The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  My throat was again tied, as if with a large needle and coarse thread. Everyone in the room nodded, our wobbling heads an affirmation that this woman should—please—be able to foster a child again. I placed my elbows on the table, and my hands, together, pressed at my mouth, and I swallowed hard through that rough, prickly embroidery. I heard Ramon breathing, hard. Like images of dogs suffering at the hands of cruel humans, wounded birds, an old woman alone on a crowded street, I knew this story, too, would undo him. Because about all the things that mattered we were the same, and I was grateful and ashamed.

  How many ways can a person feel shame? That night, after hearing Lisa’s story, this unremitting shame was for me like the Eskimo words for snow: varied, numerous, precise, particular to any one aspect of the thing itself. I was ashamed for our behavior in the parking lot out front, for my behavior, and I was ashamed for the reckless way I had often treated my marriage, for my disregard of Ramon, and how I’d buried his want of a child in and beneath my own. Were it not for me, Ramon could have had a family. I was physically in the way of that wish, and I was lucky that he was willing to go through this with me, lucky that the family he desired was the same family I wished for. I was ashamed of my self-pity, and my glibness, the privilege of my relative youth. I was ashamed of kissing Anita beneath a frozen star-filled night. I was ashamed that I had not told Ramon, and now time had passed, and I could not. I was ashamed of the boxes I checked on those forms, of my wishes for a healthy child, for an infant, someone we might bring up from infancy and somehow call our own. I was ashamed of the boxes I had not checked, and I was ashamed of capitalism and this country that fueled it, and so my need to own, for my unwillingness to give that proprietorship up.

  The room stirred first with stunned sadness and its effects—cleared throats, shifting seats, the rustle of clothes being pulled and straightened—the sounds of the humbling of humans who had previously had the privilege of shaming others with their own dismal plights.

  Then Lydia stood up. “Thank you all for sharing your stories,” she said. “I know it’s hard to do. Now, let’s take a look at the paperwork we’ll need to do for the home study aspect of your process.”

  Relieved, we stared at yet another packet of paperwork. I pushed ours toward Ramon. It sat between us for a moment, until, with the tips of his fingers, he slid the folder toward himself, and then, slowly, as if he were creaking open a rusty old door, Ramon turned to the application.

  _______

  After the training session, we sailed home, no congestion on the road at all. It was a bright, clear January night, still very much the beginning of a new year. Perhaps this would be our year, I thought; don’t we get to have one? I looked up at the stars that punctured through that deep night blue, piercing, glinting, even this close to the city.

  I will be good, I thought. I will be positive. I will try to get the life I had before all this happened back. I will hold on to my memories that are so quickly lost but can return as well at any moment, evidence of love. I apologize for my self-pity, for my obscene wanting. I will think about Lisa.

  I watched the susurration of the swaying treeless branches in the moonlight, and I had this thought: I am getting closer to you. Closer and closer. I can feel it. I can feel you out there, I thought. Truly, I did.

  14

  __

  March 2010

  Okay, ready?”

  “Yup.”

  “You go.”

  “No, why don’t you read yours first?”

  “Okay, okay, Jesse.” Ramon ran both his hands through his hair. “I’ll go, but I’m not done with it yet.”

  “Just read what you have then.”

  “Okay. So. ‘I was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1969,’ Ramon read from his laptop. ‘When I was two years old my father, who is Spanish and a geologist, got a job working with BP.’ Can you believe it?” He looked up at me. “BP of all things.” He shook his head. “‘We moved to the Netherlands, where we stayed for two years. From there, due to his job, we moved every three to four years. We lived in Gabon, Africa; England; Argentina; Colombia; and back to the Netherlands, where I finished high school and from where I came to the States for college.’” Ramon looked up. “What do you think?”

  I shrugged. “I guess that’s as good a place to start as any.”

  “I’m using the guidelines.” He rubbed his fingers over his chin, with the dimple I have always believed to be the imprint of his mother’s watchful finger.

