Creatures of Habit (5 page)

T
HE HONEYMOON WAS
over before it began. The sweep of bridal frenzy—a wave of white tulle and bone china and petits fours—receded leaving a litter of soggy napkins and a half-eaten cake.

For Lisa the planning had been like a drug, each day upping the dosage, each dose successfully veiling any fears or doubts or anxieties about what she was about to do with the rest of her life. Her energy kicked in full force just as out-oftown relatives arrived; they came in carloads, moved into the Red Carpet Inn and Bell's Econo Lodge. They toasted her, gave her gifts, wished her a long and happy life. She had never before received so much attention and now as she sat in the passenger seat, seeing Alan and the gold ring on his
finger that matched her own, she was shocked. She had almost forgotten that he was a part of it all. It was
her
wedding. She planned it; her parents paid for it. She was hungover from too much excitement and too little sleep. The spinning world had slammed to a halt and thrown her for a loop. Her mind had not ventured beyond those moments in the church; she had not looked beyond the stained-glass windows she had studied her entire childhood when the sermons were too boring or too threatening to absorb. Noah, Jonah, Moses, Jesus. They were all there.

But where was she?

They had flown to Pennsylvania (a state she had never in her life visited), rented a car, and now here they were driving through the Poconos. This had been her idea (Alan vetoed her first choice of Niagara Falls) and now she knew she had made a terrible mistake. These mountains were not so great. They were no better than the mountains of western North Carolina or the Shenandoah Valley, where she had visited relatives every autumn when she was a kid. Now, looking at these foreign mountains depressed the hell out of her. Now, with mounting horror, she wondered what in the hell she had done.

“I knew this was a mistake,” Alan said, as he slowed down,
and she jerked to attention, afraid he'd read her thoughts. But he was talking about the hotel up ahead, which looked nothing like the pictures at the back of the brides magazines. “Look, there's not even anybody parking cars or carrying luggage.” This was no big deal for her. That she might someday wake up and have to stop waiting on herself was a foreign thought. When Alan finally found somebody to get their bags, a slouched teenage boy who wore jeans and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, she had already carried everything over near the big front door. “It was the principle,” Alan said. He tipped the boy less than he would have had he been wearing a little monkey suit and cap, and they went over to the lengthy check-in line, joining the crying babies and chainsmoking women in pool attire.

A
LAN HAD DONE
all of this once before so the wedding preparation had not been something that held his interest. He had surfaced periodically with the voice of experience—make sure the bridesmaid dresses are selected with the least-attractive girl in mind, “nothing worse than one tall lean beauty in chiffon followed by a bunch of pastel stuffed sausages”—and then he would follow up with an anecdote about when he and Susan Hunter Malloy got
married. Of course, Susan Hunter knew all of these things because she had older sisters and not only were all of them married but they had all made their debuts in Raleigh.

And where are they now all these decades later?
Lisa had wanted to ask.
Sipping tea with the queen?
But that would have been acknowledging that her future husband was also quite a bit older. He was fourteen years older, in fact, which early on had seemed a positive thing. She had actually been surprised that such a smart and successful man had been interested in her at all. He had chosen cosmetic surgery as his specialty (he said for aesthetic reasons) and had gotten in early enough to make a small fortune. He and Susan Hunter had wanted to ensure early retirement, beach house, Ivy League colleges for the kids, nice cars. Now Susan Hunter had a huge chunk of all of that. She spent her summers down at the beach with her children, who were closer to Lisa's age. Rumor had it that Susan Hunter had never in her life looked better.

“I guess she does look good,” Alan liked to respond to anyone who commented, most recently his college roommate, who had bumped into her while visiting Figure Eight Island. “I gave her the breasts as an anniversary present years ago. The nose for Christmas one year. Tummy tuck to celebrate when she got her interior design degree. The butt lift
was right around the corner,” he paused. “But, of course, then I met Lisa.” He looked at her when he said this and she laughed and shrugged it off because what she was really thinking about was whether to register silver plate as well as sterling and stainless. Her mother said no; why spend time polishing something unless it's the real thing? His mother said yes; it would be nice for little brunches and afternoon events.
Where? At the old folks' home?
She said Alan had not gotten silver plate the first time, but it was because it was back before the big jump in sterling. Alan and Susan Hunter had gotten tons of sterling.

