The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “Oh,” I said. I would soon learn that most everyone adopting a child referred to Angelina Jolie often, and by her first name. “Ramon and I were thinking about Ethiopia as well.” I looked up at the lawyer, the sides of her face tinted purple where the stylist had not wiped her skin clean of dye. We were thinking of Ethiopia because the criterion for Ethiopia was: you can get a child now. They can be six months old, and the orphanages were said to be clean, with loving caretakers, and they did not seem to care about cancer. I imagined getting a grant to learn about a feminist activist community movement in the Sudan while I waited for my baby to make her way to me. Perhaps my own mother, with all her access to the developing world, might be able to help in this situation as well. The Ethiopians, my mother once told me, are the most beautiful people on earth.

  Was I allowed to care about beauty? I had no idea, but this lawyer looked at me, her chin quivering, pointed down. “You know . . .” Her index finger drew imaginary lines on the sticky table. “If you get an Ethiopian child, that child will be black.”

  I stopped writing and looked up. We were in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in one of the most diverse cities on earth. “Obviously,” I said. “Of course we’re aware.”

  “Well, I’m just saying that if you have a black baby you will have to pal around with black people.”

  I took a long sip of my coffee. “Okay.” I went back to writing. Pal around, I wrote. With black people.

  “I’m glad you see my point. Your people are Russian.” She raised her chin.

  I nodded. She was not wrong.

  “It matters,” she said. “Let me tell you about international adoption. It’s not open. You do not want open. That’s the way they do it now, domestically.”

  “Really?” I looked up from my note taking. “I thought research was showing open—where all of us know each other to some degree—was best for the child. I’ve got adult friends who didn’t know their biological parents and I don’t know that it was better for them. They have a lot of fantasies about where they might have come from, who their parents might have been. They have to decide as adults if they want to find these people, strangers really. It can turn their worlds upside down.”

  She smiled. Her face stretched, a drum, a lampshade. “I had a mother who would give me furniture and then take it back. Give me a beautiful dresser—inlaid, just gorgeous—and then take it back. A mirror. Take it back. I just couldn’t bear that. Someone’s mother coming back, I mean. Taking them back.”

  “Coming back for the child?” I asked.

  She looked at me, incredulous. “For the child,” she said. “Yes. I cried for weeks when my mother took the beautiful dresser. A stunning mid-century piece.”

  I had that same horrible feeling that I would leave many conversations about adopting with: paralyzing anxiety. They made me politically uncomfortable, or they made me fearful that I had made a fallacious choice, taken an incorrect path through the wrong forest, and, because of this, my magic pot would not only not be brimming with babies, it would not even be partially filled, not even with one infant. If every meeting, every conversation, each scrap of knowledge I accrued, told me something about adoption, here was my lesson from this meeting: When you are adopting a child, the rules of social conversation are not applicable. When you are adopting a child, you are allowed to say what you please about race. You will eventually have to write it down on a form for everyone to see, what race you want, what race you do not want. You will have to know this, but you will not have to explain your reasoning. You will not have to explain anything at all. You simply do not check the box you do not want. And, somehow, in this new country, because of the Hague laws and democracy and capitalism and America, and the fact that you will become the mother of this child, everything you say will be correct.

  I couldn’t imagine what it meant for a baby to be taken. Back.

  As we were readying to part out on Seventh Avenue, a bright robin’s-egg-blue day, I asked the lawyer why she’d waited so long to adopt.

  “You know,” she began, her fine hair separating in the wind, “my brother died when I was five. We were playing in the street up in Westchester, in our neighborhood.” She paused. “He was hit by a car.” Another pause. “I was five. I just didn’t know if I could do it,” she said. “Be a mother. And then before I knew it, it was too late. And then it was really too late.”

  That had been over six months ago. I was thirty-eight.

  “Just yesterday,” the lawyer said, “I went to pick up my children, and the teacher’s aide, she called my children over and said that their grandmother was here.”

  “How awful,” I told her, with emotion.

