The Mothers: A Novel (16 page)

I did not tell Ramon that I was late in an effort to keep expectations to a minimum. Alone, I envisioned my scar tissue unraveling from my insides the way I pulled ivy from the wooden fence surrounding my yard upstate. I thought of swaddles printed with giraffes, the texture of cheesecloth, lightweight city strollers, the safety of car seats. And the more I did not tell him, the more anxious I became. If I were pregnant, complications were likely. My chance of an ectopic pregnancy—where the egg implants in the fallopian tube and so cannot create a viable pregnancy—was about 85 percent. And if, miracle of miracles, that did not happen, there was a good chance I would be in pain from all that scar tissue stretching—those weeds, again, clawing in, forced undone. And yet, still, each month, I lay back and had a go at it, with gusto or without.

Because I never believed it. Still. That any of it, or none of it, was possible.

I decided if I did not have my period by the next day, which would be seven days late, I would just take a pregnancy test and be done with it.

That night, I refused wine at dinner, which Paola noted as she served her rigatoni with offal with an exaggerated raised eyebrow. I was not a fan of this dish—I am an adventurous eater but the frisson stops for me at entrails. I felt a wave of nausea as Paola heaped an enormous serving—my mother-in-law had, in fairness, come to understand my American love of a large portion—onto my plate. Surely, I thought, picking my way through the sauce, this nausea was due to my secret pregnancy.

“This is how you take care of a man,” Paola told me, not for the first time, as she cleaned up the dishes. “You cook for him; you clean. You
iron
.”

“Got it!” I said, bringing in the plates for her to wash in a special process so complicated—there was vinegar and a miniature dustpan and brush, and several different containers of soap—that it was impossible to get involved.

“You iron?” She looked at me sidewise, wiping her hands on her apron.

This was the three hundred and forty-seventh time she’d asked me this. “Of course,” I told her, looking away. We didn’t even own an iron and the last time the conversation had turned to the washing machine issue—when she discovered we did our laundry en masse with other Brooklyn villagers—it had ended in tears. Hers. I feel sorry for you, Paola had said.
Pacch.
Me? I lived all over the world and never have I shared a machine in this way. “I iron all the time,” I said. “Actually, I enjoy it. I find it extremely relaxing.”

She nodded her head happily over her dishes. “Goot,” she said through her smile.

Why ruin it for her, I thought as I went to clear the rest of the table. Why ruin it for any of us.

_______

Utterly exhausted—from that ancient, scorching Italian sun, perhaps, I thought, trying not to consider what I knew to be the real reason: my surreptitious pregnancy—I turned in early, the way many pregnant women’s bodies force them to do. I could hear the television at a volume that must be used to signal boats from the sea—first the news and then some kind of talent show resembling
American Idol—
as I lay back, alone, and I wondered if this would be what it was going to be like for the next nine months. I was very excited to complain as I attempted to adjust myself so the bump in the mattress that hit just at the tip of my spine and the one at my right shoulder would somehow hit my body’s fleshier parts.

When I woke the next morning, the first thing I remembered was that today was a day I could be pregnant.

I still had not gotten my period! And instead of eating with Ramon and my mother-in-law, I explained that I needed to take a walk on my own. I left to their indifferent shrugs and headed into town, to the pharmacy in between Paola’s and the village, and as I made my way in, a friend of Paola’s looked up from behind the counter. Though she did not wave at me, she nodded her head in assent, and so I bought some sunscreen for an obscene amount of money and then left. It struck me then that Paola knew everyone in this town, the gelato makers and the jewelers, the bakers and the sandal makers. And most especially Paola knew the pharmacists and the people who worked there, as this is where she spent her mornings getting her blood pressure taken. I imagined all the pharmacists calling one another in a game of wicked telephone. It was like being sixteen again, slipping in past curfew, hiding condoms, everything about my life contained and concealed.

But I was very far from sixteen, even farther, perhaps, from Northern Virginia, and when I entered the other two pharmacies within walking distance, a thick-lidded woman would look up, her head moving an infinitesimal amount in acknowledgment, and then she would return to her paperwork.

My bladder was uncomfortably full—I was holding on to the morning urine, which I knew gave the most accurate reading—and I had not yet had coffee, when I returned, exhausted, to the house.

“Ramon.” I pulled him aside. I could see Paola standing in the threshold of the kitchen, holding a spatula, her head cocked to listen. And I explained.

“We’ll be back, Mama,” Ramon told her, grabbing the car keys, and I watched her part the curtains as we drove out of the gate.

We drove twenty minutes outside of town, toward Fondi, not far from the lake, to go to a pharmacy that would not house a woman who would ask my mother-in-law, with mock sincerity, when she would be expecting her first grandchild. I used the bathroom at this anonymous shop, to find out what I had always known. Had it been positive, the story—my story—would be that I had always known it, but this story ended here: I was not pregnant.

