The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “Maybe we’ll get to do this together again. Like we almost did before. Ugh, you know what I mean. You just never know; you just have to believe,” Michelle said. “Stranger things have happened.”

  I was silent and I continued sorting through my piles of paper.

  “Okay, I’m just going to say this,” Michelle stated. “And if you’re mad, you’re mad.”

  There was a Mother’s Day card in one of these stacks. It was given to me. By Ramon. We’d been dating almost a year, and on Mother’s Day he had made me a card he’d created on the computer. “Maybe you shouldn’t say it then,” I told her as I fingered the card. “Because I’m not in a great mood.”

  “What else is new!” Michelle said, falsely cheery.

  “I realize I’ve been in a bad mood for like four years now,” I said. “I know.”

  “I know. That’s the thing, Jesse. Being a mother, it’s not like it’s all good. It doesn’t solve everything. You can’t do everything. As a woman, I mean. We have all these roles, still. Nothing’s changed since our mothers, really. As you know, I have a fairly liberated husband, and he still tells me, ‘Just bring Zoe to your meeting. We can’t afford a sitter for your meeting.’ He would never do that! Bring a child. Your job isn’t taken as seriously—no matter what you do, you will always be seen as the mother. You will always be seen as caring more about your children.”

  “But you will,” I said, “care more about your children than your job.” Also, Michelle’s husband was not so liberated, but I let that go.

  “No, I won’t,” Michelle said. “Not every moment, no I won’t. I was a person before Zoe. I am still that person.”

  “I get it.” On the front of the card was a photo of Harriet seated at a formal table set with a white tablecloth and golden china, a white napkin at her throat.

  “Do you really want to be part of a conversation about babysitting and organic carrots? Do you?”

  “Yes!” I said, opening the card. Inside was the same table utterly changed, food strewn about, stuck to the walls, noodles hanging from the crystal chandelier. Harriet was still seated, her expression the same. “I do,” I said.

  “No you don’t, Jesse. If this had been easy for you, having kids I mean, we would be sitting here bitching about what all the mothers are discussing—the five-hundred-dollar boots they deserve to get for themselves, their strollers, the new line of organic toys, attachment parenting. We’d be saying, ‘What happened to discussions of art and politics?’ You would be so pissed.”

  “I get it,” I said again. Were the complications of motherhood more than just history’s slow arrow? “You can’t really think I don’t know all this, Michelle. And yet here you are, somehow managing to have another,” I said.

  To Mutterly Love, the card said on the inside, below the great mess. And written in, beneath the print: To my favorite mummy. I love you, Ramon.

  “Yes,” Michelle said. “I realize that. Yes. I suppose I am.”

  _______

  While striving to become a mother has been unnervingly bewilder-

  ing, actually being a mother seems even more complicated. It occurs to me how little time I’ve spent thinking about the care and feeding of children. Where will it play and sleep? What will it eat? There is the faceless, raceless child: skinless, bloodless, hairless, featureless. The child is only organs, a map of arteries and veins, wrapped in transparent glass. How will I make sure it lives and that I do not shatter it? And if, right now, I order books on this matter, or go to a website, take a class even, what heartbreak have I set myself up for?

  For this reason, all our tables still have exposed glass corners. Our knives and cleaners and bleaches and open windows are in easy reach. Why prepare for something that could never arrive? Why safety-lock cabinets and bar the windows, store a stroller in an overstuffed closet, a dismantled crib in the trunk of a car? There is no reason, and yet still there is the constancy of my own internal reminders: an incessant ticking clock, the calendar, its days ripped by unnatural winds from its pages as in an old movie, marking time, seasons revolving like planetarium moons, circling Jupiter.

  _______

  Not long after I got Michelle’s happy news, along with her lecture, Ramon and I took the train to Coney Island. It had not been our intention. We had gotten on the train headed for Park Slope to see friends, including one of the newly pregnant couples, for brunch.