  “Their grandmother!” She had nodded her head, and I could tell she was in that moment, turning the injustice of it over, of aging and biology, letting it roll around, a marble on her tongue, pinging against her teeth. And then she turned and began to walk uptown. She didn’t wish me luck or tell me to be in touch if I had questions. She didn’t even say good-bye.

  _______

  In the end, Ramon and I decided on domestic adoption because we didn’t meet the criteria of many countries due to my illness, but mostly it was because we desired an infant. I put out of my mind the notion that a mother could come back and take the child away and what that could feel like, because we were told that once there was a match with a birthmother, we could be in the delivery room, holding her hand. The birthmother, we were told, would be like family. This became the fairy-tale narrative we lived by, there from almost the beginning of our once-upon-a-time. I imagined, as we headed to this agency down south, away from New York and its difficult laws that few agencies were licensed in, that we would name our baby Grace, like a lot of the adopted girls I knew. Grace, as in “divine,” as in “God’s Grace,” because of all we had to do to find her, the child that was ours from the ancient beginnings of time, but that we’d had to be tried and tested and trained to find.

  The birthmothers, we told each other, are real. They have what we want: not the stitched pink stripe, the ticking black spot, not the hand-forced specimen swimming free in a sterile cup, but flesh and blood and bones, a thread sutured to life. I thought about Grace now, on this highway. Ramon and I were relieved when we decided on adoption, and we believed we would find comfort in going to Smith Chasen for that horrid meeting, and now we felt relieved that finally this process could make sense to us; there would be logic to this grace.

  _______

  “This is going to be great,” I said, as if we were on our way to Club Med. I looked out at the road. We had just left 95 and now were on the diminutive 85, which made us feel like we were headed somewhere undiscovered. “But also, I’m nervous.” What had the sign said? Martina? I’d just seen a sign that said RALEIGH 100 MILES, I do remember that, as I remember thinking how close my parents were to Raleigh and how strange that seemed, as I consider my parents staunch northerners.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” said Ramon, still the fingers gripping and ungripping the wheel. “I’m going to speak Spanish to the child, no matter what the ethnicity. I’m going to speak Spanish and Italian.”

  As he said this I felt a combination of psychotic rage and unbearable sadness. At first my violence-bordering anger was against all Europeans who, as we uneducated isolated Americans know, speak so many goddamn languages. It quickly, however, honed in on Ramon. “Really?” I asked.

  “Of course! I’m Spanish and Italian. My mother spoke to me in Italian for my entire childhood, and that’s important to me to pass on.”

  “But I don’t speak either of those languages, Ramon.” It was my great shame that, as many years as I’d been going to Terracina, I had never learned to speak Italian. The old farmers who lived next to his mother thought I was an idiot. Here comes the illiterate Jew who killed Jesus, they said to one another as we pulled in each summer. I don’t know that they said this, as Ramon is the worst translator in the history of translators, but I’m quite sure it
was something to that effect.

  “Well, that’s not my fault, Jesse.” He looked straight ahead. “What will you do then? What will you pass on to the child?”

  I didn’t know if I would burst into tears or tear my husband’s head off. What would I do? Take our African-American, Italian-and-Spanish-speaking baby to Hebrew school?

  “What will I pass on to the child,” I said, more to myself than Ramon.

  I remembered Passover at my great-grandmother’s house in Cleveland, all the cousins rushing to find the afikomen as if it held the key to something besides Nana Sadie’s checkbook. Great-Uncle Sid with his magic quarters, his colored silk scarves pulled out of the most unfathomable and, I now see, inappropriate places. There were long dinners and a photograph of Ronald Reagan my father had gotten for his grandmother-in-law, who, for some reason that no one could fathom, had cast her vote for him, the first and last Republican vote in our family.

  “I blame Cleveland,” my father had said, laughing, as he slid macaroon after macaroon off Sadie’s delicate three-tiered dessert tray and dropped them down his gullet.

