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“We crossed paths a few more times before he asked me out on a date,” she said. The nail lady moved to dip my mother’s feet in the warm bath. “He was so shy back then, despite all his bolster on the field. I was not shy.”
“You weren’t?”
“Never,” she boasted. She laughed a deep belly laugh. “I’ve never been shy a day in my life.”
I smiled; it was something Mother and I had in common. I couldn’t think of a time where I was bashful around anyone, except maybe Andrew. I simply didn’t want to be around people for too long.
“Don’t get me wrong; I have my moments where I don’t want to be around people,” Mother said. I looked up curiously. “But, for the most part, being in a crowded room gives me energy.”
“Gives me heartburn,” I muttered.
“Yes, well, you were always the more introverted child.” Mother sighed heavily. “Not like your brother. He was a motormouth.”
We both laughed at that. Dante, for all of his perspective-taking and philosophizing, could never put a lid on it.
We both sat in silence for a while, watching the nail ladies pamper our toes, before I asked, “So when did Father propose?”
“It was my first year in law school, his junior year in undergrad.” Mother yawned. “We had dated for about two years, and I was waiting for him to propose. My mother was convinced that I was going to become an old maid, and she was constantly pushing me to get married.”
“Grandmother? Really?”
“Really.” My mother’s face took on a pinched look, her lips pursed as if tasting the bitter flavors of spinsterhood. “She couldn’t stand the fact that her only child hadn’t given her grandchildren yet. I think she might have even goaded your father into proposing to me.” She sighed. “She was always on me about one thing or another.”
Sounds familiar.
I didn’t realize I had spoken aloud until Mother answered wryly, “I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
My heart started racing, my mind trying to figure out a way to salvage the situation. Me and my big fucking mouth, I thought.
Mother flapped a hand at me, as if dismissing my fear. “Alicia, I know I’m hard on you,” she said. “You don’t have to try to cover it up. I’m hard on you, but the world is so much worse.”
Don’t hold your tongue, Ace,I thought grimly to myself. I took a deep breath before taking the plunge. “But do you have to be so hard on me, though?”
Mother’s head snapped toward me for the second time that day. “What does that mean?”
“Well,” I said in a tiny voice. “From your admonishments about how I dress, to your criticism on my hair, I feel like I can’t do anything right.”
For a long moment, the only sounds in the room were that of the nail ladies working on our toes. Finally, Mother said in a quiet voice, “Do you think I think that you can’t do anything right?”
I looked away. “Sometimes, it feels like if you had a choice, you would have chosen Dante to live over me.”
I didn’t realize that I was crying until I saw the tears hit the top of my thighs. Mother sighed long and low, and I heard something shift. When I looked up, she had moved her feet from her water basin and was facing me directly.
“Alicia Danielle Jones,” she said. “How could you think such a thing?”
“Is it that hard to believe?” I wiped my eyes and huffed out a laugh. “My whole life, all I’ve been told is how perfect Dante was and how much work I had to do to come close to all that he’d accomplished. Nobody was as good as Dante, and nobody deserved to be with him, according to you and Father.”
“You know as well as I that Dante isn’t—wasn’t—perfect. He had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which made it impossible to get him out of the house on time. He had to check every appliance three times, move every chair four times. He would have a fit anytime anything was out of place. He couldn’t stop talking; it was incessant. And then, when he and Ana got together, they were practically unbearable. They were always involved in some cause or another, always trying to rope people into their missions. And Dante gravitated toward those types of people all the time. I didn’t want to have to hear them go on and on about the environment, for goodness sake.” She sniffed. “And he—and you, too—always stuck his nose up at my acquaintances.”
“Because they don’t even know us. They didn’t care to know us. And they go on and on about being the Black Elite.”
“Yes, because it is a mark of honor,” Mother said. “To live this long in this life, and to be successful as a black person, is a miracle. We wear our elitism with pride, because at the very least, we’re alive. I’m sixty years old, Alicia. Many black people don’t make it this long. Do you know how monumental that is?”
I thought about that for a moment. She had a point. “But why can’t they ever remember my name? Or Dante’s?”
Mother shrugged, smiled a little. “They’re old, Alicia.”
We laughed at that.
