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?”