  Three generations dipping our fingers into salted water, passing the bitter herbs and the charoset, three generations, piling the horseradish high on the gefilte fish, leaving the door ajar for Elijah, even if Sadie lived in an apartment building. It was three generations singing “Dayenu” as if our lives depended on it, my grandfather the attorney, bent and birdlike; his wife, three times larger than he, belting it out; even Great-Aunt Sylvia, who was deaf, sang, in her low sad voice. And Lucy asked the four questions. Wherever we were, always, Lucy was the youngest of us all.

  Three generations. All at one table. I will be the one to break that.

  “Yes,” Ramon said. “You have to think about legacy.”

  My child would be heir to what? I closed my eyes as we drove, and I thought of Harriet, asleep at my mother’s feet as she moved around the kitchen, before a new stove she had not used until three months ago. She’d had to go downstairs to the fuse box to figure out how to turn it on. I thought with regret how we had spayed Harriet, and so we would never have her puppies, and just the thought of never seeing her or her likeness again made me breathe heavily, tears collecting at the corners of my eyes. And beneath all that was this: where do I fit in here? Most women become pregnant and they carry their babies and then they breast-feed their infants, who need them to survive. Ramon and I were the same. We were two bodies. The baby would need us equally, and yet Ramon would have his seventeen languages and his countless rich cultural experiences to share. I didn’t know what I could offer, and while I began to ponder all the perils of assimilated Judaism, really it was just this, only this: was I the mother?

  Wasn’t I supposed to be the mother?

  3

  __

  Ellen Beskin was the first adopted person I met. We were eight years old and bored when she told me. We’d made an A-frame house out of giant Tinkertoys, and when we were done, we sat down, Indian-style, inside our transparent home. Neither Ellen nor I was a particularly girly girl. We both played soccer—Ellen had been the fortunate one who got Pelé’s coveted number 10—but we did not wear tube socks pulled up to our scraped knees, nor did we trade baseball cards or walk around reciting hockey scores like a few of the tomboys we knew. And yet, as we were not built for tea parties, pinkies extended as we sipped from pretend china cups, and as my mother had put the kibosh on an Easy-Bake Oven, Ellen and I did not know what to do in the trappings of this Tinkertoy house, this bastion of domesticity, once we’d assembled it.

  We were just sitting there, pulling at the stiff shag basement carpeting, when Ellen said, “Did you know I’m adopted?”

  I shook my head. “Uh-uh.”

  “I am. Adopted. I didn’t come from my mom’s tummy. I came from a different mom’s tummy.”

  “Huh.” I couldn’t look at her.

  “My brother came from my mommy’s tummy.” Ellen gazed wistfully out of the pretend window. “So he’s not adopted.”

  I nodded. And then I stood up. I decided I’d rather be roller-skating.

  “Do you want to take this thing down?” I said as I began unscrewing the roof.

  _______

  It was my mother who made a big deal about Ellen’s being adopted by wanting to discuss it. My mother wanted to discuss a host of concerns, especially regarding disturbing topics, such as an assassination attempt on the president or the firing of a teacher for molesting a child at a local Catholic school.

  “Yes, she is adopted,” my mother said when I brought my conversation with Ellen up to her a few days later. She spoke with vigor and enthusiasm, as she had when film of the president being hoisted into an ambulance played on the six o’clock news. “Do you know what ‘adoption’ means?”

  “Yes, Mom,” I told her.

  She raised her eyes and shook her head encouragingly.

  “It means that she didn’t come from her mom’s stomach.” As I stated this I realized I didn’t understand what that meant at all. I imagined the book Are You My Mother?, that poor baby bird searching high and low, turning to all kinds of species and machines for comfort. But I had related to that bird too; my mother was away often. Claudine was the one reading to me. Are you my mother?, Lucy and I would both say together in the places I’d memorized. What, I wondered, did Ellen make of the question the book begged?

  “That’s right,” my mother said. “How does that make you feel?”

  “Fine?” It was a question that, going forward, I would be asked by her so many times I would begin to dread and despise it.

