The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

And yet, when Zoe was born, I went to the hospital. And I held her and heard about Michelle’s C-section and the horror of what led up to it, and I passed Zoe back to her and watched her bring her to her chest.

  I did not know that I could opt out of that visit, or that I needed to. I did not know how to protect myself. I still do not know what will, as Zoe’s birth had, undo me.

  “Let’s just start with the best-case scenario,” Ramon said again.

  Was there a wrong answer? Martin and James were already done with their forms. They were the ones who turned in their marked-up SATs long before the monitor called for hands up, the ones who set down their pencils and left the testing center, the ones who made us all wonder, as we watched them, longingly, slip out of the auditorium, if they were geniuses, or if they were the mythical students, boys mostly, who would merely write their names as instructed on the top and then shoot the moon.

  Leaving the drug-and-alcohol section blank—which meant that if anyone claimed to have taken any substance at all, our profile would not be sent to them—I continued down the form.

  Comfortable with twins?

  Ramon shook his head.

  It was likely our only chance for siblings. I checked yes.

  Comfortable with rape?

  I shielded the form from Ramon with my left hand.

  Check.

  Everything, I remind myself, and everyone, has a story. I am a student—and a teacher—of history. As facts, history does nothing; it merely lies there on a timeline like any number. But a girl’s diary, a found scrap of speech, a president’s letter, the map of a changed city? These are the ways in which we understand what has come to pass.

  How could I choose a child without knowing the child’s story? And to know the child’s story, one needed to know the story of the mother.

  And what, really, I wanted to ask Ramon, was the best-case scenario here?

  All I had were questions. What I did instead of ask them, though, was surreptitiously go to Crystal or Tiffany and request the form back. Then, hastily, before anyone could see, I checked all of it—alcohol, methamphetamine, marijuana, heroin—in the first trimester. I would, I reasoned, deal with it later. If someone called us and she explained it to me, and she told me about who she was before she knew she was growing a baby, the baby that could make us a family, if she explained all that to me, it would make more sense.

  Because everyone has a story. Even me.

  6

  __

  We were relieved to leave the agency that evening. I’d thought we might ask Gabe to join us for dinner, or maybe Anita and Paula, but as we shut our happy white folders and gathered our collection of papers and books into the cloth tote embossed with the same sunny insignia found on the folders, I knew that Ramon would not want to be with other people that night. This is one of the many ways we’re different, Ramon and I. When in front of people, I am cloudless and blithe; I work hard to impress others, to make them feel at ease, and to uphold the notion that I am interesting and charming. Ramon, who is always himself, feels distant and lost when I don’t look up from my performance to note him there.

  I resisted my impulse to ask others to join and instead, as we were leaving, I asked for a good local place to eat.

  “Fancy?” Anita asked. We’d walked over to their Subaru, the back filled with dog beds and bug sprays and a tangle of bright leashes.

  I shook my head.

  “No, the opposite of fancy. Maybe barbecue?” Ramon asked.

  “Oooh.” Paula nodded. “We know just the place. Do you guys have GPS?”

  I shot Ramon a look. “No,” I said. “We do not.”

  “A, where’s that map?” Paula asked.

  Anita was already fishing in the backseat. “I know it’s here somewhere,” she said, her voice muffled.

  “What kind of dogs do you guys have?” I asked Paula as we watched Anita leaning into the backseat.

  “Italian spinones,” she said. “Anita breeds them.”

  Ramon and I looked at each other. “Really?” I asked. Where did I get the idea that lesbians were always bringing in strays and helping needy children? I was starting to deconstruct every stereotype I held.

  “Yeah.” Anita came up for air. “I do a lot of behavior stuff at my practice. And I breed them. I also show some of them, and do agility.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing.” I thought of Harriet’s mother, a submissive freckled spaniel who had to be kept separate from her babies while I chose my puppy. I knew who Harriet’s mother was. I had a family tree for my dog that went back several generations, all the way to the winner of Best in Breed at Westminster.

