Creatures of Habit (19 page)

“L
ET ME HELP YOU
,” that white boy said. “I know you live alone here and I don't think you can get the air conditioner in the window by yourself. Please, let me do something for you.”

S
HE HAD READ
stories of young men muscling their way into old women's houses to rummage their purses and then rape them to death. It was in the paper all the time. Poor old woman comes out of the Harris Teeter and gets kidnapped and what did they want? Her car. Her food. Surely she'd have given them that if there was no other way. She'd've said,
Take it, children, take the money and the car keys and just leave me here in the parking lot and I won't even call the policeman until you are way out of town.
But it seemed that killing was a part of the plan. They wanted to kill is all. Many of them do.

“I can manage,” she told that boy and watched him amble back over to where he lived with a herd of wild ones of all sizes and shapes and colors. The kids from the university had been coming and going in and out of that old eyesore of a house for over twenty years, strewing their beer cans and talking the same stuff; the only thing that changed was their hairdos and outfits. That boy looked kind of hurt when he turned to go back into that zoo of a house but she couldn't worry on that. Would she have let a black one in? She had to think it through. But no, she thought, she absolutely would not. This had nothing to do with color. It had to do with being alone in the world.

“Y
OU ARE PREJUDICED
, M
ARY
,” her coworker Bennie used to tell her when they took their breaks from cleaning up the campus buildings. “You are bad prejudiced, girl.”

“Maybe. Maybe I am,” she said. “Or maybe I'm just jealous of their clean easy worlds.”

“They don't all have clean easy worlds.”

“In a town like this one they do.”

“So do a lot of the black folks.”

Those times there with Bennie were the best part of her life. Those were the times when all the anger that churned her insides just up and flew away. It made her want to sing. It made her want to crack jokes and laugh great big. She liked to tell jokes that were kind of dirty just to see Bennie get nervous and have to stare down at his feet while he chuckled. “You're something else, Mary,” he said and she knew deep down that he meant that; she knew deep down that he felt something stirring. It was like the world was humming then, the great big oak trees there on campus filled with starlings, their wings shiny black in the light. People talked of these birds as a problem, the racket they made, the filth they dropped, the way they clustered together in one big mass and then took to the sky all at once: a screeching black cloud that drowned out everything else on the face of the earth. “Pests,” people cried, like they was one of the Bible plagues,
but Mary liked when they gave her that loud second to catch her breath and turn her attention off of Bennie and what was a hopeless calling. She liked changing the subject after the racket like about how she had ordered herself a radio with a built-in cassette player that could also just play sounds. Like you could have yourself a thunderstorm or the ocean or birds at sunrise just by throwing a switch.

O
NE DAY SHE
will get everything organized. She likes the catalogs. That is her favorite thing, to sit and choose pretty things and then pick up the phone and call, put on a fancy-sounding voice. It is like being a kid with the Sears and Roebuck's only she's old and she has worked hard enough to save. She owns her house and she gets her pension. Her daddy paid off half the house and then she finished all by herself. Didn't need a man even though there was many who offered.
You think I want to spend my life feeding your fat behind and all those children you've planted in other women's patches over the years? Come here to this garden to rest till the end of your days? Think again, you. Think again, old dog.

T
HE ONLY MAN
she'd've ever had was Bennie, and as is true with everything good in life, he was spoken for, and his wife was the salt of the earth. Still sometimes when she
closed her eyes after long days at the university she pictured herself laying there with Bennie. She'd rub her face up on that Egyptian cotton pillowcase she was so fond of and think of him. This was a pillowcase anybody would be proud to have; it comes from a place that has made bed linens a specialty of sorts. Her sheets are just like those she used to spend hours ironing in a big house on Main Street where she worked a little as a young woman. She loved to iron those fine linens. It was the finest cotton she'd ever run her fingers over. Buttery smooth. When she closes her eyes at night ain't a soul on earth, not the president and whoever, and not Prince Charles and Camelia, or whatever the harlot calls herself, sleeping on a better piece of fabric.

