Creatures of Habit (9 page)

People from far away who loved her began calling as soon as word reached them that Abbott had left. They called to say
come home come home,
and she was tempted. The home of her childhood was waiting just a few hours down the interstate. Sometimes at night she got herself to sleep picturing the town—flatland and tobacco barns, billboards calling her to the coast. She thought of those summer nights when she was a kid and had nothing to do but ride her bike through the streets of her hometown.

But by then home needed to be where her children were at home. Home had become the Japanese maple she planted when they bought the house and the roses she had trained up a trellis by the garage. So she had changed what she could afford to change. The sheets. The paint. She adopted a kind old yellow Lab to replace the cat in their marriage, Possum, on whom she had completely doted until Abbott was ready to have a child. The cat's death, twelve years after their wedding, coincided with Abbott's straying, and the two events
were forever linked in her mind. The old Lab lived long enough to help her through the transition.

“Probably coyote or raccoon chow,” he had said and shaken his head as she and the children wept over Possum's disappearance. “After twelve years, old Possum is nothing but a cheap lunch.”

That comment and the scent on his face and neck when he came home from God knows where—he said golf, he said baseball, he said auto show, places she never went with him—told her that he was not who she had thought he was. He had become a stranger. This was what she was thinking as she picked her way through the wooded strip of land that separated their yard from the yards of yet another new neighborhood. In these woods the wild creatures had their own lairs, their own food supply. She could feel them watching her from their dark holes and caves as they waited for night to fall. That there had been no sign of Possum had made her feel hopeful even though deep down she knew better.

A
ND NOW
A
BBOTT
is back, twisting and turning the knob with his own persistent optimism. She dries her hands and opens the door to his tired bewildered face. His wife always comes to lead him away like a confused child. Her appearance, however fraught with anger and frustration, seems
to call him back into his present life, but until she shows up, he is back in their marriage. He asks where the boys are. He leans in and kisses her lips, pulls her close before she can catch her breath and step aside. He picks up on a conversation they had over a dozen years ago. How he's thinking about opening his own business. How he's thinking he should buy all the little drive-through buildings left behind by a defunct bank. How he will stock them with late-night necessities: milk and aspirin, diapers and toilet paper, beer and tampons. Twenty-four-hour service. Drive right through. People don't have to get dressed; they don't have to lift the baby out of the car.
WHATEVER GETS YOU THROUGH THE NIGHT
. The slogan was hers. The dream was his, one of fast fortune. There were many nights when she was all alone and believed more than ever that they had devised a brilliant plan. Necessities: those wee hours of the morning when a kid's fever spiked and not a drop of Tylenol in the house, or times when she realized that there would be no milk for her morning coffee.

I
N ALL THE
years since Abbott left, Anne has not slept a whole night through. Usually she wakes at two, sometimes three. Even with her CEO lying beside her, she often can't keep herself from playing through the nights she lay
there with Abbott, the tension between them so thick she felt she might strangle on it, so thick it forced her awake, the beginnings of the chronic habit. There is a time in a woman's life when being a mother may be all that she can successfully be, with her mind so fragmented by thoughts of fevers and stitches and homework and Little League. Laundry and cleaning, shopping and cooking. A bath is a luxury. Sleep, the greatest luxury of all. He kept commenting on how she had changed. She knew what was going on was what had changed. She could almost pinpoint the day he came home with a different look about him. She could smell the deception, but she didn't have proof. Night after night, she had lain beside him wanting anything he could give her: a confession, an apology, a profession of his love even with an admission of his inability to remain faithful. Now she hated the part of herself that over the years still refused to let go of a love that he refused to return. She hated the part of herself that delighted in the fate of the young unencumbered women that so many men who stray manage to find. A year, maybe two and then
that
woman is also encumbered, only this time he has someone who is too young to share his memories. She was disgusted with the part of herself that pictured Abbott in such a state of aloneness.

