The Mothers: A Novel (15 page)

Seeing Lydia made me think, as I often had, about Lisa. Whether she and that hideous Danny were fostering a child now, and if they were, would they be able to keep the child. Forever. I could not bear to picture gaunt, timorous Lisa, her hands marked by the attenuated, welt-like bones of her fingers, gripped tight around a steering wheel, driving her child back to social services. Honestly, I could not.

I wondered what happened to many of those people whom we’d talked with up in White Plains. I was curious about the ones in Raleigh, too. Unless we scanned the couples on the agency’s site, constantly watching for who had been matched—an activity I could not do for the stress it caused me—we had no news of anyone but Anita and Paula.

I am moving closer to you, I thought. And then Harriet walked over, wagging her tail. “Pea,” I said. “Poor Pea.” Mutterly love, I thought, kissing her and receiving several licks in return. I remembered bringing Harriet home from the vet after she’d been spayed; her belly was shaved, and stitches bisected her abdomen, not unlike my own.

Dogs could be enough, I thought as Ramon came back in, shutting the door quietly behind him. I imagined, not for the first or second or third time, giving up this ridiculous idea of New York City, the hum of the fluorescent light in my shared office, the apartment that affords such gifts as roaches, belly-up, when it rains, the scratch and shit of mice when the weather is cool and dry. I saw hills and grass and a backyard filled with dogs. But I could not picture children playing there.

“Weren’t we going to start with the best-case scenario? Mental illness?” he said. “Drugs and alcohol use?”

I rubbed Harriet’s ears and stood up. I turned to face my husband. Dogs running free and wild in my own backyard. They jumped out of the hair-filled car, leapt with joy from it, when we went for weekend hikes. The seasons were changing. “Yes,” I said, crossing my arms. Suddenly none of this felt like it was Ramon’s choice to make. “Bring it on.”

17

__

J
ust after classes ended in mid-May, and before our annual trip to Italy, our home study was approved. The letter stated:
We are very pleased to recommend Ms. Weintraub and Mr. Aragon as adoptive parents and believe that any child placed with them would receive the benefits of a stable and loving home life. They meet the standards of this agency and the preadoption requirements of the State of New York to be adoptive parents.

On a Post-it attached to the document, Lydia wrote:
The banana bread was delicious!

It could have been what did it, I thought, tearing the note from the document. My banana bread.

_______

In Terracina, just as we were recovering from the jet lag that made us sleep too late, waking up groggy, dehydrated, and hungry, I grimly turned thirty-nine.

The day was not unusual for us. We stepped into the kitchen, where our fresh-squeezed orange juice awaited us, the tops of our glasses covered in tinfoil to keep out bugs and germs and microbes. As I removed this protective cap, the story of the agony of the oranges began. They had to be picked from the trees; they had to be hand pressed; it was not easy, not at Paola’s age. Look! These calluses from so much work. Then there were the farm eggs fried in olive oil and topped with a farmer’s cheese, served with fresh bread, each with its own tale of woe in how far the special bakery only the locals knew of was from Paola’s house, and how the eggs from the farmers are very special, practically gold. Liquid gold, I thought, as I pierced the bright orange yoke, and I agreed then that these were special eggs, very very special eggs indeed.

Ramon and Paola fought as usual on my birthday. Today Paola wanted her blood pressure taken at the special pharmacy, where her friend worked, before 10
a.m.
—10
a.m.
was the cutoff—and Ramon did not want to make that trip, not that morning. I finished my breakfast—delicious, yes, but what’s the point of it when there is no talking, no discussion, no
conversation
while consuming it?—and made my way out of the kitchen.

I could still hear Paola screaming in Italian, accusing Ramon, even I could tell, of trying to kill her, of wanting her to die so that he could inherit all this—there was silence as I imagined her arm sweeping over her small kitchen. He was refusing to help her with her blood pressure before the designated deadline so that he could also inherit her art, her mahogany furniture, and the two sets of ivory tusks, illegally bought and sent here from West Africa, now wrapped and stacked in the basement.
You want all this because your job is no good!
she said in English.
Why did you not become an architect? Why oh why,
Paola began to wail, and I heard Ramon thump the table with his hand and tell her:
Mama! Ho già abbastanza preoccupazioni.
Enough is enough. This, I understood.

In the bedroom, I gathered up my purse, my laptop, and my book on why there would never be women artists, an anthology from the seventies I was using to write a new paper for a conference in early fall. Still we slept across from Paola’s bedroom and her altar to the past, her rosaries laid out like clothes for a child, her candles floating in oil, and her incense sticks, for spells. I changed into a skirt, because God forbid I go to town looking like the American strumpet I so clearly was and had been accused of being by Paola on more than one occasion when I left, in the stifling midday heat, in shorts. Even though many Italians wore shorts and jeans in the village, I paid heed.