  “What it means is that Mr. and Mrs. Beskin wanted Ellen so much they had to search for her,” she said, and then she went on to explain to me the process of adoption. “Ellen might feel bad about it, because her brother wasn’t adopted,” she continued. “She shouldn’t feel bad, mind you, but she might.”

  When Ellen’s mother—the adoptive one—died two years later, from cancer, and I attended her funeral with my mother, I fixated on Ellen and her father and brother, seated in the hard pews, her blond head twitching beside the darker versions of her family. It was my first funeral and the ritual, the flung-open casket, the wreaths of flowers propped on metal stands, fascinated me. Our teachers were there; for the first time I’d gotten to see Mrs. Gross outside of her classroom. Teachers were all we knew then of celebrity, and spotting one now, as one of us, was nothing short of thrilling.

  As the minister spoke—so many firsts in one special day!—I thought of how Ellen’s being adopted was surely connected to the death of her make-believe mother. Precisely how, I was not certain. All the kids were saying that if your hand was bigger than your face you had cancer, and I could see many students in the pews that day, testing this out. I wondered if Ellen’s mother’s hand had been bigger than her face. But because Ellen was the first adopted person I knew, and the first person whose mother—if that was what she had in fact been—had died, then certainly there was something tethering these two moments together, even if it was only in the effect of Ellen’s losing her mother twice.

  Ellen was sent to a private school for junior high and high school, and I lost track of her. Before she left, she had grown very intense. She forged personal relationships with our favorite teachers. She seemed to have protracted and fraught romances instead of the timid schoolyard dances the rest of us were having. At the parties we threw in our parents’ basements, while they swilled wine and ate fondue with their friends upstairs, we played Spin the Bottle and Two Minutes in Heaven, and sometimes smoked clove cigarettes on the covered garage tarmac, Ellen would often wander off into a dark corner, alone. I came upon her there as she was being comforted by one of the more fleshy, maternal figures of our bunch, and I was fascinated by Ellen’s vulnerability and the other’s willingness to soothe it, bodily, her arms around Ellen, a pudgy hand pushing back her white-blond hair.

  Surely it was her mother’s death that created this need for prolonged connection, fo
r succor, due to this cleaving, a crucial sense of belonging cut. I thought of this flying along 85. As we’d crossed over into North Carolina from Virginia—when the rolling hills and barns and fences, horses swatting their stunning tails, cows asleep against the green of the thick grass—everything had come into focus. I could distinguish where the land met the sky, and I could discern the rise and fall of the earth as we made our way south. It occurred to me only then that I was off the fertility drugs and for the first time in a long while I was thinking clearly, seeing the world not blanketed in fuzzy contours, but in sharp definition. Everything was radiant.

  Leaving the city can often make things brighter, the color of the moment, yes, but also the shades and nuances of home, too. The horses were placid and sweet as we drove by, and I’d wished that I had a carrot or some apple for them to eat from my palm. It was a silly wish, and I had given those up, as I had begun by then to think my wishes should be saved, that I’d used them too freely and quickly on lesser desires, like procuring a tenure-track position in New York City, no small feat, or on daily aspirations, like for the subway to just once get me where I needed to go on time. Such replaceable wishes. I wondered, as we passed the horses, if my wishes weren’t all used up. Perhaps it was time for prayers.

  My sister was a rider. She used to go with my father to a stable farther south in Virginia, and they would ride together. I remember watching her put on her hard hat, and that blue blazer with the golden buttons. I remember her soaping her saddle, a present from my grandparents, who had never so much as touched a horse. And I remember Lucy slipping a tall boot into the stirrups and sitting up straight and tall, and then the two of them moving, her body matching the rhythm of the elegant animal’s pace. After, waiting for our father, we’d pick the buttercups and dandelions that grew in large patches by the wooden fence of the rings and place them under each other’s chins. You like butter, we’d say, yellow reflected on the pale and delicate skin at our necks. And the deep yellow of dandelions. Mama had a baby and its head popped off, we’d sing, flicking the blooms from their tender stems.