“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 surprise. 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.