Mercy and Morris Eat Donuts by the River
This is the year of recalled vaccines and hoarding and old people fainting in line. He tells her he is learning to speak French to impress women. “Potential dates,” Mercy says. Morris nods and says, “From a set of tapes for the car — French for Commuters.” The river is fat from the spring melt, and sticks and strange objects hurtle by the boulder where they are perched. “Au voleur,” Morris says, “Stop thief.” A sour cream container rushes past them. “Je suis de passage, I'm just passing through, Je suis célibataire, I'm single, Il pleut, it's raining.” “Impressive,” says Mercy. By midwinter, the rationing and panicked purchases from Canada resulted in doctors' refrigerators filled with rapidly expiring vials. Morris takes Mercy's hand and announces, “Avec des glaçons, on the rocks.” “Different rocks,” she says. “Je ne peux pas bouger la jambe, I can't move my leg, Il manque un couteau, there is a knife missing.” Caught in an eddy are a pink dishwashing glove and a bunch of dead leaves. “Je crois que je sui perdu, I think I'm lost.” Mercy kisses Morris on the mouth, grabbing the back of his head so hard that he grunts. Their teeth touch and she tastes the rough sugar from the donuts, grainy and brittle at the edges of their lips. Then she is facing the river again, panting, feeling a pain in her throat. Something that might be a dead animal floats by, a mass of hair and skin. Morris is grinning, and she says, “Stop it; it's not a good thing.” She says, “This doesn't change anything.” He says, “Je comprends un peu.”
After Kissing Morris
Mercy runs the high school track until her hips feel like doll's joints. She is excessively polite to bank tellers and gas station attendants. She can't get the window display in her store right. The aqua gauze symbolizing the blue skies of April snags on her fingernails. Hats fall from their hooks. The dog barks uncontrollably late at night, and the neighbor sprays it with her hose. Mornings, she practices holding her breath until Jake wakes up. Fifty-eight seconds until she sees black. They bike in the ever-earlier dawn, wrapped in layers of spandex and polypropylene. Jake tells her to stop pushing the big gears and spin. The derailleurs clack like ice breaking. He says to relax, and she feels her knees loosen. He says everything naturally gravitates toward efficiency. She watches the thin strip of his back wheel and intuits the road ahead from its movement.
When the Bird Feeder Goes Missing, Mercy Blames the Squirrels
It has suddenly warmed into full spring, and her shoes clump with mud as she searches the shrubs beneath her kitchen window for the feeder. Later in the day, she finds it, propped against the door that leads to the crawlspace beneath their porch. When she carries it back around the house, bemused, she finds the X, chalked next to the kitchen window, small, up high, like a sleepy moth. The jolt that goes through her is the kind of fear one feels at an accidental cut. She is afraid to look directly at it. When she tells Jake about it and the first one, by the spigot, that she hadn't thought to mention, he is confused, as if these are figments of her imagination made solid. That night, they make a curry and spend a long time chopping side by side in the kitchen. The oil gets hot in the pan and the mustard seeds jump. The kitchen window grows dark as the world closes around them, the light space of the room, the smell of onions frying.
Awash
This is the year of overabundance. Storms saturate the desert into new blooms and the Great Salt Lake rises and butterflies that no one has seen in fifty years unfurl. And the stock market bulges slowly like a flooded river and the beef that Japan doesn't want rots on refrigerated shelves. Mercy's Aunt Geraldine dies, and she sorts her things, culling vintage laces and trims she can use for her hats. In her closet are thirty-two white broadcloth shirts and six pairs of unworn New Balance walking shoes. In the kitchen, two coffeepots still in their boxes. The garage is orderly, and the cedar chest holds stacks of tablecloths and embroidered pillowcases. These, Mercy holds to her cheek to test the thread count. An ancient Hershey's cocoa tin holds bone buttons and blackening snaps. The silk wedding dress tears on its hanger. Mercy's pile is growing. Then she finds the scrapbooks, the postcards glued like specimens on the ridged paper. Geraldine had an African safari fund she never used or gave away even when the osteoporosis crippled her. Boxes of screws and nails labeled by size bow the workshop shelves. Mercy's fingers grow numb with the sorting. She and Jake need to have a spring cleaning of their own. Like the pill bugs fringing the baseboards, her hopes curl in on themselves. Next to the kitchen sink, Geraldine's ashes settle in their paper box. In California, botanists name new flowers after stepchildren and second cousins, grade-school teachers who smelled of cardamom and stale polyester.
Mercy Spends All Week Pinning, Sewing, and Gluing Flowers onto Hats
Redbook's “Summer Fashions on a Budget” featured one of her hats, and she is buried under requests for pale citron bowlers trimmed with white silk peonies. Her fingers are spotted with hot glue burns and punctures from the wire stems. On the weekend, she plants azaleas in the corners of the yard, blankets them with ammoniac mulch. They are already flowering, and she admires their lacy fans; Jake, cranky from a bout of lawn mowing, says the blooms look like cat vomit. They stand in the hollow of their yard, and he rubs her shoulders, nuzzles the sweat off her neck. She counts backward and says, “Tuesday.” Early Monday morning, Jake comes in from getting the paper and says, “Something strange has happened.” The azaleas are laid out in a row on the front yard, their roots spidery and drying. The holes in the flowerbeds glare at Mercy, and when she turns to go inside, she sees the X on the doorjamb, thickly chalked, a closed eye. “Children,” Jake says, and she imagines them, curled in their tight houses, blinded like puppies by sleep. “Children,” she repeats and heads to the garage for the trowel and her gardening gloves. The sun is just coming up, a low hum on the horizon.
Jake Falls off the Roof into the Mulberry Tree and Is Unhurt
Things like this are always happening to him. Mercy carries a travel first aid kit and copies of their insurance cards in her purse. The tree is a white mulberry the first owners of the house brought back from China seventy-five years ago. Later in the summer, swollen lavender fruit will droop like pupas from the tree. Jake is still lying under it, new leaves in his hair, twigs for an aura, when she finds him. The original owners hoped for silkworms, not knowing they could no longer fly and thus existed only in captivity. “There is a huge spider web on the side of the house up there,” he says. This is the kind of thing he notices while falling from great heights. Once they pull the ladder around, they discover it is not a spider web but another X, chalked fuzzily in the space directly beneath their bedroom window. Even though Jake washes it off, late that night, Mercy feels its shadow, imagines some large dust-intestined insect watching them sleep, jealous of their warmth, their white sheets, their filaments of breath.