Creatures of Habit (13 page)

But her prizes were her pomegranate bushes. They were big and robust and, come fall, they drooped low with their
heavy red fruit. That was the fruit children most liked to sneak in and steal, because it was the rarest, with those little red seeds like rubies and the kind of sharp bitter juice that a child cannot resist. For a long time she wished that the children would just come on up and ask her for some fruit, let her go in and get them some iced tea and johnnycakes. One Halloween she had a bushel basket of pomegranates by the front door to hand out to the trick-or-treaters but they all managed to run past her house without looking. The ones that stopped did so only long enough to ring the doorbell and run, or to light a firecracker and toss it up on the porch, which just about caused Mister Simmy to suffer heart failure. He did not calm down all night even when she cuddled him in a blanket on her lap and peeled a banana for him.

Of course, that was right after Albert died, at the beginning of all the neighborhood stories. Rommy herself remembered being a child and fearing an old country woman who glared at children from her window. That woman was rumored to be a witch. Folks said that if you looked directly into her eyes, you would die an early and tragic death. Children need something like that to fear. It is good for them. It teaches them to be cautious; it teaches them that in a world such as this they have to always be careful. How strange that Rommy had grown up to become such a woman, an object
lesson in fear. When she got tired of trying to win the neighborhood over with offerings of fruit and flowers, she decided she would simply give them what they wanted. They wanted something to be afraid of? She could sit there and be that. After all, she was afraid herself.

Some children liked to taunt the monkey and Rommy committed their little faces to memory in case something bad should ever happen. After all, Mister Simmy was now her only living relative. Rommy had learned, as a very young woman, that she couldn't have children of her own. By now they might have found a way, so much has been learned about the body, but back then it was just
no.
The slamming of a door. The pulling of a shade. She and Albert talked about adopting, but somehow it never happened. She pictured them eating under the grape arbor with two little ones, a boy and a girl. Albert would pull wonderful strips of colored cloth from his ear and Mister Simmy would sing “Red River Valley” and shoot his little cap pistol.

That's what she thought about while Albert meditated. All of her meditations starred Albert. She wasn't certain she showed up at all in his. He loved her, she knew he did, but in a different, more complicated way. He said, “Love me, love my monkey,” and she had. She loved Mister Simmy. She was the one who read all the books about monkeys; she was the
one who had told Albert the spider monkey had the most dexterous prehensile tail of all New World monkeys. She demonstrated by having Simmy pick up cherries with his tail and put them in her hand; then she told him to hang by his tail from the clothesline, and he did.

“And you ask why I love you?” Albert said. “I ask why you love me.” She did not look at him, just reached and held onto the sleeve of his shirt while Simmy scurried from tree to tree. The yard was teeming with life—bees and frogs and birds—the fruit trees were in full flower and the fragrance of her gardenias and magnolias left her light-headed. It was one of those clear moments of honest recognition, as sure as the blossoms would turn to fruit, as sure as autumn would come around again. She loved him more than anything on earth. She wanted to say she couldn't imagine
not
loving him, but the words were slow coming and by the time she was ready, Simmy was dashing after a neighbor's cat, and Albert raced to retrieve him. Now, she wishes she had said it.

S
HE COULD TELL
that some of the children were shocked when they finally saw her. They were surprised that she wore shorts and sneakers, surprised that she sometimes yanked her hair up into a ponytail at the back of her head. She had just turned fifty-three and could have been a school-teacher
or a friend's grandmother or a woman working the register at Food Lion.

But people will blame a woman for a man's unhappiness and that's what they did with Rommy. She suspected people said she was not pretty enough, not sexy enough, not local enough (though she had grown up only a couple of hours away). Anyone with an IQ only slightly higher than Mister Simmy's should know better. Rommy knew better herself but it didn't ease the shame and hurt, especially late at night when there was no one for her to talk to other than a chattering little monkey who liked to pick at her scalp. She knew this grooming was Simmy's greatest show of affection —other than offering her food he had already been chewing—so she never scolded him for it. Instead she took to wearing one of Albert's old caps (he often imitated the salesman in
Caps for Sale
for children and had twenty or more in all colors) as they sat there watching the television. Sometimes Simmy fell asleep in her lap, and in just the blue gray glow from the set, someone peeping in from the outside might have thought she had a baby there.

She knew better. She knew the source of Albert's sadness, and even though he knew that she knew, it was never discussed. The folks in town who really knew who Albert was would not be talking. Their knowledge came from sharing
the same desires. And she knew who they were. She saw them in the grocery store with their families or featured prominently in the newspaper. She had seen them other times as well; she had seen them creeping out from under her grapevines late at night. Many nights she had heard a car parked over near the all-night pharmacy turn its engine over and drive away, just before Albert tiptoed into their room and eased into bed beside her. If she spoke to him on these occasions it was to pretend that his getting into bed had been what woke her. But usually she kept her breath even, her eyes closed. There were many nights when he stroked her head, his hand gentle as he fingered her neck and shoulders. She knew he loved her. But she also knew if she had opened her eyes to look into his she would have seen a look of hopelessness.

W
HEN
A
LBERT DIED
, she felt washed up on shore by an ocean of tragedy. It was Albert's big black wave that came rolling and rolling, threatening to pull her into its undertow and down to the depths forever. It was what kept him making promises that he would never be able to keep. Babies and arbors and trips to the Caribbean. Romantic nights with just the two of them and not even Simmy around to interrupt. But she had understood almost from the first that Albert's
plans—spoken with hope and the best intentions—didn't mean anything, just night talk. Come daybreak, all the plans receded.