Ramon had only been aware of this promise for half an hour and its brokenness had not damaged him, not visibly anyway. Back in the car, he chatted on about going into the hills today for some lamb for his mother. He knew I liked these excursions out of town, and I was aware that he was talking over the layer of my disappointment, a skin forming across the surface of hot milk.

“Everything good comes from the mountains.” Ramon yammered on and on. “Everything healthy and important, none of those diseases, like those cucumbers—my mother was just so upset about that! We do know the best places here. It’s not like New York either, so rarefied.”

I was not listening. “Ramon,” I said. “I have to get a coffee. Can you just drop me in town? Not the old town.”

“We have coffee on,” he said. “Filter coffee! I know you like that and there is no filter coffee in town.”

I looked at him. I was not, for the first time in a long while, angry. “Please. I just want to sit and have a coffee on my own, okay? I can’t deal with going back and sitting at that table right now.”

“Do you want me to come?” he asked. “I’ll come with you.”

I went to roll down the window, carefully, with that same piece-of-shit manual crank I had inadvertently torn off on that first visit. Warm air rushed in through the open window. It smelled of salt and berries and the sea. “I’m just going to take a few minutes and walk back on my own,” I said.

Ramon dropped me off and I walked away from the piazza, where, I reasoned, I would not be recognized, even though no one identified me in Terracina with anything but dismissiveness.

Now I walked along the stones of the street, facing the sun, and I could see my shadow stretched out long and flat behind me. I remembered Ramon and me at the warped picnic tables outside the bar by our first apartment in the West Village drinking pints of frothy beer and pulling at greasy onion rings. The waitress knew our names and we tipped her well then. We would go home and push my stacks of papers off the bed I worked on, and we’d make love and then fall asleep and we would wake up and do this again. In any number of countries, I had lain in bed with Ramon, a window open onto a street, a breeze rustling long curtains.

Now I saw a café in an alleyway out of the sun, and I stepped toward it, my shadow disappearing beneath the cool shade of the high stone walls.

Perhaps, I thought, this was also the end of desire.

____

Part 3

The Birthmothers

18

__

August 2010

H
ere’s the thing: there’s no getting a break; there’s no respite from breathing. Everywhere we go there are children and the mothers who birthed them. They are outside my window, a mother pushing a double stroller, shielding both heads from the sun. I make room for them on the street, in stores. I hold the doors open and the mothers walk straight through, so absorbed with their children that they do not even thank me. I see the mothers on playgrounds, of course, at restaurants during brunch, a meal ruled by children. And at the ob/gyn, where I went after Italy, as my period was late again, and the following month as well, and the following month, again.

I entered the cool reception of the Soho office, out of the blasting end-of-August humidity, and was confronted by a lobby filled with pregnant women, some about to pop, others in newer stages of pregnancy, but each rubbing her rounded belly as she sat, legs spread, on one of the oversized chairs, an array of parenting magazines—
Parenting, American Baby, FamilyFun, Fit Pregnancy
—fanned out before her. Where the hell was
American Infertility Today
? Where was goddamn
Vogue
?

I sat down in the sliver of space left on the large leather couch. “We.” I saw it clearly that each of these women was already a “we” and I was an “I.” I can have a husband and parents, a sibling, but I am still an “I.” My body, I mean. Even how those letters look:
I. We.
I pictured them. I saw all our bodies.

The women smiled at one another—when are you due, how far along are
you
? Is this your first? Oh, your third, can you believe it, we thought we were done!—but no one made eye contact with me. I recognized I was being ignored, as overlooked as poverty can be, and also I sensed that I was feared. These women who fidgeted and cleared their throats as I sat beside them seemed scared of catching what I had, or more, what I lacked.

The technician eventually called my name, and I practically ran into the examining room. I changed into yet another hospital gown. Then I was weighed (facing front, weight gain was the last thing I needed to worry about) and measured (was I shrinking? Please, God, tell me I’m not
shrinking
!) and blood pressure taken, the
ziip
of the blood-pressure cuff’s Velcro as familiar a sound as traffic to me now. My vitals.

I sat on the examination table, my bare legs dangling between sock-covered stirrups, waiting for the doctor to arrive.

This is what I saw: along with the array of gynecological tools, each with its own look and gleam of an instrument of torture, was a fetal monitor laid out on the counter. On the cupboards above it, signs were taped, colored sheets of paper offering: INFANT CARE! BABY PROOFING! CHILDBIRTHING CLASS! BREASTFEEDING CLASS! Beneath each oblation was a list of dates, mostly by month: August 8. September 12. October 3. November 15. Some of these dates had come and gone, but when one is pregnant there is a different notion of time. For me even the future was passing.

