The Mothers: A Novel

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Now, as Ramon and I drove north, I put out of my head that, because of the spotty cell service, I would have to take a break from my phone, and as we pulled up to the house, as if to reinforce this point, the SOS came up in red. Indeed, I thought, this ship is sinking. Send flares.

  Ramon snapped Harriet on her leash and she hopped out of the car, ready for her day of fun. He pulled the six-pack out of the backseat, and we all headed out to the backyard. First we passed the pool and the sounds of screaming and splashing and laughing children. I looked timidly at Ramon, who did not look at me, but swung the beer in his right hand.

  “Hello!” we both yelled when we saw Mrs. and Mr. Sanders standing, wide-legged, on the deck.

  Down below, Jacob manned an enormous grill that they rented each year for the party. I could see chicken and sausages and hot dogs and burgers already done and placed in front on platters, dripping with blood.

  “Hello!” Mrs. Sanders hugged me.

  I expected to hear the splash of Harriet, freed now from her leash, running into the pond, and when it did not come, I looked out at the lawn that sloped down to the water, just over from the clay tennis court. Harriet stood tentatively at the edge of the water. Several friends with their new babies, people from the neighborhood, friends of Michelle and Jacob we’d met here over the years, were all spread out on blankets, already eating and drinking. Every blanket held either an infant in someone’s arms, an infant splayed on the blanket, a toddler whom someone was trying to contain, or a kid who kept running from their parents to their screaming friends and back again.

  Some kids threw a Frisbee, and the tennis court was packed with kids and two adults who had clearly tried to have a game but had given in to the screams and cries of the children, who now held rackets bigger than they were. They swatted at the air, their bodies spinning around, as the balls went by.

  Behind me, Ramon cracked open a beer and headed down to the dock by the pond. There he stood, beer bottle in the air, drinking it down, his Adam’s apple lurching along his stretched throat. I came down to meet the two of them, nodding to several other families we knew, including Belinda, who’d had the surgical abortion at seven months and who appeared to be pregnant again.

  “Go on, Pea,” I said.

  She wagged her tail and made this growling sound in the back of her throat that signaled she was excited. Once she would have leapt off the dock, body outstretched and beautiful, but now she stepped into the water almost tentatively and pushed off.

  I watched as she made her way around the pond, and when I turned, Zoe and Michelle stood at the edge, Michelle’s belly full and round, but the rest of her slim, her legs smooth in her short jersey sundress.

  “Hey!” Michelle went to hug me. “Harriet still is such a good swimmer.”

  I nodded. “You going in?” I asked Zoe.

  She shook her head and scrunched up her nose against the pond and its non-chlorinated waters, its algae, and the slimy squish of its bottom. Even I knew she only went into the pool, with its gleaming blue floor.

  “Hi, Ramon,” Michelle said.

  He saluted her.

  Zoe looked up, and then, she took my hand.

  “Guess what, Jesse?” she said. “In four days I will be three.”

  I smiled at her. “Oh my God, what a big girl you are! Soon you will be driving! And swimming in the pond.”

  She laughed and let go of my hand.

  I did not think then that Zoe’s birthday meant that in two weeks I would have had a three-year-old. I only remembered this after I looked down at Harriet, shaking herself dry, and when Zoe squealed with delight at Harriet’s spray, and then she and Michelle began loping up the hill toward the barbecue, that we had nearly escaped everything. I didn’t care if all I ever spoke of again was mashed carrots and day care and how long each and every woman should breast-feed. I watched Zoe bound up the hill scissoring her arms to assist her up the slight incline. I had to look away. But look where?

  There were so many layers of the noise of children screaming, it was hard to think, but I chatted with a bunch of Michelle’s friends—two of them pregnant—as I watched Ramon drink beer after beer on the deck. We ate a lot of meat and some of the salads the guests had brought, and I sat on the blankets and oohed and aahed at the children; I tickled their bellies and made funny faces as I tried to keep Harriet from stealing unfinished hot dogs from plates, or worse, from an unsuspecting child’s hands.