  “I so don’t want to do this today,” I said. I looked at my boots, scuffed from winter. The leather was worn thin; I could see the shapes of my toes wriggling inside them.

  “Me either,” Ramon said. “I hate brunch. I have never liked—”

  “Don’t,” I said, anticipating his tirade against the American tradition.

  “I just don’t like it.” He looked out into the dark tunnel. “It ruins a perfectly good day.”

  Our designated stop was approaching and Ramon slid closer

  to me. “Let’s do something fun.” He hooked his chin over my shoulder.

  “Okay.” What would that be, I wondered.

  The train stopped; the doors opened. Neither of us moved.

  “Let’s go to Coney Island,” Ramon said as the doors closed and the train groaned to a start.

  I felt his chin move against my shoulder as he spoke, and I smiled. Once we had ridden our bikes there on a sun-filled path along the water, New Jersey rising across the river. When we had gotten to the Cyclone, Ramon had looked at the wooden structure and balked. He cited reading a piece about it, the only wooden roller coaster in America, and how years previously someone had died on the thing, as reason to avoid it. But I’d insisted. I remembered being a kid: Kings Dominion, Six Flags, Hershey Park, my mother refusing to go on any of the rides. She waved to Lucy and me from outside the fence and I thought that I never wanted to grow up, never wanted to become an adult who was too scared to get on a roller coaster.

  As the coaster creaked up the tracks then, Ramon’s face blanched beneath the hand-painted REMAIN SEATED sign, flanked by American flags. The beach sprawled out before us; we could see out into the ocean, over the horizon, and his palm was sweating as he held my hand tightly. Going down, Ramon screamed and I laughed maniacally, breathless. We caught our breath around the bends, then journeyed up and then shot down again. The Wonder Wheel was more Ramon’s speed. We rocked in our seat, our feet dangling in the sky, like the kids at the end of Grease, like Julie Harris and James Dean in East of Eden, as we tipped toward the boardwalk and the beach, teeming with people far beneath us.

  That was years ago, when we biked all over the city. It had been summer then, but today it was winter. As we walked from the subway I could see that the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel were stopped, their cars empty, as if they’d been frozen in midride. It seemed that all we had to do was switch the correct lever to “start,” and we could access that day again, a day when we had just gotten back from that first time together in Italy, when we walked the boardwalk amidst the girls in short shorts, smelling of coconut, passing by the arcade and funnel cake stands, the bumper cars and the strongest man, and Nathan’s, and the spinning carousel, all the remnants of the stuff that Coney Island once was, a day when Ramon screamed on a roller coaster for the first and last time, when we were at the beginning.

  Today the winter light was dazzling and clear and heart-stopping, and we headed out into the sand, toward the sea. Two shirtless men with bushy gray mustaches, their chests and cheeks a furious red, walked by us vigorously as gulls swooped around us, cawing. We walked along the sand, the sun behind us, toward Brighton Beach, the steel parachute ride, also empty, rising at our backs. We turned up to the boardwalk and sat for a moment, watching the ladies in their furs parade by, and for a brief moment I thought of Anita, bundled up against the cold, the way my lips had frozen as soon as we’d pulled apart.

  Behind us, there was a splash. Ramon grabbed the sleeve of my coat and turned me to watch several men in the water, screaming from the horror of cold and from
the joy of it. We stood and waved and walked along the boardwalk. Ramon put his arm around me and I leaned into him, and the honey sun poured down on our backs, and the wind blew sand across the wooden planks, and the gulls swept in and around, and I could feel the sand beneath the worn soles of my boots as we walked, nodding to the old people who ignored our smiles as we passed.

  Your people are Russian, that lawyer had said.

  “Let’s get dumplings and borscht,” I said to Ramon.

  We walked a block to a café one of my colleagues had told me about, where the borscht is green and sour, the pickled watermelon, loaded with vinegar, and the dumplings are stuffed just right, served with a gravy boat of sour cream.

