None of that hoping and believing girl was left in Sylvia now or at least she couldn’t be found. The woman she was now didn’t yearn for sophistication, and as far as she could tell she’d stopped yearning for much at all. The woman she’d become was fat and weighed down, but not just fat, dumb too, and always in the process of adjusting, like there was two of everything, the real thing and the shimmering copy that her brain had to work with focus and concentration to integrate. Her brain in slow-mo or she felt slow—same difference. The result was the girl she’d been had evaporated from her body like an emancipated soul.
Sylvia loved tea, the sweeter the better, but she’d been diagnosed as prediabetic at her last checkup and that meant she had to take it easy, or she was supposed to. Old people used to call it sugar. As in, cut her a small piece of that pie, she’s got sugar. Sylvia would never say that. Ava lived on steamed vegetables and the occasional organic meat that made Sylvia’s head hurt to smell cooking. Who wanted all that freshness? The smell of bovine growth hormone could produce nostalgia. Sylvia was proof. All of that good eating to bribe her daughter’s body to take on a baby. What surprises this life turned out to have! When Ava was young, Sylvia had done a lot of praying that her baby wouldn’t get pregnant in high school, though she’d never known for sure if Ava was doing anything or not. She was afraid to ask her and admit that she didn’t know. How it happened that she was afraid of her own child, she had no idea. We pray anyway. Even when we know most of the prayers are a waste of time.
The front door closed softly on the frame. In her mind, Sylvia saw her daughter dropping her leather bag on the floor; tossing her jacket on the arm of the couch.
“Mama?” Ava yelled.
“I’m in the back.”
Sylvia imagined Ava coming through the front door, the large picture window at her back. The room that Sylvia slept in now was immediately to Ava’s right. Ava would not look in at Sylvia’s room and the mounds of clothes all over the bed and floor. Sylvia had never been a good housekeeper and she wasn’t about to fix years of bad habits or she wouldn’t. Either way it was easier to swing the door of her room closed. Sylvia imagined Ava rushing up the stairs to the room she shared with Henry. On the ottoman at the end of their bed were her home clothes—a tank top and stained sweatpants in a sad little melted-wicked-witch mound. Sylvia had mentioned to her just once that she might want to look a little more put together when her husband got home. Ava had cast what could only be called a murderous glance in Sylvia’s direction that had screamed that under no circumstances would she take any advice from Sylvia. How Ava had managed to say nothing out loud was an everyday miracle. Any good advice about men could not come from her. Sylvia had herself worn that same face to her own mother.
Ava would hang her skirt on a silk padded hanger, let her shimmery slip puddle on the floor, grab her hair from behind and wrestle it into a ponytail or pin it to the back of her skull. The whole transformation complete in a couple of minutes.
Ava came to the back patio with her clothes changed, her face washed and clean. At the bank she’d been a senior loan officer for several years with a real office all to herself, a desk job, an office job so she had to look the part. From time to time Sylvia caught a glimpse of Ava in town or going into the bank, her small frame a hanger for the expensive suits and dresses she liked, a confident turn of her head that made her own child unrecognizable for a hair of a second. How she had learned that poise Sylvia could not imagine. Not from her, she thought. At home Ava was young, and even her limbs were more liquid and unassuming. At home she pretzeled herself on the seats of chairs, her legs in configurations that hurt Sylvia to imagine on her own body. Her daughter had become a professional woman, a woman with a profession, a member (a new member for sure), but a member of the middle class. Sylvia thought of the young slick skinned black men she’d been raised with in Pinewood, a few of them dead young, some dead for years, but most of them still kicking, had masked themselves, moved like robots in the factories, restaurants, and yards they worked in with no expression on their lizard-dead-eyed faces. A few of them, a very few imagined that one day they would take their places among the secure. But on their own time, they ruled the room, sailed into clubs and parties, like beautiful ships, dressed to the hilt in their high glossed gator shoes.
“Mama, did you remember not to sweeten it?”
“I remembered.”
Ava brought with her a stack of her home and self-improvement magazines, poured herself a glass, and positioned her magazines in front of her like they were just more work to be done, like Sylvia wasn’t sitting right in front of her. Somehow Sylvia had become as ridiculous and easy to dismiss as her own mother had been to her.
Ava’s Victoria’s Secret bra peeked out from the narrow straps of her shirt. Sylvia’s bras she got from the discount bin at JCPenney. Every mother thinks her child beautiful, at least good mothers, but Sylvia had the advantage of being right. Ava’s heart-shaped face and sweet bow mouth took her by surprise. A good face, a little girl’s face, innocent as a girl’s, not the hard lines and knowing that looked like experience. People dropped their guards, felt protective. No one would ever look at Ava’s face and call her an old soul. Or, if they did, it would be so far in the future that Sylvia wouldn’t live to see it. Sylvia tried to tell her it was a blessing to look innocent. But Ava was always annoyed by people’s assumptions that she was younger (which she didn’t mind so much) and dumber and frailer than she knew herself to be.
