“Yes,” she said. But the laugh, which should have flowed on, suddenly rusted and broke. “I believe you’re out of your head,” she said.
“Why? Don’t you want to?”
“No, I don’t,” said Evie.
“I don’t know what you got to lose. You must like me some or you wouldn’t have, you know, cut the letters. You wouldn’t hang around me all the time. And here I am with no home. And my career’s at a standstill, we could get our pictures in the papers. Human interest. Plus I do like you. I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t.”
“What do you like about me?” Evie said.
“Jesus.”
“Well, go on. Name something.”
“I don’t know. I like the way you listen to people. Is that enough?”
“No,” said Evie.
“Look. I like you. I want to get married. I feel like things are just petering out all around me and I want to get married to someone I like and have me a house and change. Make a change. Isn’t that enough? Don’t you want to change your life around some?”
Evie held the cushion closer to her and breathed in its musty smell. Then she lifted a hand and ran one finger across her forehead, tracing the narrow ridges of the scars, which always felt pleasantly crinkled. In the opposite house, the last of the lights went out. People slept fitfully in hot, rumpled beds hollowed to fit their shapes, in houses they had grown up and grown old in. Beside her, Drum shifted in the swing. He was waiting for her answer, which would be yes, but only after she had taken her time over it. Things moved too fast. She had wanted a courtship, with double dates and dances and matching shirts, but all she got was three minutes of staring at sleeping houses before she said, “Oh, well. Why not?” and Drum slid over to kiss her with cool blank lips.
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.