Creatures of Habit (18 page)

They would go for a little ride. He had a son just a year younger than her boy. That thought alone should have stopped her, but it didn't, and what began one lonely night stretched on and on.

N
OW IT IS
late and she is waiting out in the hall to carry off the plan. The he/she is making its rounds. Whitey still hasn't returned. Homer is tied to the end of her bed with the cord from her bathrobe. He can't wait for her to come in and snuggle up to him. She is about to decide that she's going to go on to bed and forget about the plan when she sees him again, Thomas Fenster, down the hall. He looks so young. He hasn't changed a bit. She waits to see if his wife or
any of his children are with him, but no, he is all alone. He will try to unbutton her blouse like he does every single time. He says that nothing will change the way that he feels about her but she doesn't believe him. She fears that the sight of her chest might, even though she goes to great lengths to find bras that cover and fill her out. He has not seen her naked chest in years and years.

“Where have you been?” she asks and runs out into the hallway. “I've been waiting here for hours.” And he looks surprised like she might not have a life other than coming at his beck and call. Like it is no big deal for her to sit in a parked car in a dark lot waiting for him to finish eating his dinner and kiss his children good night. She is sure he kisses his wife and tells her he hopes he won't be too late, if he can just finish all this paperwork, they will have a wonderful restful weekend. And meanwhile she sits there when she ought to be home with her own son; it makes her feel sick to imagine him sitting at the kitchen table and working so hard on his homework while thinking that she is at a meeting at the church. She is ashamed of herself but still can't find the strength she needs to drive away from it all. She crouches down so as not to be seen by people passing by.

“I thought you were dead,” she says. “They had a funeral and everything.”

“Stop it,” Betty screams. “Stop it right now.” Betty rolls her wheelchair out from behind the door where she has been sitting with a big ginger jar lamp cradled on her lap. They had sat up late one night to decide that this was the weapon of choice: heavy enough to knock out the nurse, thick and round enough that Betty doesn't need what the physical therapist calls fine motor skills to pick it up. “Who are you talking to? The dog?”

“I saw Thomas,” Carly whispers. “He's back and I don't know what I'll tell Whitey.”

“You're lying,” Betty screams. “You tell the same crazy story a hundred times a day, now shut up!” She looks like a witch, her lips smeared over with fuchsia lipstick and her brows filled in with black crayon like a clown. “They're going to send you to the other side if you don't quit. They are. I don't care if you can walk, they're going to take you. They'll tie your hands and feet to the bed and stick a tube up your peehole.”

Betty goes on and on, building up an anger until she has a kind of seizure that leaves her out of breath and blank looking so Carly doesn't say a word when she sees Gracie Allen,
who has always been a favorite. She's such a card. If Carly could choose to be somebody else that's who she'd choose and she tells her so as she passes. She says, “You always look good. Pretty as can be,” and Gracie says, “Why thank you, dear,” and then Carly says, “You have always been a favorite of mine,” and Gracie stops and takes Carly's hand in hers. Gracie smells wonderful. She smells like Carly imagines a Hollywood mansion might smell. “You're sweet,” Gracie says and Carly watches her move on down the hall. Why she is going to visit the old blind man who thinks he's still in the marines Carly can't say. Maybe Gracie has come as part of the USO show.

“Is he/she coming?” Betty screams in slow syllables like Carly might be the mongoloid. Betty has bounced right back and has that lamp clutched up to her chest.

“Not yet.” But the Dorsey brothers are out in the parking lot and so is Petie Wagner, who Carly loved in the tenth grade. That was her last year of schooling and one teacher pushed for her to get a kind of diploma that would tell what she had done. People in the country just didn't have time to go to school forever and ever. Besides everybody knew that her family was smart aplenty without school. Thomas knew it. He was pressing against her back right that minute even though his wife was on line two. His wife was nothing more
than a red light blinking at that moment and for many moments after, days, weeks, months, years. How could that have happened?

