Mother and Child Reunion, 2024
Halfway through lunch at the usual Japanese restaurant in D.C., Mary notices that a blonde girl is glaring at her, Jimmy, and David. Her eyes, nose, and chin look familiar although she doesn’t recognize her posture, stiff despite the pale pink cocktail that she is drinking. The hair, an uneven tumble that almost looks like a wig, is not familiar either. It’s the kind of hair she sees on TV these days, on the political shows she watches at night, after her stepson has gone to sleep, while her husband is working on grants or reading chapters of dissertations. Don’t get her started about the girl’s bulging lips. Perhaps she was on TV. Republican girls all look the same.
Mary tries to avoid the girl’s frown, to talk with David and Jimmy instead, or at least to beg Jimmy to eat the chicken katsu, the fried patty cooling on his tiny plate. She cuts it up; still, he won’t take a bite. It’s the usual war, she fears. No matter how much she calls it yummy food and even snatches a bite herself. Next time, she swears, she’ll bring food he’ll eat: yogurt, apple slices, toast and peanut butter, grapes, and farmer’s cheese from the Polish grocery in Baltimore.
She looks up, and the blonde girl stands before her, her sculpted arms crossed over her flat stomach and taut abs. She scowls at Mary and her family. Mary realizes that this is her older daughter Nevaeh, the daughter whom she hasn’t seen for over twenty years since she escaped from her husband Gideon and the gun he pointed at her. Both of her daughters by her first husband were raised by his family in Utah. Unlike Ava, her younger sister, Nevaeh has never contacted her mother. The young woman remembers being left behind, losing her parents, Mary imagines. Ava told her that she herself recognizes only their absence, the reason she felt adrift at her uncle and aunt’s house in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. Once she turned eighteen, she reached out to her mother. Nevaeh, she said at the time, was still angry despite her pink, sugar-coated exterior, despite her try-hard nature.
“I should have known you abandoned Prosper.” Her Western voice comes out sharp and bitter despite the cocktail she has been drinking. “Did you have any children together?”
“Prosper… I haven’t seen him in years. I read he’s married a man. They have kids, I think,” An uncertain Mary replies. But then she finds her strength perhaps years too late. “I was never his lover, Nevaeh. He is gay. He was my friend. My only friend in Denver.”
Now Nevaeh is glaring at Mary’s low-cut dress. At home, she didn’t think anything of the dress’s neckline. Aren’t all cute dresses low cut these days? She’s seen older women with necklines like these. Oh, but she has a Childless Cat Lady pin below the neckline. A friend has given it to her as a joke. She wears it for the same reason. The family’s cat is really David’s soulmate, not hers.
“I bet you tried your best to convert him, Mama. Anyway, your husband should be your best friend. Mine will be. And all your other friends should be girls. If you’re a girl’s girl like me.”
Another blonde girl slinks up to guide Nevaeh away. But her daughter gets in a few last words.
“You’re a whore, Mother. You’re old, but you’ll leave this little boy when it’s convenient. When he’s not so cute. When your man gets old and soft,” she says gesturing at David who frowns past her. “It won’t matter if he is your husband. Or that boy is your son.” She sneers at the simple ring on Mary’s finger and its twin on David’s. “Daddy should have shot you while he had the chance.”
“I’ve changed. I won’t leave them. I won’t. I won’t. I love them,” Mary finally says under her breath as her daughter totters away with her friend who is soothing her. From her daughter’s slumped posture, she suspects that she may be crying. These may be tears of rage. Maybe not. Mary wishes even a molecule of Nevaeh were like her younger daughter Ava. The one who cares for her father. Who reached out to her. Instead, everyone cares for Nevaeh. The server who is always so kind and considerate now brings hot tea and sushi rolls to her, reminding her not to drink on an empty stomach. He even brings her a shot glass of soy milk.
Mary glances at David, somehow expecting him to have defended her or at least to have told her daughter to leave them alone, to add a little steel to his boyish tenor voice. As usual, he is methodically eating his rice and fermented vegetables with his chopsticks, the chopsticks he brings to restaurants. He eats as if he is alone, wearing a headset and reading a tablet. He has always been like this, especially at tense moments. It has taken her eleven years to notice this. She wonders if he even heard her say that she loved him and Jimmy. Or if he could conceive that Nevaeh herself might have been carrying a little pink pistol in her purse. She guesses that the purse was just big enough to hold one. She could imagine her daughter thinking to put down her mother like that governor of South Dakota put down her dog Cricket.
“Jimmy, let’s go to Mickey D’s. I’ll get you a cheeseburger,” she says abruptly, getting up quickly to control her shaking. She brings the stroller to the table while David continues to eat. “We’ll go home on Metro.”
