The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  I stopped again. “That’s not really true though. We have to be truthful.”

  “Like with my father?”

  “Well. Let’s not do ourselves in here, Ramon.”

  “It is true, though. You do talk when you can. We both do. I love talking to Lucy.”

  “You do?” I asked.

  “We spoke the other night when you weren’t here. She told me that some restaurant she started with her boyfriend in Panama City went under, which was why she left, I guess. She seems like she’s doing great.”

  “Her boyfriend?”

  “Yes,” Ramon said. “That kid Greif.”

  The restaurant had failed? With her boyfriend? Greif? She hadn’t told me that. She’d merely said she was moving on. Was he still with her? I didn’t know this because I hadn’t asked her. “Oh,” I said to Ramon. “I didn’t know that.”

  He looked at me funny. “The guy she’s been traveling with for the past six months. Her boyfriend. The one from that wealthy family on Ojai.”

  I thought of my sister now, watching the largest break in Latin America. I saw her on the sand, knees curled into her chest, her chin on her knees, and I remembered walking in the woods by our parents’ house with Harriet, several years previously, before Lucy had left the country.

  Look what they’ve done to the high school!, we said to each other as we passed it in the car on the way to the park; the building where we’d spent those years now had a structure of steel and glass connecting its red brick wings.

  It was a crisp, sunny day and the park was crowded with dogs and their owners, couples leisurely strolling along the paved path that led in and out of the woods. Old leaves crunched beneath us.

  “Mom seems older,” I said, as the high school, so sleek and modern now, had surely made me think about the passage of time. “Don’t you think?”

  Lucy turned to look at me, her face framed by long, tousled hair, as if she’d just risen from bed. “I think I’m going to leave,” she said.

  I had nodded and we continued walking in silence.

  “Did you hear me?” Lucy stopped on the path.

  “I did.” I watched a golden retriever gambol in and out of the creek that ran parallel to the path.

  “Do you want to know where I’m going?” she asked me.

  “Sure,” I had said, but I recognize now I hadn’t thought she was going anywhere. I had lost sight of Harriet and so I called her name and soon she came bounding back to us, tail wagging. “I hear you, Lucy.”

  “Are you going to ask me then?” Lucy still hadn’t moved.

  I looked at my sister, her hands on her hips, incredulous. Behind her, the retriever leapt for a small branch his owner threw from the other side of the low-running creek. “Lucy!” I exclaimed sarcastically. “Where are you headed?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said.

  I had laughed at her then, shaking my head and rolling my eyes.

  Lucy walked away from me. “Somewhere far away,” she said, continuing on the path toward the woods. “You’ll see.”

  Now I looked at Ramon. “I didn’t know any of that,” I said. I felt my face redden. I could feel it, the way I do sometimes in class when I am really into a point I’m making. “So do you think it’s okay we’re doing this as a whole piece? Not answering the questions all individually? Like: my first memory was this, and so on?”

  Ramon smiled.

  “What?”

  He rubbed his forehead. “Can I just say? You are going to be such a good mother.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And?”

  “And you will be a great father.” I pictured Ramon again, bending down, guiding a toddler by the thumbs.

  “Thank you.”

  “Maybe going through all of this will make us better parents,” I said. “Together.”

  Ramon closed his laptop. “Together.”

  I watched Harriet open her eyes and wobble awake.

  And then I read Ramon the rest of my story.

  15

  __

  I was “advising” a student, a term I use loosely as the curriculum requirements continually change without my knowledge, in my “office,” another approximation, as several of my colleagues banged on their computers nearby, when Lucy called my cell.

  “Well, hello!” she said.

  I put my hand up to the student to signify it would be a moment, and I moved out into the hallway.

  Lucy was in Belize now, in a place called Sweetwater Key, where, I gathered, the surfing was no good, but the fishing was amazing.

  “The country’s mostly reef,” Lucy explained. “There’s this place, Glover’s Reef, where the surfing is decent, but it’s super expensive. What’s the point, you know? There’s so much else to see.”

