Joyce seems to notice her without really seeing her because her tone stays light. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
“Can you hear that?” Cecilia says, pointing at the crowd, her eyes growing redder.
Joyce lights a cigarette and stares at her problem child. “Hear what?”
“That.”
Mary Pat notices now. The chants of the crowd have coalesced. At first it was a smorgasbord of “Re-sist!” and “End dic-tator-ship!” and “Southie won’t go!” but now it’s one unified chant:
“Nig-gers suck! Nig-gers suck! Nig-gers suck!”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Joyce says.
The child’s eyes widen. “You don’t hear that?”
Joyce’s thin lips grow thinner, and she blows her smoke almost directly into her daughter’s face. “I hear a lot of things. I hear people laughing at you and your nipples poking through your hippie T-shirt. When you wear that to the colored school next week, let me know how they treat you.”
“I’m not afraid to go to Roxbury High, Ma. It’s you parents making it a nightmare, not us kids. We’re fine.”
“Put on a bra,” Joyce says, and this time her smoke goes directly into her daughter’s face.
Cecilia’s face tightens. Her jaw clenches and unclenches and her eyes grow cold. “I can put on a bra no problem. What’s your cure for being an asshole?”
Joyce punches her daughter in the side of the head. Joyce is big, her daughter is small, and the punch knocks Cecilia to the ground. When she starts to stand, Joyce grabs her by the hair and swings at her neck with a closed fist, but Mary Pat hooks her arm around Joyce’s and stops the punch.
She looks into Joyce’s eyes. There are two doses of rage in there — one for Cecilia, one for Mary Pat.
“No,” Mary Pat says. “Stop.”
Behind her, Cecilia scrambles to her feet.
Mary Pat separates from Joyce, and now they face each other from three feet apart.
The rest of the SWAB Sisters are frozen in shock.
“Mary Pat,” Joyce says, “step aside.”
Mary Pat shakes her head.
“Step aside!” Carol says.
“Step aside!” Maureen shrieks.
“Mary Pat,” Joyce says, breathing shallow, “I will discipline my child as I see fit.”
Again Mary Pat shakes her head.
“Get out of her fucking way!” Hannah Spotchnicki screams.
“No one touches this girl,” Mary Pat says.
Joyce charges and immediately comes up short when Mary Pat buries her fist in her solar plexus. Joyce hits the ground on her hip, lies there with her mouth open and gasping desperately for breath that’s still a good ten seconds away.
Three of the five remaining SWAB Sisters — Hannah, Carol, and Patty — attack as one. They must think they’re tough, Mary Pat reasons, because they’re from Southie and they’ve waged reigns of terror over their husbands and children for years. But being from Southie is one thing; being from Commonwealth Housing Development is quite another.
Mary Pat keeps her head down like a bull and hits whatever’s nearest. Doesn’t just hit — she squeezes, she scratches, she yanks. It’s pure street fighting like she hasn’t done since she was jumped by three girls at Old Colony back in high school. She rips off earrings, punches pussies, yanks on sagging tits as though milking a cow. She stomps ankles, kicks knees, bites a set of fingers that claw at her face. She loses some hair, gets her face and ears all scratched up, but pretty soon three more bitches are on the ground moaning, and Mary Pat is still standing — no one even got her off her feet — wiping at the blood in her eyes.
She looks around for Cecilia, but the girl is long gone. Noreen and Patty hold up their hands so she knows not to attack them. Both appear petrified and revolted.
Mary Pat turns back to her victims, sitting or lying on the pavement amid torn scraps of clothing, little plastic flags, splatters of blood, and flattened tea bags. Carol is the one nursing the freshly bloody fingers and staring up at her in a kind of dumbfounded fury. The flesh around her right eye is already turning stone blue. It takes her a bit to form a proper sentence, but when she does, it comes out as clear as a bell.
“You’re dead to us,” she says. “And when word gets out what you did here today, you’ll be dead to everyone in Southie.”
Mary Pat shrugs. The time for talk has passed. She turns and makes her way out of the crowd, which parts before her every step.
15
The first thing Mary Pat thinks when she reenters her apartment is that her place got robbed while she was at the rally. Nothing looks familiar. She wonders if she somehow let herself into the wrong unit — same layout as hers, yes, but the kitchen counters are clean, the floors have been swept, the ashtrays emptied. Not a beer can or sticky glass or pizza box in sight.
But in the next breath, she remembers...
Those bitches cleaned my home.
Was that why she took such pleasure in pounding the fuck out of them?
Possibly. Quite possibly.
She wanders down the hall to her bathroom and stands over the sink and looks in the mirror. She’s got a mouse growing under her left eye, scratches on her forehead (none deep), one on her neck (very deep; the blood soaks the collar of her blouse), a fat upper lip. In addition, what the mirror doesn’t show is the deep ringing in her right ear, like a fucking phone that won’t quit. She’s also twisted her left knee pretty good, and someone stomped the ankle of the same leg.
She goes to work first on the scratch in her neck with a series of cotton swabs and hydrogen peroxide, catches her reflection smiling even as she winces from the pain. “Pain means the peroxide’s working,” her mother always said. “Getting clean hurts.”
Mary Pat applies a large flesh-colored bandage to the cut once it’s clean. She’s got a basketful of Band-Aids, bandages, gauze, iodine, surgical shears, and antiseptic under that sink. It’s like the ER at City down there. Back when Dukie was in the Life, she needed it, of course. After he passed, she kept it around for Noel, who never met a conflict he couldn’t escalate into a fistfight.
Like mother, like son.
She smiles again. The truth is, she’s loved fighting ever since she can remember. Literally. Her first concrete memory of any length is of Willie Pike riding his bike through a puddle in front of the spit of lawn where four-year-old Mary Pat sat fussing over the hair of her Raggedy Ann doll. She saw the gleeful look in the little fucker’s eyes as he aimed the bike for the puddle. And he saw that she saw it. He pedaled faster, the little shit. Smashed his tires through the puddle and covered Mary Pat and Raggedy Ann in the slimy water that probably hadn’t come from rain — those puddles just sprang up all over Commonwealth, even during weeks of dry weather, and smelled of sulfur and bleach. She chased Willie Pike past four buildings before he wiped out on a turn. And when she got to him, she didn’t pause — a harbinger: she never paused in a fight — she unleashed. He was six and a boy, so there was no way she was going to win, but he was bleeding from both nostrils and crying like a pussy by the time he did get on top of her. He got a few licks in before Old Lady McGowan pulled him off and slapped him a few times around the head for good measure. Sure now, Old Lady McGowan told him, his father needed to strap his bottom black and blue for hitting a little girl. Old Lady McGowan thumb-poked him in the shoulder a few more times for emphasis before she walked Mary Pat back to the puddle to get her Raggedy Ann. When Mary Pat picked the doll up, it felt like lifting a trophy.