? or Ed?”

“His first name was Drumstrings,” Violet told him.

“Well, then, I suppose she did the best she could.” He peeled his gloves off. “You can go home tomorrow, if you’re in a normal state. Though what that would be — Help her to the nurse’s station, would you, miss? Ask for Miss Connolly. I’ll talk to her father before I send him in.”

“Thank you,” Evie said.

“You’d be better off in the Peace Corps,” said the doctor.

Evie’s room held two white beds, both empty, and a maple dresser with a mirror over it. There was only a nightlight on. When she looked in the mirror she saw a wide dark shadow with a band of startling white across the forehead. She touched the band with one finger. “Oh, look, you get a johnny-coat,” Violet said. “Only two ties down the whole back of it, and one of them broken. Shall I bring you fresh clothes to wear home tomorrow? Your father’ll never think of it.”

“No, he probably won’t,” Evie said.

She pulled off her clothes, which felt creased and heavy from being worn too long. As she dropped each piece to the floor, Violet fumbled for it in the dark and laid it on a chair. Their movements were slow and soundless — Evie’s because she felt awkward, Violet’s for no known reason because Violet never felt awkward. When Evie had put the gown on, she climbed into the bed farthest from the window. She sat up against the metal headboard, her hands folded across her stomach.

“They’ll bring you breakfast in bed, I suppose,” Violet said.

“Does Drumstrings Casey know about this?”

“Well, I’m not sure.”

“There was a lot of commotion over it. Wouldn’t you think he’d have heard?”

“He wasn’t singing then. Joseph Ballew was. I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you look?”

“Honestly, Evie, I don’t know. I was with you. I and the policeman. We were busy taking you out.”

“I believe this might be the best thing I’ve ever done,” said Evie. “Something out of character. Definite. Not covered by insurance. I’m just sure it will all work out well.”

Violet bent to line up the vinyl sandals beneath the bed. “Why don’t you tell me what you want to wear tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll stop by your house and pick it up.”

“Oh, anything. Skirt and blouse. While I was walking through that crowd with the policeman, I kept thinking of my name: Evie Decker, me. Taking something into my own hands for once. I thought, if I had started acting like this a long time ago my whole life might’ve been different.”

“Well, that’s for sure,” said Violet. “Anyway. Skirt and blouse. Do you want me to stay till your father comes?”

“No, I guess not. Your family will be wondering where you are.”

“All right. See you in the morning.”

Violet’s shoes made a soft, plodding sound out of the room and down the hall. When the sound had faded Evie pulled the sheets over her and lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. Headlights swung across it in slow white wedges. Some sort of blower beneath her window made a steady rushing noise that turned other noises unreal and distant. Her forehead was a tight, thin sheet. There was only a surface pain, but the tightness gave her the feeling that her skin might split into shallow cracks at any moment. She bridged her forehead with one hand, clamping it inward with her thumb and middle finger to ease the stretch.

“Evie?” her father said.

She lowered her hand and winced toward the lighted door. Her father was a tall black angular silhouette, bent at the waist. He entered with his head leading, just as he entered his classroom while students whispered and passed notes and ignored him. “I brought you some clothes,” he said.

“Oh. You did?”

“Don’t you need them?”

“Well, Violet was going to bring some.”

He reached over to the bureau and turned on a lamp, so that her eyes contracted into a sudden ache. “Is that, does that bandage have to be so big?” he asked her.

“It has to cover my whole forehead.”

“All of it?”

She shaded her eyes to look at him. “I thought the doctor had told you,” she said.

“He did, yes.”

“Do you want to see?”

“Oh, no, that’s all right.”

“I don’t mind.” She sat up and undid the gauze, which was fastened by adhesive at both ends, and laid it in her lap. “It’s only a flesh wound,” she said.

“Yes, he said that. He—” Her father looked for only one second before he dropped his eyes again. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“It’s a singer.”

“Yes, I know. Casey. I know.”

“You know him?”

“I mean, I know that’s what the name is. I never heard of Casey before.”

“Oh.”

“I never even heard of him.”

“Well,” said Evie.

Her father bent over the bag at his feet, a shopping bag with string handles. “Clothes,” he said. He brought out a blouse, a flowered skirt, and underpants but no bra. Finally he came to a pink frilled bedjacket sent her by an aunt two years ago but never used. He laid it in her lap. Evie picked it up and turned it over, smoothing the frills. “A bedjacket,” she said.

“I thought you might need it.”

In Evie’s stubby hands, the frills seemed fussy and out of place. A bedjacket must have been what he brought her mother when Evie was born — something he had been told was expected of him, along with flowers and a bottle of cologne. Evie’s mother had been the last woman in Pulqua County to die of childbed fever. Her father never mentioned her (and never said, “You are what I traded your mother for, and it was a bad bargain at that,” which was what Evie continually expected to hear). But the bedjacket, with its satin buttons, seemed to be giving him away without his realizing it, speaking up out of all those years of silence. “Well, thank you very much,” Evie said.

He went over to the window, jamming his hands into his pockets. Everything about him was long and bony; nothing but his awkwardness had been passed on to Evie. His hair and lashes were pale, his eyes set in deep shadowed sockets, his skin sprinkled with large freckles so faint that they seemed to be seeping through a white over-layer. “Plastic surgeons take money, of course—” he was saying.

“I don’t want one.”