  “But it’s the autobiography part.”

  “Yes, but I want to be sure to address all the items in the guidelines. I’m doing it in one go.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Go.”

  He cleared his throat. “‘Growing up I remember my father working long hours and also helping my mother and me adjust to the new countries we moved to. He was a great resource. As an avid reader, he’d tell us tales and the history of the countries we were about to embark to. Moving and adjusting to new countries and cultures was hard and I remember these moments with my father. They subdued the apprehension that the moving always created. My mother, who is Italian, and had never left Italy before meeting my father, had great anxiety each time we left somewhere.’”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  Ramon looked up from the screen. “That my mother had anxiety?”

  “No. That I am well aware of. I didn’t know that your dad read to you about the places you were headed to.” He nodded and then began again. “‘All this moving forged a very strong bond between my mother and me. She was my guardian, and often, my best friend. She was a stay-at-home mom and was always around when I came home from school. Maybe even overly protective at times, but understandably so, as a lot of the environments I grew up in were quite dangerous.

  “‘Because of that, my mother kept me home a lot. My hardest times were adjusting to the new schools and making new friends with children that I often had nothing in common with. I remember moving to Venezuela and attending an American school after three years of living in England, where I was enrolled in a strict private boys’ school. I wore short trousers and had a British accent. That was a tough adjustment and something I wouldn’t necessarily want for my child, since young children can’t always understand why someone is different. Sometimes children respond with cruelty. I will always make sure that if we do move to a new environment that the transition for my child is as seamless as possible.’”

  “Cruelty?”

  Ramon swallowed. “Yes. I was bullied a great deal.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  He nodded again. “Sometimes I had to stay home from school. There was this kid who waited for me every day to beat me up. He beat me several times, but I didn’t want to alarm my mother, so I just said I fell while running track, or this kind of thing. I’m not sure she believed me, but she never asked anything else about it.”

  “I’m so sorry!” I pictured my husband as a boy in little gray wool shorts, scared and vulnerable, which affected me strangely. Pity is not love, but it can feel just like it sometimes.

  He continued reading. “‘My parents came from a different time and place in the world. Both grew up in postwar Europe and so had difficult upbringings where the focus was on the basics of existence. In raising me, I see now that these basic needs like food and shelter took precedence over my emotional and psychological health. I was taught right from wrong, and I listened well, but with my own children, while I obviously want to care for their physical needs, assure their safety, I’d also like to be a father aware of their emotional weather, too.’”

  “I like that part,” I said. “‘Emotional weather.’” I wondered whether our child would be sunny or stormy. Emotional weather. It can change so quickly.

  “‘After I moved to the U.S. to study, my parents continued moving around the world until, after four years in Indonesia, their marriage ended. My mother now lives in her birthplace, Terracina, Italy, and my father lives in Java.’”
<
br />   “Are you going to explain?”

  “No,” Ramon said.

  “It’s kind of abrupt though.”

  “I don’t think it would be good for us to discuss it.”

  I nodded. I had inadvertently learned what had actually happened to Ramon’s father on that first visit to his mother’s. It was the middle of the night, and I had woken up to the sound of chanting and the distinct smell of smoke, something burning. I tiptoed by Ramon’s bed and out into the marble foyer, which led to Paola’s room.

  There she stood, stooped, her white fleshy arms waving in the dark. Her hair had come unfurled, her face was draped over a lighted candle, and she waved incense around the room. The wall was strewn with crosses and golden icons, and candles, the kind they sell at bodegas in my Brooklyn neighborhood, surrounded her.

  Paola was spellbound—almost possessed—and before she could look up to face me, I ran back to Ramon’s room and shook him awake. “Ramon,” I said. “Something is wrong with your mother!”

