Creatures of Habit (17 page)

“And you don't like pies a bit,” she said. She could tell at first meeting that he was a layer cake kind of man. She could tell he needed somebody like her. “And the symphony, shoot.” She knew immediately where he was coming from. He is not a bit boring.

Carly has finally, after a lifetime of waiting, after a husband who left her to raise their boy alone, a boy who has grown up to be so successful that he doesn't have time to visit, after her other relationship that went on for over twenty years, a secret relationship that left her all alone on the weekends and holidays, after all that, she has finally found her true mate.

It was while she was over in his room that the nurse went creeping in and stole Homer. She wishes he'd bite that fat rear end, but maybe not—if Homer took to biting on a regular basis they might have to get rid of him and that would break her heart. Homer loves Carly. You can just look at his sweet face and know it.

T
HERE ARE SOME
people in Turtle Bay who can't shut up and that is the truth. “Diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the brain,” Carly says. She loves that little saying. She used to say that (to herself, of course) years ago at her job at the courthouse, where she was a receptionist for four decades. The favorite receptionist. She had to listen to those poor folks who were trying to get some unemployment. You have never heard such. And you have never
seen
such. The lawyers, young and old, handsome and ugly alike, were always impressed by Carly and her fund of knowledge, the way she did everything just right, and they told her so regularly. They couldn't believe that she herself had not thought of going over to some place like Wake Forest and getting herself a JD. And Whitey was a lawyer for years and years right over there in Greenville. He even remembered being in the Fulton County Courthouse. She might very well have greeted him and directed him to the correct chamber; she was probably too in love at the time to even notice such a handsome man. Fate. That's what Carly calls fate.

That one big nighttime nurse is a real puzzle. The residents don't know what
it
is. One of the women from the west hall—the one who is forever wanting to show what is under
her Ace bandage, which of course nobody wants to see, looked up and said, “Is you a
him
or a
her?
” Carly and several others leaned in close to hear the answer but then somebody on
Wheel of Fortune
won a prize and there was so much screaming she didn't hear what the answer was.

Late one night, Betty—she is the smartest one here next to Carly and Wilton White, JD—said, “Let's set fire to his/her britches and then watch and see what kind of equipment is under them big saggy drawers.” Of course, Betty is also hatching out a plan to go ahead and kill the nurse because it keeps stealing Homer from where he stays by Carly's bed and also stealing Betty's candy bars, even though Betty has said over a million times that many a diabetic has to eat sweets from time to time and that she is one of this particular kind of diabetic. Betty said, “If you don't believe me, you can read it in a medical journal.” Betty's husband had been a doctor—an arthritis doctor—so she tends to know a lot about medical things. She has terrible arthritis herself and thinks now that her husband is dead and buried that he might have used her for some of his scientific research, injected her with some bugs that ate out her joints or something.

Betty says she also knows all about the homosexual conditions. She says she once knew a nice man who got the
devil beat out of him for being that way. “My husband always believed that the homosexuals was just like animals when it came to
doing things,
” Betty says. “He said those people were like cats and dogs when it came to fighting over who might get some loving.” She pauses to make sure Carly gets what she means like she might be a simpleton, and Whitey stops reading his paper—fine print, too much for Carly to handle on the average day—and he asks, “Who is?”

“You know who,” Betty hisses like a snake and nods her head in the direction of him/her. “The homosexual ones.”

