“Don’t you think I know all about that? People get stranded out there. No bathrooms, no food. Don’t you watch the news? Who wants to be floating on a stinking toilet for days?”
“You forgot about icebergs.” Ava laughed. “Come on, Mama, those are excuses. You’ll have a good time. When is the last time you had fun?”
“I’m having fun now.” Sylvia twirled her finger in the air. “See? I can’t afford it anyway.”
“You can afford it. You can pay by the month, Mama.”
Sylvia shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t want to pay by the month. Shelling out that money to a travel agent would multiply her feelings of dread with every payment reinforcing the idea that she was making a bad, bad decision. “I don’t want to go and I’m not going to.”
“You sound like a little kid.”
“I feel like it too,” Sylvia said.
“Like I could make you do anything anyway.” Ava stared at Sylvia, intent on making her laugh. Her mother’s face was not sweet but kind, a pleasant face that missed the mark of beautiful by so little, the hard jaw, her forehead in wrinkled annoyance or despair. She did wish for her mother’s happiness.
Sylvia wasn’t going to laugh and nobody was going to make her until she got ready. She rolled her eyes at Ava’s stares and concentrated on the lawn. She had considered going with Lana just to satisfy Ava. She knew that kids want the security of their parents’ happiness, and she had tried to reassure Ava to let her know her life might be diminished but it was not destroyed. Sylvia had wanted her children to think that she had lived an existence that brimmed with possibility. But smart kids know and know better. She wanted more for her children, for Ava, than struggling with a difficult man or working too hard just to keep the lights on. But it might not be possible to pass on something you don’t really know yourself. “You should get more out of life than just a ham sandwich,” Mabe had said. But what? Her mother should have told her what more she should be expecting. Two ham sandwiches? How could she expect to get what she didn’t know she needed?
“What are you doing?” Sylvia watched Ava pick up her phone and punch in a number, though she knew who she had to be calling.
“I’m calling Lana. Talk to her.” Ava held her phone finger in the air like she was testing the wind direction or signaling she was about to be talking.
“I’m not talking to nobody,” Sylvia said.
“Hey. Mama’s right here. Okay, okay. Here, Mama.” Sylvia rolled her eyes at Ava and considered refusing to speak.
“Hello,” Sylvia said.
“Don’t hello me. What do y’all want now?” Lana asked. “Don’t get me involved in y’all’s mess. I told Ava that Noah couldn’t get you on a boat and I wasn’t about to try to talk to you as crazy as you are.”
“Who is this?” Sylvia laughed.
“You better stop and come on this trip with me.”
“Get Gus to go. What’s he got to do?” Sylvia asked. Gus, the old man Lana married, was about as exciting as a paperweight and almost as useful. Sylvia didn’t exactly dislike him. Who can dislike a rock? But two people were never more poorly suited to each other. Or, at least it seemed like it from the viewpoint of the outsider.
“Unless they’re shutting television down, Gus is busy. Come on and go. Just me and you. We’ve never done that. Don’t get old on me.”
“Too late,” Sylvia said, but she was interested she had to admit. The spark of the idea of reinvention, becoming different, even for a few days stirred her. “I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think too long. It will be too late soon. Too late.”
“Don’t be overdramatic,” Sylvia said.
“Quoth the raven, ‘too late,’” Lana said.
“Take your gun.” Somebody said they saw a gun in Lana’s handbag that was actually a black hair dryer.
“I might.” Lana laughed. “Watch me. I might dry somebody to death. You don’t know what I might do.”
“Well whatever you do stop calling me.”
“I didn’t call you,” Lana said.
“Well, stop talking to me.”
“See you tomorrow, hateful.” Lana laughed.
“Bye.” Sylvia handed the phone to Ava. “How long have y’all been planning that? Y’all ain’t a bit slick,” Sylvia said.
“Will you even try to have fun? I know it’s been a long time, but try to remember what it felt like.”
