Creatures of Habit (12 page)

“Go for it,” I say.

“Oh, I didn't mean I'd do it.” He emphasizes “I'd” as if I suggested he run out into the yard naked. “That's a rainy-day project for you.” His mind slips no more than is probably normal. He seems reasonably healthy beyond the top-secret digestive troubles and the shadowy burdens of life. I make up ways to make myself tolerant of his immobility. I pretend he is a quadriplegic.

“I need some water,” he says. “Not too cold though, it makes my belly hurt.” I hand him the water and then ask if he can help me gather up the newspapers around him for recycling but he doesn't budge. He has an aching belly. He is killing me.

I pretend he is a deaf quadriplegic.

I like to think my mother had regrets. Like at my wedding, where she and James sat on one side and my dad and Margaret on the other. I like to think my parents looked longingly across the aisle at one another. My wedding was in
the very church where my brother and I had been christened, the very one where I threw up in the vestibule one awful rainy Sunday, a moment so memorable that my brother and close friends from home will still say, “Remember when you vomited in the vestibule?” And I will say, “Yes, at the Hanging of the Greens service.”

But what I remember best is being lifted up by my father and carried out into the cool wet day, put down on the backseat of our old Chevrolet and smelling tobacco and my mother's perfume on the vinyl. She wore Shalimar then; he never let her run out of it. And he sent her to get some wet paper towels for my forehead and though she resisted at first, though she worried about missing the service,
What would people say? Could they really leave my brother in the church to sit all by himself?
she did as he said. Somehow my father was able to convince her that it was just fine to sit there with us in the pouring-down rain. He talked about priorities and the upcoming holidays. He would have described at greater length the famous stuffing his grandmother used in the center of a crown pork roast if the first mention of butter and meat and prunes hadn't made me moan and gag. And when I got sick again, he swung open the back door and eased me out onto the curb. He squatted down beside me, his suit spattered with mud and throw up,
while my mother leaned out of the car and held my hair back from my face.

“Teamwork, love,” he said to her then and smiled. “Great teamwork.” And they laughed, their cold wet hands entwined on my sweaty neck. It is one of my very favorite memories.

I like to picture my parents at the college football game where my father proposed. Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice was the star player on the field; the marching band played the fight song. There were no lights in the stadium. The donation that built the stadium specified that it not accommodate anything taller than the trees. The university would have to wait many years before there could be night games. So it was the afternoon, autumn, sweater weather. Young men were swigging liquor from flasks; their girlfriends were wearing little white socks and loafers. I imagine my dad as one of the louder guys, cheering and laughing, I imagine that he mistook my mother's silence as shyness, a little bird in need of a few flight lessons. I think that he imagined far more longing and desire in her than actually existed. I marvel at what we all manage to make out of nothing, time and time again. And then he gave her the ring, slipped it onto her finger so quietly, easily, then squeezed so tightly it brought tears to her eyes.

“He almost broke my finger,” she once said, interrupting his story as we drove to a family vacation.

“She was moved to tears,” he said and laughed. And then later added, “She often is, isn't she?”

The day my father actually moved out, my mother and I sat studying the daisy picture that her grandmother had fashioned out of hair. My mother explained that this was something her grandmother said was trendy in the Victorian era —an art form of sorts.
Craft
better described what we had before us—a misshapen daisy made from a poor old woman's wiry, tangled hair. My dad had been gone for over an hour and still we studied it, the frame on the center of her bed, where we sat and waited for my brother to get home from his tennis lesson. We studied its petals as if they were tea leaves.

“I think she must have been a sad woman,” my mother said then, tracing a finger over the glass. “I think she probably always knew that she needed to make herself get up and move but something kept her from doing it.”

“I thought she couldn't walk,” I said then, still with a hopeful ear listening for the return of my dad. “I thought she was completely bed-bound when she made this and that was the whole story, that she got bored and began cutting off her hair, strand by strand.”

