“Put one of your little hairs in the jar here,” she’d said with her eyebrows raised so there could be no question about which little hairs. “Right after you go to the pot, you hear? Make him drink it. Don’t wait too long. Two days at the most.” Mabe thanked Mrs. Janey and refused her offer of collard greens, though she and Sylvia shared a square of corn bread. On the road home, Sylvia held the glass between her legs afraid to touch it with her hands, though it looked no more powerful than watered-down tea.
“Why don’t Daddy love you, Mama?” Mabe had not answered for nearly a full minute while Sylvia waited, afraid to speak again. Her mother was silent so long Sylvia began to wonder if she had spoken at all.
“I really don’t know,” her mother had said, a cloud of wonder on her face like she really considered the question. The genuine interest in Mabe’s voice was the first and one of the only times Sylvia ever felt that she and her mother had a real conversation. Mabe had never again mentioned the visit or the little bottle, but if her father had any more love for her mother, he kept it to himself.
Sylvia thought, like we all think, that she’d never be like her mother, but the man she chose for herself was just as sorry, did just as much dirt. Sylvia’s man, Don, was now shacked up with a girl much younger than his children. Sylvia was sure she could remember holding Don’s new girlfriend in the crook of her own arm when she was a fat toddler crying after her mother.
If she and Don had not had a life, they did have a house. That’s something. Don’t let anyone tell you that’s not something. What you got and can count on your fingers can give you a cushion, a bank account, a security against universal losses. Nobody has to know the hollow spaces you shock yourself by living through. You can survive the shell of nothing that ordinary living produces. Buck up! Organs rearrange, the blood reroutes, and you deal with it. You think you can’t but you do. Sylvia thought of the house as her stake, her sacrifice, her due for a life of sacrifice. There are worse things.
What was hers could be given away or at least rented for four hundred dollars a month. Ava and her husband, Henry, moved into the house with the idea that sometime, some year in the nearish future they’d own it outright. Sylvia was mostly glad that the house was becoming Ava’s by degrees. But old habits die hard or better said they don’t really die at all just lie low, waiting for the cloud cover to part and desperation to rear back up on its hind legs. Sylvia knew the house was Ava’s but she visited almost daily. Sylvia’s new home was supposed to be a one-bedroom apartment with builder-white walls and the stink of industrial carpet she couldn’t rid the place of even after five years. When she was a young woman she had dreamed of a cute version of that apartment. In it were knickknacks from her travels, avant-garde art she liked but didn’t understand, but liked that she had to think about it. In her imagination she was That Black Girl and her apartment told the story of her worldly and sophisticated life. Everyone she knew had wanted to be sophisticated, grown in a world of grown people with their own homes rented or owned, hosts of glittering parties in their form-fitting dresses, their dramatic jewelry jangling and glinting in the light, hair slicked back into a fist-size chignon mail-ordered for the occasion. She planned to have drawings of nudes and Persian rugs, books that lined built-in shelves, weavings made in countries where the brown people were not the usual black folk variety of dirt road North Carolina. It saddened Sylvia to see old women sick to be young, wearing too long hair and short skirts or worst of all wearing saucy words on their sweatpanted behinds.
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.