The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  I did the math at the Crabtree Hotel the first night we arrived in Raleigh. It was roughly the same as yesterday and it would be the same tomorrow. But one day soon that number would radically shift.

  “At least this isn’t a gamble, though,” I said.

  Ramon was silent. He does this thing when we’re in bed and he doesn’t want to talk anymore, where he puts the pillow over his head and goes to sleep. But he hadn’t done that just yet.

  “We get a kid if we do this. Not like with the IVF, where we wait and spend all this money we don’t have, and still it might not happen. This isn’t like that.” I thought of all the women in the waiting room at the hospital on the mornings I went uptown at daybreak for my appointments. Not one looked at another, as if we were competing for the few successes that day held. Statistics were statistics and there were not enough favorable outcomes for us all. If celebrities were there—and they always were, in their baseball caps and loose velveteen sweats and hoodies—we ignored them. Would they take everything due to their proximity to stardom? Would they get all the good luck, all the baby dust, all the magic, or had they too used up their wishes?

  When they did call our names—first and last—we put our heads down and we went inside, and we took whatever we had coming, and then we went home or we went to work and we turned to chat rooms on the Internet. That’s where we got the information we needed: drink wheatgrass, it improves egg quality; eat pineapple, it helps with implantation—acts that made us think we were affecting change. As we chatted anonymously, without bodies, about what our bodies weren’t doing, it made us feel, however briefly, that the plans we’d made for our lives might transpire.

  Still, I saw his expression when Ramon found out that I was not pregnant from our final course of IVF. I had gotten up for several mornings before he awoke and taken my own pregnancy tests, too impatient to wait for the doctor’s official word, and I had not told him for days that, no matter how many times I checked it, no matter how I saved each strip, comparing it with the one the following day to see if perhaps it had darkened just the slightest bit, the answer was still the same. It was after the fifth day of silence—a disposition uncommon to me—that Ramon had woken to my steady weeping over the bathroom sink. I had not heard him outside the door, and I turned as he opened it, and we both knew in that moment that everything had run out.

  “I can’t think about this anymore right now.” Ramon stretched out his arm and turned out the light, signaling that not only couldn’t he think about it, but he wouldn’t be talking about it either. “Can you just wake me when all of this is over?”

  I lay in the hotel bed and thought of other hotels I’d been in with Ramon, that first night he had run his finger along the deep grooved scar. I enjoyed what I now see as his disinterest in my scars. On the beaches of Italy I saw evidence of bodies ravaged by wars and childbirth and socialized medicine in scarred torsos, steel limbs, keloid cuts, eye patches, exposed without shame. I was just another war-torn body. But the ravages were also inside, where they had gone in several times and cut out the cancerous section of the colon, then sewed it back up, almost precisely enough for me not to notice. Each time they thought they had it all, something would be left behind and in they’d go again, and the scar tissue that grew out from those internal wounds coiled around me, an unstoppable moth vine or creeper, wrapping tightly to all the parts meant to stay open, strangling me on the inside where possibility breathed.

  “But what if I want to sleep through this too?” I asked the dark now.

  I could hear the cars moving along the highway. I could hear the ice machine cracking in the hallway, the ding of the elevator traveling inside the building. What would my life be like? I wondered, as I had lost my earlier clarity, and with it, my power to imagine. If I could see the face of the child that would be ours, I would know even a little. There in the dark rose the magic pot. I felt Claudine hovering over me, her substantial arm around my neck, the other in front, holding the book, her deep odor of sweat and musk, and the strong timbre of her voice. She turned the thick pages and I can’t say I wished for my mother then, but I wished to see her now, as I could see the magic pot drawn in that book, on the ground of a farmer’s dusty field at dusk, lacking enchantment. It grew in my imagination, so massive and black, a pot to be stirred by a coven of witches, a cauldron in a forest in winter, cold and oh so empty.

  5

  __

  The next day we were exactly on time. We were the second couple to arrive, and I felt confident and assured as I pulled my chair up to the pretend wooden table, a packet—the yellow logo of a sun beaming along the agency’s name—placed neatly at each space, like a table setting.

  “Good morning.” I nodded to the other couple. “Anita!” I said, because I remembered her name. She was a veterinarian. There has never been a vet I haven’t liked or couldn’t talk to.

  Anita’s eyes cracked into whiskerlike laugh wrinkles as she smiled.

  “Mornin’,” she said.

  Ramon nodded. He never remembered anyone’s name, ever. And this was compounded by the fact that, though he worked in graphic design and was a visual person, he could not recall faces either. Suffice it to say, it was great fun to go to a party with my husband.

  “You guys, you and Paula,” I said, loud enough so it would somehow imprint on Ramon’s brain. “Remember, Ramon?” I asked.

  Ramon leaned over and shook hands. “I think we need to put our name tags back on,” he said, after which one of the delicate-skinned social workers hustled over to a table and shuffled through some papers for blank name tags. She sat and began to painstakingly write our names again, the tip of her tongue protruding from her mouth.

