The Mothers: A Novel (18 page)

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.

Harriet 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

T
he 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.

In September we did not hear from a birthmother, but we did get a note from Anita. I got a note, I should say. She and Paula had matched with an African-American birthmother near them, in North Carolina.
I hope it’s okay that I’m telling you this,
she wrote in the e-mail. I looked over my shoulder to see if Ramon was there.

As kids we were told, There’s room for everyone, don’t worry. Girls, share! my sister and I were instructed. There’s plenty to go around. But of course that’s not true. Now there was nowhere near enough. There were fewer jobs and less food—whole countries were starving—and there were fewer babies than those who wanted the babies. So was I happy for Anita and Paula?

I was.

“Ramon!” I called out when I saw the e-mail. “Come here!” I said.

He leaned over me and I could feel his breath in my ear, and hear it stop.

I looked up at him. His face was so close. I could see his gray-flecked sideburns, and his long lashes touching down to the tender skin below his eyes and then rising up again. He rubbed his eye and cleared his throat.

“You okay?” I asked.

He cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I just wasn’t expecting that.”

“Expecting—”

“Them to be first. We started at the same time.”

“They live right there,” I said. “The birthmother must have wanted to be close by.”

I did wonder, not for the first time, why this particular birthmother was placing her child. Was she too young? Did she already have too many children? But what does “too many children” mean?

“I just really thought we’d be first.” He laughed. “I wonder when I’m going to stop thinking that.”

I looked up at him again and I knew he was talking about everything.

_______

We heard from Anita and then we heard from my mother.

I had cooked dinner—roasted salmon and lentils—and Ramon had cleaned the dining room table of his papers and computer. Ramon had just opened a bottle of sauvignon blanc when my cell rang, my mother’s face lighting up the tiny screen.

“Guess what?” she screamed when, after hesitating, I picked up.

“What?” Nothing made me less excited than my mother’s excitement. She will always, without qualification, ignite the teenager within me.

“Guess who’s going to be here for dinner tomorrow night?”

“I don’t know, Mom. Jesus? Bob Dylan?” I poured my own wine and sat down.

“No, guess again.”

“Those are my only guesses.” I opened up the solitaire game on my computer.

“You are no fun. Fine, fine, Lucy is coming to dinner. That’s who,” she said. Her grin reached me through the phone. I could tell she was ear to ear with the news itself and also with being the one to bear it.

“Really?” I said.

“Yup,” she said. “Apparently your sister is on her way home tomorrow. For good, she says.”

“Really,” I said, more than a little put off that Lucy hadn’t told me so herself.

“Can you believe it? So, can you and Ramon be here? And Harriet, of course.”

“Is she coming alone?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. She called from Memphis.”

“Memphis?”

“She was driving, she said. She’d been driving since Mexico.” I could hear my mother moving around the kitchen, the beep of the microwave, the brief rush of the faucet. “Look, I didn’t press it. Because she’s coming home now. Three years. It’s been three years. Are you going to come down then?”

“Sure,” I said. “Of course,” I said. “We’ll be there.”

I turned to Ramon, who was already at work on his meal. “Lucy’s coming home.” I pictured my sister opening up her backpack, stuffed with wrinkled print skirts and tank tops. I could not even imagine those clothes now. I saw Lucy at eleven, on crutches from a fall during soccer practice; at sixteen, returning from a school ski trip. I’m not entirely sure I was excited to see Lucy now. I loved my sister, but what if I no longer liked her?

Ramon looked up from his dinner and smiled.

_______

Lucy was coming home and once again Ramon and I were driving down to Virginia.

Perhaps Lucy was on a different leg of this same highway. What would she look like? Sound like? I thought of my mother’s returns. Who will she be now? I’d wonder as we waited at the gate for her to emerge from the stream of exiting travelers. Will I recognize her? Once I’d told my father this as he stood holding Lucy’s hand and mine: Maybe we won’t recognize her. Maybe she’s changed, I’d said.

Of course we will! my father had said, squeezing our hands tight. She is exactly the same! Just like we are.