When Albert died the wave was cresting. Though he tried to keep himself afloat, his mood had gotten deeper and darker than she had ever known it. It still hung over her now. She wanted to crash herself, to give up, too. Instead, she took to gardening as she never had before. She spent hours down on her knees, twisting and pulling weeds from the earth. She spread manure, intoxicated by the rich odor of decay. Sometimes, when the sky was clear and the breeze just right, she would answer Albert as she should have that now-lost day. “I love
you,
I love
you,
” her spade striking the earth in rhythm with the words.

If she could have, she would have poisoned Albert's demons, deflated the black doom that shadowed him and their house, found a way to tell him that they didn't have to continue living as husband and wife. That they could live as friends, have separate rooms, that even if a perfect specimen of a man fell madly in love with her, he would have to creep to her bed in the dark of night so as not to betray her real love.
Only Simmy will know,
she should have said. She should have laughed.

 

• • •

R
OMMY'S TREMBLING MOST
often set in as she sat on the porch talking to Mister Simmy. Sometimes it was all she could do to get inside the house and slam the door before the hard shaking started. She shook all over. Her teeth rattled. Her bones ached. Maybe she should have let those children see her shake. Let them see her fall completely apart. She overheard someone at Albert's funeral remark that she hadn't done a lot of crying. Was there some prescribed amount of crying for a widow? Folks didn't know that her crying had come and gone early in the marriage and that by the funeral she'd used it up. Folks didn't know there were several men in town who should have been shedding
their
tears at the graveside. Their failure to appear was evidence that their souls did not run to the same depth as Albert's. It had been Albert's desire for an honest life that killed him. Before he died, she liked imagining that Albert might get himself another chance someday, that he might eventually find peace and acceptance, that he would no longer need a good woman to hide behind.

R
OMMY MET
A
LBERT
when she was well into her twenties and still living in the town where she had grown up. The smell and sound of the ocean were important to her day. She was waitressing at a seaside restaurant where Albert
happened to come eat one night. He was with a big rowdy table of men, all of them drinking beer and telling jokes. He was by far the best looking of the lot and all the waitresses were talking about him. It surprised everybody that Rommy was the one he had fixed on by the end of the night. She remembered feeling like an amazon next to him, too large, too plain. She was one of those girls people said had an
interesting
face, the same people who remarked about her intelligence and love of science, neither of which had ever won her a man's attentions. Still, Albert kept coming back, always meeting up with the same group, always talking with her while he waited for them. They talked about what kind of fish people were catching off the pier and about the erosion of the shoreline. She was working for a conservation group to raise money for planting sea oats and depositing sandbags, and he made a contribution every time he was in the restaurant. He made her laugh as he pulled quarter after quarter, sometimes a rolled up dollar, from behind her ear and let his hand brush her neck each time.

He made people feel good about themselves. He worked magic—magic you could see and magic you couldn't. Soon enough, she didn't care if people wondered why he was with her. She thought she knew the answer. She was stable and cheerful. She
was
smart and she knew things Albert was
interested in hearing about: birds and plants, the weather, the stars. He liked the fact that she read all the time and had been to college for two years. But perhaps most important, she shared his love for animals and was always eager to visit a zoo or watch
Wild Kingdom
on television.

They were just married and settling into what had been Albert's family home when there was a terrible accident on their corner. A boy from a nearby town was thrown from his car and speared on a neighbor's fence. Rommy was in her yard when it happened; she was squatting, tending the fragile delphiniums she was determined to grow though it was clear they didn't like the southern climate. At the sound of the crash, she got to her feet and ran out into the street. She was the first one there, but there was not a sound from the boy, only the spit and spray of a busted radiator, the slow leak of a punctured tire. The whole world seemed to have gone silent. The birds had stopped singing the way they do when a snake slithers his way through the garden. For Rommy, seeing death for the first time was dark and silent. She could almost taste the loss as she stepped back at the sound of sirens.

It was the same way when she stood alone on her porch long after the ambulance took Albert away. Her gaze was locked on her neighbor's house, a house that had changed hands many times. Now its yard was cluttered with the
paraphernalia of children, but the murderous fence was still there. She felt that if she stood there long enough she might see that boy again. She might watch his death as if it had just happened, as if she had not been thirty and just beginning to learn all that she would come to know about gardening.

A
CROSS THE STREET
from Rommy's house was the town's sole apartment complex. Gardenview Apartments, it was called. “I think our garden is their view,” Albert had said as they watched the units spring up like bean sprouts, nothing but a series of soon-to-be-run-down little two-bit dwellings each with just enough of a concrete stoop to hold a cheap yard chair and a trash can. Many of the children who tormented Simmy lived in Gardenview and were, to Rommy, like scampering cockroaches; their running and jumping and shouting sent Mister Simmy practically into convulsions every time the school bus wheezed to a stop. Once they were on the bus, she had hours of peace in the shade of her own yard. She watched the women of Gardenview. They were almost all military wives, their shavenheaded husbands up and gone before dawn and their children needing attention. She observed their lives, aching with loss at the sight of khaki pants and dingy white T-shirts strung over lines. She watched the women, several swollen with
babies, sitting out on their little stoops while children in dirty diapers stumbled about. She often heard them talking and laughing, and though she knew that these were women with very little means, scrimping and pinching just to get by, she envied their lives.

Her longings held even when families split up and moved in different directions, or when the men came home from drinking ready to pick a fight. Come Friday night, who needed television? Who needed some shoot-'em-up detective or cowboy show when she could hear all the cussing and fighting she could ever want to hear sitting right there on her porch. There were more peaceful scenes, too, but they were quiet and not nearly as noticeable—a couple strolling along the sidewalk; a father sweeping his child up off the ground and into his arms; a mother stepping onto the stoop in a fashionable dress, price tags still attached, to twirl for her children and a neighbor. Those were the moments, little promises, that could enable a person to go on living.