- Olivia Brooks
- Oct 29
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 30
No Lovely
Auntie Lisa and her new baby live a few towns over, so Ma warns me she will make some sales stops along the way. From that, I know I will spend an hour watching Ma stride briskly up driveways with her makeup bag, ring doorbells, swatch lipstick samples on the back of her hand, nod respectfully as doors clip shut in her face.
“Don’t let them see you want their money,” Auntie Lisa coached. She taught Ma to subtly–unsubtly tap her foot, to leave me in the car lest my presence beg charity. To stop saying thankyousomuch as the customer signed their check. In the rearview mirror, I watched Ma practice unfurling her coldest smiles for her eagerest customers. I recognized the stitched-lip expression as the one she used on me.
“Pretend you have other buyers waiting,” urged Auntie Lisa the last time we saw her, her legs elevated, her stomach swollen. “Pretend you don’t care.”
Ma will give me the same advice before we enter Auntie Lisa’s house. “No lovely, no beautiful,” she will say, smoothing my hair with one hand and knocking with the other. “At this early age, evil spirits love to eavesdrop and steal baby girls from us.”
So when Auntie Lisa lifts a squirming yellow bundle into Ma’s arms, Ma will proclaim, “Ai—so ugly,” barely glancing at the baby’s curling hands and seashell ears. She will hand the baby back to Auntie Lisa without letting me see, and Auntie Lisa will settle the baby in the bedroom.
And I will creep into the bedroom to find the baby pillow-dammed in the middle of the bed, a snuffling yolk atop the rippled white duvet. I will worry, as I peel back the swaddle, that the baby is as ugly as Ma said, its cheeks warty and sallow. But she will look like any other baby, her eyes too big for her head, her head too big for her body. Her fist will brush my finger. I will feel words clawing up my throat, and I will press both hands over my mouth.
And before all that, Ma will ascend driveway after driveway on the way to Auntie Lisa’s, until I can’t watch another door close. I will pretend to sleep, hoping to hear the dry rustle of Ma folding a check in half or slipping bills inside her purse. Instead, as my car door swings open, as she reaches over to unbuckle me, I will hear her sigh against my cheek; I will ache from the silence she learns to hold.
ANITA LO lives in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, AAWW‘s The Margins, and American Short Fiction.