“What in the Afro-Sheen hell is going on here?” Daina asked while waving an old photograph in front of her mother’s face.
“Watch your mouth,” her mother replied with an elegant shrug of her shoulder.
It took a second for Daina to think of what she’d said, but for her mother – and God apparently – hell was a curse and one that had gotten her plenty of whippings as a child who delighted in all manner of curse words.
But as an adult, she noticed the nonchalance of her mother’s admonition, as if it was more muscle memory than conviction. As if she said it because she was expected to keep her daughter in line no matter how old her child was, no matter how much life she’d lived. Daina’s mother told her to watch her mouth because she, the mother, will always have lived that little bit more of life, seen just a bit more of the world, and still had a few lessons to teach.
As if her brain and heart had learned the motherly thing to do and would never let them go.
Normally, Daina blanched when she was under her mother’s thumb this way; it’s why she’d left home at eighteen, running a couple hundred miles to freedom, to independence, to life. To be with some man.
But now she was back under her mother’s roof, having lived a little bit of life, and lost the war with the world. If her mother wanted to mother her, Daina wanted to be mothered more.
She’d been home for nearly a week and all her earthly belongings were cluttering up the family living room, and apparently her mother had had enough. She’d woken Daina up an hour ago ready to finally clear out the closet in Daina’s old bedroom.
They’d been sifting through the fragments of decades of family history, slower than they could have, but Daina wasn’t complaining. When she was a child, Daina was the one who took her parents reminiscing about the past as an invitation to nap. But the thing about living just a little bit of life was discovering all the things you’re still too young to know, and she was taking advantage of this trip down memory lane to escape the chaos of the present.
When she’d opened this keepsake box and saw the pile of photographs a stitch had formed in her chest. The picture on top had been of her and her sister at their third birthday party. They were wearing matching red dresses with white sashes at the waist. Daina couldn’t remember that birthday specifically, but it was one of those family events that had become legendary in their family – a story they told and retold so many times that Daina thought she could hear, smell, and feel it.
What she knew from the stories was that her mother had put those dresses on layaway the day after their second birthday, scrimping and saving to pay it off five a couple dollars here and a couple dollars there for six months. She knew their cousin Junior had been at that birthday party because the whole family had had to give statements to the police to keep him outta jail for a crime he didn’t commit. She knew Junior got free of that one case only to catch another. She knew Junior was dead before she was six. She didn’t remember Junior in reality, but she remembered him in her soul.
There were so many things Daina didn’t remember about that party for real, but there were just as many details that had become part of family lore – part of her DNA – but the thing she thought she remembered for real was her twin sister Jamilah sniffling and hiding behind her, while she had soaked up every ounce of attention.
And above all else, Daina remembered her daddy.
Even now she could close her eyes and hear his voice singing Stevie Wonder’s version of “Happy Birthday” to them; his deep voice, soft and melodic, rising over everyone else’s. If she closed her eyes she could see his face – perfectly round and framed by an even more symmetrical afro, light brown eyes with darker brown flecks, jet black bushy eyebrows with a matching mustache.
Seeing that picture of their third birthday party had hit Daina in the gut and made her yearn for something she wanted back; a version of herself she was desperate to retrieve.
There was a version of this photo hanging on the gallery wall in the living room. Maybe the wall had started off as something normal, but over the decades it had morphed into a tribute to Daina and Jamilah, documenting their birthdays, graduations, and weddings.
And maybe that’s also what had shook her to her core.
That first night home, Daina’s gaze had been drawn to a photo on the wall of her in white, big smile, a tall man in a tuxedo at her side. That first night, she’d cried herself to sleep in her childhood bed, bags crowded in a corner, eyes, and throat sore from too much time crying, her body weak from months of phantom aches and pains that seemed to come from nothing but all her grief.
The next morning, that picture was gone.
But the pictures in this box didn’t hurt – or at least they didn’t hurt in the same way. She dug with ever greedy attention through the snapshots from her past, moments frozen in time like that birthday and faces alive and smiling. She sifted through those pictures and each one made her brain throb in new ways. She saw faces she’d lost years ago and the synapses that had dimmed at their death found new life again in remembrance. These pictures made her feel a kind of happy-sad she could only fully appreciate in adulthood.
But this picture of her mother was new and Daina found a sudden pleasure in seeing the woman she thought she knew so well with fresh eyes. “How old were you here, mama? Sixteen?”
Her mother snatched the picture from Daina’s hand with surprising vehemence. “I was nineteen,” she said, her voice high-pitched with annoyance, but still lovely. Her mother extended her arm and peered at the picture with a squinting glance.
“Your glasses are on your head,” Daina muttered.
Her mother sucked her teeth, but reached for her spectacles, pulling them down onto her face. She moved the picture closer and sucked her teeth again, but the longer she looked at the picture, the more her mouth lifted into a lopsided grin Daina didn’t think she’d ever seen before.
“Nineteen,” she said again. “Almost twenty.”
Daina looked at her mother and felt the same kind of warmth she’d felt sifting through those pictures, but the hurt was different. She watched her mother cradles the picture in her hands and noticed just how much older she looked than the girl in the picture and even the version of her mother that lived in Daina’s mind’s eye.
To Daina, her mother would always be in her mid-thirties, tall and thick, smooth brown skin with a small constellation of moles high on her right cheek, big hair dyed the most perfect shade of milk chocolate and blown out to perfection. In Daina’s childlike heart, her mother would always be old enough to seem worldly but young enough to lead the electric slide on the dancefloor at the Community Center. For Daina, her mother would always be the blueprint.
The hurt though was the moment she realized that somewhere along the way, the blueprint had changed.
Her mother’s hair was still dyed – Damita Kathleen could not abide silver streaks let alone a full-gray coif – but now it was a sedate semi-sweet chocolate brown and thinning at the edges. Just last night, Daina had greased her mother’s scalp and plaited it into two braids on either side of her head over her shoulders. Her mother’s skin was still clear but Daina could have sworn that the wrinkles that ringed her mouth had appeared out of nowhere, the laugh lines had deepened into harsh concentric circles bracketing her mouth overnight, and the creases at the edges of her mother’s forever smiling eyes had turned to crow’s feet out of the blue.
They say aging sneaks up on you and so Daina had been watching for the errant silver hair or the crow’s feet on herself; she wasn’t prepared for her mother.
“I remember that shirt,” her mother said fondly. “I think that shirt was the first thing I ever stole from your daddy on purpose.”
“Excuse me?” Daina shrieked. “Why were you stealing from daddy?”
Her mother laughed, light and beautiful, an innocent, nonchalant lift of her shoulders. “Just seemed like the thing to do.”