T
HERE ARE BOXES
to unpack and when she pulls out the new things it will give her a burst of energy and she will be able to get busy. It will be like Christmas morning right in the thick of a hot-as-Hades July. She'll put on the sound of a tropical rain forest, and she'll hang herself some new curtains, white priscillas with some beautiful hummingbird tieback holders. Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel and Ross-Simons and Bloomingdale's. She fancies that they see her name come up on the computer screen and they comment what a good customer she is.
What exquisite taste.
She
laughs. If they could see her now. Skinny black woman standing in the kitchen in nothing but underwear, nothing but a pair of size medium cotton drawers from Dillards, her breasts hanging and swinging to and fro like a Watusi. She imagines stepping out on her porch this way next time a white greasyfaced thing comes selling something. She'll put an old chicken bone up in her hair and she'll shoo him off with some mumbo jumbo, leaving him to think she'd cast a spell like she once done somebody at the dry-cleaning store.

That man was hateful like she'd never seen, talking to that skinny little white girl at the counter like she might've been a dog. Mary stepped forward and held out her hands and begun to twitch like she was picking up some kind of wave or something. “What is wrong with you, woman?” he asked and Mary just shook her head. “Oh, I ain't the one with the problem I fear.” And she told him—much to the shock of everybody there waiting in line—that she had picked up on his sex problems and she sure was sorry. He acted like she was crazy as a bat but still he pushed her. What did she mean by that? She didn't answer, just went on about her business, but as he was leaving she went over and whispered in his old waxy ear, “Your lovin' days is over, sir. Your equipment is likely to just ride around in your drawers like a little dead varmint for the rest of your days.” She was asked
to leave soon after but that was fine enough. The other workers looked up to her. She was a legend. Besides, her lungs needed a break from all the chemicals and heat.

A
ND IT IS SO HOT
. Too hot to breathe. The hottest summer in a long while. By noon it is a hundred and five and the woman on the television set says it ain't over yet. Mary has pulled all of the heavy yellowed shades to block the sun and feels her way around the boxes and piles of newspapers. She makes her way over to the crate with the air conditioner and sits on top of it. Order from Sears. Why didn't she let them install it? Was she ashamed for folks to see the unopened boxes? The trash that needed to be hauled out? The recycling? Or was she scared of him, scared of what he might do to her if she didn't tip him enough cash? Now she can't remember. She hears that stray cat meowing and scratching on her door. Her feet are swollen or she might ask it in. But the last time she did that it was a spooked cat and left a bloody stripe down her arm. It is odd how dark it is in here. Beyond the shade there are kids blowing their horns and riding their bikes. They are buzzing and screaming.

S
HE RAISES THE BLIND
. Bees in the clover. A distant knocking. A woodpecker? That boy again? She does not
trust such young men. There was once one that let her know she was an animal herself if she had to be. He acted like he wanted her for herself but that wasn't what he wanted at all. What he wanted didn't even need a face or a brain. She could have killed him so easy. She said, “Don't make me kill you.” She had a tiny little crochet hook she grabbed from her bedside table—one for making lace—and it was pointed right at his ear. She said, “Don't make me kill you because I will.” She said, “I will puncture your brain. Or maybe I'll let you live and go on to prison because old butt-buggering bubba might need hisself a date to the prison prom.” She could have killed him, could have beaten the everlovin' life from him. A few things like that happen in life and you stop trusting even when you want to so bad.