  Paula took out her wallet and showed me a photo of six dogs, all seated in a straight row on their haunches, their coarse hair wild, heads cocked in different directions, all camera-ready. A family portrait.

  Just look at them, I thought. I am in love with dogs. Perhaps dogs are enough.

  “That’s the mother.” Anita pointed to the middle. “Charlotte.”

  “The birthmother,” I said. It just came out.

  Everyone stood silent for a moment.

  Then Paula shrugged her stocky shoulders. “I guess so,” she said. “But we’re kind of the mothers too. We also have cats. And a few birds.”

  “We might actually need to be cut off. Here.” Anita handed Ramon a wrinkled and stained map of Raleigh and Chapel Hill.

  Ramon took the germ-infested map without hesitation, smoothing it out as Anita and Paula leaned over him, tracing a path from where we stood to the best goddamn barbecue we New Yorkers had ever tasted.

  “Wait, here?” Ramon asked.

  Anita snatched the map. “You know what? Just thinking about it makes me hungry. We’ll show you where it is! We’re coming too. I mean, it’s not like we have kids to go home to, right?”

  “Oh, great.” Ramon shifted his feet.

  “But we have animals, Anita,” Paula said. “What about the dogs?”

  “We can call Joanie,” she said to Paula.

  Paula shrugged. “Neighbor,” she told us.

  “Do you want company?” Anita asked Ramon.

  Ramon smiled, genuinely, which pleased me. I could tell he liked them, and when he liked people I took a shine to, it pleased me. “Absolutely,” he said. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of it sooner.”

  _______

  The walls at the Spot were fleshy light brown and pink, beamed with old wood, which gave the effect of being inside the chest of a pig. The restaurant was loud with thrilled voices ordering food and talking about what they’d ordered, and children crying and old people cooing, and it felt good to be part of the bustle of a loved place.

  “I’m ravenous.” I looked at the menu. “I might just eat one of you,” I said.

  “He was on the Food Network,” Paula told us proudly. Already someone had placed a bowl of corn bread in the center of the table and she nibbled on a piece, leaving a trail of yellow crumbs at the sides of her mouth and down her blue oxford-cloth shirt. She pointed to an enormous man with a sparse salt-and-pepper beard walking around the room, stopping at tables. “He’s the pit master. He does this whole-hog thing they featured on that show where that chef tried to beat them at their specialty thing.”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t help but be disappointed that we’d been taken to a place everyone already knew about.

  “Neat.” Ramon broke off a piece of corn bread and popped it into his mouth.

  “What’s good?” I asked.

  “You have to get it Carolina-style,” she said. “The meat. Carolina is dry. Not Texas-style, we don’t do that here. That’s all wet and, well, Texas-like.”

  Ramon and I nodded, looking at the menu. Whatever we chose, it came with two sides.

  The waiter came over and took our drink orders. Without consulting one another, we all ordered whiskey. All but Anita, who wanted lemonade. Women who don’t drink get my attention, as I always think they’re pregnant. Was Anita not drinking du
e to alcoholism or religion? I wondered now.

  “Look at all the sides,” Ramon said to me, eyes bright.

  I looked up from the menu, with its drawing of a pig sectioned into parts. I tried not to think about a documentary we’d seen recently on food production. The sound of squawking chickens and pigs sometimes flung together by their curling, breaking tails was still an echo I could not shake. I looked to the section of the menu that said “Everything but the Squeal” and wondered if those pigs were thrown together so tightly they couldn’t breathe, if they were given factory-produced slop, which often consisted

  of parts of pigs that humans wouldn’t touch. I thought of those pigs being forced to eat each other, and then I thought of the

  other alternative: pigs roaming free on grassy land, not unlike the rolling hills dotted with horses we’d seen just yesterday, driving in. Only yesterday.

  There was an excessive amount of choosing to be done. Did I want the meat—and who came to a place like this and did not eat meat?—chopped or pulled? Did I want macaroni and cheese or collard greens or black-eyed peas or fried okra or slaw? Well, I wanted everything, of course.