  He sat up and threw the covers off, instantly vigilant, a cat poised to make his own kill. He paused this way, all bone and sinew, senses alert, and then he let out his breath, closed his eyes, and relaxed his shoulders. “She’s okay,” he said.

  “Oh.” I sat on his bed, readying for the story.

  “Don’t sit here!” he said. “She might see!”

  “Are you kidding me?” I stood up. “Your mother is having a fit or experiencing the rapture and you’re worried about her seeing me on your bed?”

  “Okay, okay.” His hand made a circular gesture in the air, Italian-style. “Calm down.”

  “Do not tell me to calm down. A word of advice? Don’t tell any woman to calm down. Ever.”

  “She’s putting a hex on the woman who stole her husband,” Ramon said.

  “Your father?”

  “The woman who stole my father.”

  “A hex.”

  He nodded.

  “Please, Ramon.”

  He leaned back on his elbows. “I’ll tell you in the morning.”

  “No.” I stamped my bare foot and it made a slapping sound. “Tell me now.”

  Ramon sat up again and rubbed his forehead. “Okay, so my parents were living in Jakarta and my father disappeared and then he returned a month later married to another woman. She was a Muslim woman and he had just become a Muslim, just out of the blue. He invited my mother to stay with them, and of course she refused, so she had to leave and come back to Italy. She believes the woman was involved with black magic.” He ducked his head so he could see out the window. “She does this on nights when there is a full moon. Okay?”

  “My God,” I said. “That’s awful.”

  “Now you know.”

  I sat across from Ramon and as I nodded, gradually, his face began to shift. I turned around, slowly, and, as if summoned, Paola stood in the threshold of the door. Moonlight fell over her long black hair and her black eyes, which made the crevassed terrain of her face a ghostly white. I screamed, and then placed my hands over my mouth, to stop myself.

  “Paola!” My heart went out to her, left all alone on the other side of the world. Her husband married to another woman. A Muslim! Her son bringing home an American Jew! This woman from this little teensy Catholic place at the unstable heel of Europe’s torn shoe.

  She crossed her arms. “You!” she said, pointing to the other bed. “What are you doing here? Get in your own bed.”

  My eyes went wide. I had wanted to talk about her life. I had wanted to place my hand softly on her forearm to tell her I was sorry for what had happened. I will help with this hex, I wanted to tell her. Can I light some candles for you?

  “Get to your own bed, now!” Paola said.

  Speechless, I scurried across the room, scrambling under the sheets. I pulled them up to my chin and watched the moon hanging over the fields—a harvest moon, huge and round and trembling and white.

  I could hear Ramon follow his mother into her room and reprimand her in Italian. I could smell the candles, snuffed out, the smoke of the extinguished incense. But I didn’t move. Not when Ramon returned, mumbling an apology. Not when he crawled into his bed and went instantly to sleep. I stayed that way, my hands shaking beneath those vinegar-scented sheets, until the moon faded into the sky and, finally, it was morning.

  “Yes,” I said now, to Ramon. “Best just to say he’s with a new family now. That you are not too terribly in touch.”

  “That we talk but don’t see each other. Just if I’m asked,” Ramon said. “If.” He adjusted the screen again, scanning the document for the place where he’d left off. “‘I was alone growing up,’” Ramon continued. “‘I felt really alone. My schools were initially hard to adjust to, but due to my athletic abilities—I held most of the track and field records in my class and was on most of the sports teams, soccer being a sport I excelled in—I was able to find my place.’”

  “What?” I said. “Track? Come on.”

  “I did! You know why I had to walk around like this?” He got up from his chair and hung his head and his shoulders low, his back stooped, as if he was imitating an elephant for a child.

  “Why?”

  “So many medals!” He sat back down and crossed his arms. “It’s true. So many medals it was difficult to stand up straight.”

  I clapped my hands and laughed. I pictured him running through some ribbon on a dusty track in a country I’d never been to, waving his arms in victory.

