The Mothers A Novel

10

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My parents’ introduction is an American story. They were set up on a blind date by friends of their parents, who lived in the Watergate building. That American story. On their first date they had dinner in Georgetown—roast beef and potatoes, my father thinks, though perhaps it was chicken cordon bleu. My mother has no recollection of the meal at all.

Ramon’s parents’ meeting was otherworldly. His father, Ramon Sr., was studying to be a geologist. He was researching the Pontine region, and I believe, though this is merely my historical take as Ramon is vague on the story, it was to assist in the work that Mussolini had begun maintaining the road over the marshland. Did the Italians hire him? Had he come from Spain? Ramon says only “researching the region,” but what I can still see so vividly, as if I had been in the brush at Lake Fogliano myself, is Ramon Sr. coming across Paola walking along the lake. Paola, who worked at her father’s café, serving espresso and pizza and fried artichokes to the locals, is entirely alone, away from her two brothers, and she stands at the lip of the lake, one toe pointed, dipping in.

Ramon Sr. was filthy from working and he had come to the lake to cool off. The sun was so hot, he wasn’t sure if she was a real woman or a mermaid, and, according to Ramon, his father had fallen in love with Paola by the time she’d turned to face him.

Ramon’s father later went to work for BP, as a geologist, and he took Paola away from Italy and her brothers and her parents’ graves and her life at the café that had exhausted her. The café had closed when she left—I have seen it on the outskirts of the village—and so Paola got on a plane for the first time, and went first to Spain, where Ramon was born, and then to West Africa and England and then South America and then Holland, and later, when Ramon left her for college in the States, they went off to Java, where Ramon brought an American photographer to the jungle and opened an umbrella in a hot cave to protect his face from a throng of bats.

_______

I thought of Paola as we continued back to Brooklyn, imagining how different this conversation would have been at my mother-in-law’s house. Black child? Spanish or Italian would be better, but why not?, Paola would have said. Me, I had no troubles with having the babies (interesting, knowing how much she had tried for a second child), but if Jessica has the trouble with the babies, then sure, take one from somewhere else, why not. There are so many here, so many young people with the children, but we take care of our children in Italy. Spain too. We don’t give them away, acch, anyway. It’s awful, America. Just awful. So high up everyone is. And after those buildings fell? Yes, I know, where you are, it’s not so high, but, Ramon, why do you live there? Come back to Italia. I have a space for you here, in the house, where you can make your plans for all your buildings. Here, in Lazio! Jessica, too, we have very nice schools here. She can teach in them. Or Rome. Very good schools! Like England! Jesse could go to Rome, and, Ramon, you can stay here. And anyway, Ramon, she’d have said, you are so young to have a baby. Not yet, she’d say to her forty-two-year-old son. Come here and stay here and then you will see, the babies will come.

From where? I wondered, thinking of Ramon’s mother. I understood her better after all these years—or I should say I could anticipate her more accurately—but on that first trip, I’d been shocked as I watched her remove Ramon’s things from his overnight bag, as if they’d been plated in gold. She placed these items—regular things!: jeans, polo shirts, balled-up socks—on shelves cleared for him alone. The house was cluttered with a lifetime of trinkets from abroad, an accumulation of crud and beauty and memory and the evident compulsion to keep all of it. As I had not been offered my own shelf, I placed my backpack on the floor. When I returned from the bathroom, which was jammed with unopened boxes and porcelain figurines, jars of expired face cream, decade-old bottles of suntan lotion and shampoos, the backpack had been removed.

“Where’s my stuff?” I asked Ramon.

He took a deep breath. “That backpack, you know, it’s been a lot of places. Dragged all around, you know? It’s probably a little dirty for the house.”

“So, where’s my stuff then?”

“My mother is cleaning it on the terrace.” Ramon breathed out.

“Is this you saying this or your mother?” I asked. “That my stuff is in need of cleaning?”

“My mother,” he told me. “But, I mean, she has a point. The trains. The hostels. The dust. Anyway, she’s wiping it down now. Then she’ll put some sort of plastic down here.” He spread his hands out on the floor by the twin bed I assumed I’d be sleeping in. “And then you can set it down and use it. On the plastic.”