“Now?” Betty calls but Carly has to stop watching for a minute. It's hard to see. Instead she looks out through the dark robe of Jesus and watches the driveway for the car lights that will bring Whitey back. The church across the street has a sign lit up that says
ESCAPE THE HEAT, NOW AND ETERNALLY
. Lord yes. She is picturing herself in a cool cool place like the creek where she used to swim, like the cool leather luxury of Thomas's Cadillac when they parked at the far edge of the parking lot and he explained how much he loved her even though his position in town didn't allow him to leave his marriage, how he would love to help her with her boy's expenses but his wife would be suspicious, even more than she already was; he was kissing her neck, slowly unbuttoning her blouse, his fine motor skills perfectly tuned when all of a sudden she hears Betty screeching and crying out. She is so mad, cussing and carrying on. The nurse comes in and sees Betty sitting there with the heavy lamp raised, and if the cord hadn't looped and twisted around the back of the wheelchair, she would have done some real damage. As it was, the lamp slipped from her hands and crashed down beside her chair,
the body of it shattering into hundreds of pieces. He/she snatches the 3 Musketeers bar that Carly had just bought and slipped in Betty's pocket as a surprise. The nurse says, “That's it, the last straw,
you could have killed me.
” He/she says Betty is going straight to the west hall, which, when all is said and done, probably means that they think Betty is failing fast.

“You let me down,” Betty screams at Carly. “I hate you. I hate you. I wish you were dead.”

Hours later and Carly can still hear her.
Whore. Home wrecker. How could you do this to me?
She still hears Betty even though she and Homer have been sitting here shaking and crying for nearly an hour while they wait for
Wheel of Fortune
and while Carly waits for Whitey to return.

Days pass it seems and when she asks where her boyfriend, the lawyer, has gone, she is told home. He has moved back home, back where he belongs. He is lucky, they say, he has a family. So now Carly is left with only one favorite thing in her life and right now he is struggling to get away from her because that old marine down the hall has taken to bribing him away from her with treats. A boy's head can get turned quick by what he decides he wants in his life, and of course, what he doesn't want. He whines and pulls but she will not let him go, not this time. This time she is staying
there with him all the night through. She buries her face in his pretty brown hair and whispers what a good boy he is. “Please forgive me,” she cries. “I'd go back and do it all different if I could. You know I love you better than life itself, don't you? Don't you see that I always have?”

A
T TEN IN
the morning the temperature has already hit a hundred degrees and the weather station says it will keep rising. Mary squints out at the thermometer. The glare from the tin roof of her porch is making everything in the yard wavy. The big oak tree that was already big when she was just a little girl trying to climb up its rough trunk quivers limply overhead. She remembers squashing her face into the bark as she grabbed the branches and pulled herself up. But that was back when the only thing beyond her yard was a couple of houses down the road and the flat tobacco fields, the strip of woods that kept that old snake-infested river shady and cool. That was back before the interstate plowed
through town, taking away the fields and the woods and bringing with it all kinds of businesses and crime.

Now she is seventy-six and it is the hottest summer that she can recall, every summer of her life spent here in this very house, though now everything is overgrown and changed. Now the downtown area has spread in every direction and she lives on the corner of what is considered an old black neighborhood. Now her road is paved and the area is overrun with college students who want to live within walking distance of the campus, where Mary spent the last good years of her life working. She swept and mopped and cleaned up somebody else's garbage, somebody that knows better or ought to, given what their folks pay for them to sit and spraddle their long legs out, toes of dirty sneakers marking up the walls. Retirement. Hah.

She has worked every day of her grown life. She has worked in dry cleaning, breathing steam and chemicals, feeling the folds of her lungs starching and stiffening. She has kept other people's babies, changed their dirty diapers and whispered love words when the young mama is out somewhere in a business suit, trying to look like she might be somebody. They say, “Oh Mary, how we love her.” They say, “She is like family.” This is what they want to believe to be true. Sometimes she wants their lousy wish to be true as well,
but then there'll come a moment of reckoning that sends the skin of her neck up in little points. A rabbit running across her grave. She don't want to be somebody's charity. Don't you go doing your good deeding on me.

