One Saturday morning she asked Dill and me over for tea. Her daughter was surprisingly free and charming. Every time Dill dragged some book or toy out of place Mercy quickly put it back. When he spilled his juice, she spent about fifteen minutes wiping it off the floor, not complaining about it, just very focussed on it. Mercy showed me photographs of her trips to Trinidad. She travelled there with her daughter every year. She saved money on food and clothes and stuff so she could do this. She said she wanted her daughter to know where she was from. But these pictures were very odd. A lot of black people crowded into the photo, smiling and barefoot, holding chickens, wearing ripped t-shirts, dancing. Then there in the middle of the shot was Mercy. She was always wearing bright white knee socks and long khaki shorts. She had on hiking boots and longsleeved men’s white shirts. She wore a big-brimmed straw hat, tied around her little head with a yellow ribbon. Her face was obliterated almost entirely by huge black sunglasses. Her expression was always grim. Her daughter was usually off in the background dancing with her cousins. When she had finished showing me these pictures she carefully put them back into their plastic-backed envelope and then into another one and then another. Then she put them into a file folder entitled Trip Photos and put that file up high on a shelf in a cardboard box made especially for folders.
Each time she went to Trinidad she brought the family of her daughter’s father gifts. For the children she brought thick-soled leather hi-top runners and puzzles and books. For the women she brought perfume and tampons and for the men she brought white dress shirts like the ones she wore. Mercy told me that in Trinidad she and her daughter slept in a dirty one-room shack with about six other people. There was no running water and no electricity. Almost everyone went barefoot. They joyously welcomed Mercy and her daughter, their granddaughter and cousin, into their home and hated to see them go.
She was also the only one of us who worked — outside of the home, that is. Once I asked Terrapin if she worked. She said, “Yes, I work very hard raising Sunshine and Rain. If you mean do I work outside the home for wages, no, I do not. It’s more important for me to be at home with my children.” I was going to ask her why her kids always looked so grim, but instead I said, “Oh. Cool.” I had decided not to talk to Terrapin about anything concerning me or Dill, anything that was meaningful, anything about life or kids, nothing but Hello, nice day for her. God, she bugged me. One time Lish and I were moving a dresser from Lish’s apartment to mine and Terrapin happened to show up on the stairs. She was wearing a shirt that read “Have a Special Delivery.” She asked us how we were managing. Lish said, “Oh terrible, this is so heavy I’m going to have a miscarriage and I’m not even pregnant.” I laughed and Terrapin said, “That might not be funny for all of us?”
Lish sighed, “Yeah, that’s very true, Paraffin. What, am I supposed to be like court jester here or what?”
Actually, that is exactly what we expected Lish to be. She was funny. She was meant to be funny. Even if she wasn’t making you laugh outright, she was uplifting, good for the soul. She had an attitude towards life that I wish I had. She did her own thing and she never noticed when people stared at her stupid spider hat or her long square-toed shoes. She loved to hang out with her kids, but if they wanted to do foolish things like attend school or join Girl Scouts, that was okay with her. She let them do their own thing because she knew how much she needed to be able to do hers. She had successfully separated her identity from her kids’ identities and so she could really enjoy them. She wasn’t afraid to be alone, as I suspected a lot of us at Half-a-Life were.
The next morning, it was raining as usual. I cleaned up Dill’s breakfast mess, and took him over to Lish’s place. I couldn’t call to tell her I was coming because her phone had been disconnected. But she knew just about everybody in the block and could use one of theirs anytime, provided they hadn’t been disconnected, too. I brought my own coffee because Lish had stopped buying it. “Too expensive for something that makes me all jittery,” she’d said. I knocked but nobody answered. So I walked right in to the living room. Hope and Maya were in school. Alba and Letitia were in there playing and singing the alphabet song as best they could. “A B C D E F G H I J K alimony please.” I was about to say “Hi” to them when I heard moaning from the other room. At first I thought it was Lish and whoever having sex in her bedroom.
“Good morning Lucy Goosie and Dilly Willy,” said Letitia in her most agreeable teacher’s voice. They were playing school. Then I heard it again. It wasn’t sex at all, Lish was crying. She must have been muffling it in her pillow or in all her hair, because it sounded far away. Nothing sounds far away in a Halfa-Life apartment. I didn’t know what to do. Lish crying. It was too weird. She never cried.
Alba said, “Lish is crying because she has a tummy ache. And she can’t come to school right now.”
“But she’ll come in the afternoon.”
“Yeah.”
I figured I’d just slip out and come back later, but by then Dill had been made a pupil and was being taught the alphabet. Alimony please. He’d scream if I tried to take him home now and then Lish would come into the room and be embarrassed. So I stood there smiling at the kids, wondering what the hell I should do. I flipped through a wicker basket full of letters she had saved. Love letters? I was tempted to read some but I was afraid the twins would tell her I’d been snooping through her stuff while she wept in the other room. I looked around at her photographs. Her parents looked normal. John was even smiling. Her mom had a happy expression and was holding John’s hand. A picture of her brother from the ’70s when he had an Afro. Someone had stuck two straws into his hair to look like antennae. A picture of Lish and Hope and her dad. Lish was enormously pregnant, with Maya, I guess, and wearing a bikini. They were on the beach. A picture beside it showed Rodger digging a hole in the sand and Lish standing beside him laughing. Hope was playing in the background. Then another picture beside that one. Lish was lying on her stomach with her huge belly nestled comfortably in the hole Rodger had dug for it and reading a book. Maya was sitting on her back and Rodger was drinking a beer. You couldn’t even tell Lish was pregnant.