Small Mercies: A Novel

by Eddie Joyce

  It wasn’t always about the kids. One day, Tina was in a nasty mood, had even snapped at Gail a few times. When the kids were out of the way, Gail sat her down, asked her if something was wrong. Tina’s face tensed for a moment, but then she started to laugh.

  “How can I say this, Gail? I’m . . . frustrated.”

  “About what?”

  Tina raised an eyebrow, coughed suggestively.

  “It’s, uhh, it’s been a while.”

  The news of the world passes between women in kitchens.

  That’s what Maria said, one of the things she used to say anyway. She said other things too, mostly advice on how to raise kids, the advice that Gail passed along to Tina years later. Gail listened to every word, soaked in every suggestion. She’d gotten no guidance from her own mother. Constance had only ever said one thing on the subject.

  “Don’t have kids, Gail.”

  Inside a diner on Third Avenue. A lit cigarette in one hand and a spoon in the other, alternating sips of tomato soup with drags from the cigarette.

  “What?” Gail asked.

  “Don’t have children. They’ll bring you nothing but unhappiness.”

  Gail flinched. She searched her mother’s eyes for knowledge. Was this a sick joke? Did she already know somehow?

  No. Her face was earnest, the advice as sincere as it was impossible to follow. Gail was already pregnant and about to move to Staten Island and sitting there, miserable and nauseated, for the express purpose of telling her mother those two things. She’d told her about the move first, which was a mistake, because it prompted her mother’s remark. She didn’t know about the pregnancy; she was referring to the move. Of course she was. Everything that was done in the world was done for the purpose of hurting her mother.

  Gail bit her lip. She should tell her mother about the pregnancy. It would explain things. This was not abandonment. They were seeking a better life for their child, something so fundamental it could explain the history of human movements on the planet. Her mother should have understood that.

  But something held her back: fear. Not for herself, but for the child she carried. Her first maternal instinct. Protecting her unborn child from the words of its grandmother. Gail and her mother finished their meals in silence. When they stepped out of the diner together, Constance would not take her arm. A warm September night, the last gasp of summer. The streets of Bay Ridge were bustling, people out and about. The sun had slipped from sight, but the clouds above glowed an apocalyptic red. Men stood outside bars, hoping for a last glimpse of skin before the weather turned. Excitement, bordering on panic, in the air.

  The men in the street stared at Gail as she passed, as if she were some rare beauty, which she knew she wasn’t. Her looks fell somewhere between plain and pretty. Reddish hair, but not the luxuriant fire of a movie star, just a dull auburn that most people mistook for brown. A smattering of freckles haphazardly strewn across her face. A lack of curves generally, highlighted by the near absence of breasts. In high school, the boys used to tease her, call her a pirate.

  Like a pirate, Gail.

  With your sunken chest.

  Get it? Ha ha.

  Her eyes have always been her saving grace, capable of conveying emotion with a bracing intensity. A watery blue, cool and pure. Some girls spun and their skirts lifted ever so slightly; others leaned and left a button loose. Gail stared.

  Once, when her tormentors called her a pirate, she fixed her eyes on the their ringleader, Andy Tormey, whose confidence flagged in the ferocity of her stare. A few weeks later, Andy stuck his tongue in her mouth behind the brick outhouse on the playground on Ridge Boulevard. When he moved his hand up toward the tit that he’d joked wasn’t there, Gail laughed but absorbed the lesson: play to your strengths. After that, she did all that she could to draw attention to her eyes. She was never as popular as the girls with big chests or the girls who let the boys fiddle under their skirts, but she got her fair share of attention. And the jokes about her chest ended, especially after she dumped Andy before he could get his hands up her shirt.

  No beauty queen, but she’s okay with that.

  The men stared anyway. They ignored the ring on her finger, the old woman at her side. They will disregard a stroller too. Michael was right; there were better places to raise a family.

  She stared back at the men, hoping to embarrass the more brazen oglers. They laughed but looked away.

