The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  For hours I lay that way, unmoving, until the strange fingers of an orange-streaked dawn made their way into the room, illuminating the synthetic hotel curtains and then the polyester blanket—the first thing we had done upon arrival was remove the comforter from the bed due to its germs, its semen, its chemicals and killants!—in fuzzy gray light. Finally, in the blurry sunrise, I turned on my side and watched my husband asleep, acutely aware then that I did not know what brings two people together, what divides them, what can possibly let them reconnect. How elastic is a marriage?

  Likewise, we could not get back that time wasted on failing. We could not turn around those awful moments of not succeeding in having a child, and I did not know that night and early morning if Ramon’s and my relationship had already given out from it, the resilience of our connection worn thin without snapping. I did not know if it would soon split, or if we would manage through this, remain somehow supple, but I rose anyway, and in the glare of the fluorescent bathroom light, I turned on the shower to the highest heat, watched the steam fill the tub, already fogging the mirrors as I stepped in to get ready for the morning.

  7

  __

  The pièce de résistance of that weekend in North Carolina was not the pom-poms or the filling out of the profile form, or even the meat-filled dinner; it was not the sleepless nights in a lonely, sad hotel. It was the film.

  Good God, the film.

  It began Sunday morning’s training session. Nickie wasn’t there, so Crystal and Tiffany, now seated at the head of the pushed-together tables, timidly waited for all of us to file in.

  When we were all accounted for—public relations Gabe and journalist Brian filing in last and without apology—Crystal or Tiffany stood up.

  “We have a movie this morning!” she announced.

  The other one, Tiffany or Crystal, also stood. “We usually try and have birth parents come in to talk to you guys. And also some of our clients and the kids they’ve adopted. But today, we’re going to show a movie instead.”

  I looked at Ramon, my face asking, Why? Another wave of panic: this place is not real. They have no real birthmothers. They have no real people who have adopted real children. This isn’t even a real table. We are in a diorama, I thought, like the one depicting Native Americans swaddled in smallpox-infested blankets Lucy and I had seen at the Smithsonian.

  Tiffany or Crystal continued. “It’s a little out-of-date and it was really for when we started doing open adoption in the late eighties and early nineties. Just warning you! There’s some serious hair here.”

  Crystal and Tiffany giggled, their fine blond hair shining in the light, the pink of their vulnerable skulls peeking through.

  James, the volunteer fireman, stood up and flicked out the lights.

  Of course the fireman volunteers, I thought as the television went on, a square of blue and then a crude version of the sun shining over the agency logo, flickering across the screen.

  I half expected a sex-education tape to come on the display, the film of a dachshund giving birth to puppies, little beings slicked in blood and embryonic fluid, that I’d seen in fifth grade. The boys and girls had watched separately, equally entranced and repulsed by what was happening on-screen. And yet the girls all thought, Will this one day be me? I don’t see how that’s possible, we all thought, that this is our lot in life, this grossness.

  Bleary from the previous night’s whiskey and lack of sleep, I was grateful to be passive and watch a movie, to not have to think or consider our future. I was tired of deciding.

  The movie, a term I use here only loosely, began with a young woman, perhaps eighteen, who had placed her child for adoption and couldn’t have been happier about it. She spoke to the shaking camera in the backyard of a large stone house, a child, perhaps three, playing with a woman on an elaborate swing set behind her. “Come to mama,” the woman, in her late forties perhaps, cooed to the little girl as the young woman told the camera about knowing she could not parent and yet when she’d had her child, she had become a part of this new family. Through openness, she said. It had been amazing.

  The birthmother, who, one could tell when the camera panned out a bit, held a balloon as she spoke—was it a gift for her or the child?—discussed how she saw the family and her daughter often, sometimes five times a year, and always—no matter what!—on Mother’s Day.

  I admit my heart fell a little. Am I allowed to ask where I fit in here? There is a woman who gives birth and that is not I. And then she is in our lives—Ramon’s and mine, ours, whatever that life will look like—however she chooses to be. I accept that, but I had to turn away from the screen; when do I get to be the mother?

  Perhaps never. This, I realized now, is also an option, even if it is not a box I have checked. Breathless, the adoptive mother—that’s what she kept calling herself, that’s what everyone but the child referred to her as, and the rumble of a riot began again in my chest—discussed how open adoption had given them a whole new layer to the notion of family. As she said this, the birthmother presented the child with the balloon. The child promptly let the balloon go and at first everyone sucked in their breath, and then, as if becoming aware that this was being filmed, they caught themselves. Let’s all wish on it, the adoptive mother suggested. On command, everyone closed their eyes tighttighttight, and the balloon floated gently up into the sky.

  Then a new couple abruptly flashed on the screen. They looked high school age, and attractive.

  “How did you decide to place your child?” an off-screen interviewer asked.

  They spoke about being very much in love and also devoutly Christian but not wanting children so early in life. I was cheered by this couple, who sat close to each other and answered the interviewer’s questions. One day, she said, taking the boy’s hand in hers, we will have a family of our own.

