* Author : Nicole D. Sconiers * Narrator : Laurice White * Host : Matt Dovey * Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh * Discuss on Forums Previously published by Nightlight Podcast Rated PG-13 The Stiffening by Nicole D. Sconiers I was eight years old when I realized that I never saw my mother sitting. Ever. Or lying in bed or immersed beneath a blanket of suds in our old clawfoot bathtub. She was always upright. Afternoons would find her in the kitchen, tending something on the stove or wiping down counters with a dish rag. This is how I remember her: thick black hair spilling over broad shoulders and sturdy legs clad in a print skirt and drugstore stockings. She loved to cook, to bring a steaming and pungent plate of collard greens to the table, to serve my sister Trina and me a slice of her famous orange pound cake. Even though she was on her feet all day mixing batter at Xavier’s Donuts, the sound of a metal spoon clanking against a pot usually met me and Trina when we came home from school. Older than me by three years, Trina was the more thoughtful sister. “Mom, you work too hard. Sit down and let me fix you a plate,” she would say. Mother brushed off Trina’s concerns with a smile as she brought a bowl or glass to the dining room table. “That’s all right, baby. You and Valise enjoy your free time.” Then those lean long legs carried her into the living room, where she would pull back the curtains she had stitched by hand. Home from school, the other girls on the block would be practicing their drill routines in the street, or the staccato thumping of twin ropes on asphalt would drift in through the screen door as my neighbors played Double Dutch. They never invited me to join their games. “Double-handed,” I was called. That meant I turned the rope too clumsily for their liking and out of rhythm. Mother never beheld this festival of flailing limbs from a chair by the window like our elderly neighbor Miss Isabel, who wore wigs and scolded the neighborhood kids as if they were her own. Nor did my mom recline on the front stoop, glass of too sweet iced tea in hand, chatting with Miss Irene or Mr. Alphonse, an unmarried couple who lived in the bungalow next to ours. She always stood, arms crossed, in the middle of our bay window, as if she were controlling all activity on the street with a glance. Every girl tries to find her mother’s handprint in her own life — whether to embrace it or slough it off. I was no different. Although Trina and Mother were closer, I was the daughter who looked the most like her. My hairline mimicked hers, a fuzzy stream that meandered along my temples and ended at my ears in a vortex of tight curls. Moles, like dark flowers, dotted our cheeks, while Trina had the smooth brown skin of our father, long dead. Mother and I were often complimented for our long dainty fingers that we inherited from my grandmother Hallie, who used to hang wash from a clothesline with wooden pins and who once rode three buses to The Valley every day to clean homes for white folks. This is where the similarities ended. The more I watched my mother, the more I realized I was not like her. I preferred reading MAD magazine in my room to cooking, and I had no desire to pick up around the house. Serving other people bored me. But I could sit and squat and kneel, and I had never even seen my mom bend her legs. One night, my suspicions about Mother were confirmed.