The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  I entered the cool reception of the Soho office, out of the blasting end-of-August humidity, and was confronted by a lobby filled with pregnant women, some about to pop, others in newer stages of pregnancy, but each rubbing her rounded belly as she sat, legs spread, on one of the oversized chairs, an array of parenting magazines—Parenting, American Baby, FamilyFun, Fit Pregnancy—fanned out before her. Where the hell was American Infertility Today? Where was goddamn Vogue?

  I sat down in the sliver of space left on the large leather couch. “We.” I saw it clearly that each of these women was already a “we” and I was an “I.” I can have a husband and parents, a sibling, but I am still an “I.” My body, I mean. Even how those letters look: I. We. I pictured them. I saw all our bodies.

  The women smiled at one another—when are you due, how far along are you? Is this your first? Oh, your third, can you believe it, we thought we were done!—but no one made eye contact with me. I recognized I was being ignored, as overlooked as poverty can be, and also I sensed that I was feared. These women who fidgeted and cleared their throats as I sat beside them seemed scared of catching what I had, or more, what I lacked.

  The technician eventually called my name, and I practically ran into the examining room. I changed into yet another hospital gown. Then I was weighed (facing front, weight gain was the last thing I needed to worry about) and measured (was I shrinking? Please, God, tell me I’m not shrinking!) and blood pressure taken, the ziip of the blood-pressure cuff’s Velcro as familiar a sound as traffic to me now. My vitals.

  I sat on the examination table, my bare legs dangling between sock-covered stirrups, waiting for the doctor to arrive.

  This is what I saw: along with the array of gynecological tools, each with its own look and gleam of an instrument of torture, was a fetal monitor laid out on the counter. On the cupboards above it, signs were taped, colored sheets of paper offering: INFANT CARE! BABY PROOFING! CHILDBIRTHING CLASS! BREASTFEEDING CLASS! Beneath each oblation was a list of dates, mostly by month: August 8. September 12. October 3. November 15. Some of these dates had come and gone, but when one is pregnant there is a different notion of time. For me even the future was passing.

  But forget all of that, because the worst thing about waiting in that room was the thin walls. I could hear talking—a man and a woman’s voice and a third chipper voice that I assumed belonged to the technician. Then there was silence, and then a thumping noise set against a sound not unlike the calling of the ocean. Bum bum bum bum ba bum. I closed my eyes. It was a sound I had only heard by the sea.

  “There it is!” that technician-like voice said.

  “Oh my God!” the woman gasped.

  “Hmm, hmm,” the technician said. “That’s the heart!”

  “Wow.” That was the male voice. “Wow.”

  “Look! Look!” said the technician. “That’s eighteen weeks,” she said. “And there,” she giggled, “is the penis.”

  I kicked my feet. CHILDBIRTHING CLASS! I looked at the dates again. This woman in the next room might take this class. And at the end of it, or maybe somewhere in the middle, she would have her baby.

  I, however, did not need the childbirthing class.

  “Bye!” I heard from the next room. “We’ll see you in a few weeks!”

  There was a rustling and then ripping of paper, and the shuffle of clothing, the squeak of shoes—sneakers—on linoleum, then someone exiting the room.

  “I’m so excited,” the woman said. “Are you excited? Are you as excited as I am?”

  I didn’t hear a response.

  “Oh,” she said. “Are you crying, honey?” There was another brief pause. “I know,” she said. “I know. Aren’t we just the luckiest people in the world?”

  _______

  This is the way in which we were lucky: our birthmother letter, our home study document, and our online profile were finally approved. Shortly after this our profile went up online with our toll-free number and our special designated e-mail. The day it went “live,” my ob/gyn called to tell me that my results were normal, in regards to my extended cycles. I had thought perimenopause, she said, but that’s usually when the periods get closer together, but you’re good, she’d said. And I see you’re thinking of fertility treatments. Any more thoughts on this?

