“I can’t believe it.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Well, I can’t. A man like Don you expect anything to happen, but Henry, he’s the kind to run off. Now that wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.”
“He let me keep trying. You believe that? Knowing what he did.”
“No, no, you wanted that baby. A baby and a husband are two different desires, Ava. Don’t get that confused.”
“Mama let’s stop talking about this. Please. I’m not going to debate it with you.”
“I’ve never liked him. Never. Not from the minute you brought him to this house. But you picked him. I told you.”
“Why did I expect you to understand? Just let me rest here a minute, Mama.”
“How did you find out? Did you see the woman? Did she come to tell you?”
“She didn’t need to. It was obvious. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, okay?”
“You can’t just say something like that and then nothing.”
“I need you to just understand what’s going on here. That’s all. Don’t try to help. You can’t help.”
“Why did you tell me if you didn’t want to hear what I have to say?” Sylvia yelled, her voice shriller than she meant.
“Be careful, Mama,” Ava said.
“Be careful? Who are you talking to?”
“Mama, I remember James Martin.”
“James Martin? What about him? What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. James. The one that came around all the time back then when Daddy was gone. I saw the two of you.”
“What are you talking about, Ava, because I truly have no earthly idea.”
“Okay, Mama, okay. Let’s just play it that way.”
When Sylvia and her sister Lana were girls Sylvia told Lana to run inside the house and tell their mother that she had fallen in the well. In a minute their mother was running as fast as she could out the door, screaming Sylvia’s name, terror, disbelief, and rabid unreasonable hope flashing on her face. Sylvia had watched her from her position behind the well and stepped out so her mother could see her. Their mother stopped, looked at them both. In seconds she was collapsed on the ground in front of the well, like to collect her thinking she had to stop as many life processes that she could to let the truth penetrate. She didn’t move for a moment. That love we have for mothers has to be cut with vinegar and maybe even acid. Otherwise it will overwhelm us. She will overwhelm us. Great love invites pain, must have it or it becomes too big to contain.
“You’re hurting and you want me to hurt. Okay, I understand that. I guess I have to take that. But you are not going to accuse me of something I didn’t do.”
“You don’t have to tell me your business, Mama. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“James Martin was a friend of mine, my only friend. That’s all.” That wasn’t all. Sylvia loved him, was in love with him, but even at the time she knew her love was mostly a matter of convenience. She loved him because he was there. “I spent some time with him, Ava, and talked to him.” Sylvia paused, not sure what the conversation had become. “But nothing happened, except for a few laughs. Not like I have to explain myself to you.”
“Your life. Your business.”
“Oh, now it’s my business.”
“I saw him kiss you, Mama.”
Sylvia stopped to think if she had ever kissed James Martin. She had wanted to and had imagined his body, his face. Some mornings she woke up almost choking with longing imagining his arm slung over her waist, his dry, scratchy foot pressed against her leg. She’d felt like a teenager dreaming about him wanting her, telling her how pretty she was and how every part of her was just what a man desired—her skin, her rounded hips. They had never kissed. He hadn’t wanted to. James Martin would never desire her. Don traveled with a friend with a big rig on overnight trips when he could. Helping Buster out, he’d called it, but Sylvia suspected he was helping himself. That night she and James had stayed up late. They had waited until the kids were asleep before they started drinking but drank well into the morning. I’ve got a girl’s mind, he’d told her. He’d wanted to sleep with her that night to please her, because he thought she needed it. But the sure knowledge that once again she was not desired kept her from saying yes. They never got so close to sex again.
“I never kissed him. That’s not what you saw, Ava. That I know.”
“I saw him kiss your head,” Ava taunted.
“You think you know everything.” Sylvia was suddenly too tired to stand. She felt her weight sink into the bed, into the mattress, into the black hole that followed her, always had, was sometimes just a step or two behind her and would swallow her one day, sure enough, that much she understood. “I need a rest.” Sylvia stared at the ugly low shag carpet on the staircase, willing her legs to move. She turned to her child. “And let me tell you this, I wouldn’t have taken my clothes off in front of anybody in those days for everything in the world.”
