The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Paola stood on the terrace above me; I could see her out of the corner of my eye, her head pitched down. I could not see her face, but I caught her crossed arms and the wild, loose pieces of her black hair, her bright rustling housedress.

  “Ramon,” I said. “Please tell your mother that if she doesn’t think I’m clean enough for you, perhaps I should leave.” My underthings were gathered in my arms, cradled there. I wasn’t sure what to do next, as I had shocked even myself; I have always had such an unbearable need to please even—perhaps especially—the people who hurt me.

  “Stop,” Ramon said. “Jesse.” He came up to me, and beneath the clothesline, now empty, he put his hands firmly on both my shoulders. “I’m sorry. She didn’t mean it that way,” he said. And then? “I did tell you not to bring lingerie.”

  I stared at him for a moment, speechless, and then I looked up to see his mother above us, a smile of understanding, like sunlight, spreading across her face.

  “It’s underwear. Pantalons,” I said, because I had taken French in high school and somehow this is what came to me. “Sous-vêtements,” I corrected myself.

  “Mama,” he said, and then he said something as angry and beautiful as anything and everything else they’d told each other since we’d arrived the previous day.

  “What?” she said, again in clean, barely accented English, five fingertips at her breast. “Okay!” Now she brushed her hands together swiftly. “She may clean her own clothes then.”

  “Yes.” My eyes, caught in the light, squinted in her direction. “Thank you, Paola. I think that would be best.”

  _______

  That day, I did not get an apology but I did get the larger shank of lamb that evening, and, the following morning, my own full glass of fresh-squeezed juice.

  Back in America, in Virginia, my father, when he was all cried out, had told me how troubled he was for me, how he’d only ever wished for us to be happy, that my happiness had been all he’d ever wanted, Lucy, too, and look at us, one of us living hand-to-mouth without so much as a telephone—“I mean, where is Lucy?” he’d asked—and then you, he’d said, you so busy with wanting all these things you can’t have.

  “All these things?” But the rage, it had receded. In that way, the manner in which it arrives and leaves, rage is like love. It is unclear to me what brings it to me, what takes it away, and how I will know if it has permanently disappeared. “Only a child,” I’d said quietly. “I only want a child, which everyone deserves.”

  He had straightened himself up. “Whatever you need us to do, we want to help you,” he said. “Not get in the way.”

  And I had shaken my head, and I had believed him; I believed him as we threw our bags into the trunk and made our way to the highway.

  And now, returning to Brooklyn, I thought of the red balloon following our car as we double-parked in front of our building

  and dumped out all our stuff on the wrought iron–enclosed front stoop, and then circled the block looking for parking, and then found it, and then let Harriet out to pee, and then walked back and up the four steps and in and then up the four flights and then: home.

  Harriet wagged her tail. She didn’t hate it there, really. She knew—and she did know—that tomorrow she’d be walked and fed and petted and loved, and I knew that tomorrow I would teach for part of the day and I would meet with some students and then I would return home to this place I was lucky enough to call my neighborhood. I looked at Ramon, who was hanging his coat, and I felt so fortunate and content. Out our window, past the square backyards of brownstones on Second Street, past the windows of those brownstones, and into the distance, the back of the red Kentile sign obscured by the F train slowly rolling by, the sun was setting, and I felt light, for just one moment liberated from the reason we’d left Brooklyn. I ducked my head to look out and see if the balloon wasn’t in fact hovering above our fire escape on its long white string, waiting to be held.

  “We’ve got voice mails.” Ramon held out the phone. “Your parents.” He twirled his index finger, a gesture to rush the message along. “And Cheryl,” he said. “You have a department meeting tomorrow. Oh.” He smiled. “Anita and Paula.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “They’re happy they met us,” he said, hanging up the phone. The living room was illuminated in the late-afternoon sun. Harriet lapped up three-day-old water in the kitchen. Everything was cozy and sweet and good.

  “I’m happy we met them, too.” I sifted through the mail and threw it on the dining room table.

  “They want to know if we’re going to use the designer the agency recommended,” Ramon reported. He went into the kitchen and began opening and closing cabinets. “For the brochure. Which I can do, you know. Easily. Why should we pay someone when I can do it?”

  “Hmmm.” I wanted to do exactly what the agency said, just follow the plan, down to the designing of the brochure, the right smile, displaying teeth, evergreens behind us in the correct-size photo. There was no room for error here. I could feel my heart rate speed up, running toward something or away from it; what is the difference if it’s all just a circle anyway?

  “We need to make an appointment tomorrow with social services for the visit,” I said.

  “We will.” Ramon stood in the kitchen doorway. “We just got in. Relax.”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “It will get done.” He went to the couch and tipped his head back, touched his head to the exposed-brick wall.

  “By magical fairies? We need to get on it.”

  Ramon closed his eyes and sighed.

  I looked at my watch. “Look at the time,” I said to Ramon.

  Neither of us moved. In the hallway the scream of our downstairs neighbor’s child shot through the house. A car alarm went off on our street.

