They’re poor because there’s a limited amount of good luck in this world, and they’ve never been given any. If it doesn’t fall from the sky and land on you, doesn’t find you when it wakes up every morning and goes looking for someone to attach itself to, there isn’t a damn thing you can do. There are way more people in the world than there is luck, so you’re either in the right place at the right time at the very second luck shows up, for once and nevermore. Or you aren’t. In which case...
Shit happens.
It is what it is.
Whatta ya gonna do.
Tina drinks some of her beer. “How was your pot roast?”
“It was good,” Mary Pat says.
“I hear it’s slipping.” Tina looks around the bar. “Like everything these days.”
“Nah,” Mary Pat says. “You should try it.”
Tina gives her a long, slow look, as if Mary Pat suggested she burn her bra or some shit. “Why do you think I should try things?”
Mary Pat looks in Tina’s eyes and sees in the dark swim of them that Tina was probably drinking harder stuff before Mary Pat arrived. “Then don’t try it.”
“No, I just want to know.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Just what the fuck,” Tina says. “Why do you want me to try the stew?”
“The stew” — Mary Pat feels the blood flush up her neck and flood her jaw — “is not stew. It’s pot roast.”
“You know what I’m saying. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m fucking saying.”
“And,” Mary Pat has to restrain herself from sticking a finger in Tina’s face, “there’s nothing new about it. It’s the same old pot roast.”
“So eat it.”
“I just did.”
“So what the fuck are you bothering me about it for?”
Mary Pat’s surprised by the sudden weariness in her own voice. “I’m not bothering you, Tina.”
Tina’s been leaning forward, her mouth open, ripples running up her neck. But then, at Mary Pat’s tone, her eyes suddenly soften. She slackens in her seat and takes a wet drag on her Parliament, exhales in a rush. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“It’s okay.”
Tina shakes her head. “I’m just mad. And I don’t even know why. Someone told me — I can’t even tell ya who, some guy — the pot roast wasn’t as good here anymore, and I thought, I can’t fucking take this. I can’t.” She puts her hand on Mary Pat’s wrist so they lock eyes. “I mean, you know, Mary Pat? I can’t fucking take it sometimes.”
“I know,” Mary Pat says. Even though she doesn’t.
But, then again, she does.
She’s back home half an hour when Timmy Gavigan drops off the signs. Timmy G is from a family of nine on K Street. He played decent hockey in high school but not decent enough to get a scholarship anywhere, so now, at twenty, he works at a muffler place on Dorchester Street and hustles for the Butler crew when they’ll throw him a bone. It’s what all the young guys around here aspire to these days — bag work for the Butler crew. But she suspects Timmy is too soft, too decent at his core, to ever ascend the ranks the way a hard case like Brian Shea or Frankie Toomey did. As she watches him walk back down the hall toward the exit door, she hopes he sorts himself out before a nickel in prison sorts it out for him.
She spends the next two hours attaching the signs to the sticks Brian Shea dropped off with the nails Timmy G provided. Someone clearly assumed Mary Pat owned a hammer, which she does. The nails are small and thin, the kind that make it hard to hold upright and not get your thumb in the way of the hammer, but she manages. For the first time that day, maybe the first time that week, she feels useful, she has purpose. She’s doing her small part to stand up against tyranny. Nothing else to call it. Nothing else fits. The people in power are telling her where she’s going to send her only living child to school. Even if that endangers her child’s education and even endangers her life.
Which is bullshit. And it isn’t about race. She’d be just as angry if they told her she has to send her kid across the city to Revere or the North End or someplace mostly white. The thought occurs to her that maybe she wouldn’t be as mad, maybe she’d just be really annoyed, but then she hammers another sign to another stick and thinks, Fuck that, I don’t see color. I see injustice. Just another case of the rich fucks in their suburban castles (in their all-white towns) telling the poor people stuck in the city how things are going to go. In that moment, Mary Pat feels a kinship with black people that surprises her. Aren’t they all victims of the same thing? Aren’t they all being told How It Is?
Well, no, because a lot of the coloreds want this. They’ve been fighting in the courts for it. And if you came from a shithole like Five Corners or the shoot-’em-up projects along Blue Hill Ave. or Geneva, of course you’d want to be in a nicer place. But Southie ain’t a nicer place, it’s just a whiter place. Southie High is just as big a mess as Roxbury High. Same exploding toilets, cracked heating pipes, water damage to the walls, mold, peeling paint, out-of-date textbooks with the pages falling out. She can’t blame the coloreds for wanting to escape their shithole, but trading it for her shithole makes no sense. And the judge who ordered all this lives in Wellesley, where his own law won’t apply. If the coloreds had sued to attend Wellesley High? Dover Middle? Weston K through eight? Mary Pat would march for them.
But then there’s the Other Voice asking, Would you? Really? How many names you know for black people, Mary Pat?
Fuck you.
How many? Be honest.
I know “colored” and I know “nigger.”
Get the fuck outta here. Tell the truth. And not just what you know, what you’ve used. What’s escaped your chapped fucking lips.
But those are just words, she pleads to some imagined judge. Poor people talking shit about poor people. Race don’t come into it. They keep us fighting among ourselves like dogs for table scraps so we won’t catch them making off with the feast.
Once she finishes her work and all the signs are stacked along the wall on either side of the front door, she sits at the kitchen table with the window open and listens to the sounds of Commonwealth on a hot summer night and wishes her daughter were with her. They could’ve played hearts or watched TV.
Somewhere in the projects someone calls for Benny. A baby wakes up squawking. A single firecracker explodes. A few people walk below her window talking about someone named Mel and a trip to the Thom McAn in Medford. She can smell the ocean. And that single firecracker.
She was born here. Three buildings away in Hancock. Dukie grew up in Rutledge. (All the buildings in Commonwealth are named after signers of the Declaration of Independence: Jefferson, Franklin, Chase, Adams, Wolcott, where she lives now, a few others.) She knows every brick, every tree.
A young couple walks under a streetlight the yellow of bile, and the boy says he’s sick of it, just sick of it. The girl counters, “You can’t just quit. You gotta try.” He says, “That’s a shit deal.” She says, “That’s the only deal. You gotta try.”