  “And anyway, how much surfing can a person do?” I asked. “Especially someone who’s not a surfer.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “I am a surfer and the answer is never enough! But I’m not surfing now. Anyway, Greif has been doing lessons and stuff. It’s how we’ve had money to travel.”

  “Greif of the Greek restaurant?”

  “That was just an experiment. A failed one, admittedly, but we thought people would like that in Panama. The food can get so monotonous when you’re traveling in a country for a long time. Anyway, there’s reef everywhere here and I’ve gotten kind of into saving this bird sanctuary. There’s a nesting site for wading birds, like the roseate spoonbill, for instance. And herons. I met someone here in Sweetwater through Greif who was involved with advocating for this sanctuary.”

  “When did you get so into birds?” I walked slowly along the bridge, flanked by windows, connecting the two main liberal arts buildings of the college. On one side, I could see into an inner courtyard, where students stood sulking and smoking. Along the other side was the city street, where, on the sidewalk, a woman walked by with her daughter, who in turn pushed a stroller of her own.

  “I’ve always been into birds,” Lucy said. “Always. Since I was a kid. I love birds.”

  “I’m your sister. I grew up with you. I know who you were and you were not into birds.”

  “That just shows how little I was understood in our family,” Lucy said. “I have always loved animals fiercely, most particularly birds.”

  I did not know if Lucy was being serious, though she seemed to have lost any sense of humor she’d had, due to, I was sure, those misspent years in Santa Cruz. “Okay,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “In fact, I have a bird tattoo.”

  I laughed. “Well, that must make it so. Where?”

  “I know. I know. I can’t believe I said that. The small of my back. Of course.” She laughed. “I also have a tattoo of a horse. At my hip bone. Did you know that?”

  “A horse? No, God, I didn’t know that.” I thought of my sister’s body, its folds and ripples, her blank page of a stomach but for this ridiculous horse in some low quadrant of her belly.

  I too had a risible tattoo, also on my hip. Dolphins. I am that age. But I didn’t say anything.

  “So are the birds going to keep you there? Your love of them, I mean. Because we have birds here, too.”

  “Not going-extinct birds.”

  “I’m sure we do have those. I’m sure they’re around the almost-extinct mangrove forests.”

  More silence.

  “When are you going to just stay put is what I mean. I mean, we’re not kids anymore, you know? Like when did you get that tattoo, Lucy?”

  “Over ten years ago. I guess you just didn’t notice.”

  “Oh,” I said. I could not picture it, my sister’s bird tattoo. Mine—two dolphins, entwined, ridiculous—was now faded, blurred. It was nearly twenty years old.

  “But I know what you’re saying. I’ve been thinking about coming back a lot,” she said. “Coming home.”

  “Great!” I was very surprised to hear this. And also? I felt inexplicably happy at the thought of it. The kind of happy that, at this point, brou
ght bright jewel tears to the corners of my eyes. “Any thought as to where you might do this?”

  “I don’t know.” She hesitated in a manner indicating that she did know.

  “Are you coming alone, Lucy?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “But I mean are you, like, with someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Greif? Are you happy?”

  “Yes. And I don’t know. Are you happy?”

  I thought of the last time I’d been happy. Hiking alone with Harriet made me happy. Happy. Lying on my stomach at the beach with Ramon, turning the pages of a Victorian novel, the sound of the sea at our feet. Research. Eating makes me happy. And being right. “I have a lot of happy moments,” I said. “Fleeting though.”

  “I know what you mean,” Lucy said. “Just moments. I’ve been traveling for so long. I think I’ve been searching for happiness and really, I’ve been only having happy moments. Perhaps that’s just it, you know? I mean, perhaps that’s all we can hope for.”

  My student passed by on the breezeway. “I’m sorry!” I whispered to him. I pointed at the phone. “Long distance!” I said, as if we were living in pioneer times.

