The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  I imagined that town in winter, the cruel weather effect of the Finger Lakes, the way—before I had gotten Harriet—that I had walked the neighborhoods, stooped, freezing, barely able to carry the brutal weight of my coat and scarf and mittens.

  “Do you want to go?” I asked Ramon.

  “To go to a freezing town for a freezing weekend in the middle of freezing winter? Not really,” he said. “Is Paula going?”

  “Just Anita. You like Anita,” I told him, as if he needed reminding. “And Harriet will have such fun going back.” I wondered if I would enjoy this return, or if it would spark some deep vulnerability that had not been excised with the surgeon’s cut.

  I thought of Harriet springing through a blanket of snow. It is a fact that dogs are like humans in that they make long, deep friendships; they recognize places they have loved, and I pictured her bouncing through the high snow along the creek, running into some of her old pals from puppydom, though most of those dogs would be gone now.

  “I have all this work.” Ramon waved toward the dining room, the large glass table strewn with papers and contracts. This was his new default position. As a freelancer, he could always be burdened by deadlines and future projects or trying to acquire such things.

  “You do?” I asked. “Like what?”

  “Several things,” he said, very specifically.

  “I think I’m going to go up,” I said. “I’ve got another ten days until school starts. I think it might be fun.”

  “If you think fun is freezing your ass off, by all means, have at it,” Ramon said, cracking open his laptop. Sometimes he looked so out of place here. In the dining room, and also in New York. I thought of him at a café in Terracina, idly ordering the sardine pasta and muscat. As I clomped awkwardly around the village, heavy with my Americanness—my clothes, my books, my decidedly un-Italian shoes—Ramon’s gestures were elegant and effortless.

  Now I got up to go to my own computer, and passing through Ramon’s new office, our dining room, I could see him begin a game of some kind—involving mice, or perhaps it was little hedgehogs—rutting around underground and digging a system of mazes.

  “I think a trip will be fun, Ramon,” I said. “I can show you all the fabulous places where I hung out in grad school: the hippie restaurant, the really lame local bar, the place where people fling themselves off bridges and into the gorges. The little hospital where I stayed for days before going to the cancer center in Baltimore.” And there it was too, the hospital dark, the slip of light beneath the door, the sound of nurses, the squeak of their shoes, the beeping of machines, the weeping of visitors, the click of my professor’s knitting needles, Lucy in a dark corner, rising to leave. The body really does remember what the mind long ago let fade.

  Ramon looked up.

  “We need a break.” As I said this, I realized it terribly clearly. “Something to get us out of here.” I looked around the room. We had been held hostage by our wants.

  “Another time, okay?” He turned back to the computer and,

  I assumed, to his hedgehogs channeling their way aboveground

  for air.

  I nodded, but he did not see me. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  Three days later, I headed upstate alone.

  _______

  Driving into town was just as I remembered: rolling hills and wide expanses of snow, a low gray sky that gave way to the town, overcast, gloomy, blighted. I pulled into the lot at the Holiday Inn, where the rooms were practically free as students were not yet back to school, and I checked in with Harriet.

  An hour later, we were at the mouth of the trail with Anita and two of her spinones, Madeleine and Toby. Harriet sniffed at their asses, and they sniffed at hers, and, for the first time in over a year, Harriet got down on her haunches and barked, ready to play.

  “You brought two dogs with you? Wow.”

  “I’m a vet,” Anita said. “We collect animals for a living. At least these monsters aren’t sick. I can’t tell you how many vet friends we’ve got who have birds with broken wings and cats in kidney failure, dogs lumpy with tumors.”

  “Really.” I could see the small wooden bridge that led to the trail through the woods and then a path along the frozen creek.

  “It’s what makes us vets,” she said.

  “I used to come here in graduate school. When I first got Harriet.”

  Anita stepped ahead and we crossed over the footbridge. “I think you guys will love it,” I said.

  “It’s cold as shit here.” She rubbed her arms.