“Yes, that's right,” my mother said. I was hoping she would continue with the story about how the old demented woman got it in her mind to count all of the hairs on her head since they were indeed numbered. How she did he loves me, he loves me not, snipping and counting and then scribbling a number on the inside pages of the Bible by her bed. When she had enough hairs collected to braid a thin string, she began twisting oddly shaped petals and stems. I wanted to hear more about her dementia and how she, there at the end of her life, had in her mind that her husband, who was still very much alive and shuffling about the old country house, was already dead and had been found that way “nekked” in another's bed. My mother had told the story many, many times. She used a perfect country dialect to deliver the vulgarities the old woman tossed at the man she had lived with for fifty years. The family favorite was when she called him “dirty hog dick” in the presence of the pastor. My mother remembered being a child and standing in the doorway while her grandmother cursed and muttered “nekked, nekked I say,” her hair half-shorn, ragged and stringy.

My mother told this story well. My father got excited, watching and listening. He would encourage her to tell it again and again; he praised her wonderful dialect and sense
of humor. He begged her to tell it on holidays and to new friends. He said, “When you're old and sick are you going to turn on me that way?”

She said, “Only if I find you
nekked
in somebody else's bed.”

Finally, as we sat studying the picture, my mother bent forward and began to cry. She said that the end of the story was that when the poor old woman finally got down to the last few pathetic strands, she stopped on “he loves me not,” and even though her pitiful husband sat right there in front of her in the flesh and begged and pleaded and told her he loved her, there was no getting through.

N
OW
J
AMES
T. A
LLEN
sits in front of my greatgrandmother's hair daisy. “I guess you know all about this, huh?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “What is it?”

“A daisy.”

“Huh.”

“Made of hair.”

“Okay.”

It is clear that I am interrupting his day of absolute boredom. Just this morning, I passed the open bathroom to see Sam standing there, a towel around his lean waist as he
shaved, and I marveled that he was here in this house, with his parents still together, his parents still in love. Because of his happiness, he might never have reason to look as deeply into my life, or into Ron's. We might be dead before he sees us in the clear way I now see my father. He turned and gave me a look as if to say
Yeah? What do you want?
but then leaned close, mouthwash on his breath, hair slicked back the way his girlfriend recently suggested. “Why,” he whispered, “doesn't James order the vegetable plate?”

I shrugged and he broke into snorts and giggles. He might as well have been nine. “Because he
is
the vegetable plate!” He was so tickled with himself, he had to sit down on the edge of the tub. “I mean, I don't mean to be mean,” he gasped, “but he
is
the vegetable plate.”

I wonder what he and my mother
did
talk about? Did my mother save her one story like a gem tucked away and protected or did she give it to this zombie who simply paid no attention and does not now remember. Or did my mother choose silence? A chance to slip beneath the fabric of life my dad had sewn with such a flair?

These questions become an obsession and one day I can't resist. As the sun begins to sink, before Ron and the kids get home, I mix James his habitual vodka and orange juice and I mix one for myself and just as the sunlight fades completely,
before I reach to flick on the lamp, I say, “So what did you and Mom talk about when you sat together at this time of day?” After a long pause, after a long sip, he sighs and looks away. “I don't know,” he says. “Maybe the news, what to have for dinner. You know,” he glances at me and then fixes his gaze on the daisy, “I really don't remember.”

He remains silent for what seems an eternity. I can hear my neighbor's sprinklers rotating; I hear him draw in a deep breath and sigh again. “All of our conversations run together,” he says, without looking away from the wall. “Even at the very end we didn't say a whole lot.” This is the most I have ever heard him say at once, and there is something in the sadness of his voice that makes me want to press the stop button, erase my question, put a lid on Pandora's box.

“I wanted her to talk more,” he continues, “I did. I thought maybe there were things she needed to say. There were things I would have said back.” He closes his eyes and rests his head on the back of the chair. I want to tell him that I wanted her to say things to me as well, but before I can push myself in that direction, he continues. “Emma had a lot to say when she was dying.”