  My people—the Russians—did not seem to recognize me as such, perhaps because they were Ukrainian. Despite the many available tables, we were not seated for fifteen minutes. But we waited patiently, as we would in a foreign country, until finally we were seated at a table for two. Then we ordered all those things, and pickles, and a fruit compote juice, and we took off our coats and sat back and listened to the families screaming in Russian or Ukrainian, leveling our gazes at the people who stared at us without kindness, and then the food arrived, steaming and swimming in butter, all delicious, and I felt like we’d traveled somewhere together again, that we had left Brooklyn and New York and the States altogether for a place where neither Ramon nor I spoke the language or could claim the culture as our own.

  On the F train back, it all grew incrementally familiar again, each of the eighteen stops bringing us closer to home, the language shifting from Russian to Mandarin to Spanish to English. The factory buildings whipped by and the train left the outdoor track and dipped into the station. Ramon and I shivered and for a brief moment we knew we had traveled together, again, to another country.

  _______

  When we got back, we were both invigorated and in a good mood. Ramon rushed Harriet out, and I phoned Lucy for the fourth time, at the new number she’d given Ramon.

  “Lucy?” I screamed into the phone.

  “I’m right here,” she said. “Right here in the twenty-first century.”

  And yet, Lucy had no computer to video-call, there could be no visual telegram between us, and so it did remind me of the past century, the few strained conversations we had with our mother when she was away on a special occasion. Hello? she’d shout. Hello! The shouting was necessary then. In addition to the exorbitant cost, lines were often crossed or suddenly cut, and her serrated voice made me feel the panic that the conversation might end with each sentence. I stepped on the place that divided the earth in half, she’d said once, calling from Kenya. At the equator, she’d screamed. I had imagined my mother walking the line I saw drawn across all the maps my father pulled out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to explain to us where our mother was. Upon her return there’d be a grand showing of her slides of the trip, and sure enough, there was our mother smiling alongside a yellow sign with a crude black silhouette of Africa, EQUATOR in red, like a warning sign, slapped across it. And then the words: THIS SIGN IS ON THE EQUATOR. Just a crappy sign along a road.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “El Salvador,” Lucy responded.

  “What?” However long it has been—nearly twenty years now—I will never not associate that place with a war. “What the fuck are you doing in El Salvador, Lucy?”

  She paused. “I’m here with some surfers. In Punta Roca. It’s actually kind of touristic.”

  “Touristic. You’re being a tourist in El Salvador.”

  “Kind of,” she said.

  I was silent.

  “There are a lot of surfers here. This is a famous place for surfing.”

  “Well, I’ve never heard of it.” My good mood was dissipating.

  “Jesse, did you call to berate me again? Because honestly, I’m tired this morning.” She was silent.

  “Are you okay?”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Lucy?” I said.

  “I just haven’t been feeling great.”

  I closed my eyes. Latin America. She probably had some worm, a bug, some terrible disease. “Have you been taking, I don’t know, anti-amoeba pills? Whatever it is you’re supposed to take?”

  “Please, Jesse,” Lucy said. “I’ve been traveling for a long time. I know what to do.”

  It was true. It had been over two years since I’d seen my sister. Where was she staying? I wondered. In what kinds of places did she sleep? How did she get around? Was she still strapping on that REI backpack I watched her leave with? She had tried to look so assured, so grown-up, but she had gotten caught in the doorjamb and Ramon, who had come home with me for the weekend to see her off, had pushed her through it.

  “Tell me about Punta Roca.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine. I was just calling to check in.”

  Did she sound weary? Perhaps, I thought, she was almost finished with this part of her life. El Salvador, though war-torn and gang-ridden, was at least a bit north, was it not?

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s sweet. Your Spanish must be awesome.” I should tell her about the baby, I thought. About the Hispanic baby we might one day get to parent.

  “It’s good. I mean, Ramon says it’s pretty good. How are you?”

  “You guys speak in Spanish?”

  “Sometimes. How are you anyway?”

