Eddie Joyce - Small Mercies

Gail wakes with a pierced heart, same as every day. Her mouth is dry. She reaches for the glass of water on her nightstand, but it has warmed in the night. Next to her, Michael gently snores away last night’s fun.

She can never sleep in on Saturdays. Friday nights? She’s useless, like someone drugged her. They order a pie, usually pepperoni but plain last night for Lent. She eats two slices, drinks two glasses of Chianti, and is asleep on the couch by eight. Before he leaves for the Leaf, Michael drapes a blanket over her inert body. He wakes her when he gets home, no later than eleven these days. He helps her up the stairs, the beer on his breath gone stale with the walk home. She barely wakes, has just enough energy to get her tired bones beneath the covers. He says something nice, kisses her forehead.

She’s always up with a start the next morning. She doesn’t need caffeine or an alarm clock; a shapeless guilt propels her into the day. Before she steps out of the shower, she’s already in full swing, making lists, mental notes. What needs to be done. Today, tomorrow, this week, this month. She’ll write it down later. She dresses in the stillness, sitting on the bed, the comforter muffling the energy required to slip on her socks. An occasional snort from Michael is the only reminder that she’s not the solitary soul in the world.

A quick look in the mirror. Not for vanity, not anymore, but for its older sister: dignity. She makes sure she’s not a total mess, that the clothes she slipped on in the dark don’t clash. Brown corduroys and a long-sleeve faded green T-shirt. Good enough.

Her energy is tested as soon as she leaves the bedroom. Bobby’s room is across the hall and as much as she’d like to, she cannot pass it without entering. It hasn’t changed since Bobby got married and moved out. He took most of his things, but the room looks the same. The bedroom of a grown child living at home. The bed is made, the window cracked open. A faded poster of Patrick Ewing, sweat drenched and intimidating, hangs above the bed. He is leaping to block a shot. She nods to him.

Patrick, how are we this morning?

Fine, Mrs. A., fine. Can’t seem to finish blocking this shot. Always inches away.

Keep at it, Patrick.

Will do, Mrs. A.

She sucks in a breath of air, closes her eyes, tries to remember what it was like to be in this room with her son. He was barely ever here. To sleep and that’s all. The older boys had to share a room, but Bobby got his own. She can’t remember how it worked out that way. One of those things. No explanation, no reason: a fact of the family conceived in temporary convenience and cemented by the simple passage of time. When one of the older boys objected — Peter, it would have been Peter — it was too late.

“I don’t mind, Mom. He can have it. I’ll switch or Franky can move in with me.”

Easy as a hammock, her Bobby boy. But they didn’t make the switch. The youngest gets the hand-me-down clothes, the half-broken toys, gets picked on and left behind, gets teased and tormented. He would at least have his own room, even if he didn’t want it.

Besides, she didn’t want Peter to get his way. He was fourteen or fifteen. Cock of the walk. Already entitled, not in a rich-kid way but expectant. He worked hard, no sense denying it. He studied too, even though it came easy. He practiced — football, baseball — even though that came easy too. But he expected the world to open wide for him, knew that one day he would storm the castle and fuck the princess and drink all the wine, because he was smart and athletic and handsome and diligent.

And he wasn’t wrong, as it turned out.

But he didn’t get the room. She remembers now: a list of reasons, a presentation at the kitchen table. A smug little smile at the end, satisfied at the brilliance of his own logic. The shock and hurt when she said no, without giving a reason. She wanted the little prick to taste some disappointment. Strange how you can hate your own kids at times.

She walks over to the short bookcase that sits below the window. A handful of basketball trophies rest on top of it. One has been knocked over by the breeze from the window. She picks it up, inspects the placard: MOST IMPROVED PLAYER, FARRELL JUNIOR VARSITY 1990–91. Bobby held this once, cherished it. She places it in an upright position, slides its marble base into the proper place among its compatriots.

A few years back, Michael broached the topic of maybe using the room for something else. Another guest bedroom or a home office or maybe a game room for the grandkids. She stared at him, blue eyes unblinking, until he simply ran out of words. He never raised the issue again.

Some days she thinks he was right. The room doesn’t conjure anything, doesn’t evoke any particular memories. It simply reminds her of Bobby’s absence and she hardly needs a room to do that. It has inflicted pain, this room, on a few mornings, when she’s walked in to find someone lying in his bed and, for a moment, experienced a flicker of obscene hope, quickly extinguished when she realizes it’s Franky and he’s slipped in here, drunk and melancholy, while they were sleeping, spreading one sadness over another. She closes the door on those days and lets Franky sleep. When he sneaks away in the morning, hung over and embarrassed, she washes the sheets and remakes the bed and feels Bobby slip a little further away.

Mostly, it’s a distraction. A pause — maybe five minutes, maybe an hour — keeping her from her day. Like today. So it’s time to wish Mr. Ewing good luck and get on with it. She makes the sign of the cross and leaves the room.

Then she’s down the stairs, a tornado doing all the little household things that have gone undone during the week, all the things she should have done the night before. Everywhere she goes, the house staggers back to life: the washing machine swigs, the dishwasher soaks, the coffeemaker sputters and spits. The lighting of bulbs marks her path through the house. Bathroom, hallway, stairwell, kitchen, living room, front porch. The wooden floors groan up at her as she goes; the bones in her ankles and feet respond with unsettling clicks. The trash is removed, the paper is brought in.

Voices from the radio slip back into the kitchen, oblivious to the fact that they’ve been silenced these sleeping hours. A mundane news station. Nothing political, nothing angry. Just the traffic, the weather, the happenings of the five boroughs, New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island, Westchester. Something that makes her feel like she’s part of a community. A large, rambling, fractious community, but a community all the same.

There was a stabbing in Yonkers, a fatal drunk-driving accident in Garden City, downed power lines in Massapequa. There are feel-good stories: an anonymous donation to a food pantry in Mount Vernon, a rescued dog in Canarsie, a kidney donated by a stranger to a sick child in Flushing.

How awful. How wonderful. How frustrating. The traffic, always bad somewhere, even at this hour, even on a Saturday. The newscaster lists the times like a hostess at a restaurant assessing the wait for a table. Fifteen minutes at the Holland inbound. Twenty outbound. Thirty minutes at the Lincoln outbound. Forty-five inbound. An hour at the GW Bridge, in either direction.

Most mornings, she barely pays attention. It’s something to move things along, keep her company. The voices on the radio float to Gail wherever she is in the house. They grow lower, disappear, reappear, are drowned out by the dryer, grow stronger, disappear again. Her ears perk only if the radio mentions something local.