But now she wishes she'd let that young college boy from next door help her get that air conditioner out of its huge carton by her front door. He said, “I can put it in the window for you,” and his thin white hands trembled when he spoke, like he might be scared of an old wrinkled-up black woman. Like maybe he'd never carried on a conversation with a black woman. Maybe he was taught at an early age to fear darkness. Like she might say
boo
and he'd up and run for the hills like that salesman done the day he come calling where she was setting with some children and he gets a scared look when she glares at him like she might up and slit his puny white throat, with those little children standing there in the doorway in diapers all wide-eyed.

Lord, yes, that's how a child is meant to run. Naked as a jaybird. Squat by a tree or down by the creek. Sprawl your limbs out in a warm patch of grass or over a hardwood floor that's cool. The coolest spot in the house is always right down on the floor, where the cool air seeps up from the dark underneath part of the house. She loved playing down there as a girl. She loved the feel of the cool black dirt and she saw
it all from down there. Her mother and the other women who lived down that dusty road being picked up on summer mornings, their white dresses pressed perfect like they might be high-paid nurses heading off to the hospital. But then her mother came home late afternoon smelling like somebody else's little girl while her own little girl had spent the afternoon with the children from nearby who ran wild without any grown-ups telling them what to do. The teenage girl who smoked cigarettes, her stomach already swole up with a baby. The big brother who was known to pin a girl down and rub hisself up against her belly, only giving in to her begging and crying if she lifted up her shirt. Mary had done that, turned her face into the cool black dirt while the whole neighborhood watched, while he called her Tiny Tit and pinched her there. She counted in her head all the while picturing her mother walking the clean padded hallways of a big brick house, the little girl's room with a closet full of Sunday dresses and ruffly blouses that nobody was going to push up off her thin frightened chest.

“I hate that girl you keep,” she told her mother that night and on many others before bed, her mama too tired to even tell a bedtime story. “I hate her with her old white face. I hate her for thinking you love her.” And then she wanted to ask
Do you love her? Do you?
But her mother just frowned
and let out a tired heavy breath. What could she say if she did love that girl and what difference did it make if she didn't?

And Mary hates that skinny witch on the weather channel right now, too, with her flashy red jacket like she might be Miss Patooty. They all the time is wearing bright red and bright blue, strutting their feathers and saying
Look at me, look at me, I'm over here in the television set.
Look at the sky and tell the weather. Lord. She gets it better than most of them on the average day. You ain't got to go to school or wear a suit that costs the same as a automobile to be able to lick your finger and hold it in the air. You ain't got to live in a mansion with a Jacuzzi like all these folks have to be able to see how fast the clouds is moving or to take note of the sunset. People have thrown out common sense and trucked in a bunch of horse mess to make themselves feel great big and important.

T
HE OAK IS
quivering, quivering in the heat, the very movement putting her in mind of the old man who once a year stood at the front of the church and played his violin. That sound made people cry; it was a sad sound. People said he knew it all by ear—that he couldn't read words or music; he just played what his heart felt like playing. It was a
lonely sound like that sad bird she hears every morning, calling and calling, hopeless of an answer. Now as she watches the branches in that bright light she feels the same sadness. Beneath the tree is a ring of jonquils her mother planted, the Lord only knows how long ago, and every year they come up, weak green shoots, no blooms. They haven't bloomed in over twenty years.

Once when she was a child, she stared up at the sky on a bright hot day. She searched the uppermost branches of that same old oak tree for a bird she heard calling. A sad sound. She waited and waited. She passed out from the brightness, the whole world growing dark and grainylike, the sounds in the air buzzing like something she could see, something she could reach out and touch. Her father scooped her up then and carried her to the shade of the back porch where her mama was running some sheets through a wringer. She never told them that she had forgotten to breathe while standing there, that the heat and brightness made her feel like a candle melting down into a shapeless puddle.