A Slipping-Down Life

by Anne Tyler

  “What for?”

  “I feel like I’ve made a mistake. Shall we go?”

  “Oh, why? I’m enjoying myself,” Violet said. “At least let’s stay till Drumstrings comes.”

  Drumstrings Casey was preceded by a blond boy who set out drums in a circle around a stool. The largest drum had a blurry black “Casey” stamped on it with a grocery store stencil. “Now,” Evie said. She sat up straighter, clutching her coat across her chest. A dark boy had followed the blond one out. He had long black hair, too shiny, cut square across his neck and falling in a slanted line over his forehead. His clothes were black denim, a short zippered jacket and tight jeans ending in high leather boots. Instead of walking, he glided. His spangled guitar dragged a tail of cord which the drummer took charge of while Casey slid coolly on, almost keeping time with Mantovani’s violin. “Cut it,” someone shouted. Mantovani stopped playing in the middle of a note. There was a second of pure silence while the blond boy seated himself at the drums. Then he picked up the sticks. He set up a rapid, choppy rhythm that made the dark boy’s foot tap, and after that one second of silence, Drumstrings Casey’s guitar-playing seemed to break the air into splinters around Evie’s ears.

  If there were words to his song, Evie couldn’t make them out. She heard a clanging of guitar strings, a patter of drums which sometimes subdued the guitar into a mere jingle at the end of a beat, and a strong reedy voice that softened consonants and spun out vowels. “Nnhnn,” he said occasionally, close to the microphone, Then the singing stopped, but the music went on. Drumstrings turned his narrow, unseeing face toward the audience.

  “Why do you walk on my nerves this way?” he asked suddenly.

  Evie turned and looked around her.

  “Have I got to tell you again? Have I got to say it?

  “We met him on the mountain. He was picking blueberries.

  “She was emptying trashcans.

  “Don’t leave now!”

  The guitar grew louder, and the drums along with it. The song started up no different than before, with the same blurred words. Not many people clapped when it was over.

  “Well, thank you for coming,” Evie told Violet as they were starting home.

  “Was it like you expected?”

  “Oh, more or less.”

  They crossed a silent, neon-lit street. Watery reflections of themselves slid along an optician’s darkened window.

  “What I meant,” said Violet, “was Drumstrings Casey—was he like you expected?”

  “Not exactly,” Evie said.

  “You sorry you went?”

  “Well, no.”

  She paused at the corner, in front of the town library. Their paths were supposed to split here, but instead of turning down Hawthorne Street, Evie stood still with her hands in her pockets and her oxfords set wide apart. “That speaking out he did,” she said.

  “That was peculiar,” said Violet. “I never heard anyone do that before.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Well, in slow songs, of course. Those sappy kinds of songs, some girls reading out a love letter between two verses.”

  “This is different. Drumstrings Casey wasn’t sappy.”

  “No.”

  “What,” said Evie. “You liked it?”

  “Well, yes, I did.”

  “Me too.” Evie started moving one foot in a slow arc in front of her, watching it closely. “It made me want to answer. You know those girls who scream on the Ed Sullivan show? Well, now I know why they do it.”

  “Of course, he is kind of trashy,” said Violet.

  “Sure, I know that.”

  “That greasy hair.”

  “Those tight pants.”

  “Walking that slinky way he has.”

  “Would you like to come to my house for a Coke?” Evie asked.

  “Oh, I might as well.”

  They both turned down Hawthorne Street, ambling in fits and starts toward the yellow light above Evie’s porch.

  2

  After the show the days seemed longer and duller. Evie walked to school at a slow, aimless pace, stopping often to stare into store windows. She had changed to spring clothes by now. Her skirts were full, with waistbands that kept folding in upon themselves, her sleeveless blouses came untucked and her sandal straps slipped off her heels—all problems needing constant attention. She walked along continually tugging at hems and rebuttoning buttons, as if she were nervous. Yet her face, seen close to, was blank and listless. She complained to Violet that she had nothing to look forward to. “Summer is coming,” she said, “and there I’ll be on the porch. Getting fatter. Reading romances. My father will be home all day just picking at the lawn. Don’t you wish there was something to do?”

