The Mothers: A Novel (10 page)

We ordered another bottle of wine, and after we got deep into that came the emmer and raisin pudding and flourless dark chocolate cake. Then we went out to the new “cocktail place”—and by cocktail place, I mean a dark room with a couch and vodka that was not dispensed from a gun—across the commons, where I ordered us martinis.

After, we made our way, rather drunkenly, out to the street. We were padded up with scarves and hats and mittens, human teddy bears, as we hugged good-bye.

“Thank you so much for inviting me up,” I said. “It was a good thing for us to do.”

Anita placed a lint-covered, lumpy fleece glove on each side of my face. “So good to see you!”

I don’t know who went in first for the kiss. I think now it might have been Anita, because it was I who pulled away. As it was happening, though, I felt her soft lips and her warm tongue flickering against mine, and it was delicious, for a moment, to be kissing on the deserted street of a deserted college town.

“Hey.” I pulled away. I licked my lips and instantly they froze.

“Goodness,” Anita said. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“No.” I touched my lips with my mitten.
Swish swish
went my jacket. I had never thought I’d kiss anyone new again. “Me either.”

Anita cleared her throat.

“It’s okay,” I said.

She nodded and looked down.

“Well,” I said. “This
was
fun. I’m going back to the hotel.”

Anita looked up and nodded. “It was,” she said. “Thank you.”

We both turned away, then, and headed in different directions, Anita to her car—which I should have prevented due to all the drinking—and me to my hotel at the other end of the commons. My parka, moving against itself, hissed at me as I walked away.

_______

The next day I woke up late, with a hangover, and I dragged myself out to walk Harriet. It had snowed again during the night and the town was covered in a blanket of white, concealing the cars and garbage cans and streetlamps, and also further defining them.

I thought about Anita then, as I had during the night, when I’d woken with a start, zapped awake. Then I’d felt horribly guilty, and I’d wondered what Ramon had been doing on that night, and also on any number of occasions we left each other to our own devices, relieved to be apart and not to be confronted by our lonely coupledom.

Driving home, past the hills, the clapboard houses set beneath the horizon line of trees and over the hanging green bridges that cross so many upstate towns, I wondered why I had done that. There had been other drunken evenings, with other people, on many other nights, so why had this happened with Anita? It was nothing, a quick kiss on a frozen night, and then the rescinding of that kiss. I thought of Anita all bundled up in her layers of fleece, her dark wavy hair and her ruddy skin, and how her eyes squinted just at the outside corners of her eyes, like pulled spiderwebs. But in that moment, despite being wrapped in all of winter’s effects, I felt my costume undoing, as if I was unzipping my outer casing, stepping out of the livery I now wore. I was getting closer. To someone. Recently it seemed everyone I had loved was receding.

I wished for Lucy. Or for what I wanted Lucy and I to be to each other as adults. When I went to college my sister would call and report on all our parents’ usual activities. Mom’s away this month, she’d say. Dad’s taken up cooking, she’d report. Italian.

Once, she’d called sobbing. This was when Claudine left. Did you know she had children of her own? she’d asked me.

I’d had no idea that Claudine had children, that she tended to us and then went home to her own. And who watched them by day? I wondered what they looked like, what they wore, if their beds were made and what they were covered in. If they were girls, or boys, or both. If they cried in her lap, head on her breast, little fingers reaching to the shining, synthetic hairs of her wig, the way Lucy did. Or if they kept away from her as they aged, watching her from hulking shadows, as I had. It is a historical fact that African-American women have raised a considerable number of white American women’s children. I know this now, but how did I become part of a dialectic and not notice it, not even later?

She was practically my mother, Lucy had said.

Several years later, Lucy visited me in graduate school, before I got sick. I had dragged her to classes with me, introducing her to professors whom I called by their first names. Jean, I’d said, oh-so-casually, meet my sister. What was Lucy doing then? Waitressing, I believe. Did I say, Jean, meet my sister, the waitress?

While it is likely true that I did speak more that day in my classes in an effort to show off to Lucy, I was shocked when, after class, at the bar around the corner from my house, a place where I proudly knew the bartender, Lucy downed three whiskey sours in quick succession and turned instantly dark.

“Such a showoff.” She looked straight into the mirror behind the bar, blackened in spots, as if the reflective parts had been rubbed out.

I smiled at the bartender, Charlie, who made me excellent old- fashioneds when I needed them, like on those late afternoons in the premature upstate winter dark, those short fearful days when I thought the worst thing that would happen was that I would remain insecure in my work and so would not find a place in the academy. And then I looked at my sister in that bar mirror and laughed. Because I thought she was joking.

Her eyes grew small. “You always try to be so goddamn smart,” she said, sliding off her stool. “When does it end?” she asked as she went toward the door.

I watched her slam out of the bar, and then I paid up, apologizing to Charlie, and followed after her. I found her on my front stoop, waiting for me.

“Lucy,” I said. “Come on.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. As I unlocked the door, pushing the warped wood open with my shoulder, I heard her stand and follow me inside.

I put the teakettle on and then came out to the living room, where she sat, brooding, in the dark. I took off my coat and smelled the cigarettes from the bar in my hair.

“Lucy,” I said. I sat down next to her. “I’m sorry.”

It was the first time I had realized it: I have always been looking ahead. I rarely saw my sister because she was always behind me.

I watched her remove her coat in the blue dark. The kettle whistled.

“Okay?” I stood and moved to turn on a lamp.

I saw my sister nodding, shyly, as the room filled with delicate light.

And now, if I were to call Lucy to tell her what had happened with Anita, how I had done this strange and horrible thing in that same town, all I could imagine hearing between us was the sound of the surf or the caw of a foreign bird.

_______

When I arrived home, Ramon was playing his hedgehog/mouse game, several beer bottles on the table.

“Have you even moved?” I asked, dropping my bags.

“Barely,” he said.

“Living it up, I see.” I bent down to kiss him on the cheek. I should mention Anita. Say something and make it go away, I thought.

“I don’t know.” Ramon stared straight ahead at his computer. He didn’t even greet Harriet. “Sometimes I just think I’m living it all down.”

I looked over at my husband. It was not worth repeating, I thought, nodding at the five bottles of beer on the table, lined up in a perfect row. I took off my parka. He was far away. “Sorry,” I said.

Ramon looked up at me. He smiled. “Oh, by the way,” he said. “Lucy called.”

13

__

I
n the two months that had stretched out between Raleigh and the information session in White Plains, there was Anita upstate and then, as always, there were pregnancies. Three of my friends informed me—some gingerly, as sensitively as they could, some in mass e-mails to avoid telling me directly—that they were pregnant. One friend gave birth to an eight-pound boy, and another had to have a surgical abortion at six months due to a rare genetic disease. She already had a child, but I don’t think this made it easier for her when, in the supermarket, old ladies put their hands on her stomach, not knowing that inside was only a ghost.

That was when Michelle let me know Zoe would have a sibling.

“You’re pregnant?” I said when she called with the news.

“Yes! Yes. I’m so relieved, you know? Thank God,” she said. “You just never know if it’s going to work out. Of course, you know what I mean.”

“Congratulations, Michelle!” I was in my office/closet trying to get organized. I looked out onto the street, where two women walked together, both about to burst, one’s stomach taut and rounded, a fanged snake who’d eaten a bowling ball, the other’s belly torpedoed, as if she’d inhaled a missile.

“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.”