Ava snorted like she’d heard something funny.
“Don’t you laugh at me!” Sylvia felt her hands shake. “I was fat and I was miserable. I didn’t have any friends. I had a fool for a husband. Just like you.”
“I’ve got what I need.”
“Do you? You don’t know what the hell you’re thinking. You can’t go live with somebody like you know him. What’s wrong with you? Don’t be in a rush. That man’s not going anywhere? Wait and see what happens.”
“Don’t even try that, Mama. You’ve made some bad decisions. Should I just be like you? Is that what you want? You do know that Don is no prize.”
“He is not Don to you. He is your daddy. A sorry bastard, but the only one you’ve got.”
“Let’s just stop talking now. Can we do that?” Ava asked.
“Oh now you don’t want to talk. All right. You think I don’t know. I was by myself. Just like you. I didn’t want that for you, but maybe we are just lonesome people, I don’t know.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I know what I did. It wasn’t what you think. I know what this is about. You might fool yourself but you’re not fooling me,” Sylvia said.
“I don’t care. I really don’t. What difference does it make?”
“Yes, you do care, because you think you know something. You think you’ve had something on me all these years. I shouldn’t have spent time with him. That was a mistake. But this is wrong.” Sylvia wagged her finger. “And, you don’t get to treat me any way you want to.”
“This is about me and Henry, Mama. This is just about me. Not you. I’m being a bitch.”
“I can see that,” Sylvia said. She felt her head go hot. She held her breath, tried to count, get her right thinking back.
Ava’s face had screwed from angry to tortured. She wished she could cry, but she couldn’t feel anything but the cracking apart, the hollow feeling of impotent despair.
Sylvia turned to the door. She couldn’t watch her daughter’s crumbling face. If she didn’t get out of the room she might throw up.
“I am nothing, Mama.”
“You better stop it. Just stop it.”
“That’s how I feel now.”
“Well stop it! I don’t care how you feel. You don’t get to feel the way you want to. What’s wrong with you? You’ve got a life people would kill for.”
“I don’t give a shit. I can’t live for you or anybody else. That’s not on me. Quit trying to make that about me.”
“Okay.” Sylvia sighed and started down the steps. “I’m glad you know everything and see everything. You’re so smart, aren’t you? So Henry has a child. Well, guess what? You don’t want him any damn way,” Sylvia yelled. “You probably never have and you know good and well that I’m right. If this is going to defeat you, I don’t know what to tell you. Fight for your life, Ava! That’s what it comes down to.”
“Fight for your life. That is so funny coming from you. They might as wel
l have buried you with Devon.”
Sylvia turned her back on her daughter. She felt unsteady on her feet. “You don’t get to say that to me. I hope your child never looks down on you or talks to you just to say how much better she is.”
“Mama? Please, I’m sorry,” Ava called after her. “I shouldn’t have said that. Mama?”
How many times had Sylvia wished she’d been dead and buried too. If they had let her she would have crawled into the ground with him, the glad relief of the end of pain. Only people who have not felt the kind of pain she had would ever believe that death was the worst of life’s outcomes. She climbed the rest of the way down the stairs to the kitchen though she couldn’t have told you how she got there. What was there to do? Wash the sludge of juice from the bottoms of a few glasses? Sweep the faded linoleum on the floor that never looked clean anyway? She couldn’t stand the thought of moving her limbs. When Devon was a boy his hamster had gotten stuck under the very same refrigerator still there in the kitchen. The poor little thing had died there before they could find him. Days later, the stink announced to them where the hamster had fled. There is an instinct to hide, and against our better thinking we find the darkest place to squeeze ourselves into. Someone has to be able to find you on those days. Somebody has to pull you out. Sylvia slowly got up from the kitchen chair and went up the stairs to her child, her breath ragged from the climb. Sylvia avoided her daughter’s face and yanked the covers off of her, exposing Ava’s naked legs.
“Mama, please mama,” Ava cried into her hands like a child.
“Get up, Ava,” Sylvia held out her hand to help Ava up from the bed. “We’ve got to go.”