  I laughed. Ramon had not been wrong about that. Anita was dressed in several layers of hair-covered polar fleece. I wore a parka that had sat in the trunk of my car since I’d left this frozen town.

  I had been in school here after the second surgery, alone in a winter so brutal even the students were isolated from one another. After recovering at home in Virginia, in my sister’s room, as I could not walk the steps to the attic, I went back to school just as soon as I had the vigor to open a can of soup. This was before Harriet, and I walked the streets of that town on my own, to build up strength. My weight had dropped to just over one hundred pounds. My hair had begun to grow back slowly, in clumps. Even my coat felt heavy, too much to bear. My scalp and face flaked and itched. I remember picking my way along the snow and ice, like an old person, fearful of falling.

  The math I had been doing was different then: it only counted backward from the moment. Nine years earlier I had watched my sister slam the door in my face, refusing to say good-bye, as I drove away to school. Seven years: my college roommate and I by a campsite in Utah, sipping wine and reading Jack Kerouac. Three years: a breakup with a classical Greek scholar I’d met at a party in Tribeca. But then the future stopped; the math no longer moved in front of the present. Even my imagination, the foil of memory’s powerful muscle, ceased.

  Anita and I were silent as we walked through the woods, and I could hear the crunch of branches and the hard earth beneath our feet as I watched Harriet bound up the small hills and then return, leading Madeleine and Toby through the snowbanks and fallen trees. There is little as beautiful as dogs running free through the woods.

  We walked for an hour or so, until our extremities were uncomfortably numb, and then Anita and I agreed to meet for dinner.

  In the hotel, as Harriet curled up on the bed, exhausted,

  snoring—a bug in a rug, my grandmother used to say of any contented creature—I checked my e-mail. Notes on the birthmother letter. I went to make the corrections right away, as we were losing time.

  We were always losing time.

  Under the section “Our Interests,” I had written: We really enjoy the country, where we can all run around, pick blackberries behind our friends’ house upstate, and kayak in the pond.

  Here were Tiffany or Crystal’s editorial suggestions: After the blackberries is a great place for an example, something like, “we look forward to our little one giggling as they squish the berries in his or her hands as we bake our blackberries into yummy pies.”

  It is? I thought. Really? But I did what I was told, minus the little one and yummy. Time was of the essence, yes, but Ramon and I had agreed we would try to be as true to who we were as possible, even if we might still be discovering what that meant in this unending new phase of our lives.

  _______

  Anita and I met at the famous hippie restaurant I had hated in graduate school. I hated it still. The waitress smelled of patchouli and armpits, and she told us about the special lasagna made from house-made soy cheese and spinach, picked under the shamanistic light of the New York State moon and stars, and also a special ancient grain medley of amaranth, spelt, and millet served with maize and beans.

  “For the love of God,” I said, “We’d like a bottle of the Shalestone red.” It was the name of a local winery I still remembered from a trip I took there with other first-year graduate students when I had just arrived at school.

  Anita
snorted. “What is Shalestone?”

  “Everything local,” I said. “It’s their thing.”

  The wine came and we ordered our food and then we both sat back and relaxed in earnest.

  “How are you guys doing?” I asked.

  She raised her eyebrows and nodded her head slowly. “Eh. This whole thing sucks. Have you done that fucking letter yet?”

  “In process,” I said.

  “We just finished it. It’s approved.”

  “Are you serious? How?”

  “Just did what we’re told. We love ponies and puppies and bunnies and unicorns. We have flexible schedules and a three-bedroom house. Got the home study done, too. We are very good at getting stuff done, Paula and I.”

  “That,” I said as I gulped at my wine and watched several locals enter the restaurant, “is awesome.

  “So being a vet . . .” I changed the topic in order to quell my growing panic that Anita and Paula might get a baby first. “Tell me all about it.”