  I hoped they would, and I thought about loss and what it can do to love. And how the hardship was really more hers, bodily anyway. Or perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps the birthfather wandered through his days unsure what was the matter, but knowing, profoundly, that something important, ineffable, had escaped him.

  “How did you decide on the adoptive parents?” the voice asked.

  The couple looked at each other and laughed. “It sounds so silly,” he said, “but I’m a musician. I mean, I want to be. And Tony, the adoptive father, also plays music. We both like, umm, Crash Test Dummies, Barenaked Ladies, alternative stuff, and he had that on his profile. It made me feel connected to him. Now we hang out and jam together. It’s kind of awesome, and I feel like we chose for our baby what we might have been.”

  The young woman nodded her head. “Or what we might become,” she said. “Now that we have the chance.”

  “It’s true it’s the littlest thing that makes you decide,” she said. “We chose to live close and be involved, we have Christmas together, and Mother’s Day of course, and it is really nice to be able to see our daughter growing up. But before that we weren’t sure about near or far, we just knew not in New York City. That was our number one criteria. Not in New York City, people get shot there.”

  I snapped to attention and looked around the room to see how the others had reacted to this. Martin and James were nodding their heads in agreement. And so were Herman and Alex, and I even saw Paula and Anita smiling a bit, though perhaps this was just to show goodwill toward the couple. Or, I thought in a more sinister manner, they were smiling about the competitive nature of this venture; if no one wanted to place babies in New York, then we were out of the running. Get rid of the straight Brooklyn couple! Which only meant more opportunity for the gun-bearing fireman and his nurse partner.

  The only person I didn’t look at was Ramon.

  After the film, James the fireman flicked the lights on.

  Tiffany or Crystal rubbed her hands together. “Let me just say, the New York comment was from a long time ago.” She looked at Ramon and me. “I meant to warn y’all about that.”

&
nbsp; Paula cleared her throat. “So what happened to that couple anyway?”

  “What do you mean?” Crystal or Tiffany asked, cocking her head.

  “Well,” Anita said, and I noticed how often she completed Paula’s sentences in a way that made Paula shrink back in her chair, “the musician couple, in college. Are they still together? That was what, fifteen years ago. Do they have kids now?”

  Tiffany and Crystal nodded. One of them said, “Well, they broke up when they were in college, not long after this was filmed, actually. And we lost track of them, to be honest. They don’t see the adoptive family anymore.”

  “What?” Brian the journalist said. “I thought this was a film to promote openness.”

  “It does, and we as an agency do, but, to be honest, many of the birthmothers lose contact. If they move, or have other children, more often than not—statistically speaking, I mean—they fall out of touch.”

  You catch more bees with honey than with vinegar, but who the hell wants a collection of bees? And so I asked, “If openness is best for the birthmother, and dealing with her grief is a large part of this, which I totally understand, but if it’s also about the child knowing who her family is so she doesn’t have to fantasize about her parents, and doesn’t feel abandoned, well, what happens, say, when the child is four, and the birthmother just disappears? What

  about the child’s grief? To feel left twice? How is this healthy for anyone?”

  The room was silent but for some head-bobbing in assent, and I could feel myself galvanizing my troops, a trait I inherited from my mother.

  Crystal or Tiffany paused a moment before speaking. “The child will know the reality. Open adoption is not a science, but from the research we all know open adoption is best for all parties. It is.”

  I looked around the table and all of us were nodding, myself included. But how did we know? We didn’t, after all, have children.

  “But there is no guarantee that it works for everyone or that it is stable at all times,” she continued. “This is about people.”

  I thought of myself as a teenager, those nights I screamed at my mother, who would not let me go to a concert or to a friend’s to study. What would that have been like had I known I had another mother, just in the next town or state. I could, in these fraught moments, tell my mother I liked this other mother better, or worse, that I was leaving to find her. What would I do if my daughter left for her biological mother?

  The lawyer, with her purple hair, her lost furniture, her fears, made every ounce of sense now. Someone else out there will always be the mother. This is true for the lawyer’s children as well—it is the biology of adoption—but that mother will be unfindable.

  Better, I thought then, to colonize a country, take the Chinese children, the Koreans, the Ethiopian babies that, yes, I knew would be black than to live through the thought of the mother’s arriving, or worse, perhaps, the anticipation of her sure departure. I had no idea what the effect of her going, leaving that teenager only to disappear, would be.

  “There’s no guarantee of anything with children of your own either, genetic children, I mean,” Tiffany or Crystal said.

  “That’s a good point. Nothing in life is guaranteed. It just isn’t.” Gabe shared this with the rest of us.

  “Exactly,” Crystal or Tiffany said.

  Family, just the word. Even second generation.

  There it was: my grandfather holding my hand in the dark movie theater as we watched the red balloon in the film, hovering over the streets of Paris, waiting for its chosen little boy. I imagined it now, my grandfather long gone, the balloon that birthmother held, lingering at my window, and then following me down the streets of my Brooklyn neighborhood, past our butcher and our cheese shop, the yoga studios that weren’t there when I moved in, past the restaurants with their local and sustainable food, past the park with the fountain kids run through all summer long. It waits for me at Harriet’s favorite grassy hill, where it will meet all the other pink metallic unicorn balloons in Brooklyn, and it will soar up into the sky, far above my brownstone-lined borough, above our city; all the balloons, together, will carry me high into the air, and very far away.