  “You could be a camp counselor,” Violet said.

  Evie only sighed and yanked at a slip strap.

  In the changing-room, on gym days, half-dressed girls sat on long wooden benches and named their favorite singers. Their lockers were lined with full-color pictures of the Beatles and the Monkees, their notebooks were decorated with the titles of the top forty, and they traded stacks of pulpy gray magazines filled with new lyrics and autographed photos. Their favorites lived in Detroit or Nashville or London, and switched like baseball players from one group to another, from group-singing to solo, and from an outdated style to a new one. Evie couldn’t keep up with them. While the others talked she dressed behind a slatted partition, shielding the front of her 40-D bra as she reached for a blouse, concentrating glumly on what she overheard.

  “Fill in your name, they say. Mail it off. If you win you get a date with the singer of your choice, dinner and dancing and a photograph to remember it by. It tells you right here, see?”

  “Yes, but what if I win?”

  “Lucky you.”

  “I mean, wouldn’t you die?”

  “Not me.”

  “I would. I wouldn’t say a word all evening. How could you talk to a singing star?”

  “That’s why you have to watch who you pick. You can’t just choose for looks, you got to get someone with personality.”

  “Paul McCartney has personality.”

  “His name isn’t on here.”

  One day a tenant farmer’s daughter named Fay-Jean Lindsay said, “Those people in the magazines are all right, I reckon. Those Rolling Stones and all. But me, I’ll take Joseph Ballew.”

  “Never heard of him,” someone said.

  “He’s from Pulqua. Right around Pulqua.”

  “How come we never heard of him?”

  “I don’t know. You ought to have. He sings real nice.”

  “Where’s he at now?”

  “Pulqua.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” they said, and then they changed the subject.

  But later, when Evie was fully dressed, she came out from behind her partition to talk to Fay-Jean. Fay-Jean was kneeling on the end of a bench, drawing her comb through a ribbon of pale, shining hair. “I heard you liked Joseph Ballew,” Evie said.

  Fay-Jean tucked away the comb and brought out a mirror, which she looked into for some time. There was nothing else to do with it. She had one of those tiny, perfect faces, not yet sharpened enough to show the tenant farmer in her. “Who?” she said finally.

  “Joseph Ballew.”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Was he at that rock show a few weeks back?”

  Fay-Jean looked up. “Why, yes, he was,” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “I was near the back.”

  “Did you like him?”

  “Well, really I—which one was he?”

  “Oh, you couldn’t have overlooked him. He sang ‘Honeypot.’ Now you remember.”

  “Well,” said Evie. “I was wondering. Do you know Drumstrings Casey?”

  “Him? Wait a minute.”

  Fay-Jean started rummaging through her notebook. She came up with red-slashed quizzes, a Silver Screen magazine, and finally a sheet of ruled paper
which she handed to Evie. It was a pencil drawing of a narrow-faced boy with high cheekbones, one eye smaller than the other. His features were vague, hairy lines, and his mouth had been erased several times and redrawn heavily. “Who’s this?” Evie asked.

  “It’s Drumstrings Casey, who do you think.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No. Do you think it’s a good likeness?”

  “Oh, well, sure,” said Evie. “But how were you—did you ask him to sit for it?”

  “No, I did it at the Unicorn. That’s where he plays, same as Joseph Ballew. Joseph Ballew is my real favorite, but I think this one is kind of cute too. You ever been to the Unicorn?”

  “I don’t even know what it is,” Evie said.

  “It’s a roadhouse. Just south of Pulqua a ways. You can come with me sometime, I got a car I can borrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “What?”

  “Are you going there tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday. Casey only plays on Saturdays.”

  “Will you be going there this Saturday?”

  “Sure, I guess so.”

  “I’ll come with you then,” Evie said. “Could I bring a friend?”

  “Sure. And keep the picture, if you like.”

  “Well, thank you. I don’t have anything to trade for it.”

  “To—?”