  The remainder of the walk was slow and silent. Constance shuffled along and Gail followed a pace behind her. They reached her mother’s building. Her parents lived on the third floor and she usually helped her mother up the stairs, but Constance turned to her at the building’s entrance. They hadn’t spoken a word since the diner. Through her mother’s glasses, Gail saw her own eyes, the one gift her mother had given her without condition.

  Constance’s eyes were older, but held the same power as Gail’s. She found Gail’s gaze and held it.

  My husband is a drunk. One of your brothers is in Vietnam, another is a junkie, and I don’t know where the third is. Probably dead. I lost a child, your sister, when she was two. You are my youngest child. You are all I have.

  Gail nearly faltered.

  “Mom, I . . .”

  “Yes, Gail?”

  She smelled the soup on her mother’s breath, mixed with cigarettes. Another wave of nausea hit her. She found a reserve of strength somewhere.

  “Do you need help getting up the stairs?”

  Constance didn’t answer. She walked inside and closed the door behind her.

  * * *

  Three weeks pass. They haven’t spoken. No calls. No visits. Two nights before the move, her father calls.

  “Everything all right, Goodness?”

  “Everything’s great, Dad.”

  “We haven’t seen you. Everything all right?”

  “Grand.”

  “Okay then. Maybe I’ll see you Saturday before mass?”

  She hadn’t told him.

  “Sure, Dad. See you Saturday.”

  If she had, he would have asked Gail to meet him at Kelly’s or Leggett’s or whatever shit hole he was still welcome in. He would have tapped the stool beside him and picked a quarter from his pile of change on the bar. A smile. Always charming, never belligerent. “Feckless,” that’s what her mother said, a “feckless man.” Feckless, like it was the worst thing someone could be.

  And maybe it was.

  “Okay, Goodness,” he would have said, “we’ll spin this twenty-five-cent piece here and if it comes up heads, you leave for that godforsaken place. But if it’s tails, you stay here, among the good Christian souls of Bay Ridge.”

  Because that’s what he did when she was a kid, whenever Gail was sent to fetch him at this or that saloon.

  “Okay, Goodness, heads we leave. Tails, we stay for one more.”

  And then he’d spin it. It would take a few tries sometimes, but then he’d send it roaring and it would shoot down the bar, ricochet off the mug of some startled inebriate, fly off the wood, and come to rest in some dark patch of the floor.

  “Go look, Gail, which is it?”

  She would lean down, her back blocking his view of her inspection.

  “It’s tails, Daddy.”

  “’Course it is.”

  Then he’d push his empty mug across the bar for a refill. He’d hand Gail a Coke in a small glass bottle. She lied because it was better to sit there with him happy than to walk home with him sullen. Better to put off the shouting for as long as possible. Better to get a Coke than not get a Coke. So it was always tails until her mother got wise and started sending her brother Tom instead of Gail. Tom was simple. He reported the results of the coin flip honestly, without consideration for what might be best for himself or his siblings.

  Anyway, that’s how Gail feels in their new house, li
ke one of her father’s flickering quarters come to rest in a hidden corner of the booze-soaked wooden floor: spun in Bay Ridge and rotated right over the Verrazano Bridge and come to rest in this forgotten place, this fifth of five boroughs.

  She can’t get comfortable, has never lived in a house before. Takes some getting used to, being in a place with more rooms than people. Their old apartment was tiny, just a kitchenette with a bedroom barely large enough for the bed. They lived there for three years, saving every penny so they could afford the down payment on a house. This house. Her house.

  Her house. Doesn’t feel that way. Every wall is covered in hideous wallpaper: garish yellows, greens, and oranges. Nicotine stains cover the ceilings in the bedrooms and bathrooms; the old couple who lived here must have smoked themselves into the grave. Every day, she smells the ghosts of cigarettes smoked long ago in a new spot: in the cabinet next to the fridge, at the top of the stairs, even in the emptied-out shed in the backyard. Whenever she catches the scent, she thinks of blue smoke drifting out from between her mother’s brown teeth and her stomach churns.