  Anita talked about clicker training and animal obesity, and I talked about Harriet and how perfect she was—like a person almost. Anita nodded in assent and then we discussed their home in North Carolina and what Ramon and I liked to do in Brooklyn. We’d had two glasses of wine by the time our meals, two heaping piles of mush, arrived. I dug in, and despite the disagreeable presentation, the food was comforting and delicious.

  We ordered another bottle of wine, and after we got deep into that came the emmer and raisin pudding and flourless dark chocolate cake. Then we went out to the new “cocktail place”—and by cocktail place, I mean a dark room with a couch and vodka that was not dispensed from a gun—across the commons, where I ordered us martinis.

  After, we made our way, rather drunkenly, out to the street. We were padded up with scarves and hats and mittens, human teddy bears, as we hugged good-bye.

  “Thank you so much for inviting me up,” I said. “It was a good thing for us to do.”

  Anita placed a lint-covered, lumpy fleece glove on each side of my face. “So good to see you!”

  I don’t know who went in first for the kiss. I think now it might have been Anita, because it was I who pulled away. As it was happening, though, I felt her soft lips and her warm tongue flickering against mine, and it was delicious, for a moment, to be kissing on the deserted street of a deserted college town.

  “Hey.” I pulled away. I licked my lips and instantly they froze.

  “Goodness,” Anita said. “I didn’t see that coming.”

  “No.” I touched my lips with my mitten. Swish swish went my jacket. I had never thought I’d kiss anyone new again. “Me either.”

  Anita cleared her throat.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  She nodded and looked down.

  “Well,” I said. “This was fun. I’m going back to the hotel.”

  Anita looked up and nodded. “It was,” she said. “Thank you.”

  We both turned away, then, and headed in different directions, Anita to her car—which I should have prevented due to all the drinking—and me to my hotel at the other end of the commons. My parka, moving against itself, hissed at me as I walked away.

  _______

  The next day I woke up late, with a hangover, and I dragged myself out to walk Harriet. It had snowed again during the night and the town was covered in a blanket of white, concealing the cars and garbage cans and streetlamps, and also further defining them.

  I thought about Anita then, as I had during the night, when I’d woken with a start, zapped awake. Then I’d felt horribly guilty, and I’d wondered what Ramon had been doing on that night, and also on any number of occasions we left each other to our own devices, relieved to be apart and not to be confronted by our lonely coupledom.

  Driving home, past the hills, the clapboard houses set beneath the horizon line of trees and over the hanging green bridges that cross so many upstate towns, I wondered why I had done that. There had been other drunken evenings, with other people, on many other nights, so why had this happened with Anita? It was nothing, a quick kiss on a frozen night, and then the rescinding of that kiss. I thought of Anita all bundled up in her layers of fleece, her dark wavy hair and her ruddy skin, and how her eyes squinted just at the outside corners of her eyes, like pulled spiderwebs. But in that moment, despite being wrapped in all of winter’s effects, I felt my costume undoing, as if I was unzipping my outer casing, stepping out of the livery I now wore. I was getting closer. To someone. Recently it seemed everyone I had loved was receding.

  I wished for Lucy. Or for what I wanted Lucy and I to be to each other as adults. When I went to college my sister would call and report on all our parents’ usual activities. Mom’s away this month, she’d say. Dad’s taken up cooking, she’d report. Italian.

  Once, she’d called sobbing. This was when Claudine left. Did you know she had children of her own? she’d asked me.

  I’d had no idea that Claudine had children, that she tended to us and then went home to her own. And who watched them by day? I wondered what they looked like, what they wore, if their beds were made and what they were covered in. If they were girls, or boys, or both. If they cried in her lap, head on her breast, little fingers reaching to the shining, synthetic hairs of her wig, the way Lucy did. Or if they kept away from her as they aged, watching her from hulking shadows, as I had. It is a historical fact that African-American women have raised a considerable number of white American women’s children. I know this now, but how did I become part of a dialectic and not notice it, not even later?

  She was practically my mother, Lucy had said.