But forget all of that, because the worst thing about waiting in that room was the thin walls. I could hear talking—a man and a woman’s voice and a third chipper voice that I assumed belonged to the technician. Then there was silence, and then a thumping noise set against a sound not unlike the calling of the ocean. Bum
bum
bum
bum
ba
bum
. I closed my eyes. It was a sound I had only heard by the sea.

“There it is!” that technician-like voice said.

“Oh my God!” the woman gasped.

“Hmm, hmm,” the technician said. “That’s the heart!”

“Wow.” That was the male voice. “Wow.”

“Look! Look!” said the technician. “That’s eighteen weeks,” she said. “And there,” she giggled, “is the penis.”

I kicked my feet. CHILDBIRTHING CLASS! I looked at the dates again. This woman in the next room might take this class. And at the end of it, or maybe somewhere in the middle, she would have her baby.

I, however, did not need the childbirthing class.

“Bye!” I heard from the next room. “We’ll see you in a few weeks!”

There was a rustling and then ripping of paper, and the shuffle of clothing, the squeak of shoes—sneakers—on linoleum, then someone exiting the room.

“I’m so excited,” the woman said. “Are you excited? Are you as excited as I am?”

I didn’t hear a response.

“Oh,” she said. “Are you crying, honey?” There was another brief pause. “I know,” she said. “I know. Aren’t we just the luckiest people in the world?”

_______

This is the way in which we were lucky: our birthmother letter, our home study document, and our online profile were finally approved. Shortly after this our profile went up online with our toll-free number and our special designated e-mail. The day it went “live,” my ob/gyn called to tell me that my results were normal, in regards to my extended cycles. I had thought perimenopause, she said, but that’s usually when the periods get closer together, but you’re good, she’d said. And I see you’re thinking of fertility treatments. Any more thoughts on this?

Set the stunned rage aside, I thought, hanging up. Because now we have pre-menopause to consider. I was in a new state of alert and so the day our profile went online, I took my phone from the shower to the bathroom to the coffee shop to the grocery store. This must happen now, I thought, before I go into
menopause,
and so I resolved I would not leave my phone’s side; I pledged myself to it. Until we were matched with a birthmother, I vow, Phone, I will never leave you.

We were told this process could play out in one of several scenarios. One scenario was we could get no calls, until, several months or a year or so down the line, we would be contacted by a birthmother who would be the right match for us. In scenario number one, there is a lot of waiting without any calls, which can be stressful. Or, in scenario number two, we could get several calls and e-mails from several birthmothers, who might, in the end for any number of reasons, end up choosing other prospective adoptive parents. Whatever the case, we were told that this process could take a year, on average, but for some it was much quicker, for some far longer.

Since when did average apply to me? The one time I came home with a C—in algebra!—my father nearly lost his mind. When I told him a C was
average,
this made him more distraught. Let me tell you something, my father said to me, a fury in his eyes I had thought previously saved for my mother, I will not have mediocrity in this household. Average, he’d said, incredulous. I will not have it, he said.

When it came to adoption, Ramon and I were not really a C couple, I reasoned. For one we were heterosexual. In the South and the middle of the country, the red states, where many of the birthmothers seemed to hail from, where our agency had offices, it seemed, heterosexuals might have an edge. Though my Jewishness might wear that sharp blade smooth, we did have what I had begun to refer to as the Ramon Advantage, his Spanishness. Our letter was translated into Spanish.
Queremos agradeceros por vuestra valentía y generosidad en su consideración de la adopción abierta,
he wrote. Thank you for your bravery and generosity in considering open adoption.

And while some in these parts had the false impression that New York was where people got shot, many people living outside of cities might find our lives rich and exciting. In this way, we were told, adoption works in the same manner genetics might. A birthmother who wants her child to live in diverse, culturally-minded Brooklyn is likely to be more similar to Ramon and me, who struck out for the city and all its rewards and frustrations.

Why didn’t anyone call the first day? Was it New York, or that we lived in an apartment, or that I was Jewish? Could they tell that we were not wealthy? That we were renters?

In the beginning of the second week, though, we did get a contact. Someone at the agency office in California—Allison—called to tell us there was a Carmen, a twenty-year-old in community college who lived with her parents in Los Angeles. I was told she was shy, and so she didn’t speak with me directly, but, Allison said, from her experience, as long as she’d been doing this (from her high, seventeen-year-old-sounding voice, how long could that have been?) she could tell Carmen was serious—the real deal—and though it was quite early in her pregnancy, she would be contacting us soon.