He barely heard her. His mind had snagged on a new thought. “Evie, had you been drinking?” he asked. “Was that it?”

“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.”

Drumstrings Casey leaned against the doorframe, crossed one boot, and removed his sunglasses. His face lost its smoothness. He had, after all, the narrow brown eyes that Evie expected, so straight-edged that each seemed formed from a pair of parallel lines. The slant of hair was not greased down today; he ruffled it through his fingers, stroking his forehead with the same motion. “It’s the newspaper lady,” he said.

“No,” said Evie. She meant no, she was not from the newspaper at all and had told him so before; but Casey, misunderstanding, said, “Well, you sure do look like her.”

“More reaction, Casey,” the photographer said. Casey stretched his mouth wide into a wide straight line. “Will you turn this way, miss?” Evie turned, focusing her eyes upon a drawer-pull for as long as she felt Casey watching. The photographer clicked the shutter. “Now, Casey, put your arm around her. Smile. Don’t you know how to smile?” But Casey only stared fixedly at the bottom half of Evie’s face. Every now and then his eyes darted up to her forehead and then down again, as if they had run away with him for a second. Across Evie’s shoulders his arm was limp and motionless, the hand falling open off the edge of her sleeve. He had the pleasantly bitter smell of marigolds. Even this close, he seemed filmed by cold air.

The camera clicked again. For the first time, Evie remembered that the purse she had left at the Unicorn contained her snapshot of Drumstrings Casey. “Oh—” she said, but when the two men turned, she went back to staring at the drawer-pull. The snapshot had come out dappled by tiny pools of light, glinting for no apparent reason on the edges of his dark clothes and on his face, which was tilted slightly up, the veiled eyes turned in her direction.

“Now, it’s Evie, that right? Evie Decker,” said the photographer. He was writing on a scrap of paper with bitten-looking edges. “Age?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen. Really? Occupation?”

“I go to school.”

“I thought you were older,” the photographer said. “Now. Could you tell me what end you had in mind?”

“End?”

“What your goal was in doing this?”

“Oh,” said Evie.

“Your reason, then. Could you tell me your reason?”

Drumstrings Casey shifted his weight, his fingers hooked in his back pockets.

“Let’s put it this way,” the photographer said. “We’ll say you’re just a music fan. You dig rock, especially Casey’s rock. That sound about right?”

“Oh, well, I guess so.”

“We’ll put it in quotes, then. Now, would you mind telling what you did it with?”

“I don’t remember,” said Evie, suddenly tired.

“Was it all of a sudden? Had you planned it?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Well, I suppose that’s enough,” the photographer said. “It’s only going to be a caption.”

Drumstrings Casey straightened up. “A caption, what’s that?” he asked.

“The writing under a photo. You know.”

“Couldn’t you give it more?”

“It’s not me that says, boy, it’s the boss.”

“Well, God almighty,” Casey said.

“What now?”

“Wasn’t it you that was waking me at seven this morning? Shouting about publicity? I don’t see what that was all about. Little old grainy newspaper picture, heap of gray dots nobody’ll recognize.”

“Don’t talk to me, talk to your drummer,” said the photographer. “He’s the one called me. Well, thanks, folks.” And out he walked, leaving the two of them alone in the middle of the room.

“Well,” said Casey. He slipped his dark glasses back on and jammed his shirt down tighter into his pants. Then he turned toward Evie. Behind the glasses it was hard to tell where he was looking. “What’d you go and cut it backwards for?” he asked her.

“It just worked out that way,” said Evie.

“Worked out that way, how do you mean?”

“I don’t know, that’s just the way it happened. Can’t you read it?”

“Sure, I can read it.”

“Now I can see that it’s uneven,” Evie said. “I know that’s going to bother me. Every time I look in a mirror I’ll think, why did I let the Y droop? Why did I shake on the C?”

“Why did you make it ‘Casey’?” Casey said.

She stared, mistaking his meaning. She thought he had asked the only question she minded answering.

“Why not my first name?” he asked. “There’re thousands of Caseys around.”

“What, Drumstrings? I don’t have that big of a forehead.”

“Drum,” he said. “Nobody says the whole thing, for Lord’s sake.”

“They call you Drum?” asked Evie.

“That’s right.”

“Well, I certainly wish I’d of known.”

“Yeah, I suppose it’s too late now,” he said.

He was teetering on his heels, his hands in his back pockets again, plainly thinking of going. Evie pressed her palms together and said, “You are going to be famous someday.”

He raised his sunglasses to stare at her. His eyes were bleached-looking in the sudden light. “It’s funny,” he said finally. “I would never have took you for a rock fan at all.” Evie held still under his gaze, until he dropped the glasses and turned toward the door. “Certainly was a peculiar feeling,” he said to nobody special. “Feels like meeting up with your own face somewhere.” He was halfway out the door now, but still with no good-byes, no summing up, no rounding off of the conversation before he left. “Almost like something you would dream in bed at night,” he said, but by then he was out of sight. His voice was sliding away and his boots were ambling down the hall. Evie remained where she was for several minutes, staring out the open doorway. She was used to definite endings. When Drum Casey left he trailed bits of conversation like wisps from a cotton ball, clouding the air behind him. His voice remained in the hall, disembodied. His heel-taps clicked for a long time without seeming to get farther away. The doctor when he came found Evie alone in the middle of her room, surveying the insides of her wrists, and he shook his head and signed her discharge papers in silence.