33
I’m not going to tell you everything. Sylvia washed the frying pan and stacked it in the drain with the three or four other dishes and a few utensils. So much of it doesn’t matter anyway. Sylvia rearranged the dishes on the counter so they wouldn’t collapse to the floor in the middle of the night. I should say that Ava’s pregnant again. We’re hoping. I didn’t want her to keep at it, but what can I say? When I was pregnant with you, I saw the doctor two times. That’s it! And one of them was when you were born. I probably told you that old story a hundred times. Sylvia dried the dishes and put them away in the cabinets, wiped down the stove and counters, and quickly ran over the floor with the lazy woman’s spray mop her mother would have rolled her eyes to see. How many times had she done that set of motions, fired up the neurons in that groove of her brain? She could be twenty, forty, fifty-eight. Eternity lived in those well-worn grooves. When I was coming up all your mama had to do was keep you alive. Keep a roof and keep you breathing until your eighteenth birthday. Life was harder then. People didn’t have time like they do now. I thought I was so much better than them.
After Ava’s doctor’s appointment, Sylvia had gone to her apartment, but there was no chance she could be comfortable there. She had come back to her home to eat and maybe get some sleep if she was lucky. Sylvia found the remote and sat on the sofa, slowly changed the channels. The closed captioning could be a source of entertainment, the misspellings, sometimes the captioning for one show got put on another one. Gilligan mouthing the words to The Price Is Right.
What’s left? Sylvia wiped her hands and got as comfortable as she could on the couch. She watched first the KitchenAid mixer infomercial with the beautiful mixers in rainbow colors lined up like cars in a showroom, couples and families, happy people churning ice cream with one attachment and making zucchini spaghetti with another. Their smiling happiness contagious. I always figured it would be you and me, Devon. What do we do now?
Though she hadn’t believed it possible, the combination of dinner and the lull of the television, the warmth and stressful day had all conspired against her. By the time the phone rang, she had been in a dead sleep for hours. She had dreamed of being alone in an empty white room the light in it yellow and warming on her skin. The readout on the phone said Burkson County Corrections. She almost didn’t answer. “Marcus?”
“Hold please,” a voice announced.
“Sylvia. Are you there?”
“I can’t talk right now, Marcus. I’ve got too much going on.”
“Sylvia, Sylvia, wait, wait, please don’t hang up.”
“Marcus,” Sylvia said as she sat upright on the couch. “I have to go. You don’t know what kind of mess I’m dealing with right now. I’m going to hang up, honey. I can’t do it.”
“Wait, wait, please. Get a message to my daughter.”
“I’m not going to do that, Marcus.” Sylvia sighed. “You’re going to have to get somebody else.”
“Tell Charlotte to come and bring Dena. You tell them, Sylvia. They’ll listen to you.” Marcus paused, searched for the right words. “Tell them it just seems like a long time, but it’s only the days that are long, just over a year. That’s nothing, Sylvia,” Marcus said, his voice broken. “Sylvia? Sylvia? Are you listening?”
“Marcus. You don’t know what’s going on here. I’m tired.”
“Please Sylvia, tell them I am a changed man. No don’t say that. Tell them I’ve learned. Please Sylvia, please tell them not to forget me. I can make it if they don’t forget me. Can you tell them? Will you?”
“Marcus,” Sylvia began. She wouldn’t tell him that she had tried to see Charlotte but couldn’t make herself walk into that woman’s life, like she had a right, any right to be there. She couldn’t tell him that. She wanted to tell Marcus that his family could not keep waiting for him to come back. They have to get on with their lives. She should say. Think about what is best for them. Sylvia wanted to say that they can’t get too close to him, white-hot when they could spend a minute with him, icy death hoping for him to return. She wanted to say that only an idiot would take the word of a man unlucky enough, miserable enough, to land himself in a cage. Wouldn’t that man make any promise? But Sylvia heard the small voice of failure again whispering to her like it did, reminding her that she was the last person to be telling somebody else to get on with it, reminding her that she had never known a single true thing.
