Creatures of Habit

by Jill McCorkle

  “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.

  ALAN 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.

  THEY 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.

  BUT RANDY 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 m
ade 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.

  When she met Alan, he talked a lot about the real world and about how so many kids her age had no idea what they were in for when they were actually expected to work and participate in adult venues. “Except someone like you, of course,” he added. He made her feel smart and mature. He constantly commented on her appearance, saying how she was someone he wouldn’t dream of raising a scalpel to; there was nothing to perfect. She didn’t believe that, but still it was enough to make her want to keep her brows plucked and her legs waxed, to primp and preen as she had watched her suitemate do. She never mentioned Randy to Alan, except to say that she had known him her whole life and that the relationship had ended because he had needed some time to find himself.

  “Oh please,” Alan said, “I haven’t said that since I was fifteen.” At the time she was still so hurt and angry at Randy that she relished hearing someone else attack him. Randy could not afford one of Alan’s shoes, not to mention the pearl and diamond earrings he gave her. Randy’s idea of a good present had been water skis and a thong bikini she had never had the nerve to wear. She was impressed by Alan’s good looks and his Italian suits (though she never would have known their nationality if not told), the gray Volvo he insisted she drive because it was so much safer than her Dodge Dart, the places he took her for dinner (her suitemates begged her to order big and then get doggie bags).

  Still, she had those moments when she felt washed in homesickness and desperate to reclaim what had always been hers. She wished herself back to her hometown, where she and Randy used to get food from Taco Bell and then sit out in the middle of Hollydale Cemetery, where they leaned against the side of the only mausoleum in the place. They had been going there since the fifth grade when they chalked their initials in the cool marble slab and vowed that every word spoken in this place was top secret. It was their place, something they had never told another living soul about. But by graduation she had put Randy out of her mind and instead was trying to decide what to do with her life. Teach high school French as her diploma entitled her to do? Go to graduate school?

  She had gotten used to riding along beside Alan. She was used to the way the soft leather of the seats felt against the backs of her legs, the way the car smelled clean and like the cologne Alan wore (Aramis) and not like stale beer and cigarettes and wet dog. He talked at great length about his work and about his clients (swearing her to secrecy) and about his ex-wife, who was trying to bleed him dry. It made her feel more mature than she had ever imagined being. She felt secure in the knowledge from one day to the next that someone was planning where she would eat and what she would do, and sometimes even what she would wear. She had read that many women seek this, a comfort zone that enables them to exist without physical hardships or worries. Then they can focus on the part of themselves that is creative and independent; they can raise children in a comfortable nest.

  She was living at her parents’ after graduating so she was still privy to all the hometown news: Randy had brought a girl to meet his family. They went with his mother to church on Sunday even though Randy hadn’t been to church in years. Lisa knew from the descriptions that it was the same Chi O girl and she confirmed it herself when she rode by his parents’ house late that Sunday night when she couldn’t sleep and saw the little red car parked there. She stopped at the corner and waited, half hoping that Randy would see her sitting there.

  Later that same week, she heard that Randy was applying to veterinary school and was going to take a year off in the interim. Work a little, move in with the girlfriend, who would be starting graduate work in the fall. She saw him at the A & P soon after hearing this and crept up behind him, placed her hands over his eyes, but before he could even guess, the girlfriend was standing beside him, her arm looped through his. “You must be Lisa,” she said without really cracking a smile. “Randy has told me all about you, all about your little secret places like the one we went to today —creepy—and your secret languages from grade school. Cute.” If his eyes showed any apology for his betrayal she didn’t see it, and after a polite exchange—he asked her if she was still involved with the “plastic doc”—she dashed out of the store, abandoning her cart behind the greeting-card stand.

  So of course she said yes when Alan as
ked her to move in with him. Who wouldn’t? After all, here was this successful, nice-looking person ready to take care of her for life. And marriage made the most sense of all. What she had with Randy was a kid thing; intellectually she knew that this was the choice that made the most sense for her. So she read Bride magazine cover to cover, and the thought of herself in one of those dresses, the wonderful place settings to choose from, the whole prospect of buying her very own house with window treatments and furniture thrilled her beyond belief and took up a good chunk of her time. She would have to think about school or a job later, after the wedding. She might even decide not to get a job at all, ever, a luxury she had never dreamed of having.

  Randy sent her a wedding gift—a doormat that said “Wipe Your Paws” and a cookbook with all of Elvis Presley’s favorite meals called Fit for a King. She had not shown Alan these, fearing what he might say, though for several late nights, she scoured the pages of the cookbook for a hidden message—anything, a hair from his head, a turned down page that might lead her to read every word for the message. She told herself that if there was not a sign, she should let go and move on.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” her mother had asked, and though she had a chilling moment when she wanted to voice her uncertainty, she had a sudden image of Randy bumping along the fields in his truck with the Chi O, showing her all of the places and telling her all of the things they had sworn to keep secret, and it made her sink her heels deeper. It made her turn her attention to some more expensive choices: she went from Gorham to Wedgwood. Everyone got cold feet. She studied all the travel ads in the back of the magazines. Alan had said that they could go anywhere on their honeymoon—anywhere she wanted to go.