Mercy Meets Morris's Ex-Wife, Lydia, for Lunch at the Mall
Her basal temperature tells her she is ovulating. She and Jake had sex twice in the last three days. The Chinese gender chart says their child, if conceived this month, would be a boy. She enters the mall through the lingerie section of a department store. Past the mesh bras and tap pants are the children's clothes, a joke, she wonders, natural progression? By habit, she resists looking at the baby clothes; any act of imagination feels like a jinx. Lydia is waiting by the Taco Bell, wearing one of Mercy's hats. She looks awful in it, and Mercy feels momentarily angry at the thought of all those unsuitable women buying her hats, paying for her lunch and her shoes and her gynecological exams. They sit by the carousel with their trays of mall-Asian food — eggroll, lo mein, plastic pillow of sweet and sour. “You've been keeping secrets,” Lydia says. “Morris told me all about it.” Children drag by on the creaky carousel, and Mercy feels a pang deep in her gut, an egg releasing, fear, a kiss, an X on the doorjamb, a hatch mark on the calendar. “Your hat was in Redbook,” Lydia says, holding her hand to the crown of her hat as if the carousel is kicking up a wind. “I dug this out of my closet — it was in the Salvation Army pile,” she laughs. “One more month and it would have been gone.” Mercy leans forward and tips Lydia's hat back on her head, rests her hand on the curve of her neck. She says, “I guess I got lucky.”
They Start Finding Xs Every Other Day or So
On the paving stone closest to the storage shed, the red flag of the mailbox, every fence post in the backyard, appearing one by one like light bulbs flicking on. On the spare wheel of Jake's Jeep, the clapper of the bamboo wind chimes. The potting soil is dumped in a mound in the backyard, the bag knotted around the front doorknob. Their garbage cans are knocked down, dented; they find their newspaper burnt on the walk. “It's some kind of campaign,” Jake says, and they stay up late, peering from their dark living room. In the bedroom, Mercy pulls a chair next to the window and watches the yard swell and diminish in the moonlight. They set amateurish traps, a video camera whose tape runs out, a string of bells on the garden gate, a drugstore motion detector alarm on the driveway. They don't call the police or quiz their neighbors. Without discussion, they both know there is a message here they must unravel. Jake talks about digging a pit and covering it with grass clippings. Mercy starts constructing her own semaphore; she leaves milk in an old tin pie plate for the neighborhood cats, paints their door Greek-isle blue, ostentatiously recycles. She ties paper lanterns onto the beams of the porch and washes the sidewalk in front of the house. She is broadcasting good intentions. The bells in the garden ring without provocation, on windless days, and Jake says, “Listen, the ghosts are at it again.”
Mercy and Morris Meet at the Cineplex Fifteen Miles Away
The Chinese film they are seeing is folded away in the smallest theater, and the only other people watching are two elderly women who whisper through the credits. Morris puts his hand over hers without looking at her. Mercy holds her breath as the colors stain the screen. A chartreuse dress, gold lanterns, indigo streets burnished by lamplight. The subtitles flash too brightly and create a sensation of flickering vertigo. Mercy turns to Morris, finds his mouth, sinks into a kind of oblivion, the long kisses she remembers from high school, the kind that went on until it wasn't about desire anymore, was simply the pursuit of texture, dark fleshy spaces that stretched until everything felt like an extension of one's own body. She relaxes into this moment, despite Morris's inept rubbing at her shoulders, the giant paper cup of soda with its straw squeaking between them, the chirps and gongs of the fight scene. When she pulls away, her mouth is tacky with saliva and Morris looks blissfully at her, like a dog, she thinks and is startled by her bitterness, the extent of her betrayal. She tries to pay attention to the movie, but the subtitles seem wrong for the action, and she doesn't know if it is because she has missed crucial information or if it is just shoddy translation. Her jeans are wet as if something inside her is weeping, flooding with the onscreen dialogue, a language she doesn't understand.
Suddenly, Everything Makes Mercy Paranoid
Someone is calling and hanging up. The chalk Xs continue to bloom on their property, and Jake refuses to get caller ID. Mercy hacks his hotmail account in search of chat room hussies and grad school crushes. She sniffs his underwear, finds only the musky almond scent of him, scans his shirt collars like a fifties housewife. At work, she goes over their finances while the Catherines mutter at their sewing machines. No plot is beyond imagination: offshore accounts, angry bookies, a looking-glass family in Tennessee. A gray Cadillac passes her twice while she is running; a woman in the coffee shop is wearing the same cardigan as she is. She imagines her china rearranged, a shadow in the bathroom mirror, every horror movie cliché burned into her brain during countless bad date drive-ins and basement sleepovers in high school. When she calls Morris to ask if he is stalking her, he says, “It was just a couple of kisses, pretend we were drunk.” And then he laughs his horsey laugh, and she knows there is no way that Morris is creeping around her house at night. It is the season of thunderstorms that blow up without warning and a sky that darkens as if a filter has clicked into place. One evening, when the power has gone out and Mercy and Jake are sitting on the porch, lightning strikes the neighbor's fir tree. The air turns purple, their fillings hiss, and the light is so thick it hurts their sinuses. In that moment, she sees the figure in their yard, half hidden behind the elm. She runs toward the spot, leaving Jake shouting after her, knowing that nothing will be waiting there, just the smell of burning sap and loosed rain, the sound of water hitting skin.
The Spine Is a Delicate Evolution
“I'm mortified,” Mercy tells her sister as they line up for yoga class. She is visiting her in New York amid meetings with department store buyers. Her sister is the one person she can tell about Morris because they aren't particularly close. They have a two-hour threshold for mutual tolerance, worked out after rooming together for a year of college and nearly killing each other over mildewed dishrags and borrowed belts. The yoga instructor greets them all with a half-bow and ushers them into the small, mirror-lined room. He is shirtless and his skin is ruddy-tan, stretched tight over his belly like a roasted pig. They start with cat tilts, and her sister whispers, “Is it serious?” “Of course not,” Mercy hisses and feels the arch of her spine crimp. They face the wall for dancer pose, and Mercy says, “It's fucked up, right, making out with my best friend while my husband and I are trying to get pregnant?” She stumbles into her sister and they both yelp. The instructor squints at them and intones, “Get grounded.” During boat pose, Mercy inhales the dust of the mat as her sister rocks placidly beside her saying, “You just needed a little attention.” In corpse pose, she can feel every bone of her back touching the floor, and she imagines her body a crypt, each vertebra a walled-up secret. The instructor places his hands beside her ears to realign her head, and a small space opens at the base of her neck, radiates relief.