



1 / 6 Chevron Chevron Photographed by Mario Testino, Vogue, February 2018 Oh, Baby! Alexis Olympia Ohanian, Jr. was born on September 1, 2017. “We’re not spending a day apart until she’s 18,” Williams says, only half-joking. Williams wears a Valentino dress and Irene Neuwirth bracelet.

Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.

On a moist South Florida morning at the end of a relentless hurricane season, their wedding only a week away, Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian are seated side by side at their long kitchen table discussing the Marshmallow Test. Some 50 years ago, in a famous experiment, the Stanford University psychologist Walter Mischel invited children to choose between a small immediate reward, such as a marshmallow, or, if they could sit and wait for fifteen minutes, a larger prize. The children who found ways to stave off temptation—by singing songs or pulling pigtails—went on to have higher SAT scores and lower body-mass indexes than their ravenous peers.

“I would have eaten that marshmallow,” says Serena, who, in conspicuous contrast to that image, sips a radioactive-looking broth, which she nudged her chef to prepare after reading online that ginger and turmeric were supposed to aid in breast-milk production. She positions this tincture on a stack of gold lamé swatches: Golden Harvest, Gold L’Amour, Golden Daydream, Victorian Gold. One of these will be selected for the tablecloths at the wedding dinner. Thinking better of her coaster choice, she shifts her glass to a stack of photocopied pages from assorted newborn instruction manuals. Serena loves printing and collating and stacking. She loves paper. She is the analog to her husband-to-be’s digital.

“Are you kidding?” Alexis shoots back. “You would never eat that marshmallow. You would stare down that marshmallow like it was the enemy. It would be Serena versus the marshmallow.”

“You’re right,” she admits with a squeak of laughter. “But it would have been fear. I would have been scared to eat it. I would have been like, Am I supposed to eat this? Am I going to get in trouble if I eat this?”

Watch Serena Williams Absolutely Tear Up an Airport Runway:

It’s no secret that a high capacity to delay gratification—to place discipline and self-sacrifice in the service of a dream that shimmers in the distance like a mirage—is among the distinguishing characteristics of the elite athlete. Serena is a special case, of course, an athlete whose unique gifts fused with years of hard work to produce an avalanche of victories—more, she swears, than she ever dreamed of as a braided nine-year-old captured uncomfortably in the pages of her local newspaper. A more painful vision of reality has also encroached over the years: the drive-by murder of her older sister Yetunde Price, in 2003; a slip on a piece of broken glass at a Munich restaurant that led to pulmonary embolisms, which in turn led to a year on the sidelines (and then, somehow, after age 30, the five most brilliant seasons of her career). One gratification she always knew she’d be keeping on the back burner was motherhood. But on September 1, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. arrived. Serena calls her Olympia. Alexis prefers Junior.