Sylvia stifled the urge to stroke her daughter’s back, tickle her bones with spelled-out letters like they used to, but Ava was a bundle of nerves these days, anything could set her off. Sylvia told her that her baby was coming to her. Any day now, she’d said. Besides, she’d never heard of a black woman having problems having a baby. Ava had called her a racist. Her, a racist! Of course Sylvia knew that anybody’s body can disagree with her mind—black or not. She stated a fact, reported what life had demonstrated to her, lessons she’d learned from her own pain. Of course her world was small, of course she didn’t know it all, but when had she gone from knowing enough to knowing nothing at all good enough to repeat?
“I’m not telling Henry this time, Ma.” Ava pursed her lips, stared at Sylvia hard. “So don’t say anything, okay?”
Sylvia slowed her breathing to stop the tug of anger building in her chest. “I won’t mention it, Ava,” Sylvia said.
“Sorry.” Ava swirled her tea and tried not to ignore the tension on her mother’s face. They were both too jumpy these days and too quick to be annoyed. “Did you bring the agave?”
Sylvia shook her head and watched her daughter move to the kitchen. Sylvia was not a superstitious woman, not really, but she felt sickening guilt about her daughter’s infertility. She’d hoped from the beginning of Ava’s marriage that she would leave Henry before she had any of his babies. Henry wasn’t a bad man, but even after almost fourteen years married and almost twenty in a relationship, his presence had not felt permanent to her. Any day it seemed he might be up and gone from them, and finally she and Ava could continue the life she thought they’d have from the moment Ava was born. A life together. A fool’s dream, entirely selfish, a mother’s dream, but it persisted. If no one knew it, did she still have to be ashamed?
“Are you ready for all of this again, Ava?” Sylvia attempted to keep her tone casual, but she was afraid. “It’s just been a couple of months.”
“It’s been five months, Mama. I’ve got to be ready.” Ava shrugged, she would never be ready.
“I’m worried about your body. I don’t know everything about all these processes and procedures, but I do know that you can put too much on your body. It needs a rest.”
“At my age you mean?”
“No, honey, that’s not what I mean.” Sylvia sighed. “You know Mama was up there when she had me and Lana.” That the weird angst between Sylvia and Ava skipped Ava’s teenage years and was waiting for middle age to bloom was an infuriating surpri
se. She and Ava had not experienced the usual run-ins that teenage mothers and daughters famously have. Now whatever Sylvia did she was always wrong. Nothing she could say came out right either. Ava had come to Sylvia’s room a few weeks pregnant the last time in just her bra and gym shorts. “Look, Mama,” she’s said holding her completely flat belly. “Don’t you see the bump? I think there’s one there for real now.” Sylvia had rubbed her daughter’s smooth skin no bump to the touch, none visible to the eye. Her daughter had watched her mother’s face for confirmation. Sylvia’s own stomach had been stretched hard and early from both of her pregnancies, but she’d had much more of a belly to start with. More than forty years after her pregnancies and she had the extravagant stretch marks on her belly as proof. She willed herself to feel the baby, feel anything underneath her daughter’s skin. Nothing. “What a beauty you are,” she’d said. Ava frowned and sucked her teeth. “So you don’t feel anything then,” Ava said and left the room.
Sylvia’s mother had gotten pregnant six times, the first when she was sixteen and the last time when she was thirty-seven and each and every time was to her a miserable surprise. Sylvia and Lana, her last two, the only two now left alive were especially infuriating to her and she never got over that feeling. Mabe had resented Sylvia’s physical body, any happiness in her voice, the sight of her broad smiling face. Sylvia had become quiet in her presence, but looking for any opportunity for her mother’s attentions. Sylvia had never felt that embarrassing jealousy with Ava. Hardly ever. And she had never tried to lock her daughter out of her affections. At least she hadn’t thought so. What had gone wrong at this late date was beyond Sylvia’s comprehension. Sylvia liked her daughter and liked spending time with her or she had. Even when Ava was a teenager Sylvia had liked her. Ava had not brought home airheads and name-brand-obsessed silly girls, who would include her in their groups just for the joy of later locking her out and telling her secrets to anyone who found that kind of cruelty particularly amusing. Ava had not been drawn to the heartless or mean but to the sadly broken, the missing, and the ones left behind.
“I wish you’d give it some time. I don’t know anything. Don’t roll your eyes. I saw you.” Sylvia wanted to stop talking but she couldn’t help herself. “I know nothing about nothing.” Sylvia crossed her arms over her chest. She knew she looked like a brat but she couldn’t stop. “But I wish you’d take a break.” When Ava was very young she’d played house with another little girl from down the dirt road. Instead of playing dolls and motherhood the ways Sylvia and her own sister had done, Ava had played a game of their own invention called Girl. Girl, I’m so tired, the children would say. Girl, work is about to kill me. Girl, let’s go shopping. Not a baby bed, no dinner making for a man, not even a man present in the make-believe. Sylvia had wanted to play herself.