“I might. I’ll think about it, Ava. You’re the one should go.” Only the idea of travel appealed to Sylvia, but she could see the reality too acutely. That was one of her problems. She could see the sordid underbelly of a thing and often little else. She was too serious. If she’d had a dime for every time somebody had told her to cheer up, lighten up, stop thinking so much, stop being a downer. She used to love smoking pot for that feeling of letting go, just laughing to hear herself laugh. Those had been nice days, but it had been years, decades since she smoked any. Other people saw a boatload of people dancing, eating from the large and plentiful buffets, watching the roiling waves in the moonlight. Sylvia saw only the desperation, the straining of these same people to have fun, to not go back home exhausted and sad. You shouldn’t have to try that hard for fun. She knew these were mostly excuses. If she left what would Marcus do? He could hardly make it a few days without hearing her voice. How could she help him if she was on an ocean trying not to be miserable? Of course he would be okay.
“Lana needs to mind her own business.”
Ava squeezed more agave into her glass. “She’s your sister. You are her business.” Ava looked around for a spoon and ended up swirling the tea with her finger. “That’s nasty, I know.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Sylvia said, but Ava must have seen it on her face. “I talked to Marcus today.”
“The prisoner? Is that why you won’t go with Lana? Mama you’ve got to stop talking to him. I know you feel bad for him, but you can’t help him.”
“I know you feel more for people than that,” Sylvia said.
“I’m not trying to be mean. I’m thinking more about you than him.”
“How he remembers my number I don’t know. How many phone numbers do you know? I know yours at work, your cell phone, my work number,” Sylvia said.
“Mama don’t change the subject. You need to stop with that prisoner.”
“You don’t get many collect calls anymore.”
“He’s calling you collect! You’re paying to talk to him?”
“Nothing is long-distance anymore. It’s fine.” If Ava knew how expensive it was to talk to Marcus she would have a fit. Thank goodness the phone bill still came in her name. If there is a way to make a buck from even the saddest, poorest people in the world, you better believe some company has been created to do just that. “I’m tired. I should just go on to bed and call it a day.”
“Mama?” Ava searched her mother’s face for something she hadn’t seen or had ignored, some sign she was in pain. “What does he say?”
“Who? Marcus?”
“The prisoner.”
“Stop calling him that. He has a name.”
“You don’t know anything about him but his name. He could be dangerous, Mama.”
“Over the phone.” Sylvia laughed.
“You know what I mean. How do you know you’re not talking to a killer? How, Mama?”
“They don’t let the killers stay in county.” Sylvia sighed. “He wants me to get a message to his girlfriend and daughter.”
“What message? You’re not going to do it are you?” Ava hadn’t realized that her mother had been that lonely but she hadn’t asked.
“That woman might be crazy,” Sylvia hissed through her teeth. She hoped it sounded like a laugh, like seeing Marcus’s girlfriend was the last thing she planned to do in the world. “You have to be careful with people these days.”
“Mama, are you okay?”
“What are you talking about?” Sylvia reached for one of Ava’s magazines. She didn�
��t bother to flip it open. “JJ’s house is looking good.”
“Mama!”
“I’m just talking to a sad boy, Ava.” Sylvia raised her voice, she hoped she hadn’t shouted. She couldn’t tell sometimes. She started to think that late middle-aged women lose their hearing and they shout to hear themselves. Loss of hearing felt better to believe than the thought that she was disappearing from view, shouting for help before the last of her vanished into thin air. “He doesn’t have anybody,” she said. “I’d want somebody to help my son.”
Ava had never experienced real jealousy for Devon, at least not strong jealousy. They were separated by two and a half years, he a boy; she a girl. They never got labeled the athletic one, the pretty one, or the smart one, the way some people speak of siblings close in age. Still she couldn’t help but imagine that her mother must know a closeness with Devon she could never feel for her, the number two child. Oprah grinned up at Ava from under the brim of a wide hat announcing the arrival of spring and a new body, a new turn of mind. Of course her mother helping Marcus was about Devon. So much of their lives eventually shifted in her brother’s direction. Her mother had her eyes closed, though Ava knew she was not relaxed. She was done with the Marcus subject. “Mama, get some sleep. You’re not listening to a word I say.”
