Trapped on the Subway Due to a Fire on Another Track
The scratched Plexiglas gives the feel of an aquarium, one of those cheap globes at Kmart Mercy mooned over as a child, each studded with a plump goldfish that her mother refused to buy her because she said they wouldn't last a week. The car is on a section of track closed between two walls, and Mercy is late for an appointment with a woman who makes flowers out of old calligraphy workbooks, every petal an imperfect word. She scuffs her pumps against the accordion floor and reads the newspaper over the shoulder of the man next to her. Cancelled shuttle launches, grilled chicken recipes, bomb scares that turn out to be lunch sacks. At the last station, waiting for the train to arrive, she called Jake on her cell phone, had a frizzled conversation of last syllables and interruptions until she said “I miss you,” and hung up, not sure what he heard. The walls were papered with Rodenticide warnings, forbidding people to touch or eat the bait without specifying what the bait was. A man slept on a folded blanket under the escalator while a woman next to him sat alert, scowling, as if daring anyone to disturb his delicate refuge. It broke Mercy's heart to see them, but then the train rattled in, blowing sweaty air in front of it, and she was pushing for a seat, not knowing yet about the fire burning ahead of them, not yet thinking of the orange fish and their conscribed pirouettes, their languorous acceptance of their fates.
Mercy Goes to Her Ob/Gyn for the Third Time This Year
Her doctor, who is a little Texan redhead, drawls, “It's time to start looking at other options.” Pink plumes of reproductive propaganda flutter in the air conditioning. “Y'all have just about exhausted the natural route,” she says and pats Mercy's paper-covered thigh, clicks her pen, draws a pamphlet on fertility treatments from her clipboard. She barely looks at Mercy's ovulation charts, four months cross-stitched with temperatures, mucus descriptions and do-it dates. In the park across the street, mothers yell at their children on the slides and Mercy tosses the doctor's pamphlets in the trash can atop ice cream ruins and yesterday's news. Although profoundly unreligious, she is superstitious, needle-phobic, lazy and in love with the romance of old-fashioned cock and womb, candlelit, sweaty, pungent reproduction. She figures this is a sign or more likely, a punishment for procrastination and that her best defense is graceful concession. She summons up glamorous trips, unencumbered old age, reading novels until noon, starts exchanging one fantasy for another. A chalked X greets her from her driveway, boxed like a hopscotch square, and she sneaks into the backyard to cry, knowing Jake is calculating the odds on the computer upstairs. The corner of the yard is overgrown and shady, and she crouches in the ferns. If she is quiet, she can almost hear someone else's heartbeat, someone else's breath, as if coming to her from a distance, from a future she hasn't yet imagined.
Jake Talks about Defoliants Over Dinner
Dioxin, demeton, cacodylic acid. Mercy takes this as a hopeful sign; maybe he is missing his job, longing for a lectern, research trips, access to microfiche. Miscarriage, mutation, birth defect. He rolls the word, teratology, on his tongue with the black beans. Midway through the meal, she goes to the kitchen for a bottle of wine and two glasses. The look on his face is that of someone surprised by disaster, the click of a land mine, the drone of a plane's engine. “Pour it,” she says. She is tired; in the crib of her pelvis, she feels her ovaries wither. He fills each glass without spilling a drop, a terrible competence. The bottle sounds heavier than it should when he puts it down on the table. They sit without eating and watch the resin spread like poison across the surface of the wine.
When Mercy Goes Outside to Pick Basil for Dinner
She finds a man crouching by her back door who fumbles chalk into his pocket, says, “I thought you weren't home. Your car &” She says, “We're having the timing belt replaced,” almost apologetically. When he turns his face toward her, she recognizes the man whose dog they hit, and she recoils as if the windshield is breaking in front of her again. Into the awkward pause she asks, “Would you like to join us for dinner?” When she goes upstairs to get Jake, he hisses, “There are limits to politeness.” Back down-stairs, at the kitchen table, the man sits with a sweating bottle of Corona untouched in front of him. Jake says, “Hi there buddy, long time no see, what have you been up to?” Mercy says, “It's not much, just pasta.” Jake flings open the refrigerator and says, “Ham, we've got ham, and brie and look at these plums, gorgeous, big as fists.” He is yanking food out and slamming it onto the table. “How about another beer?” He opens the rest of the six-pack of beers and puts them one by one in front of the man, pulls containers of olives and cherry tomatoes out of the refrigerator, piles pita bread atop takeout fried rice atop romaine. Carrots tumble over blocks of butter and eggs tremble at the edge of the table as the refrigerator rattles to life, leaks its cold air over them. The man doesn't touch a thing. Jake takes one of the beers and drinks it in noisy swallows, drops it onto the table where the bottle cracks into three pieces. Mercy says, “Please, Jake.” The man reaches across the table for the shards, stacks them into a lopsided pyramid. Jake asks, “Have you ever seen plums that big?” softly, as if truly puzzled by their appearance.
What They Learn
All the man's knuckles are bruised brown, and Mercy wonders if he is diabetic. He works the night shift at the ammunition plant out by the interstate. He checks the plastic honeycombs filled with bullets as they slide down the line to the boxing station. If one slot is empty, his job is to find the proper caliber and fill it before the case passes out of reach. As the light fades, Jake rummages for candles. He finds two his nephew made him last year in a class project — wax-filled seashells that tip on the table as if rocked by invisible waves. During the day, the man refills candy machines at local restaurants. Mercy can imagine it perfectly, the click of the candy like bullets filling the glass jars, the sweet metallic residue the man washes from his hands each morning and evening. The beer is finally getting to Jake, and he says, “Why the Xs?” The dog whines at the door to be let in, and they all pretend not to hear it. The man fingers a bit of bread that has fallen next to his plate, rolls a ball and flattens it. “It's funny,” he says, eyes trained on the row of crumbs he is aligning. “I used to yell at that idiot mutt ten times a day.” Mercy touches his elbow, hesitantly. His arm goes still as if she is a wild animal he is afraid of startling. He says, “You guys are nice people, good people, I can tell.” She clears the dishes as Jake leads him to the front door. Jake comes back with a plastic tub half-filled with Chiclets and says, “He wouldn't take no for an answer.” Mercy remembers chicken-fried steak at a roadhouse called the Chuck Wagon near her grandmother's farm, the begged nickel, a handful of lacquered gum, the blissful ache of sugar seeping into teeth.
Mercy and Jake Go Backpacking