  “‘My favorite subjects were art and geography, yet I was very good at math and physics, and until about halfway through college I wanted to be an architect.’”

  “Is this how your mother got the idea for you to build the house?”

  “Are you going to let me finish? It’s my autobiography, stop interrupting!” he said, but he was smiling. “‘My friends through tenth grade were for the most part the “outsiders,” kids who, like myself, had come from other countries, as well as the geeky kids.’”

  “I can’t believe they ask that—about what kinds of kids we spent time with in high school.”

  “I think it’s interesting. I think who we are in high school matters. Because people don’t really change, do they? I mean, really, fundamentally? Not so much.” He turned to read again. “‘My friends and I spent a lot of our time playing Dungeons and Dragons and video games. It was only when we moved back to the Netherlands for the end of high school, where everyone was from another country, that I finally found acceptance and got along with everyone. I also finally dated a girl.’”

  “Ooh,” I said. “A girl.” But people do change. I thought of Lucy. From horseback rider to fake ID–bearing, white-faced, red-lipped clubgoer, to solo traveler. But that’s only the outside.

  “Yup. Magdalena Cortada. She was quite something.” He looked back down at the screen.

  “Well, if the name is any indication . . .”

  “‘It was when I got to college, though, that I was finally able to accept who I was and even appreciate my uniqueness. What had been a curse till then finally became an asset.’”

  “I can imagine.” I liked my husband’s difference, and the way it turned into ease when we traveled, how he shifted effortlessly from English to Spanish and how we received different treatment in the world—shelter from a storm in Costa Brava, special tapas in Barcelona, an upgraded hotel room in Madrid—because of this.

  “‘My mother is a wonderful cook who grows all her produce on her farm in Italy. Jesse gets along great with my mother, whom we visit every summer. We spend two to three weeks with her and enjoy every minute of it.’” He glared at me, his head cocked to the side.

  “Absolutely.” I nodded vigorously. “I can’t get enough of Paola’s farm.” The truth was I had grown to like it there: the town, the proximity to other towns, and the food and the sky there and the way the lemon trees smelled, the way the wine tasted, all of it sun-kissed. As an extra bonus, a few years after that night, Paola even allowed us to close th
e door to the bedroom.

  “ ‘My mother and my extended family in the village are an important part of my life. Having grown up all over the world, Terracina, which I’ve visited for almost every summer of my life, has been the one constant place I’ve gone to.’ ”

  “Umm, Ramon?” I interrupted. “Just say your father lives with a new family in Indonesia and you don’t really speak as often as you’d like.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Be careful.” What if it seems like your family is broken? I thought. Perhaps it is broken.

  “Okay. Where was I? Oh yes, here. ‘Jesse and I met in Italy, too. It was a strange confluence of events—I was early to meet friends, and I just stepped into this church on a whim. I had not been inside before and I saw Jesse standing there. It was magical. Her hair was pulled back and I could see just the very tip of her profile and she looked both familiar and other. I knew that I would marry her.’”

  “Really?” I remembered Saint Apollonia’s skull lighting up, and then fading out, a heartbeat, and how Ramon told me that the relics were not real. None of them, he’d said. You didn’t know that?

  I had not. I had believed that the relics were real. Part of me still believes that all the relics in all the churches have been real.

  “That’s sweet, Ramon. Did you really know though?”

  “I did. Even then. I do love you, Jesse.”

  I looked at my husband. There he was. “I love you too.”

  We were silent a moment.

  “That was really beautiful,” I said.

  “Now you.” Ramon pointed at my papers.

  I took a deep breath, but I couldn’t catch it. Then another.

  “I’ll start here,” I began. “‘My sister, Lucy, and I are three and a half years apart. I remember her always as a baby. One of my clearest early memories, cast in this fuzzy light, is her coming home from the hospital on a warm November day, my mother bringing her out of the wood-paneled station wagon to show her to me. My sister lives abroad now, and we talk as often as we can.’”