  Children were proliferating year by year, and so were the mothers. Our friend Helen, with Ryan, whom she’d had the past December, breast-fed her child as she asked me about our prospects.

  “How is it going for you guys?” she asked, with meaning, looking up from Ryan, who was pumping away, grunting at her nipple.

  “It’s okay,” I said. Sometimes I wanted to talk about it all the time, like there was nothing else I could bear to discuss, and so was angry—outraged—when people did not ask me, and in other moments, like this one for instance, I wanted to zip my mouth closed and just lie back and watch the clouds pass over. “Not much to report.”

  “You know,” she said as her son sucked on, “holding babies really helps.”

  “Holding babies? Helps what?”

  “With getting pregnant. When we were trying, I couldn’t get pregnant for like six months and in addition to acupuncture, I just held a baby whenever I saw one. They say it helps for some reason. Do you want to hold Ryan?”

  It took me a moment to register this. I closed my eyes. I opened them and checked my phone. SOS, it said. Helen popped Ryan off her breast, which for some reason didn’t make him howl, and she held him out to me. I had no choice but to take him, cradling him in the crook of my arm, as I looked out at the party.

  “You know what else helps?” She popped a pacifier in the baby’s mouth and it moved comically in and out as he sucked.

  A new addition to the chaos of the lawn was a woman about my age, spooning food into the mouth of a child in a stroller. I cocked my head and watched her, leaning in and smiling close to the child’s face.

  “No,” I said, “what else?”

  “If you go to a bris and if you are the one to give the baby to the rabbi. That helps. It’s good luck. Just do it. It can’t hurt.”

  I rolled my eyes and shifted Ryan toward my chest as the woman took her child out of the stroller and rocked him to her. I watched Helen look at this mother we didn’t know.

  Helen turned to her husband. “That’s the kid from Ethiopia, right?” she asked.

  He shrugged, shoving food into his face quickly, before his baby was returned.

  “I think it is. I think one of Michelle’s mom’s colleagues or something adopted it. In any case, she’s single.” She reached out and let Ryan grab her index finger. “And she went to Ethiopia three times or something.”

  “That’s great!” I wanted to know what agency she went through and how long this woman had to wait. I wanted to know what the age of the child was when he or she arrived.

  Helen looked at me. “That seems hard.”

  I cocked my head. “What does?” I asked. “Which part, I mean? The going to Africa three times? The singleness?”

  She nodded after a moment. “Mm-hmm,” Helen said. “Both.”

  “Huh,” I said. I remembered the single woman being forced to leave that meeting at Smith Chasen and I felt happy for this woman who subverted those rules.

  But I don’t think that was what Helen was referring to.

  I looked out to the lawn filled with white people and white babies. And two or three Asian girls, each over ten years old. And then I saw Harriet sniffing around in a pile of dirty plates next to several mothers and children I didn’t recognize. I handed Ryan back over and stood up. “Gotta prevent a disaster here,” I laughed. “I’ll be back!” I said as I went to remove Harriet from the food.

  Just as I had pulled her off of a plate of chicken legs, I saw our friends Carolyn and Michael, who, Michelle had told me, had placed thr
ee embryos—that joined donor eggs and Michael’s sperm—into a surrogate.

  “Hey,” I said, trotting up to them, pitched sideways, as I held Harriet by the collar. “How are you guys?”

  Carolyn was beaming. Michael too.

  “Good news?” I asked, sitting down. I forced a wet Harriet, who wanted only to have a go at every plate of food on each blanket, to lie down next to me.

  “Our surrogate is pregnant.” Carolyn straightened her lean tanned legs out in front of her and shook them. Her red patent flats flashed in the sun. “Eight weeks.”

  “Oh, great!” I leaned in on her legs for a moment, emphasizing gladness. “I’m so happy for you guys.”