  “It’s a shitload of food,” Paula said as she watched Ramon and me scan the menu.

  The multiplicity of choice overwhelmed me, and it became impossible not to think of all the decisions we had made that day.

  The waiter came back with our drinks. As always, I had many questions. “Is the corn fresh?” I asked.

  I saw Paula look over at Anita, as if to say, We shoulda known; here we go.

  “Honey, this is North Carolina,” he said. “Of course it’s fresh, and yes, it’s from a farm not twenty miles from here. That’s where we get our greens too, and the cheese for the mac ’n’ cheese comes from a dairy close in the next town.”

  I didn’t care that he rolled his eyes at Anita and Paula.

  “I’m going to have the whole rack,” Ramon said.

  The waiter tilted his head. “You’re not a large guy,” he said. “That’s a lot of meat.”

  He nodded. “I know. I’m ready!”

  “Baby-back or Carolina-style?”

  Ramon looked at Anita and Paula, who both nodded their heads, urging him. “Carolina,” he said, with feeling.

  “I’m getting the chopped pork,” I said. “I think. Should I get the chopped or pulled?”

  “Chopped,” said Anita. “It’s a thing here.”

  “You all sure you don’t want to split?” the waiter asked.

  “Let ’em eat,” Anita said. “We’re hungry as hell.”

  After the waiter took down the rest of our order and after Anita called him back to order the fried green tomatoes, yet another regional dish we had to try, we sat for a moment, sipping our whiskey.

  “Can I ask you guys something?” I said.

  They nodded.

  “What did you check for drug use?”

  They paused and then looked at each other.

  Anita traced her finger along the table. “We’re gay,” she said.

  I looked at her blankly, and Ramon lifted his drink to his lips again.

  “We know that,” I said. Did they think we didn’t know that? Should we have told them about all our gay friends in New York?

  “No, what I mean is, we live in a rural part of the state.”

  “It’s not rural,” Paula told her. “It’s twenty minutes from here.”

  “Fine. We’re in Holly Springs. It’s a small town. And it’s not like a small town in Connecticut. So those guys, I know what they were thinking: just a white kid, otherwise it will draw even more attention to us being gay parents, which is not easy here.”

  “Is it easy anywhere?” I wanted the fried green tomatoes to come.

  “True.” Paula rested her hand at the crook of Anita’s elbow.

  The tomatoes arrived, thick slices in a light batter, on a white oval plate, garnished with long strands of tender basil, a ramekin of vinaigrette nestled to the side.

  “Yum.” I was the first to stab one with a fork.

  “But we are gay women. You know what that means?” Anita carved her tomato.

  “I do and then I guess I don’t,” I said, shoving a quarter of the tomato in my mouth, where it burst with juice and the zing of lime.

  “It means that the birthmother? She is dealing with the prospect of two mothers. Did you know gay men are the first to get matched? Because with two men as parents, she will always get to be the mother. Everyone wants to be the mother. Even when the child is being raised elsewhere.”

  Paula, who hadn’t yet touched her portion, nodded at Anita as she spoke.

  My eyes widened. Chewing, I felt my throat stitch closed. I couldn’t look at Ramon.

  “This is delicious.” Ramon chewed exaggeratedly.

  “This is a roundabout way of saying we’re kind of open to everything. We realize we have to be, unless we want to wait until we’re, like, eighty for a kid. We have to be open, and so we are open, which means drug use, yes, and race, and all of it. Just whatever comes our way,” Anita said.

  “We’re ready,” Paula affirmed.

  I swallowed the last of the tomato and batter that had come apart in my mouth, and cleared my throat.

  “We’ve discussed this a lot,” Anita said. “Those men in there? We don’t think they’re wrong to want a white child.”

  Paula nodded.

  “They’re realistic. And if they want a white child, having them check a child of color would be wrong for them and wrong for the child.”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” Ramon said. “I don’t hold it against them either.” He put his fork down. “Look, we’re all just doing what we can.”