“I can’t get involved in that, Marcus. I’m going to go now.” Sylvia was at her house, alone at last, the life her mother had feared, the life she’d feared. She’d gone to the grocery store and bought real food to cook for herself. The moment of eating had felt sustaining, but never lasted, never helped for long. The cleaned-out shell of her sweet potato, vacant like an abandoned snakeskin. The Y-shaped bone from the pork chop was gray and left over on her plate like the remains of a dinosaur. She’d even chewed the gross spongy fat of the meat for punishment. She should never eat anything recognizable from an animal’s body. All the time, with every bite, she contemplated the mistakes she’d made, the nasty ones she knew about, and the sad ones she hadn’t understood at the time.
“Sylvia, Sylvia? You’ve been good to me. Please don’t leave me now. Please. Sylvia?”
“I can’t do it. I can’t handle another thing. Everything has gone to hell, Marcus. I can’t do anything.”
Neither Sylvia nor Marcus spoke. When Sylvia was much younger if she remained quiet on the telephone line she could hear the sadnesses, the rantings, the soft love professions of other people in conversation on party lines. Most of the time she could make out just a few words, but the timbre of the voices, the cadences, made the intentions clear. She’d felt a secret thrill at being witness to all those feelings right along with those strange voices as unknown to her as ghosts.
Now the line was silent. Sylvia had not planned to say good-bye to Marcus, but that was exactly what she was doing. “I’m sorry, baby. I am.”
“You said you helped me because of Devon. You know he’d want you to help me. He understands about being a black man. Please. I know you don’t have to, but please.”
“Devon is dead.”
“I don’t know what you mean? What are you talking about, Sylvia?
Sylvia thought that she had never said those words before. “I can’t say it aga
in, Marcus. I’m not going to. Devon doesn’t want anything anymore. Just like me. Neither one of us wants a thing.”
Sylvia could hear Marcus’s breathing. For the first time since they began their relationship, their conversation would be over before the line went dead.
“I can’t believe you,” Marcus said. “I don’t believe you.”
Sylvia held the phone. She would not hang up, that felt cruel.
“Mrs. Sylvia, are you there.”
Sylvia said nothing. She hoped her silence was less hurtful than hanging up the phone. If she hurt along with him, maybe he wouldn’t judge her so harshly. Maybe one day he would understand. Nobody ever understands.
“Mrs. Sylvia? Sylvia?” Marcus held the phone and waited for Sylvia’s reply. “I just need you to answer, Sylvia. Please.”
Sylvia listened to his breathing on the line. She used to listen to Don this way when they loved each other. Both of them hanging on to the phone, content to know the other was alive. Not when they loved each other, that was wrong. When she believed that he loved her.
“Okay, Sylvia. I’m sorry about Devon. I’m really sorry. Sylvia? Okay. I get it. I get it. I’ll call you some other time. I can wait. I’ll call you. Is that okay?”
Sylvia did not answer.
“Sylvia, please,” Marcus said, but Sylvia could hear the resignation in his voice.
“You did good by me, Sylvia when nobody else did. I appreciate you. You’ll never know how much. Okay? Okay? I mean that.”
34
Ava had been sitting on the sand for too long, her behind and legs stiff with inaction. “Help me up, Jay,” she said and reached her arm out to him. In all the books Ava had loved as a girl the plucky heroine and her friends had a special, secret place, known only to them. Ava had decided back then that theirs would be the fourth exit at the reservoir. Jay pulled Ava to him and tried to envelop her in his arms. She gently moved out of his grip.
It was unbelievably still the month of May, and the light though fading still shone too brightly on them. There were no other people on the man-made beach area yet in the middle of the week. But soon when the real heat arrived families would line the shore with sand toys and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Big and small boats would float or buzz through the muddy water creating the shallow waves that lapped up on the shore. The reservoir wasn’t an ocean and didn’t give you the feeling of the infinite, the miraculous sight of water that could rise up like a wall and swallow you up without compunction or remorse. But who needed the brine of the ocean, the constant reminder that whatever the end was you would never see it for yourself, when the bathwater of the reservoir was a few minutes from your door? Ava listened for the violent, recurrent snap of the flag she kept hearing but had not spotted to reset her thoughts.
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