Only then does she realize that her son’s face is growing remote, sealing up, just as he used to do in his childhood. And Avis can feel her insides start to crumple, a fernlike twisting-in. “Oh — I. I’m sorry.” She steps back, as if she could pull away from the words. “Just — never mind. That didn’t come out right, maybe.”
“About a thousand years late, Mom.” His voice parched. Stanley sidesteps Avis and offers his hand to the girl to help her up. They behave so formally, like children impersonating adults. Avis finds herself admiring their gravity as they move to the door, a regal height to the girl’s shoulders.
“I’ll call you later,” Stanley mutters to his father as he ushers his girlfriend through the door. Then pulls it quietly shut.
Avis stands alone for a moment, staring at the door, not moving.
“Ah,” Brian says.
She wraps her arms tightly around her middle. She doesn’t want to talk. All the words have left her. How many times is a person supposed to lose her children? Is this why she went through motherhood? The morning sickness that lasted all day, the swollen ankles, the all-night feedings, the fevers and crying and vomit? The anxiety and the waiting up, and on and on. All for what? A moment where you stand there and watch your child close the door in your face.
BRIAN FINDS AVIS OUTSIDE, sitting in the backyard on a teak folding chair. He sits beside her and for a few minutes neither of them speaks. Finally he reaches for her hand. “You’re in shock. I know you’re in shock. We both are. It’s a lot to take in. For both of us. But — just imagine, sweetheart? A grandchild.”
Avis stares at the fluttering palms. “Not my grandchild. You can have her.”
“You don’t mean that! You’re just overwrought.” He attempts a new, lighter tone, “How do you even know it’s a her?”
“Don’t you see what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to replace Felice. He was cheated of his old family — we all were — so he’s trying to make a new one. Just like he was always running off to his gardening and his market.”
“Sweetheart.” Brian presses her palm between his fingers, his voice thin and trembling, as if running through a wire strainer. He sits unusually upright, his face so alert he seems almost frightened. “Isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t everyone eventually want a family of their own?”
Avis frowns, smoothing back the short ends of her hair.
“Maybe we should just give them the money.”
“It’s too much!” She wraps her arms around her elbows. “Who is this girl he’s with anyway?”
“Well, the mother of our grandchild, at the very least.”
She is touched, briefly, by an awareness of her husband’s anxiety, but her own preoccupations are overpowering. She doesn’t respond. The late-afternoon sky is a green watercolor. Everything in the world seems bound to the screen of fronds; everything is breathing, subtly, quietly, barely moving.
TUESDAY MORNING, AFTER BRIAN — finally, blessedly — leaves for work, Avis leaves her rounds of dough to rise and goes straight outdoors. She’d listened to the mynah’s chatter all through the early morning while kneading the puff pastry (“I swear it — I’m going to report those people to animal control,” Brian had said at the door). When Avis steps through the fronds, pushing aside the nodding spindles, Solange is sitting in the grass, legs folded under, as if at a tea ceremony. She doesn’t exactly smile at Avis but she nods, her face relaxed.
Solange hands Avis an old-fashioned silver peeler and they cut tiny zucchinis into strips that Solange collects in a pot beside her on the grass. Then they hunt around for a shrub buried in the thickets at the west corner of the yard. It has a frilly, dainty leaf that Solange calls “vervain” and she tells Avis that it’s good for strengthening the “female systems.” She hums as they collect, and the bird grows still, then she sings a few fragments of song, shreds of music, the words floating away like confetti, like tearing a letter into pieces. The long, patient labor reminds Avis of the externships she did in culinary school — visiting different pastry shops and kitchens, listening to the bakers’ philosophies about their work, their approaches and aesthetics. Only Solange speaks little, her thoughts seemingly embedded in the small movements of her hands.
“My son would be shocked,” Avis says into the silence, vaguely smiling. “Me, in the dirt. Outside! He would be amazed.” She glances at Solange.
“You don’t go out of doors?”
“Almost never.”
“You close yourself in on purpose. It’s not healthy.”
“I don’t like vegetables, either.” She continues to smile, enjoying the feeling of confession. “I don’t like growing them, cooking them, or eating them.”
Solange finishes cutting a zucchini. “When I was growing up, there were two worlds — one was inside the great house and the other was outside with my mother. Inside was very fine and very clean, and a lot of black women to keep it so clean. The lady of the house — Myra — she was light-skinned, but she wasn’t pure white. There were a few drops of Africa in her, so we knew that was why she hated us so much. She worked the women like slaves. But my mother would steal outside when she could. She changed us out of our good house clothes into the old castoffs, and we would go tend to the vegetables and herbs in the patch the gardener gave her.” Solange wiped at the edge of her forehead with one hand. “Sometimes she went foraging too. Inside, I learned the alphabet, but outside, I learned all the plants.” She looks at Avis, holding the peeler aloft.
They work easily together through the silent hours and heat. A few times during the course of the day, Avis hears the phone ringing inside the house and she knows she should go back inside: she imagines the dough overinflating, the orders unfilled. But there is such rare pleasure in sitting in the grass and sweating, skin pearly with humidity, the sweet chlorophyll stains on her palms: she can almost understand why someone would choose not to live inside a house. She thinks about the hours, whole days on end, Stanley spent working his garden. Outdoors, nothing but the scent of the air. Midafternoon, Solange goes into the house while Avis dozes in the shade near the birdhouse, sweat curling down her neck. After a while, she brings out a soup with a cloudy, briny broth, dashes of the peeled vegetable and chopped greenery they’d collected. They eat it, sitting together on the back step of the house, holding white porcelain bowls. It is ineffably good and restorative. Avis’s knees and back are stiff, but she finds that she’s so hungry she barely notices. When they finish, they put the bowls on the cement step.
Avis sighs, sitting back. She rubs her hands on her jeans and says, “I guess I’m going to have a grandchild.”
Solange sits back as well, placing her hands flat on her knees, her stern gaze seemingly drawn into herself. Avis watches her and begins to feel that the other woman is looking at something invisible — a sort of communing — and that the slightest movement could cause her to fly away. Eventually Solange turns her attention to her empty bowl. Her face is hard, her teeth an unearthly white against the purplish color of her inner lip. “It’s a strange thing, how life can roll out in front of you, so nice and welcoming. Like you been promised a trip to a beautiful island, where the trees and gates are full of flowers and the roads are like shining paths and the air smells like sweetness, and all around the ocean’s like a bright blue marble. You reach out for it…” Solange lifts the surface of her palm, uncurling her fingers. “You can almost touch it and smell it, you’re practically almost there. And then, just at the moment before you arrive…” She closes her hands into a fist, skin over her knuckles turning pale. “You have to understand — after something terrible—insupportable—happens to a person, it’s hard not to feel like the terrible thing is out there, everywhere, inside of every single thing you see and encounter. And it’s hard not to feel this sort of rage against everyone. Sometimes it takes everything a person has, not to let everything turn black, not to feel like everything you touch is scraping off your skin.”