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Anne Tyler

A Slipping-Down Life

1

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. ”