  And I was. There is, after all, room for everyone. Maybe there is a magic pot after all. As Carolyn proceeded to discuss the drugs that this donor, her donor, had taken to stimulate her egg production, and the spas Carolyn had sent the surrogate to in order to prepare her for pregnancy, I thought, first, about how Carolyn was married to a man who worked in finance, and second, that she and I were really the lost generation. Because soon, technology would be perfect enough to tell us which of our eggs would work, and soon it would be efficacious and cheap enough for all twenty-year-old women to freeze them. It would become a rite—a right—of passage, and soon these women would be stomping through boardrooms and trading floors like warriors, unconcerned with that thirty-five-years cutoff our gynecologists began to warn us about when we were still in training bras. Single young women will freeze their eggs, and suddenly their clocks will tick as steadily and calmly as anyone else’s. They’ll start drinking whiskey and smoking cigars in back rooms. We’ll grow a pair and we will not be afraid to use them.

  We will be cowboys.

  “Twins,” Michael said.

  “No way!” I hit him on the arm. I looked around for Ramon, but I couldn’t see him. “I can’t wait to tell Ramon,” I said, though that might have been a little bit disingenuous.

  “Thank you,” Carolyn said. “I appreciate that, Jesse. And tell me what’s going on with you. Michelle tells me you’ve moved on to adoption. I hope it’s going well.” She looked into my eyes, to show me just how much she meant this and hoped I had good news.

  “Don’t ask.” I rolled my eyes. “We’re up with our profile and now it’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait-a-while. Anyway.” Hers was the magic pot. Mine had been taken by the king after the peasants had all been slaughtered.

  I still could not see Ramon, but I could hear the splashing and yelling and crying at the pool. I realized that, aside from Jacob’s assistant, who was single and in her twenties, and the older couples here for Mr. and Mrs. Sanders, Ramon and I were the only childless or unexpectant people here.

  I went to stand up, groaning. “I’m going to find Ramon,” I said. “I’m hoping he’s not already passed out in the barn.”

  I scanned the lawn and saw him holding a beer by its neck, chatting with Jacob at the barbecue. Seeing my husband there, from this far away, I could detect his unhappiness. It was physical. He slouched. His hair was too long. His eyes looked tired, and a little sad. He had lost weight—I could not wait for the next time Paola saw him, for her to shriek that he needed to be in Terracina at all times or he would die from starvation.

  Ramon and I first had come here ten years ago. We all were here then, Michelle and Jacob, Ramon and me, and Belinda too, before she’d ever had to terminate her pregnancy. She had a different boyfriend then, and the six of us would grill and drink margaritas and roll joints, and Belinda and I would sneak away to smoke cigarettes and talk about presidential biographies and British novels by the pool in the pitch-dark, our feet dragging in the cool water. Someone would always streak naked into the pond and pretend to be bitten by the massive koi that somehow stayed alive in there. Harriet was the only child then, and in the mornings, hungover, we’d all drink coffee on the dock and languidly throw her sticks in the early sun.

  Now Fishkill was a place I couldn’t get airlifted out of soon enough. After Harriet dried off, and after I ate my weight in chili and sausages, and held enough babies to make me pregnant—by Helen’s calculations anyway—for a lifetime, I’d had enough. I could feel the weight bearing down, but I had lost sight of Ramon.

  “Where is he?” I said to Harriet as we went by the pool, encountering a battalion of children and the accoutrements of their attempts to swim—flippers and life vests and inflatable water wings and swim rings, kickboards—and the few adults drinking spiked punch and ignoring them. We looked in all the bedrooms and bathrooms. We went to the tennis court, also ruled by an army of children, and then around the back and into the woods.

  The earth changed, and I felt my sandals sinking into the deep moss and dead leaves. We walked a few feet to the gazebo nestled at the edge of the property, in the woods.

  “Hey,” Ramon said. He sat in the gazebo beneath a canopy of spiderwebs.

  “Ramon!” I said. “We’ve been looking all over for you.” Harriet, always the underminer, ran inside and placed her paws on Ramon’s lap.