  I sat down on the couch next to my husband, my elbows sharp on my knees. “It’s so much later than I thought,” I said, and just like that, the afternoon light slipped out of the living room, and the gray of winter crept in.

  ____

  Part 2

  THE APPLICATION

  11

  __

  Winter 2010

  If everything about being a mother is a memory—the memory of your own childhood evoked by the sounds and smells and touches of your child and the air and water and substance that surround her—then working hard to become a mother is about the imagination, an unknown future. All the mothers have wondered: What will it be like? Who will I be if I become a mother? What will be gained and what will be lost? Will I be the same woman to myself? To the world?

  My mother’s water broke while she was shopping for coats on sale at Garfinckel’s. There was a small dark spot in the outerwear department until I was three years old, and my mother used to take me there to show me the history of my birth, evidence that it had taken place, that the story she had told me held truth. Then one day the carpets were changed, and that little spot—substantiation of my birth story—was gone.

  But still I have this story.

  What story will I have to tell? When one doesn’t know if or when or how or from where a baby will emerge, the questions change. Where will my baby come from? Who will grow him first? When? How will I know she will be safe until I find her? It is all invention, and the endless possibility of it—all the things one cannot know, and so cannot unknow—can make for a world of fantasy, thought with no end or resolution.

  Which is why details can offer comfort, however cold. The week after returning from Raleigh, I was relieved to be busy with work and meetings and grading student papers on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the suffragette movement. Men say we are ever cruel to each other. Let us end this ignoble record and henceforth stand by womanhood, she’d said at her address at the Seneca Falls women’s convention of 1848, and this appeared, largely without attribution or analysis, in nearly every paper.

  I called social service organizations to secure yet another training session at the earliest date possible be
cause we were required to use a New York agency to do all the local paperwork, including the home study, a major event in the adoption process. Other particularities offered refuge from my own invention. For the home study, a social worker was to come to our home and interview us, to ensure that we were both suitable parents and lived in a satisfactory home.

  After securing the earliest date—January!—I nudged Harriet, who was asleep beneath my desk, gently in her soft stomach with my slipper.

  “Want to go for a hike, H?” I asked.

  She slept on.

  “Harriet!” I knelt down. “Want to go for a walk?”

  Her eyes shot open. And then closed again.

  Eventually she rallied and I packed up water and a few snacks for us both, and we got into the car. After some pawing and sighing, she settled herself in, and then we were off to hit traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and on the West Side Highway, before we were in more traffic on the George Washington Bridge. Ramon and I had once biked uptown from Brooklyn all the way to the George Washington Bridge the autumn after we’d met in Italy, and I remembered the exhilaration of getting to the bridge and riding out over the glistening river. And then: sudden, paralyzing fear. I could not move, not forward or backward. We had walked our bikes off the bridge and cycled back to Brooklyn, where we wolfed down burgers and too many beers as the sun went down, and it was the kind of day that I recognized as a salient memory, even while it was happening.

  Finally, Harriet and I crossed over and onto the Palisades, the Bronx across the river to my right, as glittering and shining and bright as any jewel I’d seen.

  The local news was on NPR, and soon a story about a young woman abducted as an infant in a Bronx hospital came on the radio. After twenty years, she’d been reunited with her biological mother. There had not been one day, her biological mother said, that she had not thought about her daughter and what had happened to her. What had happened was that the woman, the kidnapper, had had several miscarriages, disguised herself as a nurse, and took the child. She then went on, the piece said, to abuse her. Now the FBI was hunting her down.

  As the city fell away, and Harriet and I made our way to Harriman State Park along Seven Lakes Drive, toward the trail that snaked around and up from the water, I wondered if I understood any of the players in that drama, the child, the woman whose child was taken, the woman crazed by loss. I felt I had been all of those things; but I knew exactly which one I was now.

  _______

  At Lake Askoti, there was a large flat rock that Ramon and I would sit on and eat chicken sandwiches as Harriet flung herself into the lake, then, trembling with joy as she shook water all over our food, she would attempt to eat our sandwiches, and lick our faces, before jumping back into the water.

  Ramon and I came here on weekends, when the rock and other places to hang out comfortably around the lake were crowded with boys guzzling beer and smoking joints, and the trails were filled to bursting with families and hikers. But occasionally it was still and quiet but for the lapping of the water, the creaking of trees, and the swooping of small birds.

  When we arrived, Harriet leapt out of the car and made her way to the familiar trail, jumping in and out of the water along the lake before I even got to the water’s edge. We passed by our rock, and I stood for a moment as she hurled herself in, and then I hauled her up when she couldn’t make her way up the smooth, wet surface. The lake was a brilliant blue, a mirror reflecting a cloudless day, the remaining foliage browning. I turned from the lip of the lake and Harriet followed, pushing ahead of me, her energy boosted by being wet, and we made our way up along the rocky trail that led to another trail higher on the ridge.

