She’d have at least twenty more fights before she reached sixth grade — and those were the ones outside her door. Inside the Flanagan home, it was Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots from seven a.m. wake-up to ten p.m. shutdown. The boys — John Patrick, Michael Sean, Donnie, Stevie, and Bill — lived in one room. At one point, John Patrick’s senior year at Southie High and Bill’s first year in second grade, all five of them were living in there at the same time. Mary Pat’s father, those times she could remember him actually being home, would say the room smelled like a fish’s asshole. After John Patrick left — hitching a ride west; no one had heard from him in twenty years — a battle ensued for his top bunk. Donnie, who was stronger than Michael Sean, got it for the first six months, but Michael Sean spent all that year working out at L Street until he was stronger. About a week of fistfights and two broken noses later, Michael Sean got the top bunk, but Stevie hated the sound of Michael Sean snoring through his broken nose, so he tried to smother his brother with a pillow — Stevie, possessor of the scariest glare Mary Pat had ever seen, was always fucked in the head — and their mother had to break it up. Stevie, who was thirteen at that point, small and feral like their mother, slammed their mother’s head against the window and broke the pane. That it was it for Stevie, they shipped him off to St. Luke’s Home for Troubled Boys and never spoke of him again, even when they saw his name in the papers ten years later for that stickup that went horribly wrong in Everett.
The stitches — black, thick, and hard as metal, all seven of them — remained in the back of their mother’s head for three weeks, and when they came out, it wasn’t much better. For the rest of her life, Louise Flanagan’s hair grew around the scar and refused to fall over it, so it looked like all her thoughts, secrets, and shames could be accessed by pulling down on a red zipper in the back of her skull.
Not that her mother couldn’t dish it out as well as she took it. To this day, Mary Pat can’t look at a wooden spoon without recalling the sting of one against her wrist, her cheek, the poke of the tip in her stomach. And that was for the minor offenses. For the major offenses — Weezie’s shoe. She had three pairs, all prewar, all built to last. Every five or six years, she’d get the soles replaced, and then everyone walked on eggshells for weeks, hoping to not be chosen as the one she’d use to break them in.
If the old man was around, you had to watch out for his hands — the backs of the knuckles as hard and pointed as lug nuts, the flick of his index finger springing off his thumb into your temple, the grip of his fingers in your hair to drag you across the floor toward his belt (as he had the night Mary Pat got all Ds on her report card). Jamie Flanagan loved that belt most of all. He hung it on a hook just outside the bathroom door for that purpose only, used a different one to hold up his pants.
Then there were the internal skirmishes — between brother and brother, sister and sister, brother and sister, or, the worst of them all, two siblings against one. After Stevie and his faulty-hand-grenade temper were removed from the house, Donnie and Big Peg were given the widest berths because you never knew where you stood with them. But Mary Pat and Bill, once he grew up, were the ones everyone avoided getting really mad because neither had an off switch.
Her last fight with Big Peg, Mary Pat had spent two nights in the hospital with a concussion and compound fractures to the head because Big Peg had hit her full in the face with a brick, but what no one ever forgot was that before the ambulance arrived, Mary Pat returned to consciousness and finished that fucking fight before passing out again.
“I hit you with a brick,” Big Peg said when they wheeled her into the hospital room to visit Mary Pat. “A brick.”
“Next time use a cinder block,” Mary Pat said.
She hasn’t seen any of her brothers in years. Michael Sean joined the Merchant Marines and drops occasional Christmas cards from ports of call she otherwise would be unaware of — Cabo Verde, Maldives, South Sandwich. Donnie lives in Fall River and installs gutters. There’s no bad blood between them, just the unspoken acknowledgment that blood itself is all that ever tied them together. Last anyone heard of Bill, he was doing ten years for a stabbing in New Mexico, which was a surprise. Not the stabbing, the New Mexico part. Hot weather always made him irritable, which, come to think of it, might explain the stabbing.
Mary Pat finishes cleaning up and tosses all the bloody swabs in the wastebasket and wipes down the sink with a splash of rubbing alcohol. She considers herself in the mirror. Her face looks like she was dumped from the back of a truck into a pile of gravel. Her hands are screaming — not just the knuckles but the wrists. Her ribs ache. Ear still ringing away. Knee and ankle in need of ice.
She gets some from the freezer. Props the leg up on a kitchen chair, puts one napkin full of ice on the ankle, another on the knee. Outside the window, Commonwealth is eerily quiet. Everyone must still be at the rally or in the bars around City Hall. She sits there and smokes, flicking the ash into a spotless ashtray. She can’t believe how clean her kitchen is. They really did a nice job. Professional grade, she thinks with a smile.
For the first time in a week, she loves how she feels — bruised and scabbing up, the taste of blood in her mouth that some describe as bitter but she’s always felt was kind of buttery. She reaches behind her and turns on the radio, and the DJ, just coming out of commercial, welcomes her to settle in and listen to some Mozart, a boy genius who started composing at five.
“The Piano Sonata Number Eleven,” the DJ says in a voice as smooth as toffee, “is also known as the Rondo Alla Turca. Composed as a trifle, it has, over time, become one of his most popular pieces the world over.”
The DJ’s voice feels as if it’s coming from the darkest of rooms. She pictures him in the black, surrounded by the inky shadows of bookshelves.
The music begins and Mary Pat closes her eyes, floats in the light dance of the piano keys.
Mozart knew what he was supposed to do. He didn’t hunt down what he was good at — at five, he wasn’t searching. It found him. Greatness. Just as it found Ted Williams’s arm and eyes and legs. Just as it found James Joyce’s pen. (Not that she’d ever read Joyce, but she knows he’s the greatest Irish writer of all time.) Work only gets you so far. You have to lean into what you were born to do.
Mary Pat, since as long as she can remember, has been getting slapped, sometimes lightly, sometimes hard. She’s been punched, tripped, hit with hangers, hit with broomsticks, Wiffle-ball bats, those wooden spoons, her mother’s shoes, her father’s belt. Donnie once threw a bar of brown soap at the back of her head and knocked her completely off her feet. On the streets, she fought girls, boys, and packs of both. Anytime one person attacked her, she fought back against all of them, throughout her history, who’d ever hit her or twisted her hair or ear or nipple, anyone who’d ever screamed at her or snapped at her, hit her with a belt or a shoe. Everyone who had ever made her feel like a frightened little girl wondering what kind of fucked-up fire she’d been born into.
She can’t remember that girl, but she can feel her. She can feel her bafflement and terror. At the noise and the fury. At the storm of rage that swirled around her and spun her in place until she was so fucking dizzy from it, she had to learn to walk in it without falling down for the rest of her life.
And she learned well. She’s happiest when she’s opposed, most ecstatic when she’s been wronged.
She’s lost the last four days of her life to mourning.