  Several years later, Lucy visited me in graduate school, before I got sick. I had dragged her to classes with me, introducing her to professors whom I called by their first names. Jean, I’d said, oh-so-casually, meet my sister. What was Lucy doing then? Waitressing, I believe. Did I say, Jean, meet my sister, the waitress?

  While it is likely true that I did speak more that day in my classes in an effort to show off to Lucy, I was shocked when, after class, at the bar around the corner from my house, a place where I proudly knew the bartender, Lucy downed three whiskey sours in quick succession and turned instantly dark.

  “Such a showoff.” She looked straight into the mirror behind the bar, blackened in spots, as if the reflective parts had been rubbed out.

  I smiled at the bartender, Charlie, who made me excellent old- fashioneds when I needed them, like on those late afternoons in the premature upstate winter dark, those short fearful days when I thought the worst thing that would happen was that I would remain insecure in my work and so would not find a place in the academy. And then I looked at my sister in that bar mirror and laughed. Because I thought she was joking.

  Her eyes grew small. “You always try to be so goddamn smart,” she said, sliding off her stool. “When does it end?” she asked as she went toward the door.

  I watched her slam out of the bar, and then I paid up, apologizing to Charlie, and followed after her. I found her on my front stoop, waiting for me.

  “Lucy,” I said. “Come on.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. As I unlocked the door, pushing the warped wood open with my shoulder, I heard her stand and follow me inside.

  I put the teakettle on and then came out to the living room, where she sat, brooding, in the dark. I took off my coat and smelled the cigarettes from the bar in my hair.

  “Lucy,” I said. I sat down next to her. “I’m sorry.”

  It was the first time I had realized it: I have always been looking ahead. I rarely saw my sister because she was always behind me.

  I watched her remove her coat in the blue dark. The kettle whistled.

  “Okay?” I stood and moved to turn on a lamp.

  I saw my sister nodding, shyly, as the room filled with delicate light.

  And now, if I were to call Lucy to tell her what had happened with Anita, how I had done this strange and horrible thing in that same town, all
I could imagine hearing between us was the sound of the surf or the caw of a foreign bird.

  _______

  When I arrived home, Ramon was playing his hedgehog/mouse game, several beer bottles on the table.

  “Have you even moved?” I asked, dropping my bags.

  “Barely,” he said.

  “Living it up, I see.” I bent down to kiss him on the cheek. I should mention Anita. Say something and make it go away, I thought.

  “I don’t know.” Ramon stared straight ahead at his computer. He didn’t even greet Harriet. “Sometimes I just think I’m living it all down.”

  I looked over at my husband. It was not worth repeating, I thought, nodding at the five bottles of beer on the table, lined up in a perfect row. I took off my parka. He was far away. “Sorry,” I said.

  Ramon looked up at me. He smiled. “Oh, by the way,” he said. “Lucy called.”

  13

  __

  In the two months that had stretched out between Raleigh and the information session in White Plains, there was Anita upstate and then, as always, there were pregnancies. Three of my friends informed me—some gingerly, as sensitively as they could, some in mass e-mails to avoid telling me directly—that they were pregnant. One friend gave birth to an eight-pound boy, and another had to have a surgical abortion at six months due to a rare genetic disease. She already had a child, but I don’t think this made it easier for her when, in the supermarket, old ladies put their hands on her stomach, not knowing that inside was only a ghost.

  That was when Michelle let me know Zoe would have a sibling.

  “You’re pregnant?” I said when she called with the news.

  “Yes! Yes. I’m so relieved, you know? Thank God,” she said. “You just never know if it’s going to work out. Of course, you know what I mean.”

  “Congratulations, Michelle!” I was in my office/closet trying to get organized. I looked out onto the street, where two women walked together, both about to burst, one’s stomach taut and rounded, a fanged snake who’d eaten a bowling ball, the other’s belly torpedoed, as if she’d inhaled a missile.