Ava attempted her kindest look. “I know you didn’t mean anything. I’m just nervous. Running out of time, Mama.”
“You know I understand that,” Sylvia said.
“I know. Can we change the subject? I’m getting a headache.”
“What you think now you won’t think forever. I’m telling you, Ava.” Sylvia couldn’t figure out a way to explain to Ava that her current feelings were not exactly untrustworthy, but too short-lived to rule the trajectory of her life. In a few years Ava would see her worries as not exactly trivial but from a different angle and more comprehensible, compared to the hurt that was coming. Everyone acknowledges the angst of adolescence, the hormone stew that can rule the body and mind. Why had no one told Sylvia that the changes do not end? Sylvia had always imagined that there is a fixed adult state that a woman sails into until her golden years. The pain of the loss, the true loss of youth, the change of life, THE CHANGE, the terrible sure feeling of being shunted out of the everyday progress of living, the move from a player on the stage to a member of the audience—until finally, the fear that crept and inched into your mind, then your soul, that your life had amounted to too little. Like some version of that joke, life was terrible and in such small portions. And finally, the realization that you hadn’t performed enough or well enough and now everyone you loved would suffer. Why hadn’t anyone said something? Of course older women had said in their way. By way of warning and encouragement, they had told Sylvia not to get old. “Don’t get old!” they’d said. Like anyone ever in the history of time had had any intention of that.
Sylvia could see that Ava was trying to smooth things over and get through the bump in the conversation. Stop talking, stop talking, she thought. She said, “All I’m saying is you don’t have to worry as much as you do.”
“Did you like it when people told you that, Mama? Did it make you feel better?”
Ava’s sharp tone hurt Sylvia to hear, but she pretended otherwise. She wasn’t sure when it happened that Ava started talking to her any way she pleased. She started to protest, but the truth was Ava knew much more about this subject than Sylvia ever could. Sylvia had not dreamed of babies when she was a girl. She didn’t think of herself with children at all and looked with confusion and a little bit of envy at other women who saw the world of children and were neither slack jawed nor afraid. She had dreamed of grown children, talking to them. Having her son did not take away the fear but made her realize that the body adjusts quicker than the mind, and whatever she had thought those other women possessed the secret knowledge that unraveled the trick of mothering was mostly in the doing. She figured it out. She had done a good job when Devon was a tiny baby. Once he started to move around on his own, pull himself up on a kitchen chair, his back to her, fat legs wobbling as he focused on a sound in another room, she knew she started to lose him. Lose him isn’t quite right. Misplace is better. Like those lost keys that might show up right under your nose in a place you’ve looked a dozen times. But what is lost or misplaced can be found, can’t it? Stuck between the cushions of the world. All she needed was a lucky strike, a glad day, and she’d reach down into a crumb-filled cranny and he’d be back—a baby who craved the sound of her heartbeat as he rested on her chest. What Sylvia knew was she had no real idea what Ava felt. Sylvia had been an old mother for a poor woman, but her daughter seemed to feel that her own inability to get pregnant was a moral mistake and not just the body doing what it does. Sylvia had never felt the weight of judgment for not getting pregnant early. She had not felt like she’d done anything wrong. Of course who knew what she might have felt if she’d never gotten pregnant at all.
Ava sighed big and rolled her eyes. Her mother would think her condescending, and maybe she was. Her mother had been nearly thirty when Devon was born, not over thirty-five, the magic number and certainly not in whispering distance of the forty, that Ava was. Ava was technically thirty eight and a half, though the doctor always added a year to her age, the age she would be closer to when her baby arrived. Either way, she was now what they called geriatric maternal age. What she wouldn’t give to be twenty-nine and three-quarters.
Ava sipped from her tea. She felt corked. She was bloated and full like a shaken champagne bottle. A queasy feeling but strangely hopeful at the same time. Maybe this time. Her mother would probably see something on her face, a hurried look, a tightness in her grin that suggested a lie or evasion. She usually did. She had tried for years now to get used to the taste of food without the cloying satisfaction of sugar. Everything you read said that Americans were too fat, too slow, at risk for the most serious ailments and all those ills pointed in sugar’s direction. At first who cared if the sugar was gone. Food had its own subtle realness. A taste! That was a surprise. But tastes took a palate, some discernment to differentiate and appreciate. Very soon, she despised the realness of the foods and ached for the sweet, just sweet. She even liked the strange, exotic sounding word, sugar, sugar. She’d almost given up eating at all. Ava drank the tea and held the glass to her face to disguise her wince. “Lana called.”
“Lana called me or you?”
“She called me to talk about you.”
&
nbsp; People loved Lana. When they found out Sylvia and Lana were sisters they expected Sylvia to have Lana’s brightness, her humor, her unmuddied outlook of the world. They were always disappointed.
“What’d she call you for?”
“She wants me to talk you into going on a cruise with her this fall. Why don’t you go?”
“I hate boats.” Sylvia crossed her arms over her chest.
“It’s not just a boat. They have a casino and shopping and dancing. All kinds of things.”
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