  “Trade. Trade for the picture.”

  “Why would you want to trade for it?”

  “I don’t know,” Evie said.

  She pasted the picture in the middle of her mirror. Drumstrings Casey’s penciled head took the place of her own every time she combed her hair. “When we go to the Unicorn,” Violet said, “bring a camera. Hanging out with the likes of Fay-Jean Lindsay is bad enough; I fail to see how you can live with her art work.”

  “I don’t mind,” Evie said.

  The Unicorn was out in the country, a gray windowless rectangle on a lonesome highway with darkness closing in all around it. Cars and motorcycles and pickup trucks sat any old way in a sand parking lot. In front, beside a baggy screen door, stood a policeman with his arms folded. It was not a place that people dressed up for, but Evie and Violet didn’t know that. They came wearing full, shiny dresses and high-heeled pumps. Fay-Jean had on a skirt and blouse decorated with poodles on loops of real chain, and she twirled her car keys lightheartedly around her index finger as she passed the policeman.

  It seemed to be noise that bellied the screen out—pieces of shouts and guitars and drums and an angry singer. Noise hit Evie in the face, on a breath of beer and musty-smelling wood. Someone wanted pretzels, not potato chips. Someone wanted to know where Catherine had gone. The singer’s voice roughened and he sang out:

  You ask me to be somebody I’m not,

  How can you say you’re my honey pot?

  “Hear that?” Fay-Jean said.

  Evie thought if she heard any more the noise would turn visible.

  She followed Fay-Jean through darkness, past rows of long tables and seated couples. Once she nearly tripped over someone’s outstretched leg. When they came to a table that had room for them, she found that a hand holding a lighted cigarette rested on the back of her chair. “Excuse me!” she shouted. Her voice disappeared as soon as it left her mouth. Finally Fay-Jean reached over and lifted the hand away, and Evie pulled her chair out.

  “What did you do with that ring I bought?” the singer asked. He stood under a dim red bulb, moving constantly in a small circle as he sang. “You ain’t acting like no honeypot.” Besides his guitar there were three other instruments and possibly a piano, although Evie couldn’t be sure. All she saw was someone soundlessly pressing the keys. Behind them, on the same platform, a few people danced. The smell of beer gave the air a cold feeling. The rough walls and tables, built of the grayed wood used in picnic pavilions, made the building seem flimsy and temporary.

  A fat man in a butcher’s apron was handing out beer. When he started toward them Fay-Jean shouted, “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” said Evie.

  “How old is Violet?”

  “I’m eighteen,” Violet said. “I caught scarlet fever in the fourth grade and was held—”

  “What?”

  “Eighteen, I said.”

  “You’re okay. You— “and she pointed to Evie, “go way over. Say you’re twenty. Then they won’t ask for proof.”

  But the fat man did not even question her. He wanted to see Fay-Jean’s driver’s license, which she showed him. Then he looked over at Evie, slumped against the table with her arms folded under the billowing bosom of her dress. “What’s for you?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Budweiser,” Fay-Jean told him.

  “Same for you, ma’am?”

  Violet nodded.

  Joseph Ballew left the platform. The dancers remained, pivoting on their heels and gazing around the room, until someone started a record of Frank Sinatra singing “Young at Heart.” Then they gave up and wandered back to their seats.

  “That Joseph Ballew is my ideal,” Fay-Jean said. “You can have your big names, I don’t care. He is only nineteen but looks twenty-five, at least, those two cool lines running down alongside his mouth.”

  “Have you ever gone up and talked to him?” Evie asked.

  “Oh, sure, all the time. Once I called him on the phone and he let on he was busy, but I could tell he was right tickled to be called.”

  “What would you say if you went up?” Evie asked.

  “Why, anything that comes to your head. You’ll see. Aren’t you going to go talk to Casey?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” Evie said.

  Her beer was brought to her in a chipped glass mug. She took small sips of it and looked sideways at the other customers.

  “Once,” said Fay-Jean, “a girl fell out, right about where I am sitting. She was listening to the music and then the next thing you know had fell out. Laying out on the floor with her eyes shut. I would have been right embarrassed, if I was her.”