  8

  __

  My mother stood waiting at the door with Harriet like June fucking Cleaver when we reached my parents’ house late Sunday night.

  “How’d it go?” Her arms were open.

  “Fine.” I put down my bags and caught Harriet’s paws in my arms, leaned in for her smooches.

  “So,” she said, eyes wide. “Where’s our new grandchild?”

  I stood up from Harriet and looked at my mother. “You can’t be serious.” I placed her front legs back on the floor.

  That was when my father came out of the living room.

  “Hi, guys.” He kissed us both.

  “It’s going to be a wait, Joanne,” Ramon said. He turned to my father. “It could be a long wait for a baby,” he said.

  My father shifted his feet. “Sure. Of course it will be a wait. Of course.”

  “I mean, Jesus, Mom.”

  “Honey, I was joking.” My mother went into the living room for the spread of cheeses and a tapenade I now saw on the coffee table. “I just hope it comes before I’m too old to get on the ground and play with it.”

  I let out a sound that resembled the initial escape of steam in a humidifier, the warm steam of illness.

  “Sweetie, Mom’s been really hoping this weekend went well. Just so you know. We can’t wait to hear about it. I made venison!” My father clapped his hands together.

  “And I made risotto,” my mother interjected. “Right?”

  “Your mother made her famous tri-mushroom risotto. The mushrooms are from the farmer’s market.”

  My mother’s famous risotto? Famous to whom? I knew I’d certainly never tasted it or heard tell of it. I also knew my mother was not aware of any other mushroom variety than the porcinis she got at the Safeway (did she even know they were porcinis?) until she started reading Alice Waters and talking about the importance of eating together, as a family, though of course by then neither my sister nor I lived at home.

  Ramon said, “Well, that sounds positively delicious!”

  Ramon was always so sweet to my parents, but the truth is, he has a delicate, catered-to-by-an-old-world-mother constitution, which makes him sensitive to just about everything physical, and we’d eaten so much meat the night before I knew it sounded as revolting to him as it did to me.

  I, however, had the energy for only one battle. “Well, we’re exhausted and I don’t really want to talk about it, okay?” I cleared my throat. “Dinner sounds awesome!”

  “Cheese?” My mother swatted Harriet’s nose; she was already grazing around the table.

  “But hopefully it will be soon.” Ramon walked over to the coffee table and cut a slice of Manchego, clearly chosen in his honor. “I, for one, certainly hope this is all over very soon.”

  Why couldn’t he have just said “we”? I clenched my teeth. I am angry at everyone, I thought. How will I stop being angry at everyone? Ramon had opened the door to discussion.

  “I understand.” My mother watched him eat her proffered cheese. “We are really excited to hear all about your weekend. You know you haven’t talked to us much about this at all.”

  I closed my eyes. How would I explain? About one of those blond social workers—Crystal or Tiffany, with their Johnson’s No More Tangles–like smell, asking us, their faint eyebrows raised: Will the adoptive child feel welcome in your home, embraced by all members of the family? Will the adoptive child feel welcomed by the prospective adoptive grandparents?

  “We’re not against talking to you about it, Mom.”

  “Thanks so much for taking Harriet.” Ramon looked at both of my parents.

  “We love having her!” My dad cut himself a big slice of cheese.

  “Anyway.” I grabbed my bag to go upstairs. “Just so you know, we’re dancing as fast as we can.”<
br />
  _______

  Up up up to the attic. The goddamned attic. It is a place, but let’s be real, the attic is also a metaphor. And so is the woman who lives there. I was moved to the attic when Lucy was born and she, in all her adorable, teensy babyness, took over the room next to my parents’ bedroom.

  I heard the padding of Ramon making his way up the carpeted stairs behind me.

  “Can you believe that?” I hissed, turning toward him.

  “Come on, Jesse.” Ramon reached the top step. “Your mom’s just trying to help.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Oh, please.”

  “You have to relax.” Ramon put his hands on my shoulders.

  I shook them loose. “Seriously? If you tell me to calm down, I might lose my mind.”

  “I said relax.”

  The last time I’d seen Michelle, Zoe had been playing with some hideous bald doll at the table, and, reaching to pat my arm, she’d told me, as her kid banged the shit out of the doll, It will happen for you guys. Everyone I know who has really wanted a child has gotten one, she’d said. I’d laughed inwardly then, but now, here in the attic, I thought perhaps the problem was that I had not wanted this enough. Perhaps I had, like so many mothers, had my doubts. My wasted wishes, ones I’d made in this room, for boys to love me, for my sister to disappear, for my nightmares to recede and my dreams to come true—perhaps these were responsible for what I now lacked.

  “I am as relaxed as I’m going to get,” I told Ramon as I lay back on my old twin bed.

  “You know, we don’t have that many black friends,” Ramon said. “A few, but not that many.”

  I breathed deeply. “What’s your point?”

  “You took the black pom-pom. You just took them all without thinking.”

  “Oh, I thought,” I said.

  “Did you though?” Ramon asked.