  Soon the other couples materialized, taking the same places they had the previous evening. And then Nickie emerged from the office with a regal let’s-get-down-to-business stance, and the training was thus commenced.

  _______

  The day was mind-numbing. We were given a wide range of information, including, but in no way limited to, how to create a profile, which includes a letter to the birthmother and photos—with captions—of our lives together. The birthmothers receive these profiles from the agency, sometimes in huge stacks, and this is our way of introduction. We learned the word count for birthmother letters (950 words), what we should communicate in these letters (who we are, where we’re from, why we’ve chosen open adoption, just to start), the sizes of the photos (five by seven for the main one, the one that should communicate visually that we are in love, which should be in front of a seasonless plant), what we should be doing in the photos, what we should be wearing in the photos (bright colors), what we should be thinking in the photos (how much we want to be parents).

  There were toll-free numbers to call and be called on, websites to visit and to create, designers to contact, though I saw Ramon scoff at that.

  “How will you portray that you’re committed to each other, to being parents? How do you want to be perceived?” Nickie said. “Who are you as a couple?”

  I looked around at the other couples. Brian, a journalist in DC, was most recognizable to me, with his jeans and a hunter-green wool sweater, the collar of a shirt folded at the neck casually, unlike the blinding white, knifelike corners of his partner Gabe’s shirt. Gabe had his hand at Brian’s back and together they looked over the sample brochures, bright, sturdy flyers of couples who had come before us and had already measured their photos properly, found foliage to stand in front of in the middle of winter, composed captions that were friendly and informative, and written a 950-word letter that passed muster with

  Nickie.

  Gabe and Brian looked like a nice couple, and so did Anita and Paula, who sat close, rubbing each other’s backs. As for the other two couples, each from separate small towns near Raleigh, I was reserving judgment, which is to say I judged them negatively. They made clear that they desired a white child—both claimed the landscape of these small southern towns as motivation for this—bef
ore the question had been posed to them. Their concern over what to do with their guns and ammunition when the social workers came for the home visit (store them separately!) made me think of them as the Killers, and I wanted to be sure to remember this term so I could later tell Ramon something droll about our day.

  I could see who these couples were on the outside, but what information did that give up about what darkness lay within? What light?

  I thought of those late afternoons fading into night in the basements of our American childhoods, the basements we snuck in and out of through sliding glass doors, stickered with rainbows or unicorns, so birds—and drunken teenagers—would not forget the transparent divisions between outside and in, in those basements where we grew up beneath the weight of our homes; it began for me a kind of wonderment that I would carry into adulthood: How would I convey who I am on the inside to the outside? I thought it now: How do we relate what is private about our relationship, a secret sometimes even to each other, to the world? And how would we reveal something so vital and true it would make a birthmother set our brochure aside and say: These two. I choose them.

  I did not think, then, what would make a woman give up her child. Or any of the factors that might make her have to do so.

  We broke for lunch, take-out “Italian,” my antipasto salad of canned mushrooms, rolled-up and sliced ham, American cheese, and turkey on a bed of limp lettuce, Ramon’s calzone soggy, nearly cold, and, he found upon biting in, nearly empty of its spinach-and-mozzarella promise.

  “Good God.” I nudged Ramon.

  “Stop being such a snob,” he said. “Not every meal has to be handcrafted.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him.

  “Hmm.” Martin glanced up from his meatball sub to look at my meal. “Did you get the pink raspberry vinaigrette with that? The pink raspberry vinaigrette is awesome.”

  The training then switched gears from who might want us to whom we might select, as if we had any control in this process. To announce this changed perspective, a large glass bowl of white, black, brown, and yellow pom-poms was placed on the table, and smaller, empty bowls were passed out to us.

  “Take the pom-poms based on the color of the various people in your lives, your friends, your neighbors, your family,” Crystal and Tiffany told us.

  We all stared rather dumbly at the large bowl set before us.

  “Even if you are open to adopting a child of any color, you have to think about what kind of role models of their own race they will come into contact with as they grow up,” they said. “Think of your families, your communities.”

  We all went for our pom-poms.

  I looked around the room. Martin and James’s bowl was very white. So was Gabe and Brian’s, though they had some yellow peeking out. I looked down at our bowl; I had taken all the pom-poms. They didn’t fit in the bowl, and so I held on to them, my arms widening; I was embracing all the pom-poms.

  Ramon looked at the spread before us.

  “Okay,” they said. “Good! Now we’re going to hand out your profile forms.”

  We were handed a two-page client profile form to select the races and ethnicities of our prospective child, as well as the amount of the birthmother’s alcohol and drug use we could possibly tolerate, and the genetics of her family, ranging from physical and correctable issues such as cleft palates and clubbed feet, to mild to severe issues of mental health.

  “Be as open on your form as you are both comfortable with,” Nickie instructed, tightening the bright-colored scarf knotted at her neck. “Look at your pom-poms but also know that the more open you are, the quicker you will get a child.”

  Crystal and Tiffany nodded behind her, silent backup singers.