I jump with the mention of this new name. My mother had always referred to him as a widower, never making any
mention of his first wife. “Emma and I had a lot to say to each other but then we had a lot of years between us.” He smiles when he says her name, and there is a look of comfort on his face, something that I have not seen there before. His eyes are still closed and I can only imagine that he is picturing some bit of his life with Emma. “You must know by now,” his voice shakes, “your mother was not a happy woman.” He sits up straight with this statement and looks me in the eye. “I thought that once we were married and settled in our own world that it would all get better; I thought she was just sort of worried about how I would fit in.” He waits as if wanting me to intervene. “It was easier for her to stay unhappy, that's all.” He nods and I nod along with him. “I'd say, ‘What can I do? Just tell me,' but she never did.”

He fidgets, his right hand smoothing the brushed corduroy of the arm of the chair. My plan to have a good story to tell Sam and Ron late tonight has backfired. It is true that James T. Allen was my mother's white noise, her third martini, Demerol in her veins. It is true that his presence enabled her to check out of the world without anyone noticing her absence or her inability to change. He played the part my father was not willing to play. But what I didn't know, what I never even considered, is that James T. Allen never
wanted the role she assigned him. Whether or not it was her conscious intention, she used him. In his own weak and watered-down way, he wanted exactly what my father had wanted. He wanted life. And now I understand, as he reaches for my hand, that this is where we come in.

E
VERYBODY IN TOWN
knew who Rommy Whitfield was. She was the woman with the monkey cage out on her front porch and a spider monkey named Mister Simmy inside it shaking the bars like a crazed convict and baring his sharp little yellow teeth. She was the woman with the most beautiful garden in town. She grew flowers and she grew vegetables. On late summer afternoons you would see her sitting in the glider on the shady end of her porch shelling field peas and butter beans into a big shiny colander on her lap.

Children came to spy on her, the mission being to creep close enough to hear the peas falling from their shells, close enough to hear what she was saying because her mouth was always moving, her head shaking from side to side. One boy
had reported that she was cussing up a storm but he couldn't quite make out the words because Mister Simmy spotted him hiding in the shrubbery and started screeching and throwing his crap.

She knew the children came to look at her; a lot of adults who didn't know any better did, too. Her husband had killed himself. He had taken the sash from the silk robe he bought for her one Christmas and used it to hang himself. That was the attraction. They came to see what the woman who was married to the man who killed himself looked like. What was she doing there all alone with the monkey? Even people who had known her since she first came to town kept a somewhat cool distance after the death. Oh they came to the viewing down at the Cape Fear Mortuary and they came to the funeral; they whispered back and forth, speculating on
why
he had done this. Some of them knew things. That much was clear to Rommy sitting there in a hard metal chair and staring into the damp earth where Albert lay in his padded box. She could feel their tidbits of knowledge, their memories of this time or that, burning into her back. She kept her eyes open during the prayer, half hoping that Albert might rise up from the ground and break into hilarious laughter. He loved to trick people; he loved to go to birthday parties and pull coins from children's ears and flowers from
his own sleeves. He loved to throw his voice so that it seemed as if Mister Simmy was singing “Red River Valley.” Simmy would wear a little tiny cowboy hat strapped to his head and a bandanna around his neck so that he looked just like Albert. Yes, Albert loved nothing better than a trick. The fine art of deception.

R
OMMY HAD LOTS
of fruit trees heavy with fruit: apples and pears and hard sour cherries. She had a muscadine grapevine that had completely taken over the old car shed, where Albert used to sneak out for what he called his meditation. She knew he went out there to smoke a cigar, to think about life, and for the most part she resisted following him and trying to peek through the dark window at the rear of the shed. She planted the vine when they first got married and Albert promised to build her an arbor. They would have a wrought-iron café table and chairs in its shade. She had in mind that years in the future they would eat supper there on summer nights under the canopy of grapes. Sleep, creep, leap. That's what folks say about a vine and sure enough by the third year that grapevine had taken off in every direction.