“I heard you, Ava.” Sylvia crossed her legs at the ankles and sloughed off her beat-up shoes. Her daughter’s shoes were lined up in military rows on the upstairs landing, beautiful high heels, boots standing upright and at attention like a small regiment, expensive wooden shapers poking from their tops like in a showroom. She would get better shoes, she promised to remember. She had been a stylish young person, hadn’t she? She could almost remember looking nice. But who can remember? The mind plays tricks, or better said even reasonable people forgot the honest particulars of their pasts. Her feet were alligator feet without the charm. When did it come to all this? There had to be a start to this decline. If she could pinpoint the moment of decay maybe she could reverse it. That was the logic in the sci-fi movie. Get to the source.
“What are you smiling about?” Ava asked.
“I’m not smiling.”
“I saw you.”
“You wouldn’t believe what goes on in my head these days. I’ve got too much going on in there. Right here,” Sylvia said and tapped her temple.
“That’s for sure not it.” Ava smiled at her mother. “Hard to believe so much time has gone by. I hope he hasn’t moved on.”
“Who moved on?”
“JJ, Mama. You’re the one that changed the subject to him.” Ava tried at a lightheartedness she did not feel. JJ could have moved past them. He’d been away and seen different people and situations and it could be that they were part of a past he needed to lose. He hadn’t bothered to contact them for years and years, a fact that Ava could not have predicted and could not quite believe. When they were young Ava and JJ had wasted so much time together, in front of the television, riding around the downtown and on the bumpy dirt roads near the county line. All the harmless time wasters that most poor young people do in one-horse towns. All except for screwing the life out of each other. That they didn’t do. At least not until they left town. Ava had known even then that the stories that get told about you can spin wildly out of control without the buffer and framework of a known family history. The new kid drifting alone could be anyone and anything, while the town sniffed out clues, prosecuted the case of his life by his every stray comment, by his simple reactions to everyday events.
They had been nearly inseparable shortly after he arrived in town. All that time Ava pretended to be oblivious to JJ’s infatuation for her while he pretended that his feelings were simply lustful and incidental, easily contained, easily disposed like a used carton of Chinese food. Often in these infatuations, the pretty girl uses the boy as a playmate, like another girlfriend but one who reflects back to her proof of her beauty and desirableness. His gaze proprietary but not competitive, his inclination was to do whatever the girl wanted. A teenage girl lives for that power, so often the only taste of it she gets. In that situation, the boy waits patiently for any opening in her amorous attention, any suggestion that his being the confidant and best friend might lead to her love. Not just sex, but of course the boy wanted sex, but these sorts of boys are romantics, the ones that hear the same call to love that so many of the girls hear. Theirs, Ava’s and JJ’s, was not that story. They had been friends. She had made an important friend in a life that had not produced many.
Sylvia tried to sound confident but she worried he might not show up too. “He’ll be here. He so reminded me of Devon. Always did.” Sylvia couldn’t wait to see JJ. She thought how a face, his face, a body slicing through the air in a room, can crack the shell of your memory and erupt into your present. When that happens the past is not just ephemera or even pictures darting in and arresting your train of thought, but real in ways it can never be otherwise. The body makes the proof that you lived other than the moment of your last breath. JJ would materialize for them and it would be like they were all young and together again. The logic of it clear as day to Sylvia.
“I never thought he looked like Devon, Mama. I know you did.”
Sylvia tried to keep her face a stone. She knew Ava was tired of hearing about her problems with Devon. Everybody was. Some days she’d resort to chatting about him in the car or to a wheelbarrow full of topsoil, a dirty coffee cup or a drawer of sensible stretched-out panties.