I intensified my relationship with my phone and did little else but sit and wait and watch it. I thought of Los Angeles, where I had an aunt in Pasadena, a cousin in Silver Lake, a friend in Los Feliz who once had taken me surfing in Santa Monica. I thought of Venice Beach, and Rizzo from
Grease,
her schoolbooks held close to her chest, just like Carmen, I imagined. This waiting was familiar; I had waited for the results of our embryo transfer, from petri dish to womb, for my period to not arrive and the strip to be darned with two pink threads. I had waited for the ultrasound results to be conclusive the one time a fetus did for a moment grow. But every kind of waiting, like each Eskimo word for snow, like shame, has a different facet, a new slant of light.

While I cannot say that Ramon was unmoved by this development, he did not have the obsessive attention to the possibility of Carmen that consumed me. He had a meeting in the city, which he did not cancel. He even met a friend for a drink afterward.

I thought, This adoption process has been so easy! Finally we have gotten through something relatively unscathed. Waiting on someone else’s body is nothing. Some couples have been waiting for years! Not us. Not this time, people. We were called and we are about to be matched with a birthmother in the second week. We’d been unlucky in many ways, but now good fortune was smiling upon us and all our wishes—the important ones, prayers, let’s say—would soon come true.

But of course the call did not come. Nor did the e-mail to our special designated JessandRamon Gmail account. What did arrive was Ramon, in the evening, smelling of beer. He shook his head when I told him and he got into bed with the pillow covering his face.

I did not sleep well, not that night or the next, and each time I woke from a fitful sleep, my hands were at my sides, clenched into fists, half-moons impressed in my palms. For three days I sat in my office refreshing my e-mail and having Ramon call our 800 number to make sure it worked properly.

It works, he’d say, staring at his computer. It fucking works. Could you stop being so compulsive?

By the end of the third day, I had revised my theories about this particular moment of waiting being effortless. The worst state a human can be in, in fact, is in the state of waiting, I decided, and so I called California Allison.

“Carmen has not called,” I told her. “We’re waiting and waiting.”

“Oh she will,” Allison assured me. “I know she will. Sometimes,” she said, “birthmothers are scared. They’re unsure. But I know she was serious about placing and serious about you and Ramon when she called.”

It was August, and while I was supposed to be writing and preparing for my new classes, I didn’t have to be anywhere, per se, and so I waited some more, languishing around the apartment like a bored housewife. I turned the television on and off. I opened and closed the refrigerator. I baked cookies, as the mothers, I reasoned, once again, are always baking. I spent inordinate amounts of time trolling the Internet, where I checked our profile. Unable to control myself, I went to those pages of the pregnant women I’d looked at on my birthday in Terracina and who had, by now, given birth, of course they had, time was passing.

Three days more of this and again I called the agency.

“Oh, Jesse,” California Allison said. “I was about to e-mail you. It looks like Carmen went with another family here, in the next town. She wanted to be nearby.”

This is part of openness, being close, perhaps, close enough to visit often, like the girl-holding-the-adoption-balloon movie. Still, I was stunned. I was silent.

“I’m sorry. It happens,” she said. “But that you got this call so soon, it’s such a great sign.”

“A sign of what?” I said.

“A sign that someone else will call again soon. It will happen,” she told me. “Believe.”

Believe in what? When I hung up the phone, I felt a crushing sensation, a physical feeling that I can’t say I didn’t recognize. I felt flattened by everything. By illness and financial stress, and childlessness and disappointment. I thought of those used-up wishes—for decent dry cleaning, a sleek couch, a country house—and I tried to comfort myself with the thought that I had not known that I should store up my wishes like a squirrel stores nuts. I did not know that a cache of dried berries in my puffed cheeks was one of my essential wishes. Babies happened to every creature. They
happened
.

When Carmen—a woman whom I had never spoken to but whose life, if given the different flap of another butterfly wing, could have been intertwined with mine forever—did not choose us, I felt I would not be able to get up from bed, not ever. The weight of the past and the future, both, was devastating, and without my knowing it, Carmen had become the key to life. And now the key had gone missing. The door to happiness was locked! I could not get in.

The opposite of happiness is not unhappiness. The opposite of happiness is waiting. The opposite of happiness is panic, that the future held no one but Ramon and me. The panic that this—my husband and me, alone at a table, moving our forks to our mouths, the cups to our lips—would not be enough. The panic that Ramon and I had chosen the wrong agency, one that specializes in southern gay and lesbian couples, an agency that promotes the idea that where we live, in New York, is where people are murdered. And who’s to say it isn’t? My friend Liza had been mugged at gunpoint the previous year, when she emerged from the F train, not far from the school where our child—should we be lucky enough to get one—would go to school.

I imagined Carmen; she was caramel colored with black hair. Her back was against a wall and she sang, “There Are Worse Things I Could Do,” the diffuse Southern California light behind her. I saw her burgeoning stomach, rising like bread. Like my stomach, from the tumors that wouldn’t stop. I saw Carmen as clearly as anything I had turned to watch disappear.