  I could feel the moss and pine and dirt beneath my boots, the give of earth, and also its resistance to my steps, the way it protected its boundaries, and I felt filled up as I walked in the crisp air, across streams and up switchbacks. I felt the singing in my legs as we climbed up, passing only a German or Austrian or Dutch couple, in lederhosen, carrying crooked walking sticks, their long white hair pulled back, as they hiked the Appalachian Trail, which intersected here with our local one. We nodded hello and then Harriet and I walked along the perimeter of the hilltop, in the sun, occasionally stopping to sit and look out onto the lake and the lakes beyond, the rise and fall of the uneven trees.

  Hiking gave way to thoughts of being in that upstate town for graduate school, all the time I spent alone there in the woods with Harriet, growing stronger again after my surgeries, and with it that feeling that I might not be a stranger to myself forever. I remembered my mother seated next to me in the hospital, holding my hand. It is one of the few memories I have of us touching. I thought about the mothers as I drove onto the bridge, toward home, and I remembered Harriet, just today, running down the hillside, bounding ahead of me, the splash of her entering the water, and then smiling as I came upon her, so happy in all that blue.

  12

  __

  Winter came on suddenly. An icy draft I hadn’t remembered from the previous year curled around my ankles and wrists; a raw numbing cold filled up my office as I tried to plan the following semester’s classes. Gearing up for the new semester, I had every intention of creating innovative, mind-blowingly wonderful classes, courses where students would learn about feminism and women’s diverse and global histories in creative ways, which would somehow reflect all the research I’d been doing on women’s activism in rural communities. And yet, the deadlines came and the deadlines went, and I found myself sending off the same syllabus I’d used several semesters in a row, the same books, the same supplemental reading material, my ingenuity sapped.

  How had this happened to us? my friends and colleagues asked one another, not the mothers, but those of us who had never left our careers, not for a single moment. Perhaps it was poor strategizing or lack of proper planning, or the ignominious notion that we were always on the very cusp of our most significant work, an opus that would be widely recognized, placing us far above the standard academic fray. Whatever had caused it, we marveled at where we were, midlife really, up for varying contract reviews in non-tenure-track jobs, our futures terribly unsure.

  But life, my grandmother had always told Lucy and me, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Sure enough, Ramon got laid off, along with the rest of his department. He had begun freelancing for what at first seemed like more pay, until work appeared to be something he was doing little of. I was still appointed on a contract basis, just when money seemed like it could be the answer to so many of our problems. I had visions of defying those beneficent Hague laws and just showing up in a developing country, throwing a bag of cash at someone who would run behind some bush—perhaps an African wanza tree—and return to me with a child.

  I don’t know if my grandmother knew she was quoting John Lennon, but she said it again after my grandfather died, and she said it when I got sick, and then we said it without her when she died, just before my final surgery, the one that attached what was left of my intestines together.

  My poor mother. She wept when I went in for that surgery; she wouldn’t let go of the gurney they wheeled me away on, and I know she was thinking of her mother, too, and all that could be lost.

  _______

  In the time between the training in Raleigh and the information session in White Plains, we worked on our birthmother letter. Oh, the birthmother letter. The editorial suggestions that came from the offices of Crystal or Tiffany were endless and nonsensical. As I made each correction, I longed for the editors at scholarly journals, whose comments I often laughed at as I read them aloud to Ramon. But we believed now that Crystal and Tiffany held the secret to what would “work,” the key that would unlock the doors that led to what these birthmothers, these magical earth women, wanted, the key to our own houses of happiness.

  For the birthmothers, whoever they were, wherever they were, however we would come to meet them, please please let us meet them, we would write about my pie baking and how we c
ould not wait to watch our child squish berries in her fingers. We would write about my mother-in-law’s recipes (You want rooster claw? She’s got it) and our happy visits to her village each summer. We would write about our diverse Brooklyn neighborhood, about my family’s celebrations at Christmas, where my father, in a fit of submitting to the dominant culture, dressed the house in candy canes and mistletoe and framed the fireplace with poinsettias. He placed the Christmas cards carefully along the mantel, noting who had not sent one this year and who would now be added to the list. We would address our birthmother letter to a “special person,” which we certainly believed this hypothetical woman was, though it was not how we would have chosen to express these sentiments.

  This brochure of our life featured an assortment of pictures. Our friends’ children embracing us, Ramon and I eating at large tables with our families. Here we were holding on to other peoples’ children tightly, everyone smiling brightly. These photos were chosen over those we might have picked, of Harriet and me looking out from a hilltop, Ramon crouched and smiling in the branches of one of Paola’s lemon trees, the two of us leaning into each other, beaming, before a table in Capri all those years ago, wine and bread and tomatoes and sardines set out before us, the sea winking behind us, tiny glittering whitecaps breaking. No wine in photos, we were told. Never.

  _______

  Just after the New Year, Anita called. She was attending a conference at the vet hospital where I’d gone to graduate school, and she wondered if we would meet her.