“I think so. Miss Ogden is back from her honeymoon. She’s Mrs. Bishop now. Has a florentined wedding-ring set with diamond chips. It looks kind of tacky; everybody says so.”
“What do they say about me?” Evie asked.
“Oh, well, I don’t know.”
“They don’t say anything?”
“Well, bits and pieces. You know.”
On the television screen a tense married couple sat gingerly circling each other’s feelings, casting significant looks after a simple sentence, causing the music to swell ominously over no more than a phrase and a pair of lowered eyes. Violet watched them and tapped a fingernail against her front teeth.
“My father thinks I’m going to a plastic surgeon,” Evie said.
“Well, aren’t you?”
“Ha,” said Clotelia. “You think she got that much sense?”
“I don’t know yet,” Evie said, “but I doubt if I am.”
“You could cut bangs.”
“That would be worse. Showing up at school wearing bangs all of a sudden, everyone knowing why.”
“Then go to the surgeon.”
“Watch, now,” Clotelia said. “This man here is some operator. Listen to his sweet-talk. Yesterday he was after that blond, the one before the commercial. Fickle?”
“I’m not sorry the letters are there” Evie said. “I’m glad. I’m talking about something else.”
“What, then?”
“Well, I don’t really know.”
“School will be out in just a few more weeks anyhow,” said Violet.
“I keep forgetting.”
“That’s because you don’t get outdoors. It’s hot now.”
“Is it?” Evie twisted in her seat, tearing a shank of hair through her fingers. “I just hate summer,” she said.
“Every year you tell me that.”
“I mean it. What have I got to look forward to? You know what I thought, Violet: This summer might be different. Now it looks like it won’t be.”
“Why would it be different?”
Evie didn’t answer, but Clotelia did. “Ha. Thought that Casey boy would come riding up and spirit her away, once he heard what she done.”
“You hush,” said Evie.
“I don’t see him beating down no doors. Do you?”
“Ignore her,” Evie told Violet.
Violet sighed and wrapped her hands around each other. “You could take your finals at home,” she said. “Your father could arrange it.”
“You think I’m scared to go back.”
“Well, Evie, here you sit. What are you staying around home for?”
“Look. Can’t you tell me what they’re all saying? I won’t care. I promise I won’t. Just tell me what you’ve heard.”
“I already did,” said Violet. “Just bits and pieces, that’s all. Someone will come up and say, ‘Is it true what I heard about that friend of yours? ’‘What’d you hear?’ I say, and they say, ‘Oh, you know.’ ”
“But you must have to answer sometime,” Evie said. “What do you tell them?”
“I tell them yes, I believe there was something like that.”
“Do they act surprised?”
“What would they act surprised for? If they asked, they must have already known.”
“Well, shocked then. Do they laugh? What do they say?”
“Oh, they just think a while. Like when — but no, not exactly—”
“Like when.”
“Like when the cheerleader had to get married, I was going to say.”
“They think I did something evil, then.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Good Lord. Like when someone has crossed over where the rest of them haven’t been. Getting pregnant, or dying, or that boy in the band who shot himself. Remember that? You think, ‘Why, I saw him in the hallway, often. And sat behind him in algebra. But I never knew, and now he has gone and done it.’ That’s what they sound like.”
“Ah,” said Evie.
At suppertime, Evie and her father sat opposite each other at the tiny kitchen table. Clotelia would have set out the food and left by then, slamming the front door behind her and clicking away down the sidewalk. She rarely said good-bye. The silence she left behind seemed an angry one, as if she had said, “Now, you’ve done it. See? I’m leaving. I’ve had all I can take.” The two of them looked guilty and awkward as they sat poking their baked beans. “Well, now,” her father would say finally. “Tell me what you’ve done with yourself today. Talked to anyone? Been out much?” But all Evie ever answered was, “I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t go anywhere.”
“Violet come over?”
“Yes.”
“How was she?”
“Oh, fine.”
His impatience was controlled, showing up only in the way he fidgeted with a fork or drank water in deep, hasty gulps. He did no reading at the table nowadays. He concentrated solely on Evie, as if he had made some sort of resolution. When Evie tried to keep on reading herself, she felt his eyes on her and his premeditated smile, burdening her mind until she had to give up and shove the magazine aside. “All right,” she would tell him.
“What?”
“Was there something you wanted to say?”
“Why, no. Not that I can think of.”
They finished the meal without speaking, every clink of fork against plate sounding as loud and as artificial as a sound effect. Food she didn’t enjoy, Evie thought, was not fattening. She waded through her mound of baked beans and frankfurters, lukewarm rings of canned pineapple and instant mashed potatoes, and everything sank heavily to her stomach and left her feeling uncomfortable but virtuous. When her father brought sherbet glasses full of Jello from the refrigerator, she ate every last mouthful and set her spoon down neatly beside her knife. Then they were free. They could go off to opposite ends of the house and do whatever kept them busy.
She no longer listened to the radio. She lay on her bed filing her fingernails or leafing through more magazines, and sometimes she fell into daydreams that involved one-sided, whispered conversations. “Aren’t you Drum Casey? I thought you were. I heard you sing once, years ago. Yes, I’m Evie Decker. I was fat back then, I didn’t think you would recognize me.” She would toss her hair back, exposing a smooth white forehead. But not surgically smooth. She pictured the effects of plastic surgery as being just that, plastic, a white poreless rectangle like a blank label surrounded on four sides by a thin border of scar tissue. In her daydream, the smoothness was natural and the ragged letters spelling “Casey” would have been only a joke, something she had written in red ink as a prank or, better yet, just something Casey had made up. “Letters, you say? I never cut letters. Where did you get that idea? Do you think I go around cutting strange names in my face?”
But she always ended up feeling hopeless and betrayed. Rising to fetch a Kleenex or an emery board, she would catch sight of her reflection whispering in the bureau mirror and she would clamp her lips shut and lie down again. Then by nine o’clock she would have started trying to sleep. All her muscles lay coiled from a day of sitting. She turned from one side to another, tightening her sheet over and over in order to erase the untidy feeling that followed her even to bed.
On Tuesday morning, ten days after she had returned from the hospital, her father said, “Evie, honey, I’d like to talk to you.”
“Hmm?” said Evie. She was already in her easy chair, a bag of marshmallows beside her.
“I was wondering about school. Don’t you feel like going back now?”
“Oh. Well, no, I don’t,” Evie said. She looked up at her father, who stood rocking gently above her. The morning sunlight bleached the tips of his lashes. “I’m not really up to it yet,” she told him.