  Set the stunned rage aside, I thought, hanging up. Because now we have pre-menopause to consider. I was in a new state of alert and so the day our profile went online, I took my phone from the shower to the bathroom to the coffee shop to the grocery store. This must happen now, I thought, before I go into menopause, and so I resolved I would not leave my phone’s side; I pledged myself to it. Until we were matched with a birthmother, I vow, Phone, I will never leave you.

  We were told this process could play out in one of several scenarios. One scenario was we could get no calls, until, several months or a year or so down the line, we would be contacted by a birthmother who would be the right match for us. In scenario number one, there is a lot of waiting without any calls, which can be stressful. Or, in scenario number two, we could get several calls and e-mails from several birthmothers, who might, in the end for any number of reasons, end up choosing other prospective adoptive parents. Whatever the case, we were told that this process could take a year, on average, but for some it was much quicker, for some far longer.

  Since when did average apply to me? The one time I came home with a C—in algebra!—my father nearly lost his mind. When I told him a C was average, this made him more distraught. Let me tell you something, my father said to me, a fury in his eyes I had thought previously saved for my mother, I will not have mediocrity in this household. Average, he’d said, incredulous. I will not have it, he said.

  When it came to adoption, Ramon and I were not really a C couple, I reasoned. For one we were heterosexual. In the South and the middle of the country, the red states, where many of the birthmothers seemed to hail from, where our agency had offices, it seemed, heterosexuals might have an edge. Though my Jewishness might wear that sharp blade smooth, we did have what I had begun to refer to as the Ramon Advantage, his Spanishness. Our letter was translated into Spanish. Queremos agradeceros por vuestra valentía y generosidad en su consideración de la adopción abierta, he wrote. Thank you for your bravery and generosity in considering open adoption.

  And while some in these parts had the false impression that New York was where people got shot, many people living outside of cities might find our lives rich and exciting. In this way, we were told, adoption works in the same manner genetics might. A birthmother who wants her child to live in diverse, culturally-minded Brooklyn is likely to be more similar to Ramon and me, who struck out for the city and all its rewards and frustrations.

  Why didn’t anyone call the first day? Was it New York, or that we lived in an apartment, or that I was Jewish? Could they tell that we were not wealthy? That we were renters?

  In the beginning of the second week, though, we did get a contact. Someone at the agency office in California—Allison—called to tell us there was a Carmen, a twenty-year-old in community college who lived with her parents in Los Angeles. I was told she was shy, and so she didn’t speak with me directly, but, Allison said, from her experience, as long as she’d been doing this (from her high, seventeen-year-old-sounding voice, how long could that have been?) she could tell Carmen was serious—the real deal—and though it was quite early in her pregnancy, she would be contacting us soon.

  I intensified my relationship with my phone and did little else but sit and wait and watch it. I thought of Los Angeles, where I had an aunt in Pasadena, a cousin in Silver Lake, a friend in Los Feliz who once had taken me surfing in Santa Monica. I thought of Venice Beach, and Rizzo from Grease, her schoolbooks held close to her chest, just like Carmen, I imagined. This waiting was familiar; I had waited for the results of our embryo transfer, from petri dish to womb, for my period to not arrive and the strip to be darned with two pink threads. I had waited for the ultrasound result
s to be conclusive the one time a fetus did for a moment grow. But every kind of waiting, like each Eskimo word for snow, like shame, has a different facet, a new slant of light.

  While I cannot say that Ramon was unmoved by this development, he did not have the obsessive attention to the possibility of Carmen that consumed me. He had a meeting in the city, which he did not cancel. He even met a friend for a drink afterward.

  I thought, This adoption process has been so easy! Finally we have gotten through something relatively unscathed. Waiting on someone else’s body is nothing. Some couples have been waiting for years! Not us. Not this time, people. We were called and we are about to be matched with a birthmother in the second week. We’d been unlucky in many ways, but now good fortune was smiling upon us and all our wishes—the important ones, prayers, let’s say—would soon come true.