  Michael says he can’t smell anything, that she’s imagining things. He doesn’t understand, couldn’t understand. She can smell the brown mustard he’d smeared on the sandwich he’d eaten for lunch. She can smell the can of Schaefer beer Mr. Greeley, their new next-door neighbor, drank before he walked over to welcome them to the block. She can smell the chicken pot pie he’d had with the Schaefer, the Ivory soap he cleans himself with.

  The nose of a pregnant woman is a wondrous curse.

  Pregnant. Another thing she doesn’t feel. Well, most of the time. An occasional dab of nausea, precipitated by nothing at all. The supercharged sense of smell. And the other thing. But that’s it. Only in the last few days has she noticed a change in her stomach; the gaze of her belly button has drifted up, its bottom half pulled out ever so slightly by a nascent bulge.

  The pregnancy. It is the reason for the house, its expedited purchase, the loan from Michael’s parents, the awful dinner with Constance, the silent walk home, the disorienting move.

  She goes days without seeing a soul. No one to talk to. She draws stares at the market. Tight smiles that don’t linger. She can almost hear slack returning to cheeks when her back turns.

  The house is cold and creaking. She stays in the kitchen with the occasional dash to the toilet. The phone sits in its cradle, no hint of agitation. In Bay Ridge, she had her friends and her job. Waiting tables wasn’t glamorous, but it passed the time, kept a few coins in her pocket. Michael doesn’t want her to work. He wants her to rest, to get the house ready. She can’t rest and she can’t ready the house either. There’s too much to do; it overwhelms her. So she sits and she looks out the window or reads a book, and when Michael comes home every day, he looks around at his unchanged home a little confused but says nothing.

  She looks out at the trees; their black, barren limbs sway menacingly at dusk, threatening to choke the street itself. A few hundred feet away, an empty lot stands rife with them, foreboding and defiant. The whole place makes her long for the dense certainty of concrete.

  Michael is always at work, either at the firehouse or with his father, making a few extra bucks, putting a dent in the loan. His father owns a shop: part butcher, part deli. Enzo’s Italian Delicacies. They make their own sausages, their own soppressata and fresh mozzarella. When Michael comes home from the store with a grocery bag full of food, Gail makes him shower, a quick rinse, but it does no good; she can still smell the meat and blood on him. He cooks and pleasant aromas—garlic in olive oil, the fry of onions, fennel, and pork sausage—fill the house, mask the stink of sinew and tendon on him. She watches him cook and feels useless.

  He is excited.

  “I bet it’s a boy.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s a boy. I can tell.”

  “How?”

  “Girls take their mother’s looks.”

  “So?”

  “You still look beautiful.”

  They go straight upstairs, dinner unfinished, because when she isn’t sick to her stomach, she wants Michael desperately. This is the other thing besides the nausea and the nose. She thinks of little else. And when he isn’t around, she pretends that he is and touches herself, gently but still. She worries that something is wrong with her. He worries that they might hurt the baby, but the doctor assures her that sex is perfectly safe.

  What about being so horny that you can barely read? Is that safe too? She doesn’t ask these questions.

  When they finish, she cries. The hormones are fiends: happy, sad, feisty, horny, withdrawn, hopeless, angry. All in the space of thirty minutes. Ping-ponging from one to the next with no discernible pattern. Michael tries to comfort her, asks her what’s wrong.

  “I’m lonely.”

  She is lonely, yes, but also unhappy. A new feeling for her. She’s never been unhappy before, not really. Her mother hoarded the entire family’s unhappiness so the rest of them simply pretended it didn’t exist, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Gail couldn’t wait to get out, get away, and now that it was done, what?

  Unhappiness.

  “You’ll meet people. It takes time. Besides, in a while, you’ll have all the company you need.”

  He rubs her stomach. She is already ready for another go. She feels out of control. No, that isn’t it. Controlled by some other part of her, one she never knew existed.

  “I miss my mother.”

  Words she never thought she’d utter. He frowns, furrows his brow.

  “Hey, I have an idea. What if my mom came over, kept you company?”

  “Michael, she doesn’t like me.”

  “Of course she does.”

  “She doesn’t speak English.”