  I did know. But our parents had raised us to achieve and be committed. That was happiness: success. And Lucy had bucked that, so shouldn’t that have made her happy? “Well, I’ve been staying put here and doing kind of the same thing.”

  “Happiness.” Lucy laughed. “I don’t even know if that’s what I’ve been going for. Like is happiness even a goal? Maybe it’s just not one of my larger goals.”

  “I want a child.” It just slipped out. I had lost any semblance of control over what I said and how I behaved. “But anyway, I don’t know if I associate it with happiness. I suppose that’s strange.”

  “I know,” Lucy said. “I know that you do.”

  “Hey!” I said. “Come to New York. We’ve got a semi-comfortable uncomfortable couch.”

  She laughed again. “Maybe. We’d kill each other if I lived with you.”

  “I didn’t say live!” I said. But briefly I imagined us with mugs of coffee, the blanket she’d cover herself with to sleep thrown over our legs as we talked into the afternoon. There we are, Lucy and me in my attic room. We are the ages I remember us as most often: I’m fourteen and she’s eleven. I’ve just learned to put on eyeliner and mascara, and I’m leaning in, toward the full-length mirror. I’ve also learned to curl my hair, which I try to do so that it feathers out. Lucy leans on her elbow, watching intently from my bed. I’m getting ready for adventure, a night out with new friends. I put down my eyeliner and I look at Lucy, on my bed, leaning her head against my fading poster of James Dean.

  Everything is stopped. When I turn back to the mirror, my face, now with makeup, framed by this strange hairstyle, looks foreign to me, and I both like that and fear that distance from myself. Everything is about to happen.

  Lucy has been gone on this trip over five years.

  When she told me that day in the woods that she was going away, I had not even thought to ask her where to, or when, why, even, and I see now I hadn’t believed her. It was my mother who left. Lucy and I, we stayed. We were the stayers. I lived in New York and she lived in California. We saw each other only at moments of unusual intensity: our grandmother’s funeral, where I tried to give a eulogy but could not, and where my sister had guided me, shaking, away from the bimah. At our cousin’s wedding, where we sat at our designated table drinking champagne and watching everyone else dance. Look at that one, we said, laughing. We never danced at family weddings.

  We had not lived together and fought for the bathroom or more mashed potatoes or space in the backseat of the car since she was fifteen.

  “Well, offer’s open,” I said. It would be different this time. Now we were the same.

  “Thanks, Jesse,” Lucy said. “That’s nice to know.”

  “Come home.” I looked out at the students filing out of the courtyard for class.

  And then my sister and I said good-bye.

  Meanwhile, the photos. We were told we needed to take the main photo by foliage, preferably of the “seasonless” variety so that our profile would not be tethered to a time of year. We were to face front, our teeth exposed. This is what you need to know: if you do not smile with your teeth showing, you are not really smiling, not according to our adoption agency. You can be smirking, you can be leering, simpering, but you cannot be smiling in a way that a birthmother will interpret as joy, unless you are smiling teethily. Also, you must be touching.

  This is what Ramon and I did one Sunday. We left Harriet at home and walked around our neighborhood, looking for trees that were not bare, bushes that were not brown, and hedges that were not dead. This is harder than one might imagine in Brooklyn in the lion part of March, but we found a solution. In the front gardens of several of our neighbors’ was the coveted timeless foliage, large evergreens in one, trimmed hedges in another, a holly bush (was that seasonless?) around the corner. We opened and then closed gates, and ran inside. Ramon would find a stoop on which to place his camera, setting it to automatic, and then he’d run back to place his arm demurely around me as we flashed the camera our toothiest grins. Mostly, the camera shot too soon, as Ramon was reaching around me, which registered in the photo as if he were about to strike me, or too late, our smiles faded or forced, and we’d have to take the photo again, before the old Italian woman straight out of Terracina parted the curtains and sent her young beefy son out to shoo us away.