  But of course the call did not come. Nor did the e-mail to our special designated JessandRamon Gmail account. What did arrive was Ramon, in the evening, smelling of beer. He shook his head when I told him and he got into bed with the pillow covering his face.

  I did not sleep well, not that night or the next, and each time I woke from a fitful sleep, my hands were at my sides, clenched into fists, half-moons impressed in my palms. For three days I sat in my office refreshing my e-mail and having Ramon call our 800 number to make sure it worked properly.

  It works, he’d say, staring at his computer. It fucking works. Could you stop being so compulsive?

  By the end of the third day, I had revised my theories about this particular moment of waiting being effortless. The worst state a human can be in, in fact, is in the state of waiting, I decided, and so I called California Allison.

  “Carmen has not called,” I told her. “We’re waiting and waiting.”

  “Oh she will,” Allison assured me. “I know she will. Sometimes,” she said, “birthmothers are scared. They’re unsure. But I know she was serious about placing and serious about you and Ramon when she called.”

  It was August, and while I was supposed to be writing and preparing for my new classes, I didn’t have to be anywhere, per se, and so I waited some more, languishing around the apartment like a bored housewife. I turned the television on and off. I opened and closed the refrigerator. I baked cookies, as the mothers, I reasoned, once again, are always baking. I spent inordinate amounts of time trolling the Internet, where I checked our profile. Unable to control myself, I went to those pages of the pregnant women I’d looked at on my birthday in Terracina and who had, by now, given birth, of course they had, time was passing.

  Three days more of this and again I called the agency.

  “Oh, Jesse,” California Allison said. “I was about to e-mail you. It looks like Carmen went with another family here, in the next town. She wanted to be nearby.”

  This is part of openness, being close, perhaps, close enough to visit often, like the girl-holding-the-adoption-balloon movie. Still, I was stunned. I was silent.

  “I’m sorry. It happens,” she said. “But that you got this call so soon, it’s such a great sign.”

  “A sign of what?” I said.

  “A sign that someone else will call again soon. It will happen,” she told me. “Believe.”

  Believe in what? When I hung up the phone, I felt a crushing sensation, a physical feeling that I can’t say I didn’t recognize. I felt flattened by everything. By illness and financial stress, and childlessness and disappointment. I thought of those used-up wishes—for decent dry cleaning, a sleek couch, a country house—and I tried to comfort myself with the thought that I had not known that I should store up my wishes like a squirrel stores nuts. I did not know that a cache of dried berries in my puffed cheeks was one of my essential wishes. Babies happened to every creature. They happened.

  When Carmen—a woman whom I had never spoken to but whose life, if given the different flap of another butterfly wing, could have been intertwined with mine forever—did not choose us, I felt I would not be able to get up from bed, not ever. The weight of the past and the future, both, was devastating, and without my knowing it, Carmen had become the key to life. And now the key had gone missing. The door to happiness was locked! I could not get in.

  The opposite of happiness is not unhappiness. The opposite of happiness is waiting. The opposite of happiness is panic, that the future held no one but Ramon and me. The panic that this—my husband and me, alone at a table, moving our forks to our mouths, the cups to our lips—would not be enough. The panic that Ramon and I had chosen the wrong agency, one that specializes in southern gay and lesbian couples, an agency that promotes the idea that where we live, in New York, is where people are murdered. And who’s to say it isn’t? My friend Liza had been mugged at gunpoint the previous year, when she emerged from the F train, not far from the school where our child—should we be lucky enough to get one—would go to school.

  I imagined Carmen; she was caramel colored with black hair. Her back was against a wall and she sang, “There Are Worse Things I Could Do,” the diffuse Southern California light behind her. I saw her burgeoning stomach, rising like bread. Like my stomach, from the tumors that wouldn’t stop. I saw Carmen as clearly as anything I had turned to watch disappear.