Maybe Sylvia would go back to her own apartment to sleep and let the television be the only noise in the room. “We’ll be seeing JJ before too long. I hope he doesn’t need a job. He’ll be barking up the wrong tree around here.” Sylvia was glad for JJ that he could come rolling into town like Big Daddy Rich, money like a superpower at his fingertips. Vanity wasn’t vain if it wasn’t about you. Of course Sylvia realized JJ’s triumphant return had to be about her too. Someone like her, someone black, someone once poor, could come back to town and smash it underfoot. No, not smash it. That was wrong. He could be in control now and not tossed in any direction the wind blew. The cool of the ground, even the rocky places on the patio, felt good on Sylvia’s bare feet. She bent to pull some small weeds from between the pavers. She had never wanted Ava to have to hold her up or become her helper.
Ava stared intently at her mother’s face.
“What are you looking at?” Sylvia asked.
When a parent has trouble it can be very hard, maybe impossible not to make it into the child’s sadness. The child becomes a helper, a new creation. Not quite a spouse but no longer young enough. Some of that was inevitable of course, part of the unfairness life doles out.
“Don’t start talking to me about a pedicure again,” Sylvia said.
Ava tried to laugh, but she couldn’t get the sound out and into the air. Of course JJ’s absence had hurt her mother too. “You’re right, Mama. He’ll be here when the house is done.”
Sylvia hesitated. A look, a panic had flashed on Ava’s face and was just as quickly gone. She would mind her own business. When Ava wanted to tell her she would. No need to pry.
“Now, let’s talk about what’s wrong with you,” Sylvia said.
4
The body knows the day. Monday lies in your bones different from Thursday, different from the urgency of Friday. But Sunday’s drag is the strongest no doubt, pulling like it means it, like it is working for its life. Sunday has to be the biggest day for suicides. If Henry was ever going to take his own life, he was sure it would be on a Sunday. The terrible struggle done. The struggle used to be all about work. Henry used to feel like he’d tried to swallow a pill that would not go down, that threatened to choke the breath out of him as he worked at his station at the furniture plant. He felt less of that now. Inside the red tape on the concrete floor that marked the territory of the machine, he was the owner and proprietor. If you are not Henry Bailey, do not cross the tape. Henry could get beamed up from that space and if the mother ship e
ver came they would know for sure where to concentrate the light. Henry took solace in the security of his routine, the work burnishing the stubby places off his life. He might not have long to work there anyway. The weeks before saw a new round of layoffs with more to come. Henry worried that his would be the next job cut, but everybody worried. The older guys who did the work of three were kept on, absorbed into other furniture factories, at least so far. Nobody worried too much about the kids, the twenty-year-olds, at least not when the first closings began. They needed to move around a little bit anyway. A twenty-year-old can take on a little adversity, they had time to recover.
One closing felt like lightning and not the first domino in the sequence. Most days Henry considered quitting just to stop the suspense, but there was nothing else a man like him could do but hang in there and hope the inevitable would pass him by. Years ago the first furniture plant had closed and moved to Vietnam. These things happen and nothing that an ordinary man can do about it. If anyone saw that closing as the end of an industry he kept it to himself. There were no signs. Business was good. Productivity was high. Probably even the line bosses didn’t know that the end was coming—ten years at most.
When Henry started on the line a couple of years before he got married he thought he wouldn’t be able to stand it. The first week he found any excuse to go to the toilet, sit in the stall, and stare at the pitted metal door. Never before had he been tempted to write a note on the walls of a bathroom, but the urge to speak almost overcame him. Almost. Every man on the line would know he was the author, and they already thought he was either lazy or had an abusive, bullying bowel. Henry had not known before the kind of misery he felt on that factory line. The smell of sawdust and furniture stain seeped into him, aging him twenty-five years with his head of silver hair. God almighty did he hate it. Under his fingernails a dirty dust line remained like the vein in shrimp. But that was nothing, nothing compared to the assaultive sound, the constant, crazy-making whirring from the saws that churned into his chest as they cut the tumbling wooden legs and tabletops another man loaded onto the conveyor belt. When the quitting bell rang, Henry sprinted like he was on fire, the first one to the time clock, oblivious to the shaking heads from the older men as he spun his car out of the gravel lot.
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