“I came to see how to make baking-powder biscuits,” Evie said.
“Ain’t you got no cookbook?”
“You know a cookbook wouldn’t do it right. Drum has a special recipe in mind.”
“Sure. Him and his kind use bacon drippings,” said Clotelia. “Nothing special to that. Oh, come on in.”
She led Evie through the darkened living room, where an old woman with powder-puff hair sat nodding on a vinyl couch. In the kitchen, she sat Evie on a step-stool decaled with panda bears. She whipped up a mound of crumbling dough, mixing it with quick, angry fingers and cutting it out with a drinking glass before Evie even realized it was finished. Meanwhile Evie stared around her to see how other people’s kitchens were kept. “What is that china thing on your stove?” she asked.
“Spoon-rest.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Cost me fifteen cents at a rummage sale.”
“Well, that’s the trouble. Fifteen cents here, a quarter there — you don’t know how they add up. I didn’t know.”
“Should have thought of that before you got married,” Clotelia said.
“Why are you talking like this? I thought you had started liking Drum.”
“I tell you why: go look at your father. You’ve broke his heart.”
“You never cared before how he felt.”
“Nor don’t now,” said Clotelia, “but it kills me to see somebody’s heart broke. When you going to visit him?”
“Well, maybe in a day or two.”
“All right. You got your recipe; important thing is mix it with your fingers. Now go before Brewster comes. You know he don’t like to see you here.”
She fanned Evie out the door with floury hands. Drum was waiting for her in David’s Jeep, with a crowd of little boys closing in like moths to touch the headlights and run their fingers over the canvas top. “Shoo now,” Drum told them. “You get the recipe?”
“I think so,” Evie said.
He drove her home carefully, as if the recipe were something precious and she the shell that held it.
On Wednesday school began. She went, even though Drum couldn’t see the point. “I never finished, and I ain’t sorry, either,” he said.
“But it’s silly to quit my senior year.”
“All right, suit yourself.”
There was Mr. Harrison to argue with too. He was the principal, a close friend of her father’s, but even so he had to tell her about the rule against married students. “We make exceptions, sure,” he said. “Especially when their grades are as good as yours. But not if you, not if there’s a little one on the way, so to speak.”
“No, of course not,” Evie said.
“And then too, it would depend on your discretion. We have a lot of impressionable young girls here. Knowing you as I do, I’m sure you wouldn’t talk about, well, but still—”
“Of course not,” Evie said again.
Even if she did talk, what would she say? She had overheard more in the girls’ gym than she had yet found out with Drum in the papery bedroom. Their love-making was sudden and awkward, complicated by pitch dark and a twisted nightgown and the welter of sheets and blankets that Evie kept covering herself with. Besides, there weren’t many people she could talk to. She arrived every morning at the last minute, having caught a Trailways bus out on the highway and ridden it in to the drugstore terminal. In class, people stared at her and were too polite. She didn’t mind. She had known that getting married would set her apart. And there was always Violet, who ate at her table in the cafeteria and walked her to the drugstore after school. Violet was full of talk. Witnessing a wedding seemed to have the same effect as being godmother at a christening: she was proprietary, enthusiastic. “Evie! Do you cook, just like that, every night without a single lesson? Does he like what you feed him? Have you had your first quarrel? Oh, I can’t wait till I’m married. Nights when I pass lighted houses I think, ‘All those people, so cozy with someone they belong to, and here I am alone.’ I think you’re the luckiest girl in the senior class.”
Coziness, that must be what the world was all about. It was what Violet wanted, and David, who sank onto their borrowed couch and kicked off his shoes and said, “Oh, man, a place all your own. I might get married myself someday.” And most of all it was what Drum wanted, when he rolled over in bed to watch her dress and said, “Ah, don’t go to school. Stay home and make me pancakes. I’ll do more for you than any schoolhouse will.”
“But we’re getting ready for a test.”
“So what? It’s cold outside. Stay in the house where it’s warm.”
And often she did, more and more as fall set in and the fields were frosted over every morning. Drum worked very little now — just odd jobs at the A & P, and then the two evenings at the Unicorn. If she stayed home their days were unscheduled and almost motionless, with great blocks of time spent on manufactured tasks. Afternoons, Drum practiced his guitar or made up songs. He tested new lyrics in a mumble, almost inaudible—“My girl’s wearing patent leather shoes—” No. “My girl wears—” The guitar strings barely tinkled. At first Evie stayed in the other room, thinking she might get on his nerves, but eventually he would crash down on all the strings at once and say, “Where are you? What are you doing out there, come in and keep me company.” Then she sat on the edge of the bed, watching how the slant of his black hair fell over the guitar just as it had the first night she saw him.
She worried that he would get tired of her. She spent weeks feeling she had to walk on tiptoe and check everything for stupidity before she said it, since she had never imagined that Drum would settle quickly into being married. He would be hard to live with, she had thought. She had seen his moody silences and the way he shrugged off what people said to him. But he turned out to be the easiest person she knew. All he wanted was a wife. He ate what she fed him, kept her company when she washed the dishes, slept with one arm thrown across her chest, and rose in the morning asking for her baking-powder biscuits. Gradually she stopped tiptoeing. She talked about anything that came to mind — a casserole in The Ladies’ Home Journal or a new way to stop runs in stockings — and he kept cheerfully silent and mended chairs. These were the things she was supposed to talk about. Wearing her bibbed apron, tying a scarf over her pincurls, she began to feel as sure and as comfortable as any of the feather-light girls floating down high-school corridors.
“All I saw was a cat, slinking on a fence,” Drum called out at the Unicorn.
“Will he be there tonight?”
“Yeah!” his audience said.
“Will I be there tonight?”
He wore black. He was cool and glittering. Evie sat smiling below him in a baggy brown skirt and a sweater that rode up around her waist.
“My girl is at a hymn-sing.
“What happened to double ferris wheels?”
“Yeah!” they said again.
She still couldn’t understand what that speaking out was about.
She had to darn socks now instead of throwing them away, and she clipped recipes for meatless meals and carried her lunch to school in a brown paper bag. They never paid the rent on time. “There is nothing for it,” said Drum, “but to get me a part-time job. I wish now I hadn’t fallen out with my daddy. Pumping gas was not too enjoyable but the pay was sure good, and where else would they let me work such loose hours?”