By one o'clock the sun is beating full down, pressing the cracked ceilings closer and closer to her face. The old oscillating fan lifts the pages of the catalogs at her feet and she can't keep her eyes open at all. She struggles to stay awake; the next radio show is a gardening show and they have lots of tips that she will need in another week or so when she is feeling better. She has bought herself some half barrels and several big bags of good rich potting soil and a couple of bags of moo doo and great big red geraniums. The porch will be beautiful then and when the heat breaks, she'll put on that
frock she ordered from Bloomingdale's, a frock that nobody would ever expect
her
to wear—bright green jungle print with loud-colored animals turned every which way—and she'll set there in the swing with some iced tea in that pretty crystal goblet from the Ross-Simons set and she will open all her Harry and David goodies, maybe break out the Godiva chocolates she ordered several weeks ago and that caviar she was aching to try out even though she suspected that it was probably going to be a lot like when she got herself lox and bagels. Orange fish on a piece of tough bread.
What was the Jews thinking,
she wondered. “You can have it. Buy yourself some mouthwash, too,” she told that old man in the fish market. She said, “What has happened to you, man? This ain't no fish market. Smoked fish and orange fish and ole slimy mess. Where's the catfish? Where's the flounder? Where's the cornbread crumbs to roll it in before you fry it?” He laughed. He wanted to say that's a black thing, a colored thing, a Negro thing, an African American, Afro-American, Kwanzaa-celebrating thing. Kwanzaa is what the white folks latch onto in a town such as this so they can act like they're teaching their children something. Teach them collards. Teach them don't cross the street and hold tight to your purse when you see a black man.

T
HAT BIRD WITH
the sad sound is high in the oak and now Mary knows she has to go and see it for real. She makes her way, naked and dark, heavy bare feet wedged into satin slippers,
the perfect end of the busy day for the woman of the nineties.
She stares one step ahead, the brown painted floor. Who painted it last? Her daddy? That man that tried to take up with her that time? Don't trip. Don't fall. Dark floorboards she used to walk as a child, arms held to the sides and balanced. She was on a plank high above the Pee Dee River. Below her were alligators and above her were snakes swinging from the limbs. And watching her was everybody in the whole town—man and woman and black and white. All the children in her school held their breath as she crossed, her own breath held.
You can do it, Mary,
they say,
You can do it.
In her mind she is always being a hero.

H
ER DADDY SAID
, “Mary, what are you doing?” and he yanked her through the kitchen doorway, her white cotton socks stained brown from the paint. “Didn't I tell you not to walk on that floor? Didn't I tell you?” And his grip on her arm hurt and she shut her eyes and waited for a slap to sting her bare leg. Fly swatter, switch—ligustrum limb stripped of its leaves, a whistle through the air, a slap, a sting, pulling
the skin up into a thin welt. She never got a whipping in her life that made her want to be a better person. It was the opposite. It made her want to be a bad person. It made her want to beat them right back. Bennie hisself thought that children who were beaten on would grow up to do the same to theirs unless they got hold of a book or two or talked to a person who might teach them different.

“Bennie, you act like a white man,” she told him. “Like one of these teachers packed with brains.”

“I act like a man is all,” he said and she was thinking,
I wish you did, honey. I wish you did 'cause if you acted like most men, like the men I know, then I'd've had you by now. I'd've had you at least once.

S
HE WANTED HIM
. He was the one she wanted. But he was too good for her. The floorboards are straight and narrow and it's hard not to tip to the side. She made herself a promise never to strike a child. Never to hit a loved one. But beyond that any fool is fair game. She ain't one to go hunting but you muscle your way into her life with some bad intentions and she will kill you. She says, “I can kill you. I will. I will kill you if I have to.”

She'd done just that before when an old bloodthirsty bulldog belonging to some no-good down the street come
into her yard like something from the wild and went after a little puppy belonging to those students next door. That dog walked right up and grabbed that puppy by the throat, broke its little neck, shook it like a dust rag, and that young boy was off on the steps wringing his hands and sobbing. And without thinking Mary got herself an axe and went after it. By then the animal had tore open the little one's belly and was lapping right into it like it might be a bowl of milk and she brought that axe down before the mongrel could think. And yes, it looked at her. And its eyes looked frightened. Its eyes seemed to say
I can't help that I was raised this way. Raised to be angry and mean,
but that didn't stop Mary. And when a full day and night passed and nobody came looking for it, she wrapped its body in some old bath towels and called up the department of sanitation. The boy from next door came back later to say that there was nothing the doctor could do for his puppy. He stood outside her locked screen door, hands in his pockets as he shifted from side to side. “Thank you,” he said. “I hope I can help you some time.”