Her great-aunt Rosemary was fond of saying that by and
large marriage is an unnatural state. Anne resisted the notion and clung to the natural history of certain rare monogamous creatures in the wild—the prairie vole, the purple martin, geese—even while she secretly believed Rosemary was probably right. Why else do women so easily settle in with their litters and nests; why do the females in nature blend into the background while the males remain flashy and continue life as sexual predators? Why was man created to continue giving life while women ran out of time, ran out of eggs?

I am dispensable
, she thought one night when the coyotes' blood-chilling cries kept her awake.
A temporary shelter, a brief stop on a very long journey.

N
OW SHE SLIPS
the cordless phone into her pocket and goes into the bathroom to call Abbott's wife while he murmurs to himself about how great everything looks, how neat and clean. She closes the bathroom door, leaving just enough of a crack that she can see his shadow, hear his footsteps. She plans to once again whisper into the receiver
He's here, I have him,
but then there is no answer, and his voice— strong and coherent—on the answering machine startles her and she hangs up.

O
VER A YEAR
ago, her sons had told her there were problems. At first they thought he had had a stroke of some kind. Then a brain tumor. There had been a CAT scan, all kinds of tests. He was just that unlucky person, a man barely sixty in the throes of dementia.

“But isn't he too young for this?” she had asked his young wife.

“Yes,” she said, her eyes lined and weary. Their children—a boy and a girl—were barely in junior high.

“And
I'm
too young for this,” the wife added, then she caught herself and softened. She spoke then as if reciting from a medical textbook, spoke of her support group and how most of the others were a lot older and yet it did happen. One in a zillion. “Lucky huh?” she asked. “And think about genetics, will you? Your children and my children.” She said all of this with Abbott right there in the next room. She said,
“your
children and
my
children,” the business of women.

“I'
LL BE THERE
soon,” the wife had said last time. She hesitated. “Maybe if you stopped letting him in . . .”

But he might get lost. He might get hit by a car. He might get mugged,
she wanted to say.

When Anne was a child her great-aunt Rosemary had had a cat who wandered, a gigantic yellow-and-white tom named Pumpkin Pie who regularly came home beaten and battered. Nobody got their male cats fixed back then. They were allowed to go about their business, spraying and screwing and prowling the streets. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Pumpkin Pie by name. They would feed and pet him; sometimes in the winter he'd be invited in to snooze by a fire. Sometimes the call of nature and a female cat in heat was more than he could bear and some well-intentioned neighbor would have to turn a hose on him. Rosemary painted his battle wounds with Mercurochrome, bright orange splotches on his silky white fur. In winter, Pumpkin Pie liked to climb up and snuggle down near the engine of a recently driven car. But one night he wound up riding all the way across town. When he climbed out and ran away, Anne's great-uncle, a man too old for running, tried to follow and catch him. In vain. They mourned and blamed one another; Rosemary locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed. Then three weeks to the day, there he was again, clawing on the screen door and crying, one ear ripped and bleeding.

“Marriage goes against nature,” Rosemary had said. She sat stroking the big tom, the white of his throat bright orange
with Mercurochrome. “The tom wants to roam while the missus stays home with the little ones until they pull her old teats to death. Then she just wants to stay home. I myself have always just wanted to stay at home.”

A
NNE HAD TOLD
the boys about Pumpkin Pie and his trip across town, stoking any lingering hopes that Possum had met a similar fate, or that some well-meaning neighbor had let her in and would soon read her tag and call to say that she was fine. “Unless she lost her tag,” Abbott added, giving all three of them hard leveled stares. “Then we may never learn what happened. If so, it can't be helped. It can't be changed.”

He was right, of course. It could have been an animal, could have been a car. Anyway, someone was nice enough to take the body to a veterinarian. They had her in the freezer if Anne would like to come and claim the body. They had some Polaroids so she could make a positive ID; the tag was close by but not on the cat's neck at the time it was found. They strongly advised that she not look at the body. “Better to remember her as she was,” the teenage attendant recited handing Anne the box.