  “Awww,” he said as she licked his face.

  “Are you crying?” I asked.

  Ramon cleared his throat and leaned back.

  The gazebo was musty, coupled with the yeasty scent of beer, and it was hot and moist and dark, like the inside of a tropical cave. I sat down on the bench across from him.

  “What’s up?” I asked. My voice was strained.

  Ramon wiped his bloodshot eyes. “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Ramon. You’re being positively misanthropic.”

  “Who cares?” Ramon kicked at the soft planks of wood.

  “I know.” I sighed.

  We were silent for a moment, just sitting there, listening to faraway joy.

  He shooed me away with one hand. “Go ahead.” His eyes glistened.

  “No,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “You know I don’t even know my father’s birthday?” His words were slurred.

  “Really? Is that true?”

  “His parents never told him the day of his birthday. His parents were Franco supporters, did you know that? That’s why he left Spain. For Italy.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “But that’s quite a trade-off.”

  “Seriously!” he said. “This is not an American story.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And now I don’t know his birthday.” I saw the tears streaming down his face get caught in his stubble, shining, on his dimpled chin. “Now I’ll never know it either,” he said.

  I sat down next to him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But you never know. He might be back, like your mother says. It might be black magic. I mean, it really could be all of that.”

  Ramon said something, but I couldn’t make it out.

  “You know you shouldn’t have drunk so much,” I said. “You’ve been drinking a lot lately.”

  “Can you not?” Ramon sat up. “For once can you just not do that? Not berate me or criticize me or have a fucking problem? Just this once?”

  I could barely understand him, but I could discern the meaning behind what he was saying. I swallowed and sat back. “Okay,” I said slowly.

  “Because you know what? I don’t have a father and now you know what?” He stood and stumbled and then stood again. “And now I’m not going to be a father either. No more fathers!” he said, mocking the making of an important speech.

  “Ramon.”

  “You’re always talking about the mothers,” he said. “But the fathers are here too.”

  I stood up. I put my hand on his shoulder. It was awkward for me, as I had become less inclined to show affection. “You will be a father. We will be parents. It’s what you’ve been saying and it’s true.” I brushed the hair out of his face. “Okay?”

  He nodded. “Maybe this is just too hard.” He reached down to the floor, where a beer bottle stood. He took a long slug. “Maybe this is too hard for us.”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  Ha
rriet had left the dank gazebo for the brighter green grass and the prospect of uneaten sausages, and I looked out to watch her approach the blankets of people, leaving mayhem and destruction in her wake.

  “Jesse!” someone from within the chaos called out. “You have got to get Harriet out of here!” Children began to shriek.

  I looked over at Ramon, snarling into his beer. I took his hand. “We’ve got to save the poor innocent children from our feral animal.”

  He laughed, a little bitterly.

  “We can find out your dad’s birthday,” I said. “I mean, you can find out anything now, can’t you?”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “I guess that’s the point. I can’t even wake up and say, ‘Today is Ramon Sr.’s birthday, how strange not to talk to him today.’”

  I nodded.

  “There is just nothing that makes me remember him. I don’t live where I grew up. I don’t have a sibling. I don’t have a child. Nothing reminds me of my father.”

  His speech had suddenly become clear. I nodded.

  “Jesse!” someone else called.

  I popped my head out. “I’ll be right there! Harriet, come!” I screamed, more for the people than for the dog, who I knew would not obey.

  “Let’s go,” I said, trying to heave Ramon up.

  I felt the pull in my arms, the inverse and opposite feeling of Ramon dragging me up from bed this morning. “Please,” I said. “Let’s grab Toto, click our heels three times, and go home.”

  19

  __

  Fall 2010

  The seasons were changing; time was just going and going; there was no holding back that stream of sand in the hourglass.

  We had no calls in September.

  And yet, there is nothing as exquisite as that month. Though I taught at a city school, hardly a university crawling with ivy and ringed by old trees, even here, September was about promise and winning. If spring is rebirth, September is for remaking.