But we were not the same, Lucy and me, and my father, too. My father had successes and failures at work. And Lucy went to Roley Poleys, and sat with Claudine as she smoked, starching and ironing my father’s shirts. Presidents were shot and I kissed Andrew Tanaka on the playground and I got my period and I dissected a frog, and my mother was not there for any of these things.

Driving down our block with Ramon now, toward the house, I thought how every trip lived inside my mother, every zebra or cheetah, each marketplace where she bought bracelets for her ungrateful daughters, every field harrowed and well dug, each woman’s hand held. Even if my mother was as identifiable as before she had gone, her hair the same, perhaps lighter from the sun, her glasses dusty, her all-over freckles more pronounced, she was still changed. As we were changed.

We pulled into the driveway and parked behind a red rusted Toyota Camry with a frowning tailpipe, and I ran up the stairs toward the house while Ramon let Harriet pee.

Through the window, I could see Lucy, seated on the living room couch, her face in profile, as recognizable to me as my own. Her hair was long and fine, nearly blond, and she was a soft shade of brown, not that mahogany color so many travelers to places by the sea become. Her face was a bit fuller now, which gave her the appearance of being younger than thirty-six. Her cheeks looked like they had when she was a child, not as they’d been when I saw her last; her cheekbones and chin had been defined then, her eyes deeply set.

Lucy turned toward the window, and seeing me there, she smiled. She waved and slowly rose to her feet to make her way to the door to greet me. It was when she stood that I saw it. Bisected by the picture-window panes was my sister’s body, standing now, the center of her rounded. Her hands slid along her belly as she moved toward the front door.

I did not shift from the bottom of the stairs leading up to the house, and then the door was opened, and there she was, framed by the doorway. She leaned against the door now, nothing like herself and also more herself, her thighs and arms thick, her belly the shape of a small turned cauldron.

I stared. I am not sure if my jaw was slack, but I could not register the image before me. It entered me the way all the bits of necessary information I’ve accrued have entered me, far too slowly and without clarity.

Inside, though, the intelligence was making itself clear. And then I heard Ramon breathing next to me. For a moment, we were all silent, and then my mother peered out from the door, behind Lucy, and then Ramon charged forward, up the stairs.

“Oh my God, Lucy!” he said, taking the stairs quickly. Harriet followed him inside the door. “Look at you!”

I could see her face as she hugged my husband, whose arms seemed ever-large to me now, big enough to embrace the world, and Lucy’s eyes were squeezed tight, her shoulders high.

“Hey, you!” I said, still unmoving at the foot of the stairs.

I walked up the stairs and she moved toward me and then I felt her imprint upon me, her large stomach at my stomach, her burgeoning breasts at mine as she hugged me tightly. She gripped my back, and as I went to release myself from her grasp, she continued to hug me, tighter now.

I could not explain then even one of the reasons I was crying.

_______

“You okay?” my mother said to me inside. I smelled garlic and also cinnamon and melted butter.

“Of course!” I said.

Ramon brought our bags upstairs, and after Harriet greeted everyone, my father poured wine—“None for Lucy!” he laughed—and we all sat down.

“When did you get in?” I asked Lucy.

“Just like an hour ago.” She rubbed her belly and then, when she saw me scrutinize her, she stopped. “I drove from Memphis.”

“Mom said. Did you drive all by yourself?”

“Just from Santa Fe. We took buses everywhere. Greif and me, together, I mean, up the Pan-American Highway. And then we got that Toyota that’s out front. He drove me to New Mexico and then headed back to California. I didn’t want to fly.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s good you didn’t fly, Lucy,” my father said, going on his knowledge of pregnancy from 1973. That was the year Lucy arrived in a wood-paneled station wagon, a pinprick in my mother’s arms. My mother held her like that for six weeks, until she went back to work.

“Did you guys know about this?” I turned to my parents.

“The traveling? No,” my mother said. “I have long ago washed my hands of Lucy’s choices in that regard.”

“What?” Lucy said.

“I meant the baby,” I said. “Jesus, Mom. Obviously the baby.”

“Oh, no,” my mother said, her mouth pursed. “We didn’t know about this either. First we’re hearing of it. You two will see. Sometimes you just have to go with it.”

“Go with it?” Lucy said.