  Well I do, I thought. The white gay guys and their guns and their white choices were wrong. I was wrong, too. I remembered Nickie speaking about special-needs children. Think about the prospect of raising a child who has autism or cystic fibrosis, she said. But I didn’t want to choose a child who had either of those things, I’d thought when Nickie introduced the idea.

  And then the waiter arrived. With a tray of food so enormous, he had a helper with him to lower it. Massive amounts of greens hung off the sides of the plate like wilted streamers. The steaming creamed corn nearly lapped over the edges of the dish, and some of the fried okra tumbled out of the red plastic basket lined with a paper towel before it even hit the table.

  Then came the meat.

  Shaking his head and smiling—glibly?—the waiter placed about fourteen ribs, food from prehistoric times, in front of Ramon, who gazed down at it, stunned. My chopped pork was piled so high I could have sledded down it. I couldn’t help myself; I thought of the pigs in that documentary thrown atop each other into live shrieking piles, cows branded, stomachs seared, and herded in the most inhumane of ways. And then I realized. I had gotten caught up in being around people, in being outside myself again, and of all the things I’d asked, I had neglected the one single most important question.

  I’d forgotten to ask about the meat.

  I grabbed the waiter by the arm. “The meat!” I said. I could feel the tears hot along my cheeks and I tried to turn away from Paula and Anita, who looked up from dividing up their meals like civilized people. “Where is it from?” I asked our waiter.

  He cocked his head. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “Please,” I said to Ramon and to the waiter, pushing my chair out from the table. I couldn’t look at the piles of food, the slop of it. I thought of waste and those children in Ethiopia, their bellies distended with hunger, flies buzzing around their heads in the USA for Africa infomercials, “We Are the World” playing in the background, flashes of the video, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen baby-faced, Cyndi Lauper, dewy and pudgy—even Dylan was young then.

  How had I ever had the right to want?

  “Can you just tell me where you got this meat?” I asked again.

  “Honey, where do you think I got the meat?” The waiter crossed his arms.
“From the kitchen,” he said, laughing.

  _______

  In the bathroom, surrounded by cartoon renderings of pigs and cows, I gathered myself up like so much loose change, coins I had collected on countless other nights, evenings when someone announced their unexpected—and unwanted—pregnancy, or when an acquaintance showed up at a party nine months pregnant, or when my cousin’s child answered the doorbell all grown up, offering, in a fake English accent, to take my coat and hat. I gathered myself up, and after I’d splashed cold water on my face and reapplied lipstick, painting on a smile, I went back to the table, ready to hack at my mountain of chopped pork.

  “Welcome back,” Anita said, patting my leg as I sat down.

  Paula bowed her head, slowly and succinctly.

  And I was grateful then that we had all dined together. Anita, I had learned that night, spent an inordinate amount of time on the insides of dogs, exhuming objects from their intestines, patching up torn hearts, while Paula mixed up TPN—milky nutrition dripping through an IV for the sick and the elderly. I did not mention that I knew what that was, how I’d lived on it for weeks at a time, but I felt understood more deeply by them than I had been understood in a while.

  The rest of dinner was a daze of food, and then the dessert, a banana pudding Anita insisted we at least taste. It came topped with marshmallow and meringue, four Nilla Wafers standing in the sugary soup of it. Everyone else tasted, and I ate most of it, and then we slapped two credit cards down to split the cost, which wasn’t really fair to Anita and Paula as Anita hadn’t had a drink and they only ordered half of what Ramon and I had ordered, and this, along with the amount of food I’d personally consumed, is one of the many things I would feel guilty about as I lay awake at three in the morning.

  But I didn’t know that yet when they dropped us back at the hotel, where, in our unremarkable room, my husband and I undressed without speaking in the near-dark, two moving shadows in a foreign space. I could feel my stomach distended from the excessive dinner, a stomach not unlike a starving child’s.

  We got into bed, between the cold white sheets, and we lay there in the dark. I could hear us breathing but I could not reach out to touch Ramon’s hand, not even to tell him, tomorrow will be better, or to make a joke about the Killers. Or to tell him I loved him. And I did love him that night.