I headed down the marble stairs to the gate, creaking it open, and then out—free!—onto the dirt road and then the paved one that led into town, to the café at which I had been sitting summer morning after summer morning since I’d met Ramon, where I could read a
Herald-Tribune,
check my e-mail, and, today, look at how many people had wished me well. I took a seat at an outside table that looked out onto the ancient piazza still waking, light illuminating the old stones, famous for having been taken from the Roman Forum. My parents, in their usual effusive way, screamed
happy birthday
out of my computer. They sent off-center, low resolution, barely readable photos of Harriet. And, despite the early hour in the States, several friends had already sent notes.

Also in this mix was an e-mail from a friend who regularly fostered dogs. Every week she housed what seemed like at least fifteen of them in her Upper West side Apartment, and she spent much of her waking life trying to find these animals good homes. Today she sent an image of a collie-spaniel mix, just to me.
A sibling for Madame Harriet?
she wrote.

I did not delete it as I flipped to the next e-mail, from Lucy. When I clicked it, a mouse in a sombrero played a manic happy birthday to me. I looked around the café, embarrassed, and deleted it before the mouse had finished his song.

And then, turning to Facebook, I looked at the early birthday wishes from former students; colleagues; peers I’d gone to high school, college, graduate school with; friends. Since I was here at the café anyway, I thought, why not take a quick look at Michelle’s page to see if there was evidence of her pregnancy. And yes! There, in a photo, was her round, full belly, Zoe with a child’s pretend stethoscope pressed to it as she professed to listen. A mutual friend in this photo looked a bit bloated around the eyes and cheeks, and sure enough, her page announced boldly:
I’m told we’ll have a little one in November!

Why not, then, look at the baby status of my colleagues and acquaintances, distant relatives, friends recently married, women I’d met on those hateful cold dawns in sterile doctors’ offices? One or two of their status updates shrieked with happy, blessed, beautiful news, photos posted of their faces, dazed and sleepless, with that postcoital look special to those who had recently given birth, teensy loaves of bread swaddled in soft blankets in their arms. I scanned Anita’s page for any kind of update but found only evidence of yet another spinone puppy. No baby news from her or the eighteen other women I investigated. Still, I went farther in, now to the bloggers, their links offered from acquaintances’ walls, writing extensively—for whom I could not say—about every aspect of their pregnancies, from how they felt (
Big as a whale!
Icky!
) to what they bought (
baby food makers, German breast pumps, organic strollers
). I read these exhaustive accounts all morning, looking at all the mothers. Spending the start of my thirty-ninth birthday in the beautiful coastal town of Terracina, Italy, running away from my mother-in-law and her farm eggs and her just-off-the-boat squids and fishes, her rising blood pressure, and my husband who tended to her.

Ramon found me seated at one of the small wicker tables, trying not to finish my second coffee in three gulps. I watched him amble up to my table in an easy manner he wore only here.

“Hey,” he said.

“As much as I love the screaming, I thought I’d get a break from it today,” I said.

“You’re hardly a stranger to screaming.”

“Too true.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” Ramon pulled up a chair and in one swift movement had the barista’s attention and a coffee already hissing.

“I just can’t deal, Ramon.” I opened the paper. There had been an
E. coli
outbreak in Germany due to Spanish cucumbers and Paola had been screeching about it all the previous night. As a result, tomatoes were, for some reason, banned from our diet, a tragedy, as there was little I enjoyed more in life than a delicious Italian tomato, with fresh mozzarella, and basil from Paola’s garden.

“Look.” I turned my computer toward him. “Jackie sent me another dog in need of a home.”

“Oh! So sweet.”

“Should we take her?” I asked. “She’s part spaniel.”

“Don’t you think we’ve got enough on our plate?”

“No!” I said. We didn’t have enough, remember?”

“We could get a baby at any time, just as soon as the profile goes up. We have a good shot. Compared to a lot of those couples, we’re young.”

“Not the ones at the training session,” I said.

“Yes, but the ones online. And I have the Spanish. We translated every goddamn line of that letter into Spanish. We could have a birthmother in just a few weeks. I don’t think we want a puppy and an infant at the same time, do we?”

The dog, Jackie said in the e-mail, was named Daisy. She was adorable. “I suppose you’re right.” I turned the computer back toward me.

Ramon’s macchiato arrived, and the waitress smiled at him, her long nose dipping down into her flowering mouth, as she set the teensy cup surely on the table. His legs were crossed, and the top leg kicked slightly, a navy cloth espadrille dangling from his toes. He sipped at the coffee and he looked nothing like he did at home, where he seemed caged, stalking our apartment, unsure, his movements jerky and new, skin sallow.

“It’s your birthday, Jess, let’s do something fun today.”