  I glanced at the form. And then I watched the other couples looking at the form. For Herman and Alex, the form would be easy. Their pom-poms said: Caucasian. Everything white. Blindingly white. But for us, there were unimaginable combinations of races: East Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern? Check. Native American, Hispanic, and Asian? I nodded at Ramon and he back at me.

  Check!

  But what did all these combinations mean? The pom-poms sat alone, a single color. What if the mother of an African-American Palestinian child (miraculously) chose us? I thought of all the shades of colors that child might be.

  Then came drug and alcohol use, and for this portion there were no props to help us decide. Nickie explained that checking no drugs or alcohol included drinking before the woman knew she was pregnant. We had friends who’d had a few glasses of wine before realizing they’d conceived. That had also, we did not acknowledge as we filled out this form, been me. Four years previously, before all the fertility treatments, I had gotten pregnant nearly magically, as we had been told that, due to my surgeries, my getting pregnant would be impossible. I remember being so confused when my period—the only internal process that works in me with Swiss-watch precision—was late. It had been a stressful time—I was finishing my PhD then, studying all day and well into the night for my defense, and—I can hardly bring myself to admit this now—drinking several glasses of wine nightly.

  I try not to remember the joy—pleasure combined with that feeling, what does one call it, when one has narrowly escaped something terrible, has made a clean getaway? Is it cheating God? It is certainly more pleasurable than only pleasure in and of itself, I thought when I got that blood test back with the numbers I would come to covet, high beta numbers, strong, irrefutable digits. And then the doctor, with his arrogant face, some stranger, telling me seven weeks later how that pinprick on the ultrasound was no longer a viable prick of a pin. Nope, he’d said. Nothing happening in there.

  One moment unscathed, and the next?

  The very opposite, of course. Scarred, damaged, injured, traumatized.

  I have tried not to think what life would be like now had my pregnancy not come and gone as quickly as gossip. I tried not to think of this also as the indication of how easy it likely would have been to have children of my own had this illness not undone me. Who, then, would I be now? I would be a woman with a child, perhaps two; one might not even notice me at all. But what I asked myself while choosing the box for the tolerable amount of drug and alcohol abuse was, would we have chosen myself as a birthmother?

  I looked at Ramon, who shook his head.

  “Let’s start with the best-case scenario and work backward,” he said.

  Very quietly I asked, “So many of our friends drank before they knew they were pregnant. Would we not choose them?”

  Ramon shook his head again.

  “These women are young, Jesse,” he said. “You think they’re having a glass of Chardonnay with their salmon? If they’re drinking, they’re drinking.”

  “Ramon,” I started. I couldn’t think about the one chance I might have had to not be sitting here right now. That baby would have been three in August. My friend Michelle, Zoe’s mother, and I had imagined it together; our due dates were ten days apart, and we thought we’d spend long leisurely days at their place on the Hudson, our legs shin-deep in the pool, sighing over all that we were missing, our babies cradled in our arms.

  We thought we’d have a double baby shower. We made a list of the friends we shared from the neighborhood, those whom I saw every year at their annual summer party, and others we’d invite separately. And what we would serve. It would be August, and we would be so pregnant, so ickily pregnant and hot and uncomfortable, we’d said, so summer salads, maybe some chilled sesame noodles, shrimp satays.

  Now I tried not to think of her face when I told her it would be just her. Alone. I gathered myself up. It is every part of you one assembles, limbs and organs and memories and hopes, every one of your bad choices. Time itself is an imaginary hourglass you carry, lashed to your neck. You straighten yourself against it.

  I tried not to think of seeing her in the neighborhood as I walked Harriet, her belly growing rounder. Or at the baby shower, where I had spent most of the afternoon in the bathroom alone wi
th my personal bottle of champagne—listening to the shrieks of Michelle’s friends as they smeared microwaved chocolate bars into diapers and bobbed for nipples.

  I knew then that soon Michelle would be one of the neighborhood mothers, so exhausted and overwhelmed and cheered by their children that, no longer working, they all got together, the way we had once done as respite from dating in our twenties, cutting out from our jobs early in the roaring start of our thirties, and now, now?, the mothers sat together along a farmhouse table in someone’s tricked-out kitchen, sharing war stories of croup and incessant crying, night panics, time-outs or no time-outs, the protocol of the playground, as they wondered when they’d ever go back to being the women they once were. Once we were such girls, remember?, the mothers all said as they picked at their kids’ organic chicken nuggets and poured themselves pinots, their children coloring beneath their feet like good dogs, or sucking organic yogurt out of little plastic strips, or playing make-believe in their mother’s dresses and lipsticks and high-heeled shoes, or napping, or watching Bob the Builder DVDs, or screaming their fucking heads off. Remember bars?, they’d say with a giggle as Michelle and I avoided each other. Why not unhitch myself now?, I had thought when I told her. Because I knew that in eight months Michelle would be pushing a child of her very own and the mothers would welcome her. Come!, they’d all say, opening up their front doors, hiding the gorgeous chaos behind them. Welcome!, they’d say. And I’d be drinking alone.