“Hi, Lucy,” said my dad. “We’ll have to talk later. I’ve been put to work.”
“Hi, Lucy,” said Hart, with a less serious expression on his face. “I came here to get some legal experience, but now …”
And he and I burst out laughing. My dad turned around and almost smiled and touched Dill’s arm. He kept his hand on Dill’s arm, looking at it, and then, finally, he spoke. “From what I understand your friend has chosen to deliver the child in the bathtub,” he said.
This made Hart and me crack up all over again. I couldn’t believe my dad was cleaning a tub for some single woman in public housing who wanted to have her baby in the bath. And wearing sanitary napkins on his knees!
“If your fucking family reunion is over I wouldn’t mind having my fucking baby already if nobody fucking minds OOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH I don’t care if it’s covered in dirt fill the tub and let’s do it OOOHAAAAHAHHHAOOOH!!”
My dad and Hart snapped to attention. If they were upset with Mercy’s language, they certainly didn’t let on. My dad filled the tub, expertly, I might add, feeling the water, swooshing it around to make it the same warm temperature everywhere. Hart got a bunch of towels ready and took on the same stern expression my dad had. They were totally focussed. These were men, finally, with a mission. I got the hell out of that bathroom just in time. Mercy lumbered in, telling everyone around her to just fuck off, and plunged into the tub. She yelled, “I JUST NEED ONE OF YOU TO CHECK THE CORD AND CATCH THE BABY. THIS BABY’S GONNA BE BORN ANY SECOND AND I MEAN ANY SECOND!!!” Immediately, Hart ran out of the room, leaving my dad the job. Teresa and Lish offered to do it instead but Mercy told them, “Keep all your kids away from the bathroom,” and “Lucy’s dad can hold me up if I need it.” I barely heard my dad murmur something like, “But I … but I have never in my life done anything like this—” and Mercy answer him with, “Listen, it’s pretty fucking straightforward. I’m having a baby here, alright? Just do what I tell yaaaaAAAAHHHH—” I caught a glimpse of my dad’s face just before Mercy yelled at him to shut the fucking door and he looked, well, he looked terrified. Kind of like the way he looked when he found out my mom was dead. I tried not to worry about him in there. I figured if we could all survive being born, then he could survive watching someone being born. I mean, I had never heard of, you know, the midwife or the obstetrician dying in childbirth. And the way Mercy had been clomping around swearing and screaming, I wasn’t worried about her dying. So. Nobody was dying. That was good.
Lish and Angela and Hart and Teresa and Dill and me sat in the kitchen quietly, drinking coffee, making sure we didn’t leave a mess, sometimes getting up and walking over to the balcony to watch the girls, who had become bored with the whole thing by this time and were playing in the parking lot in the sunshine. We were in shock. Mercy having a baby was the last thing we thought would happen at Half-a-Life. And why hadn’t she told us? We could have helped our. Then again, it would be a great feeling of accomplishment to have kept a secret for that long, nine months, or actually, eight, in a place like Half-a-Life. Finally Teresa said it: “So does anybody know who the father is?” and all of us just kind of gawked at each other and shook our heads and, naturally, wondered.
It was kind of a sacred time, the actual birth and everything, so none of us, even Lish, made any cracks about who it might be, though we were thinking about it, and later on, maybe in a day or two, we’d be trying to find out and coming up with our own ridiculous scenarios. Birth is a special thing, but in Half-a-Life we all start our nosing around very shortly afterwards. Not only us, but the dole, too. In the lives of the kids of Half-a-Life there were only a few days of freedom, of possibility; of what-ifs, before the dole swept in and took snapshots, fingerprinted, and filed all available data on the origins and future of this child, case number whatever it was. And all the questioning started.
While the other women talked about their own birth stories and revelled in the special conspiratorial mood of the occasion and Hart played with Dill, I sat on Mercy’s kitchen chair trying to sort things out. My mother’s death, Mercy’s baby, Gotcha’s fake death, Dill’s unknown father, my own father, who right now was helping to deliver the baby of a perfect stranger. He had never even seen Dill until tonight, his own grandson, and now suddenly he was Geoffrey Van Alstyne, midwife to the poor. I got up and walked over to the bathroom door. I listened to my dad saying over and over, slowly, in a soft voice filled with confidence, “Very good, very good, very good.” I sat down on the floor in the hallway and listened to him coax the new life out of Mercy, a woman he had never met until then. At the end of the hall I saw Lish move towards the fridge and stop for a second, on the way, to make a shadow puppet with her hand in the square of sunlight on Mercy’s wall. I could see Hart, awkwardly pretending to chew Dill’s toes off, and I saw Dill’s big wet mouth open, chuckling. If my mother had been in this apartment, she would have reflected happiness. If my mother was a mirror, like she said, I would have seen myself smile. And if my mother had been there she would have seen my life, and she and my dad would have spoken the words together, “Very good, very good, very good.”
fifteen
Mercy had a girl. The father turned out to be the same father her other daughter had. We were all a little taken aback by that: in Half-a-Life it’s sort of assumed that siblings have different fathers. Mercy could control just about everything around her and keep everything in order, in nice, straight, clean lines. Except for her feelings about this guy. The Father. Most of the time she could keep him out of her mind and out of her apartment, but not always. And so, she had another baby. There are worse things that could happen. Since working for the Disaster Board, Mercy had a new life philosophy: to name what you fear, to look it in the eye and embrace it. And so she named her new daughter Mayhem.
You might think that my dad and me caught up on the years we had lost or talked about my mom or declared our love for one another. Wrong. After Mayhem’s birth, he and I and Dill went back to my apartment. He sat at my little kitchen table and drank a diet Coke with ice and gave Dill a present. It was a microscope. He hoped Dill could use it when he was older. We talked about the rain, his wrecked basement, not much else. But there we were.
That night Teresa had a tequila Scrabble party. It was only going to be a Scrabble party, but then after adding up all the positive things that had happened, she decided it had better be a tequila parry, too. Even Sing Dylan was celebrating, though not with tequila. Hart had managed to convince the women in Serenity Place not to sue Sing Dylan for flooding their basements. He told them that it would take months to get money for that but they could get money right away from the Disaster Board if they said their basements flooded naturally like everyone else’s. Welfare mothers all understood the appeal of quick cash, and we rarely let convictions stand in our way of getting it. So Sing Dylan wasn’t going to have to go back to wherever the hell he came from after all. Which was good. He had even managed, finally, to wash off every last trace of the graffiti on the North wall.
What was bad was the new graffiti. The morning after Mayhem was born, Lish and I looked out of her kitchen window and saw Sing Dylan back at his wall with his pail and his hose. Nobody could miss those big fresh yellow letters: EAT THE POOR THERE MORE TENDER. Lish really liked the sound of that, despite the spelling. Again. She said it was like a welcome sign to Half-a-Life.