T
HEY MET AT
the Empowerment Workshop, which Lisa was told used to be called something else, but they got a bad rap for not letting people pee when they needed to. It sounded like a tough-love course for people with money, people like Alan. She was there as one of the several undergraduate students hired to man the doors and hand out Kleenex and point out the bathrooms, serve coffee at the breaks. Alan, handsome in a gray pin-striped suit even though all the other people were dressed down, was one of the first to stand and deliver a tragic story about how he had never felt loved as a child, how that Harry Chapin song “Cat's in the Cradle” (he actually sang a few bars) was
completely applicable to him. He was all shook up by the end, crying about how he, in turn, had not always been the best father and that, even though he was now a single parent, he wanted to make a difference.

“He's kind of cute,” Emily, the graduate student working with Lisa, had whispered. “I'm going to check him out at the break after he's blown his nose and collected himself.”

If not for this statement by a studious, sensible girl Lisa admired, she might never have given Alan a second look. She personally did not like the exhibitionist aspect of the Empowerment Workshop. Besides, at the time all she could think about was Randy, whom she had known her whole life and had always assumed she would marry. She was thinking of Randy and the time she sat on the riverbank reading while he ventured out in a rowboat. Not thirty minutes into his journey, he shot a hole in the boat when a snake dropped down from a tree and startled him. Once she knew he was safely back on shore, that scene never failed to make her laugh, and she relied on it when bored and needing to pass the time. She was thinking of Randy at the break while the graduate student dashed by to whisper that she had found someone else, who though not as handsome as the crying man in the pinstripe, was definitely more her type. Lisa absentmindedly served coffee while she watched the student
talking and laughing with a guy who wore a long gray ponytail and Birkenstocks. He had not yet spoken before the group, because Lisa certainly would have remembered. He was wearing enough turquoise to sink a ship.

And there was Alan, dry-eyed and cool looking, extending his hand for a cup of coffee. He had come back from his inner child and was telling her about his professional life. Lisa had actually heard of him. Her mother knew women who had secretly been to the young genius surgeon. Those who hadn't yet been talked about going. It was the first time that Lisa had gone out with someone who all women— young and old alike—were interested in hearing about. At first her parents didn't trust him. Her dad said there was something shifty about him, and Lisa's brother, Mike, just out of high school said “shifty or
shitty?
” Mike was completely devoted to Randy; at times it seemed he was the one who was enduring a breakup.

“Why are you going out with him?” her mother asked. “It isn't the money is it?”

“No way,” Lisa said.

“Well, why do you guess he's going out with you?”

“What do you mean by that?” She asked. “I'm not good enough?”

Lisa knew her mother meant well, that what she really
wanted to ask about was Randy and if Lisa had seen him. Her mother had already asked one time too many, sending Lisa into a rage the likes of which she had never experienced in all of her life. “Screw Randy,” she screamed, her parents sitting there in the his-and-her recliners they'd given each other for their twenty-fifth anniversary, “everybody else has.” Now, her mother knew not to utter a peep.

The truth was that, after years of loyalty, Randy had screwed up and she had caught him. He was going out with other people, had been for over six months.
Randy
Randy, her roommate said. So what if her parents loved him like a son? So what if he had been the one to straighten Mike out back in ninth grade when he was on the verge of trouble?

He said he was unsure of the future. Well, who isn't, she asked. He said he had
accidentally
slept with a girl who lived right there in Lisa's dorm. She had yet to figure that one out. Over and over he kept asking what he was going to do. Take over his dad's land and farm? Go to vet school? Or should he just chuck all of that and take some time off, maybe trek cross-country, camp some, visit a few friends? Regardless of what he chose—if history counted for anything—he'd change his mind in a month or two.