“Nonsense,” Whitey says, his face getting red and that cute vein that runs across his forehead popping up. The nurse is always fussing over how poor Carly's veins are and so she'll have to remember to point out Whitey's to show him off. That will make him feel good. “Good veins,” she says and grins at him. She just loves when he voices his intellect. He gets to leave Turtle Bay on a regular basis and so he knows a lot about what is happening out there. He has a daughter from one town over who comes and takes him for weekends. “Thank God,” Carly heard him say once when he saw the daughter's car pull up. Carly usually waits at the front door with him. One, because she loves to be near him and two, because residents are only allowed to have cigarettes outdoors under the watchful eye of one of the guards.
Carly never even smoked and has only taken it up so she can get outside and enjoy the fresh air from time to time. Betty is a real smoker; she's been at it for sixty-five years. She says that she has special immunities to cancer. The
it
nurse lights their cigarettes for them, so Betty had the idea that they should talk about women things when the
it
is around and see if they can guess by the reaction. Does
it
nod in agreement when Betty tells of going in for a “Dustin' and a Cleanin'” (DNC for those who like the scientific terms, Betty says) or when Betty tells (at too much length) about when she had her hysterectomy. Betty whispers in a harsh voice for Carly to join in but this is a hard topic for her to discuss. These are private matters so she sits there with her arms crossed over her chest, ridges of scar tissue left behind there from her surgery. She was not immune to cancer. She also knew that her days of meeting her true love in the darkened parking lot over near the courthouse were long over. She was only forty-two. Her boy was in high school, concentrating hard so he could go to college. He was ashamed that his daddy had left without a trace and now he was ashamed that this had happened to her. So was she. She felt it was some message from the great beyond that loving a man who already had himself a wife and some children was
wrong. This was her punishment. What man would want to look upon her barren chest?

W
HITEY'S DAUGHTER IS
beautiful and his little grandbaby has long golden hair that Carly just has to reach for and wrap up in her hand. She says “pretty pretty” like a little lullaby until Whitey takes to shaking all over and he says “damnit woman.” He is showing off for his daughter, letting her know that Carly is his woman. She follows them to the tall wire gate of the porch, the nurse holding onto the nape of her sweater, and his sweet daughter keeps turning Carly back with a gentle push, telling her good-bye. Carly says, “Take me, please take me, too,” but the daughter says, “I'm sorry, really I am,” and Whitey is shaking all over by now. He says, “You have got to make another arrangement.” Sometimes his speech is garbled sounding but Carly hears this clear as a bell, and his girl says, “I'm trying, Daddy, I'm trying.” He is all the time talking about
his arrangement
but what about
her
arrangement? What about the way that Carly is left to live? What about her son? If Dennis would just come see her, they could walk outside and look for the turtles; she would remind him of his pet turtle she got him one Christmas. He named the turtle Slowpoke and it lived in a
little plastic paradise complete with a set of stairs and a beach umbrella.

A son is a son till he takes a wife but a daughter's a daughter all of her life.
Carly wishes now that she had a daughter; she wishes she had his daughter and she closes her eyes and imagines that it is her strapped there in the car beside her. The girl says,
Oh Mother, I've missed you so.

“Please,” Whitey says as they drive off, and Carly thinks he might be crying. He is worried about her, left there all by herself even though she has tried again and again to reassure him that she has been alone most of her life. She took care of her parents until they died and then she took care of her husband, a man who never really loved her. If he had, he would've stayed; he would have tried to make her life a better one, and he would've given the boy what he needed to grow to be a good man.

Carly is temporary here at Turtle Bay, too, just like Whitey. And she meant to tell Whitey's daughter this bit of news but by then they were driving away. She watched them disappear and then she walked back up to sit with Betty in a little square of sunshine. Carly is the most ambulatory of them all. Everybody compliments her on this and says what a good job she does. She gives the Nike shoes a lot of credit and Velcro is a miracle; for a woman with fingers that aren't
as nimble as they used to be, Velcro is a godsend. Whitey would be more ambulatory if the stroke hadn't left half of him weak. But he can still make it up with a walker and a cane and that's what keeps him here in the east.

B
ETTY IS BACK
on the story of how she came upon her husband, Darnell, face down in his garden—heat stroke. Carly has heard this story ten million times but she is the only person on Betty's intelligence level so she listens again. “I turned him over, there in the garden,” Betty is saying and kind of acting it out like she always does. “His face was so white it shocked me. White and cold. I knew he was dead but still I threw myself there atop him. Oh my, when you love the deceased you'd be surprised what you'll do.” Carly doesn't dare ask what she means. She is still distracted by hearing the word “white” like Wilton White. She stands and walks to the gate, that nurse right on her heels calling her back. She presses her face against the fence to see if he has come back so fast. “Who just said, ‘Mr. White'?” she asks. “They said, “A call for Mr. White: line two.'”