She has to bring Jimmy to a place where he can eat and she can drink a vanilla milkshake, soothing herself as if she were still a child, as only she can, as she must. She is his mother, after all. She must stop shaking. She must stop shaking now.
Nevaeh Versus Sasha, 2048
Mary always knew that her older daughter was a go-getter, even a girlboss, but she never expected her to run for President. OK, she had been Josh Hawley’s Vice President. But still enough women had tried and failed. Even before Hillary. But here Nevaeh is, giving a speech, hatless on a cold day, her blonded hair pulled back in a French braid to resist the wind. She looks more like Gideon. Probably she is also wearing stilettos or boots with high heels, but she has his height, slimness, and complexion. Back in the day, she was his “best girl,” riding on his shoulders after he came home from practice.
However, Nevaeh has disciplined out all of her father’s earnestness and passion, his sweet eyes and smile. Her fiercely blue eyes, her smile, her smooth forehead, and her determined mouth might as well have come from some other family. Mary wonders how her daughter would seem with the sound on. She is sure that she would sound like any other woman politician on the other side. She could not listen to her own daughter, she realizes as she closes the video on her device. But that woman is not her daughter. In fact, she has proclaimed that her parents abandoned her and that her uncle and aunt raised her. They are her real parents. Even when Nevaeh had her children, she never reached out to Mary or Gideon. Never. She has lost track of the number of pictures of the children with their great aunt and great uncle, their “grandparents,” she has seen during this campaign. Worse, the pictures of Nevaeh teaching her not-so-little girls how to aim a gun while their “uncle” and “Aunt” look on proudly.
Mary remembers the one time that Gideon, her ex-husband, looked as determined as his daughter does. That afternoon he was pointing a gun at her and her gay friend, and she ran and ran and ran to the car that she drove and drove and drove back to Venice, to her mother’s house. She let her friend run to his own car. She left her daughters behind. The police took her husband away. Her daughters stayed with their uncle and aunt, their guardians. The last time she saw Nevaeh the little girl still played with her medical Barbie, sending her on pretend missions to Rwanda and Russia. She was so poised that Mary didn’t believe that she was her child. Perhaps Nevaeh was still that little girl except that she wanted to round up poor, old people without families, let them “choose” assisted suicide. She wanted women to have babies, more babies than they could raise. Mary shook her head. And she had once wanted a houseful of Gideon’s children. She had wanted to raise his sons and daughters.
Mary wills herself to think of Ava, the daughter who calls her mother and who lived with her during the pandemic. Ava, the shorter daughter whose red hair is threaded with white, who mothers her dad and their cats, the one she visits in Eugene, the place where she and Gideon had been happy. The daughter she could visit because President Hawley has revived passenger flights, especially for people with far flung family.
Mary taps in Ava’s number. It is still afternoon in Eugene. Gideon is probably out and about, talking to people and cats and drinking hot chocolate at the Lichen Cafe. Ava doesn’t pick up. She is probably working, wearing one of her shapeless uniforms, either the dark green one from the elite assisted living facility or the beige one from the fertility clinic. Mary figures she’ll call her later, maybe tomorrow if she’s out late tonight. What was she going to do—just say hey or ask her what she and her dad think of Nevaeh, what are they going to do if she becomes President. Her friend and housemate Katy always joked that Mary would have to die or leave the country because of the way her daughter spat out her name in interviews. In the next breath, Katy said that no one ever leaves the country. No real person. Just rich people. Not us.
Mary wanders into what she still thinks of as Katy’s room. Even now, she expects to see her in her wheelchair or in bed, watching a news channel, waiting for her to stop by. Just past one hundred, Katy used to call Nevaeh a fembot. The two old women would laugh as they watched that woman, Mary’s child, with the sound off. Mary sinks onto the empty bed beside the table where Katy’s husband’s ashes used to be. She clicks on the news. Sasha Obama-Nash, a darkish-skinned woman in a pale blue pantsuit, is speaking at an indoor rally, smiling, welcoming the diverse crowd to her vision of America while her twins and her white-haired father stand on the stage. Mary prays that this woman will be President, that the important states will vote for her next month. Then she texts her family, starting with Ava and Gideon, continuing with her sons, to remind them to vote, to remind their friends to vote.
Only then, turning the sound up so that she could hear it in the next room does she start to get ready for the evening ahead. Maybe she’ll sing with her boyfriend’s quartet or her sons’ band at the open mic at what used to be Thelma’s Restaurant. Maybe. No, she will sing with them tonight. She will walk past the sinking buildings, walk on the uneven sidewalks in the humid dark just to sing with the men she loves. As Katy always told her, it is time to sing. It is always time to sing.
Add comment