“Ecch. Birthdays.” I thought of myself this time next year, in this very café I’d been sitting in for the past ten years, still without a child. Only on that day I’d be forty.

“Want to take the boat to Ponza? Or go to the beach? Take a nice walk in the hills?”

My husband does not hike. He walks. And this walking never involves any kind of
gear
. In fact it involves little in the way of preparation—looking up trails, say, places of interest that might be passed along the way—just leather sandals and perhaps a bottle of water if I fight hard enough about the perils of dehydration.

“Whichever,” I said. “It’s not going to be much fun anyway.”

I knew I was in a sort of paradise and I knew that I could not appreciate my good fortune.

“You know, you are really something.” Ramon lifted the coffee to his lips and then placed it back down on its chipped saucer. “Do you know how many girls would love to take a trip to a coastal Italian town with their husbands?”

“To come stay with their mother-in-law? Not so many.”

“You wanted to be away for your birthday,” he said.

“I know. I know. And it is so beautiful here. But I wish we’d done something different.”

“Like what, Jess? We have so many expenses right now and this is free for us.”

“I know this.” I imagined us on a lounge chair by an infinity pool, a drink with a pink paper umbrella popped into a tall glass dripping with condensation, on a holiday we would never take even if we had the money. “I wish you’d just plan something for the day.”

“Okay.” Ramon stretched with catlike grace. “Here’s the plan. Let’s go to the beach. In a coastal town in Italy. Together. Let’s go to the beach, and let’s just this once be thankful for what we have.”

_______

We did go to the beach that day and we swam in the cold, salted sea and we lay back on the sand, and watched the Italians with their racquetball, and their ease, and their elaborate packed lunches, and I read in my book about how women, living in a man’s world, have been cut off from education, culture, life, and Ramon sat beneath his umbrella reading
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,
and then, after a glass of beer by the ocean, we went back to the house because Paola was cooking dinner.

And then that birthday was, thankfully, behind me.

We stayed in Terracina for two more weeks. I read and made stabs at an article in the mornings as Ramon and Paola divided and conquered, each other and the world, and then, in the afternoons, Ramon and I took a few hours to ourselves in town or at the beach or at the lake, and often we’d come back along the canal after dinner, to drink wine and eat strawberries and fresh ricotta. Once a routine was established and I was able to work, the trip somehow became more relaxing.

Until the moment I realized I was a week late getting my period. There it was: that familiar
pingpingping
of my heart, the sign of dread and longing. Could this
be
? I reached, Pavlov-like, for my breasts and squeezed: Had they grown? And had we actually managed to have sex at the right time this month? I had peed on sticks each month to pinpoint the coveted LH surge—the onset of the hormone that indicates the start of ovulation—for so many years, I’d had what I had come to call ovulation syndrome. We both had it. Ramon and I had become two trapped, frantic, desexualized animals, unable to mate. While most months we still managed to have sex when I was ovulating, by my own calculations, it was hardly with much of the gusto of our earliest endeavors.

Oh, the times we thought we were having sex for children in earnest! After, I stood on my head. And then, in those first few months, I was so good! Not a drop of alcohol touched my lips. I ate organic kale and brown rice sweetened with sushi vinegar. I did not jump up and down, not even for joy, lest I risk destabilizing the possibility of implantation. And yet my period still arrived each month, unerringly on time.

Within a few months of this tedious process, sex was transformed into something unrecognizable. I peed on sticks, and we did it on the nights the blank white space was slashed bright pink, but it was the very opposite of those first tries. We were completely lost to each other now; worse, perhaps, we lacked hope. When I began to feel that remove, I wondered what Ramon was thinking, or about whom, and then, at some point later still, I did not care; he could think about whatever he wanted to think about if it would end it sooner.

Which felt like the worst thing ever until it got even worse, as on the high holy days of my ovulation we began to rattle the bars of the cage of our apartment, the chains of our marriage, most fiercely, as we tried, helplessly, hopelessly, to turn our marriage of two into a family. We would fight about who would clean the bathroom or pay the rent or wash the dishes, and in the middle of my yelling, I’d think, Great, how am I going to get my husband to have sex with me now?

Which is why so many women become pregnant when they decide to make that leap from relying on their own bodies to conceive and give themselves over to the bodies of strangers. How many stories—life lessons, really—had been retold to me of the infertile couple who decided to adopt and then,
boom!,
they became instantly pregnant. Too many of these tales, but now I clearly saw their worth: could that be us? Day after day, moment upon moment, in Terracina, waiting for my period to come and hoping for it to stay away, I thought, This time, it is us. This time, we were the lucky ones. If, however, this was so, had I drunk too much frascati the other night as the town cooled and the moon rose? At four glasses, I knew the answer was an unequivocal yes.