“But you did, right? You did?”
“For years I did. At least I think so.” Jay had met Ava soon after he’d been sent to town to live with Alice Graham. He’d been lucky, at least that’s what the caseworker said. Alice was willing to take him right away and he wouldn’t have to languish in limbo without a home. Jay knew the other kids whispered about him but he was too numb to care. That wasn’t entirely true. He did care, but only in retrospect could he appreciate how deeply he was wounded, and only the onslaught of years would reveal to him how much he had truly lost. The pain would come to him by degrees and for years. But there at the beginning, Ava had come to him. She approached him in the way of beautiful girls, like she had nothing to lose, like she was unaccustomed to a man saying anything that sounded like no. He had never forgotten that moment after school as he waited for the bus. She said hello. She’d asked him where he was from. He had been drowning. He’d wanted to touch the downy sideburns on her face and melt into her thank you, thank you, thank you. Ava’d had no reason to be kind to him. He could have broken down at that moment in worship to her. Only the idea that she might run away stopped him. We are not ashamed to be saved.
“Come back to bed.”
“Do you want to go for a ride?” Ava asked.
“No, baby.”
Ava nodded but Jay didn’t see.
“I don’t want to drive, Ava. We’re okay.”
“Why not? Let’s drive and keep going. We could drive to Alaska if we wanted to.” For a quick exhilarating moment, Ava saw a way out. She could pack a bag of clothes in five minutes. They could make sandwiches, grab a jar of peanut butter and bread from any convenience store, get some fruit and soda for a cooler, she could drive until she collapsed from lack of sleep.
“Nothing’s going to help, Ava. You can’t outrun it,” Jay said. “Whatever is going to happen, we can deal with it.”
Ava yawned and thrust her arms above her head in a dramatic pose visible even in the faint light from the house. “You think you can deal with it?” Ava asked. “That’s good, Jay, because I’m fucking exhausted.”
32
Sylvia knocked on the door to Ava’s room though she could see Ava with her eyes closed, head leaning against the headboard. She almost walked back down the stairs. She’d half expected Ava to have ransacked the room in anger at Henry and emptied out the drawers and closets like robbers had come. But that destruction was more her style. She would have made a mess, and then she would have to be the one to clean up later. The fact that little looked disturbed was somehow not surprising either.
“I thought I’d find you here. Are you going to the doctor’s?”
“In a couple of hours,” Ava said. She wondered how her mother knew, but maybe it was obvious. She hoped so.
“Why are you going by yourself? Don’t I go with you every time?”
“They’re just going to test my blood, Mama. Just a quick check. I spend longer in the lobby than with the nurse. I don’t want you to have to wait around.”
Sylvia would not look at Ava’s face. “Well, I’m ready now. I just need my pocketbook. You should have somebody with you.”
The memory came back hard in her chest. More than forty years had passed, but her first time in Dr. Nathan Yount’s office at the Carlisle Hotel remained. Dr. Yount delivered the black babies in the county. He was the only one. Too bad he was a mean man. So much so that the beautiful black women in town, even they, the ones unaccustomed to scorn at their naked bodies, found themselves both uncovered and ashamed in his presence. What was hard for the beautiful women was even worse for the ugly ones, worse still for the fat ones and Sylvia Ross was among the fattest, her homemade dresses as wide as the bedroom windows. Sylvia wished invisibility when the jokes turned to fat girls, when the song “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More with No Big Fat Woman” came on at the nightclub, or when somebody announced something clever and original like “ain’t that girl big as a house, a cow, an elephant?”
Sylvia had been pregnant once before, though it had not taken. That was probably the reason she ended up with Don in the first place, who was a good part of the reason she packed on pounds like insulation, like protection from the hurts of being someone who loved him. But that first baby didn’t stay, and losing it left her raw and sensitive head to toe, inside and out. No baby would ever survive in her, that same Dr. Yount told her. But Sylvia saw an unmistakable pregnancy mask around her almond eyes. Though her stomach was prominent already, she knew that she felt what the other women called a flutter, what she thought felt like kernels of popping corn poking in her belly.
Sylvia Ross waited at the Carlisle Hotel in a washed-out gown that did not begin to close around her frame, seated herself on the examining table. The small room was dim and gray like old meat, though she could point to nothing that seemed soiled. In came Dr. Yount. Sylvia watched him look at her fat drool like maple syrup off the side of the narrow examining table. There was no chipper banter, no what seems to be the problem, not even hello, but Dr. Yount snapped the gown up, attempted to lift the massive dimpled belly that obstructed his view. “Goddammit,” he said and walked out, leaving her legs exposed in the stirrups, embarrassment on the old nurse’s face. Sylvia’s brown ringlets like the flutes of a pie surrounded her broad, pretty face. She did not twist in pain. A crying fat woman she would not be. A crying fat woman blubbered in the retelling—she knew enough to know that. Dr. Yount and his nurse returned in ten minutes, fifteen, Sylvia stretched back out while the nurse held the red sea of her stomach away from the doctor. It is important to remember her name, she thought. She was Sylvia Ross, not anything outside of that. After the exam, with the doctor out of the room, the nurse whispered to her, “You okay, honey?” It was not until then that Sylvia began to cry.
“I’M GOING WITH YOU,” Sylvia said.
“Okay, Mama. We have a few minutes. I’m going to rest.”
Sylvia didn’t move but sat at the edge of Ava’s bed. Her daughter had not taken off her clothes from the day before. “Do you need a shower?” Ava smelled of new paint.
“You tell me.” Ava laughed. “I showered at Jay’s. I’m just here to change clothes. I don’t need much time.” Ava knew her mother had more questions than she knew how to answer, but she just wanted to close her eyes for a few minutes.
“When are you going to work?”
“I sent you a text.”