“Yes, Lucy. Just as it all falls. Plays it as it lays. Because you lose control of your children. You never stop worrying, but you lose control.”

Lucy leaned her head back against the pale yellow wall, her mouth open, as if caught on a line. Then she lifted her head. “I realize I should have told you guys earlier.”

I gulped at my wine and looked at Ramon. I raised my eyebrows. My father, I noted, did the same as he looked at my mother.

“Would you stop it?” Lucy said to me. “I’m sorry to let you know this way, but it is not about you. It’s not about any of you, but I’m sorry I didn’t warn you, I guess. I don’t know, I thought you might be, like, happy or something.”

“We are happy,” my father said. “As long as you’re happy.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “So! When are you due?”

“We’re
very
happy,” my mother interjected. “A grandchild!” she said.

“End of February,” Lucy said.

“And who is the father? Where is the father? Is no one asking about the father?” I asked.

There was silence.

“What color is the father?” I laughed. Perhaps this would be a family with two Hispanic children.

“That’s enough,” my mother said. “It’s that boy she was traveling with. Lucy has already told us this.”

Lucy nodded again. “Greif is the father—he’s white, for whatever that’s worth—but, as I said, he’s in Baja, he didn’t want to come back, and I did. I wanted to be with my family.” She made an effort to hold back tears.

I rose and then sat next to my sister. “This is really great news.” I patted her hair along her back, as if she were a pony. “It’s wonderful news. It’s just shocking.”

“I think so,” Ramon said. “I mean, that it’s terrific news.”

“We all do,” my father said. “It’s a girl,” he stated. “Right, Lucy?”

Lucy smiled and nodded. “A lot could happen. I mean, she’s not here yet.”

“Well, I’m here to say,” my father said, “that daughters are just the most wonderful thing.” He got up to crack open another bottle of pinot noir. “Just the most wonderful things.”

_______

It was my mother’s famous forty-garlic-clove chicken for dinner, and this time the fame I could get behind, as it was a dish I remembered having eaten repeatedly. Lucy sat across from me, my parents at the heads of the table. But for Ramon beside me, it was as if I had never left this table.

My mother spooned rice onto our plates and served the chicken out of the red Dansk casserole dish I will always associate with company, and we passed a big wooden bowl of salad, and I heard Harriet come into the room, and it was, for a moment, so pleasant to be there. Every time I looked across at Lucy, I would feel a swelling of happiness at seeing her again, and then an acute sadness whose source I would not name.

“So what is the plan, Lou?” my father asked. “We want to hear all about your travels, too, but I need to know the plan.”

Lucy moved the food around on her plate. “Let me start by saying, this was planned. Well, let me back up. When I was in El Salvador, I got pregnant, uh, accidentally. That was last January, I guess, so after I lost that—”

“You lost it?” I asked.

“Yes.” She looked down, touching the chicken several times with the tines of her fork.

“I’m so sorry!” I said. I remembered what that was like, the way it just slipped away, the life you’d begun to imagine and the thing itself that let you imagine it.

“Sorry, Lucy,” Ramon said. “That’s terrible. Especially alone.”

“Greif was there! Greif has been great. Really. He started giving surf lessons to other tourists to take care of us. He was on board until I decided I wanted to leave. Leave Mexico, or any of the other beach places. Leave that whole
mode
. It didn’t make sense to me if I had a child. In any case, after that I realized I was at that age when you’re supposed to worry; everyone kept saying that if I wanted a baby, the time was now, how if I had the faintest desire I would regret not trying later, how in childbearing years I was already old, how my eggs were old, and then everything that had happened to Jesse”—she held her hand toward me, as if we didn’t know me and my plight by now—“and so I decided I wanted to try. I wanted there to be a baby in the family.”

I startled at this stinging sentiment, spoken so freely, as I did not want to be the focus of this dinner. In childbearing years I was now ancient. And so I went in for more chicken, tearing a thigh apart, first with my knife and fork, and then taking the bones up with my hands. It was succulent. Had I been wrong? Perhaps my mother had always cooked. Perhaps we had been eating out of that red Dansk casserole dish since the invention of the station wagon.