  Who is a birthmother? What we were told by Crystal or Tiffany that day, almost a year ago, is this: a birthmother is eighteen to twenty-five years old. Fifty percent of birthmothers are in relationships. The birthmothers are scared. They fear the unknown. The birthmother might have wanted to terminate her pregnancy, but it is too late. Or she might not believe in terminating a pregnancy. The birthmother has love for her unborn child, big big love, which is why she wants to make a plan for that child. But at the same time she is detached from the child, to protect herself from the sorrow to come. The life of the birthmother, this rare bird, tends to be chaotic.

  In other words, the birthmothers are only women.

  What we were waiting for now was the birthmothers.

  I did not move for forty-eight hours, but to drag myself to the table to eat. And while extreme emotion—depression, wild happiness—often puts people off food, this sort of thing has never, ever, made me lose my appetite. I am not one of those wan, depressed people listlessly wandering drugstores; I am the depressed person listlessly wandering the aisles of the pharmacy with a rosy plumpness in my cheeks that comes from sustained good nutrition.

  I heard Ramon’s moving about and working in the dining room, so much weather. He peeked his head in to check on me.

  “You alive?” he said.

  I nodded into my pillow.

  “This is the first one.” Ramon sat on the bed. The weight of his body, how it moved the mattress in the slightest way, hurt me. “We were lucky to be called so quickly,” he said. “Sometimes it takes months and months.”

  “Not helping,” I said. “And remember. We were not called.”

  Had I had the opportunity to speak to Carmen, perhaps my very charm would have made her forgo California and choose us. Was being picked over—scenario number two—better than scenario number one, not being contacted at all? Was it better to be bludgeoned with a club or assaulted with a cleaver? Which, I wonder, would you rather?

  I heard the landline ring and I heard Ramon speaking into it and I heard him and Harriet come and go for her walks, her return signaled by the click click of her nails on the wood floors. She arrived to check on me and then departed quickly—was she skipping?—to get to her meal or her biscuit, depending on the hour. She always gave a little yelp before her meals, cries, I imagined, of uncontainable joy.

  After two days, Ramon came in and dragged me up by both arms and, as if it were my leg, not my spirit, that had been broken, he placed my arm over his shoulder, gripped that hand hard, and helped me into the bathroom. He shoved me into the shower and I held my face up to the spray of water and washed up and dressed myself and then we were in the car heading upstate to Fishkill on the Hudson for Michelle’s annual family summer party.

 
; _______

  Going to that party started out as a good idea, a sure diversion. It was an hour-and-a-half drive out of town, and just leaving my bed, and the apartment, felt pleasant and fresh and like a brand-new day. I turned on the CD player. Our car had one of those old players where seven CDs get loaded up in, of all places, the trunk. It defies explanation and logic, and because of this, the same seven CDs had been in this contraption in the trunk since we purchased this car, used, five years previously. Despite this, each time I turned on the CD player, which was rare, I was surprised and grateful to hear the first few electric bars of Blood on the Tracks. I reflexively skipped “Tangled Up in Blue” and went to song number two: He hears the ticking of the clocks / And walks along with a parrot that talks . . .

  Fishkill was Harriet’s second-favorite place, after my parents’ house, with its abundance of food and love (not the same thing, I tried to show Harriet, but how do you teach a dog this lesson?). Michelle and Jacob used to invite us several times a year, and often, during the week when it was empty and I wasn’t teaching, I would go up with Harriet and stay alone to work. Harriet could spend the day in that pond, flinging herself jubilantly off the dock, chasing a stick I’d throw for her. When I tired of this repetitive exercise, I would often turn to find her swimming the pond in circles, her little tail a propeller, her paws paddling her along. She looked like one of those old ladies in the community pool I belonged to as a kid, the ones who emerged from the lounge area during adult swim, hair tucked into rubber bathing caps with straps under the chins like gaping smiles. When the pond bored her, she’d step out to shake herself off, always as close to me as possible, and after she’d dried in the sun, often we hiked up to the summit of a small mountain.