  “Who was it over?” Violet asked. “Drumstrings Casey or Joseph Ballew?”

  “What? Oh, I don’t know. It turned out to be a fit of some kind, nothing either of them bothered taking credit for. I will say this, though, she got a right smart of attention for it. They had to lay her out clear across a table. When she came to, Casey said, ‘This here is for that pretty little girl yonder on the table,’ and he played her a song. It was all wasted, though. Seems she didn’t even know she had fell out; she just slid down to her seat and looked around her for some time, smiling kind of baffled-like.”

  “Is that right?” Evie said. She studied the foam on her beer a minute. Then she said, “Well, talking about attention. Would it cause a fuss if I were to snap his picture? I brought my Kodak.”

  “Oh, I thought I had give you that portrait,” Fay-Jean said.

  “You did,” Violet told her. “I remember it, clearly.”

  “Well, I can’t see how taking a picture would do any harm. Joseph Ballew once had a lady here snapping photos all evening long, writing him up for a motel newspaper.”

  Drumstrings Casey slid onto the platform as silently and as easily as some dark fish, the spangles on his guitar flashing dapples of red light. Nobody hushed or looked in his direction. He might have been anyone. Yet his face, which was a smooth olive color, gave off a glow across the cheekbones and down the bridge of his nose, and surely the audience must have noticed the separate, motionless circle of air he moved in. He hooked a chair with the toe of his boot and slid it to the center of the platform. With one foot resting on it he stared out over Evie’s head, and the blond boy ambled forth from behind an amplifier to seat himself at the drums. “Where is the drum with ‘Casey’ on it?” Evie asked Violet.

  “How should I know?”

  “He should be using his own drums.”

  “Maybe these are better.”

  “I wish he’d use his own. These could be just anyone’s.”
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br />   “Maybe it’s too hard to set them up each time. What difference does it make?”

  “Well, still,” Evie said.

  They played a song called “My Girl Left Home.” All Evie understood were the first four words. Halfway through, the music slowed and Drumstrings frowned.

  “Hold on, “he said.

  The audience stopped talking.

  “She left, you say?”

  He hit one note several times over.

  “Where were you? Did you see her go?

  “The meter man’s coming.

  “Buy the tickets. Wait in the lobby.

  “Have you noticed all the prices going up?”

  “My girl left home!” the drummer called. As if that had reminded him, Casey hit all the strings at once and continued with his song. Here and there conversation picked up again, but a few girls stayed quiet and kept their eyes on the guitar strings.

  Fay-Jean danced with a boy chewing bubble gum. At the end of the first song she rested her hand on his shoulder and talked about something, steadily. Then a new piece began and another boy took the first one’s place. She talked to him too, looking out toward the audience as if what she said took no thought. Her feet wove a curved, slithering pattern on the bare floorboards. The music seemed familiar. It was probably the song Drumstrings Casey had played at the rock show; but then when he slowed his guitar and spoke out, where was the man picking berries and the woman emptying trashcans? This time, he told about someone throwing soda-bottle caps at the moon. And then a bicycle.

  “Basket on the front. Shiny in the dark.

  “If I tell you again, will you listen this time?

  “Never mind.”

  The song went on. Evie fumbled in her handbag for her camera, and then without allowing herself to think ahead she stood up and aimed it at the platform. Casey looked out beyond her. “Casey!” she called. He turned, still playing, not seeing. When the flashbulb went off he blinked and his eyes snagged on her. “Oho, she lied,” he sang, and studied her white, shaky face. Then she sat down. He looked out beyond her again. Her hands were so tight upon the camera that the circulation seemed to have stopped.

  “Evie, I declare,” Violet said.

  Evie said nothing.

  He sang someone else’s song next, one she had heard before on “Sweetheart Time.” When his guitar slowed, the drummer beat louder, prodding him to hurry, and Drumstrings didn’t speak out after all. At the end he bent his head slightly. It must have been a bow; everyone clapped.