  “She does. It’s broken, but it’s English.”

  “Broken?”

  “Okay, it’s fucked up beyond all repair.”

  Gail giggles and her breasts heave. The pregnancy has given her boobs. Michael reaches over and fondles one. He kisses her nipple.

  “She can teach you how to cook.”

  She slaps the unshaven cheek grazing her nipple.

  “Are you trying not to get laid?”

  “All’s I’m saying is you’re always saying how you’d like to learn how to cook.”

  “I know how to cook. Open can, pour.”

  “Man cannot live on soup alone.”

  “Bread alone.”

  “Whatever.” He rolls up on one shoulder, earnest as an altar boy. “Give it a shot, Gail. For me.”

  She rolls her eyes, pulls him to her.

  “Okay. Now shut up and fuck me again.”

  She thinks, I don’t say things like that.

  * * *

  A black car stops in front of the house and Maria gets out. Enzo beeps the horn and the car slowly rolls back into motion. Enzo drives like a man who learned to drive late in life, overly cautious, fixated on every detail. He performs a slow, precise K turn. The street is a dead end.

  Maria ambles up the steps, one giant smile. She is a short stout woman with a ruddy face, a long thin nose, and stringy gray hair. She wears glasses that enlarge her eyes and give her face a slightly grotesque appearance. She looks like the den mother for a house of goblins. Enzo is handsome and dignified, despite his line of work and age. Gail would love to know how they ended up together.

  Gail opens the front door, manages a smile. Maria hands up a bag of groceries from the store. She uses the railing on the stairs, helps herself up. She seems ancient to Gail.

  “Grazie.”

  She gives Maria a tour of the house. They walk from room to room. Gail comments on the first few rooms, speaks of their plans and designs, but after a while she stops, frustrated by Maria’s silent scrutiny. Maria inspects each room with the intensity of a drill sergeant: she knocks o
n doors, she flushes toilets, she opens and closes windows, she kneels down to peer under beds. They finish in the kitchen. Maria looks at Gail.

  “Needs work.”

  “Yes, you’re right. It needs work. We . . .”

  Gail’s voice drifts and she turns to hide a leaking tear from Maria. For a moment, she’s afraid she might start sobbing in front of this woman who clearly dislikes her. Maria takes a hold of Gail’s arm; her fingers are surprisingly thin and delicate.

  “Is very nice. Very nice. But . . . uh . . . needs work. Good?”

  Gail nods.

  “Good? Good.”

  Maria puts on a white apron and produces a tiny knife with a chipped black handle. She starts taking things out of the grocery bag and putting them on the counter. Garlic, onions, a can of tomatoes, a few stems of parsley, sausages. She takes out a chopping board and goes to work, all the while using the little knife. She moves quickly. The kitchen gets heavy with smells. They’re like the smells that Michael’s cooking produces but heftier, more elaborate.

  Gail tries to follow what Maria’s doing. The can of crushed tomatoes is opened and poured into a pot with olive oil and garlic sliced so thin it’s translucent. Another burner is lit, sausages are tossed into a pan. Maria adds things to the pot, she adjusts burners. A film of sweat appears on her forehead. Gail watches as a bead rolls down her nose and drips into the pot as she’s stirring it. She laughs. Maria turns, smiles, rolls her shoulders as if to say, “Hey, it happens.”

  The aroma in the kitchen adds layers, blends into a whole with distinct notes. After a while, Gail realizes she’s no longer watching what Maria’s doing. Instead, she’s watching Maria: the crooked smile on her face, the lips moving silently, words in another tongue, conversing with ghosts. She’s watching someone who loves what she’s doing, who’s transported by it. She’s seen this look on Michael’s face.

  The pot is on a simmer. Maria slides some cooked sausage and meatballs into it. She lowers a wooden spoon into the sauce, tastes it. She reaches for the salt, throws a handful into the sauce. She chops some herbs, drops them in too. There’s no recipe, no set of instructions; Gail will never learn to cook like this. It would take another lifetime, a different mother. Michael will have to learn to deal with canned soup.