The hardest part of the breakup was that she and Randy had all of the same memories and points of reference, and
though she tried to cut him away from her thoughts like tearing a face from a photo, it was impossible. Everything she knew about boys and what they liked or didn't like came straight from Randy. If people saw her, they asked about him, and vice versa. She had been the one part of his life that he remained faithful to, or so she had always thought. Now she was beginning to wonder.

B
UT
R
ANDY WAS
trying to find himself, a euphemism Lisa despised. That's what everybody on the soap operas was doing—trying to find themselves. Whenever a character said that, all the girls clustered in the dorm TV room sent up a scream of deafening cackles. She made the mistake of telling all of her friends about Randy, not knowing that many of them already knew. Many of them, in fact, were secretly hoping to hear from him themselves. They called him a hunk; they called him a fox. It was a mistake to have aired her laundry because late that spring when he came back around, still unsure about what to do with his life but certain that he wanted to get back together, her pride got in the way of what she really wanted to do. “Well, think about it,” he said. “I'll be around.” The girls on her hall called him a rounder. They called him a chick magnet.

At the time she convinced herself that she was acting on
her own desires, only to later worry that she had let her fears about what the other girls would think (girls she'd probably never see again in her life) overpower her own feelings. She put him off a few more times, thinking the suffering would make him want her even more and would definitely teach him not to ever do that to her again. She did not return his call even though more than anything she missed their late nights at
The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
where they dressed up and acted out all the parts like the hundreds of other cult followers crammed into the small dark theater on Main Street on campus. After the show, they used to go to Snoopy's, a popular hangout that stayed open all night long. Sometimes they sat there until the sun came up. Sometimes they talked about what their future would be like—the house (a cabin built right near the river, the back porch facing westward so that they would watch the sun go down over the tobacco fields that he would one day own), the brood of kids (at least five), the dogs (the bigger the better). The Rocky Horror party they would throw every Halloween. Sometimes they talked about things that had happened back in grade school or junior high, stories and gossip about people in their hometown, using their own shorthand that was guaranteed to shut out anyone else around. She had never even thought what life would be like without those stories.
And then she heard that Randy had been dating all along, that he had been seeing the same girl for several dates, a Chi O from Richmond, a tiny, tanned Chi O with a 3.7 grade point average who drove a little red Karmann Ghia and was madly in love with Randy. Why did people feel the need to tell her all of this? Was it like that story her father used to tell about chickens in the barnyard, how they can all be living in harmony and then if one starts bleeding they all rush in and peck it to death? He told that, of course, to make Lisa and Mike sensitive to the weaknesses of others. It translated to
Don't bully or tease people; be someone who steps in and defends what's right.
But she had never imagined that she would one day be the bleeder, that she would spend three days cooped in her room without taking a shower or changing her clothes. Her suitemate, a girl known for her impeccable taste and fastidious hygiene and clearly well versed in the rules to being a good person, insisted that she get up and wash her hair and get dressed. And the next week, with Lisa still not out of the woods, that same girl insisted that she take the job as door watcher for the Empowerment Workshop. The only other choice for campus volunteers was door watcher for the evangelist who was coming right before summer.
JERRY IS COMING SOON
, the signs read. Jerry, she later heard, claimed to have received a letter from God that was written on the
back of a Twix candy wrapper.
Spread the word, Jerry,
the letter said.

How different her life would have been if she had gone to that one. There certainly wouldn't have been a date to come out of it. Instead she would have called Randy to see if he remembered the time a boy in their school pretended to be blind so that he could then be healed and attempt to heal others, right during the basketball game halftime. Randy would have remembered the boy's name and who they had been playing and then they would have pretended that nothing had ever happened. He would have come over to get her and they would have gone to get a pizza and that would have been that.