  We might as well have waited until spring, when the crocuses pushed up through little boxes of wet earth, when the tulips, petals open like throats, black tongues wagging, were out in full force, as the text of that “Dear Birthmother” letter took ages to be approved. It needed to be revised again after it had been edited and re-edited and edited again, each time by a different social worker or branch director whose concerns negated the edits of the previous, which in turn needed to be edited. I felt I was in a Dantean sort of hell, where my students gathered to taunt me. Revising is an important aspect of our work, I’d tell them, and here, as revisions of our revisions were repeatedly returned, I felt all those chickens roosting. When all was said and done, it had taken approximately five months, and four different social workers and a director, to complete.

  In its finality, this sacred text—more holy than the Dead Sea Scrolls—would appear in hard copy and digital form in both English and Spanish. Who would edit Ramon’s translation was unclear. The holy text included our first and last names—a testament to our commitment to holy openness—and already the idea of my students finding this document online, reading this earnest text about our admiration for each other and my love of baking pies, which, in the end, was not as true to us in voice and tone as we’d once pledged, kept me up many nights.

  What is opened and what is closed, I thought on those nights when I remembered Ellen Beskin, and my father pushing my sister and me on our wooden Flexible Flyer down the snow-covered hill at Shepherd Park, and also the earliest days of life with Ramon when just the way he smoked a cigarette made me want him. What is time moving and what is time standing still, and what will I do with all my memories, of everything that is finished? If you don’t see the past growing in the future, do you lose them both? All I pictured on those bleak nights, my husband walled off by sleep, was sand spilling from the hourglass.

  We were even hemorrhaging sand.

  16

  __

  Lydia, who had spoken to us at our session in White Plains, turned up for our home study visit in a torrential downpour at the end of April. I had hired a professional cleaner to prepare for the occasion. When I called to book someone from a woman’s co-op, I said to these strangers on the phone that we were having a home study visit, where a social worker comes to your home to make sure it’s suitable for a child and that you and your partner are adoption material. It needs to be very very clean, I said. These women were expensive, but I was willing to pay extra
for their days off and health insurance, so as not to be exploitative. When the woman came to clean, she said, You can’t have babies? Her palms moved in circles over her stomach.

  I looked at her hands, her short fingers, the bitten nails, circling and circling. Just make it clean, please, I told her.

  I bought daffodils and set them in a little vase we keep on the mantel. We have several vases there, but rarely are they filled with flowers. I baked banana bread. In our birthmother letter there was the bit about the pies, but it was morning, and there was no reason for pie in the morning. Also? I don’t really make pies. I could. I could absolutely bake a pie. And I would.

  Magical thinking: the cleanest house, the best banana bread, the prettiest flowers, will yield the healthiest, most beautiful baby. I knew this was not true. This visit afforded a simple “approved” or “not approved.” Couldn’t it be, though, “highly approved,” or “extremely approved,” or “significantly approved”?

  _______

  Lydia arrived dripping wet, and Harriet came out of the bedroom to greet her at the door, tail wagging.

  “I don’t like dogs.” Lydia straightened. “But this one doesn’t jump up, which is nice.”

  “She’s amazing with kids.” I took Lydia’s raincoat, hanging it carefully on the rack behind the door.

  “Old dogs usually are,” she said.

  Ramon stood, smiling broadly with teeth. “Well, she is. Hi, Lydia.”

  She smiled at Ramon and then she smiled down at Harriet in that distant way that people who are not dog people smile for dogs they are trying to make the owners think they like. “Good.”

  “Have a seat.” I pulled a chair out from the dining room table, normally strewn with Ramon’s papers and folders and invoices, but today wiped completely clean. “Coffee?” I asked.

  “Sure.” Her eyes wrinkled at the corners when she smiled. She had a batik scarf on her head that was shot through with gold and silver threads, tied at the nape of her neck, the way I used to wear a bandana in college. “Black,” she said.