Creatures of Habit

by Jill McCorkle

  “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.

  AND NOW ABBOTT 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.

  IN 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.

  NOW 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.

  OVER 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.”

  ANNE 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 t
he 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.

  EVERY 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?”

  “Rest,” she says. “Just rest.” She waits for him to close his eyes and for his breath to fall into the rhythm of sleep, his fingers still linked through her own. She knows she needs to call. She knows he is not hers to keep even though she would like nothing better than to believe that at the end of his long journey, after all was said and done, that what he wanted more than anything in the world was to come home.

  Dogs

  IF I WERE a dog I would have been put down by now. Put down. Euthanized. Sent to the country (the euphamized euthanized). Gassed.

  I once dated a boy who had the nickname Mad Dog, but it was because he loved his wine, and what an unsophisticated drinker he was: Ripple, Boone’s Farm, T. J. Swann, Mogen David—MD 20 20 some called it—he called it Mad Dog. But that was long before I thought of myself as a mad dog. I dated Mad Dog over five years ago when I was in high school and had my whole life ahead of me. He was back before the mistake of my two-month marriage to an ice sculptor who left as soon as I got pregnant, saying he was sorry but that his profession required a lot of concentration and focus.

  That mistake was back when my friend Marissa took on the notion of her superior wisdom and when I might have been described as a well-tuned instrument, physically and mentally. I could play a concerto and I could also flat-out fiddle, but then my strings got wound so tight that they started popping all over the place and making a mess. Thank the good Lord my baby, Richie, was smarter than his father. That child, even before birth, became my lifeline, my reason for working hard to establish my own business. There are people who tell me that I have become a nicer person since having Richie and since working with the dogs. They don’t say if this is the result of Richie or of canine companionship or some combination of the two.

  I don’t mean to imply that I’m rabid. Rather, I am of the frightened aggressive variety of mad dog. The type is well known to animal behaviorists. I will bite you before you bite me. I am like the dog that even the dog psychiatrists can’t cure. They might try Prozac. They might even try a muzzle, but I can bite through steel when I take on a mood. Woody (with whom I was involved, I am ashamed to say) discovered this about me fairly early on. When he first hired me at the Dog House he said he liked a challenge. He said he could train me without breaking my spunk. (I wasn’t sure if he was teasing or not.) He slapped me on my butt when he said this and he said it in front of a whole roomful of clients sitting there with their little charges on their laps or at their feet. And of course I knew he had a lot more in mind for me than pulling off ticks or treating some retriever’s pernicious ear infection or hosing down the concrete runs out back. I’m sorry to say I smelled the desire on him and I do have to also say that at first meeting I was kind of turned on. Let’s just say if you’ve never gotten right up in a pit bull’s face, you might be curious.

  I should explain. I am in the boarding and grooming business and I had plenty of work experience, mainly with dogs, long before I took up with Woody. I once accidentally killed a cat by giving it a dog flea dip (poisonous, I now know, to felines) and have the irrational belief that cats everywhere have heard that news and are ready to make me pay. So, I am known as the Dog Girl, a title I take great pride in. I do good work, and trust me, it isn’t always easy. For instance, those little hairless breeds get blackheads. I have one Chinese crested client I call Miss Clearasil (not in front of her owner, of course) and a Westie with eczema I call Little Leper. There is a Labrador who passes a big white tub
e sock each and every time he comes in for a visit. His owner, an elderly woman with a hearing problem, was so ashamed when I told her that Ellery appeared to be eating up her husband’s socks she cried. Her distress, however, has not curbed Ellery’s appetite.

  This establishment—the Dog House—is, along with Richie, my life. I am stashing money away, and all the while building up a clientele that would follow me when I am able to move on. I favor the pair of basenjis who come in once a month for a little weekend visit while their owners—a good-looking couple who drive up in a convertible, their overnight bags already on the backseat—take a romantic trip. I used to say to Woody, “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” and he said, “What, and leave all this luxury behind?”

  You can imagine what my line of work smells like. When I get home at night, I leave my clothes and sneakers outside on the deck to air out. Woody has said “I like how you smell, Dog Girl” many times. The first time he said it, I liked it, but it’s gotten old. Now I’d like to smell like the basenji owner. Her long hair carries the medley fragrance of oils and lotions as if she lived in the cosmetic section of a department store. Do you know basenjis are nearly mute? Instead of barking, they make a little chuckle sound deep in their throats, which makes me sad, but the skills they lack in the vocal chords are more than compensated for in their agile little paws. I have seen that pair scale an eight-foot chain-link fence in ten seconds flat and escape. An admirable talent, I think.