  “Fine. You know Ramon and I are doing our paperwork to adopt.”

  I could hear Lucy breathing. “That’s great, Jess. That’s so great.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No, I did.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Ramon.”

  “Ramon? When?”

  “A while ago, I guess, a month or so?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, you never said anything.” I wondered if he told her in Spanish and suddenly I thought of my sister and my husband and my hypothetical child all sitting around and having a blast in Spanish as I ran back and forth from the kitchen bringing regional snacks and trying to understand.

  “I haven’t talked to you much.” Lucy cleared her throat.

  “There’s also e-mail.”

  “I thought we’d be able to talk,” she said. “There’s not a lot of e-mailing here.”

  “Anyway.”

  “I think this is good news, though.”

  “You think?” I asked her. “Well then it must be!” I was becoming furious, but I could not say why that was.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. All those hormones, after everything you’ve been through, I just don’t know if that was good for you. Being pregnant could be difficult too for you, I mean, if all that stuff had worked.”

  “Stuff.”

  “Okay, treatments.”

  “Hmm,” I said. The sound of judgment. I guess I didn’t like it much either.

  “How are you feeling? Can I help with anything?” she asked.

  “You mean physically?”

  “Both,” she said. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, tensing up. “I feel just fine.”

  “How’s your stomach? Are you able to eat okay?”

  “Yes.” But I no longer wanted to discuss it with her.

  There was silence.

  “And how about the adoption? Are you excited?”

  “Excited? No. Feeling hopeful,” I said. “Cautiously optimistic,” I told her, though this was just something I had read that I was supposed to feel.

  “Being positive is important.”

  I didn’t respond. People were always telling me such things. Had this all happened because I had been negative? Like Ramon and I just had fantastically awful karma? I made another mental note not to send my hypothetical child to school in California. “Yes,” I said. “It is. Anyway, you’re surfing in El Salvador, right?” El Salvador. It might be a fascinating place. Our future baby could have biological parents from there.

  More breathing. But I noted that it seemed qui
et, in Punta wherever. I tried to picture my sister, tan, her legs smooth, the color of Bambi, and easy on a board. Instead I kept picturing her at her eighth-grade dance, a huge corsage strapped to her wrist, waiting for her date to arrive. Now I didn’t hear the sounds of people or traffic or the sea breaking hard on the shore. “I’m not surfing, but yes, there is surfing here. It’s actually the largest break in Latin America.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  Lucy laughed. “It’s good is what it means. People come from all over to catch the waves here.”

  “Okay!” I said. “Dude.”

  She laughed. “In any case, all’s well. Seems like we’re both fine! I should get going, but maybe we can talk again soon.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Talk to you soon then.”

  “Kiss Harry for me,” she said before hanging up.

  I smiled when she said this, but I had the worst feeling, when I hung up, that I had missed the purpose of our conversation, that we both had. We had been apart for so long and no longer knew how to speak, other than as strangers. How are you feeling? we said, but what we meant was, Where are you? Who are you now? Are you still in there?

  _______

  The next day, Ramon and I were back on the road—albeit this time just for a forty-five-minute jaunt to White Plains—for our information session with the organization that, as our agency did not have an office in New York, would be handling our local paperwork and doing our home study. The moment we got on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, we hit traffic.

  “About tonight,” Ramon said now. “Let’s try and let other people talk a little tonight, okay?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Other people need to talk,” he said.

  “Well, I’m sorry.” Wounded, I gazed longingly out at the road.

  “Me for instance. Or anyone. You could really just let anyone talk.”

  “Oh sure!” How easily can hurt become anger? Far too easily. “Sure. And why don’t you try and not say something completely stupid then. Okay?”

  “I said let’s. I did not say you. God, Jesse.”

  “Yes you did,” I said. “I know what you meant. I know exactly what you meant.” I felt the anxiety filling me, water poured over ice, crackling, in a tall glass. Please, I thought, let us just not be late.