She built Possum a little mausoleum, easy enough on that frigid February afternoon. A little spit for mortar and the
bricks froze solid. Without ever looking under the wrappings, she put the body into her biggest Tupperware and sealed the lid; she could not stand the thought of some hungry creature digging up what little bit remained. And then she just sat there. Anne had a lot in common with Possum. Black hair with the occasional streak of gray, voluntary sterilization. (She liked to believe that this is what Possum—at least in those later years—would have chosen for herself as well.) They both appreciated fine wool fabrics and warm spots in front of windows.

She had put the Tupperware down into the little brick cave just as Abbott was about to go out that dark late afternoon. His breath formed a cloud as he called out to her. He had a dinner meeting, hoped it wouldn't go on too long, but he never knew. He was wearing a new shirt, a shade of green that brought out the green of his eyes. She'd bought him a sweater that shade one Christmas that he had refused to wear, clinging staunchly to a wardrobe of khaki and navy, the occasional burgundy or gray. “Men don't wear this kind of color,” he'd said. She thought about that as she watched him drive away.
Men don't primp and preen and wear that kind of color unless there is someone new out there asking for it, someone waiting for a sign.

By that springtime afternoon when he broke the news in
the kitchen, she was almost relieved, she had waited so long for him to tell her the truth. Anything is better than the waiting, she told herself as she stared out the window where Possum's brick tomb had thawed and toppled to one side. And after he left with most of his personal belongings already piled on the backseat of his car, and before the boys got home, she did what she was not supposed to do. She looked. She peeled back the soggy layers of towel and stared down at what had once been Possum. There was absolutely nothing familiar left.

E
VERY TIME THE
wife came after him, her eyes seemed to say
This is supposed to be your life.
Did her eyes also say
Do you want him back?

The wife looked all around Anne's house, maybe looking for old traces of her husband, or maybe in awe of the order a single woman with grown children can bring to a home. A calm. A peacefulness. The wife was drawn to a framed photograph of Anne and her CEO and then to a small picture of Anne and Abbott at the beach with the boys—a picture taken three years before the end; it was the one photo of him that she had never managed to put away. It reminded her of a time when trust and faith meant everything.

But today, Anne lets time pass before calling again.
Abbott is standing in the doorway of her room looking at the bed.

“Okay,” he finally says. “Something's different.”

“No,” she says, “nothing's changed.”

“C'mon, you can say.” He goes and stands by the window. “Anne?” He calls her name as if testing it over his tongue, then repeats it. “Anne, how many years . . .” he pauses, shakes his head.

“Since we moved in?” she asks, and he nods, still clearly unsure of his question.

“Almost twenty years,” she answers him. It's not a lie.

“It's good.” He leans his face against the glass pane. His shoulders are slightly hunched, thinner than she remembers, his corduroys loose through the hips.

“Yes, I think so, too.” She goes and puts her arm around his waist and he returns the gesture while still staring out at the small backyard. In a few minutes she really will have to call his wife. She may already be driving over, frantic and worried, just blocks away, coming once again to claim him. But for now Anne can't seem to move away from the warm afternoon light that fills her room.

“Here, lie down.” She leads him over to the bed and then stretches out beside him. When he rolls over to take her in his arms, she sees the change in his eyes, faint traces of what
she once knew. He pulls her closer, burying his face in her neck, his breath warm, his heart beating against her chest. Same heart. Same rhythm. It is the most natural thing in the world.

“Rest,” she whispers, her hand stroking the hair back from his forehead, then slowly moving to the warmth of his neck. She moves her hand down his back and then inches her fingers under his belt and along the edge of his pants, teasing only to then pop the elastic of his boxers. It was an old joke; it was
their
old joke and her need to repeat it seems an involuntary act, one that makes him laugh and hug her tighter. And then in the very next second, he is on the verge of crying. “What will we do now?” he asks and shakes his head, a look of total defeat washing over him. “What can we do?”