“You don't listen,” Betty says. “Nobody listens.”

“I listen,” Carly says. The nurse reassures her that there was no announcement made for a call. After a few minutes of watching the empty road she comes back to her seat.
“Honey, don't I know just what you mean. I know it all clear as day.”

“You've loved a deceased?” Betty asks and Carly can tell she's getting a little jealous, just like she gets jealous when Homer lets Carly hold tight to his collar instead of her.

“I've loved many deceased,” Carly says. She doesn't say that she's thinking of men who might as well have been dead. That she is thinking of herself and all the parts of her life that have slowly died away.

“Hush,” Betty says and squints her eyes up in that mean way she does when she starts planning fires and murders, so Carly changes the subject to what she had seen in some of the books over in the television room. She tells her that there are all sorts of different things the young women are inserting into their private region down below and that these things are photographed and right there in the magazines that the men look at as well as the women. This makes Betty laugh and get off the hate track but it also leads her to act like Carly is not as smart as she is. Carly is about to say that she had thought that maybe Betty's precious Darnell was one of them that went after the lovin' like a cat or a dog or a he/she person, but then she decides not to say anything at all because Peg, who has Down's syndrome, has come out
there to join them. Betty is the one who taught Carly to say Down's syndrome because her husband used to be a doctor and so Betty knows what is correct even though the rest call Peg a mongoloid. It doesn't seem to bother Peg which you call her if you give her something to eat.

And Carly does. She walks back and forth to the candy machine all day long with a pocketful of dimes that people give her when they come in the door and she says “Good morning. Now how can I help you today?” and she holds out her hand and without fail they will drop something into it. They aren't supposed to give money to Carly, or so the nurse says, but how can they resist when she is sitting there looking so pretty, the best receptionist that they have ever had, and just needing one thin little dime.

“Oh dear, I've just got quarters,” Whitey's daughter had said and Carly said, “That's okay,” and she took them—five of them—right out of her hand. That got a candy bar for Betty and some Necco wafers for Peg.

B
ETTY SAYS THAT
when they actually do kill the nurse, Carly will be the lookout woman because she is so good on her feet. She will knock real loud as he/she approaches the room. They did a test run not long ago, only
Carly kept thinking it was him/her and knocking when it wasn't. And then sometimes if she concentrated too hard she was able to see people who she just couldn't believe were out here at Turtle Bay. She saw her cousin, Alma, who died from lack of breath when they were kids and then she saw Lawrence Welk, Buster Keaton, and then him, her favorite lawyer in the world—her favorite man in the world—who often complimented her fragrance and asked why nobody had latched onto her yet.

“I suppose I've not yet met Mr. Right,” she said, putting on a few airs to let him know that she could communicate with the brightest and the best. She was already thirty-five but no one ever would have guessed.

“Oh but you will,” he said and stepped up close behind her. When she glanced down his suit jacket fell forward alongside her hips, that's how close he was standing there, and she could feel his body leaning into her backside, a slight hard pressure against the base of her spine. “I'm sure you will.”

And then every day he found a reason to step there behind her at the counter. He might reach up and over her for a file out of the top drawer or he might stand right over her as she bent to retrieve a paper clip and upon looking up, feel his warm large hand cupping her face, the crease of his fine
wool trousers brushing against her flaming cheek. Thomas Fenster, JD. Thomas Fenster with the thick dark hair and monogrammed cuff links, the one often shown in photographs in the town paper for various social activities and good causes. The one who made sure that the poor children from across the river had a way to walk to school other than over the train tracks. The first man in the whole town to have a pool in his backyard, and there he was, pushing against her every day, begging to meet her some late night after work when they could do all of the things he knew she wanted to do.