I did believe it was crazy and slightly defamatory. But then! But then. The social responsibility, the need to understand a different way of life . . . I had thought, as I sat for a moment on the mattress, which managed to be an impossible combination: equal parts hard and lumpy. I was in another country, on another continent. I needed, I thought, adjusting myself on this very uncomfortable bed, to be respectful of a differing culture.

Which I was. Even though where I come from, in America, the guest usually gets the largest, softest towel, the finest cut of meat, the heartiest slice of cake. Not here in Terracina. On that evening, as we ate inside the cramped kitchen, sealed in tight, removed from the dust and germs of the fresh open air, Ramon received for his dinner a heaping plate of rooster and polenta. I saw Paola serve him the tender breast meat of that bird, and then deliver to my plate something resembling its talon. As we ate, she would not look at me, speaking only to Ramon, who didn’t do much translating. Occasionally he gestured toward me or pointed to certain pieces of art on the walls—a series of butterfly wings fashioned into the shape of women, ceramic ticking clocks displaying incorrect times, and my favorite, a portrait of Ramon and Paola together that must have been done when they lived in Indonesia, as they were both painted with beautiful and flat crescents for eyes, which created an Asian cast. As they talked—occasionally saying words I understood, like Americana and New York and gelato—I looked down at my claw and picked around its nails with my fork.

That night Ramon and I slept in the same room, in separate wooden beds short enough for children, windows closed tight, the bedroom door wide open into the hallway and Paola’s open room across from it. The hard lumps were difficult to sleep on, and so I was awake when I heard Paola slip into the room. I opened my eyes to see her there, a silhouette in the half-light of the low-hung moon, standing over her son, her hand over her heart.

I had just fallen asleep when the rooster—one we hadn’t eaten—called us up, which led to the baying of donkeys, the squawking of chickens, and the barking of neighbors’ dogs, jangling on their chains. Dogs on chains! I tried to think of different cultural mores when I stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast with Ramon. I thought of divergent conventions, even when Paola gave me a thimbleful of fresh-squeezed orange juice—from her garden, she said, in nearly perfect English—and Ramon a glass big enough to hold two cans of beer, and I thought of those social mores again when he got his plate of perfectly fried eggs, while mine were both punctured and a little overcooked, my dish chipped.

I knew her husband was working in Indonesia, but who knew if he’d return, and I also knew that Ramon was not here often. I imagined Paola, at the end of her day of obsessive mopping and dusting and ironing—even socks got ironed, to burn away the germs—

and watering her garden and going into town for her bread and cheese and milk, sitting down at the wooden kitchen table, her head in her hands. I wondered what she thought about then, what she wished and longed for and what she missed most about her life, and I felt for her, deeply, all alone out here on this secluded farm, cordoned off from the world.

Until the following evening.

This particular evening Ramon and I had come back from an afternoon of drinking coffee and eating ice cream, wandering through the old stone streets, sitting at the port. We rushed home for lunch at four o’clock, which, we had been told by Paola, was the time to be there, and, as I wanted her love and approval—as I wanted the love and approval of most strangers—it was I who, despite my touristic cravings, made sure we did not go to the Temple of Jupiter on the hill or into the duomo in the piazza in order to make this time precisely.

It was just three forty-five (fifteen forty-five Euro time) when we pulled into the gate. Relieved that we were punctual (not, I would learn, a trait shared by most Italians), I then noticed a series of birdlike shadows on the reddish sand and stone of the drive. When I looked up to see what was throwing those silhouettes, I saw that it was my underwear hanging on the line. All my underwear—and it must be said it was an era of thongs—hung out in the sun, drying in the scorching heat. Just my underwear was on the line, mine alone, pinched by clothespins, the crotches exposed and baking in the sun.

As I stood and looked at the wash line of my undergarments, illuminated by the golden Italian light, I realized I did not know the Lazian customs but also I did not know Ramon terribly well. And, as I stomped over to the clothesline and began to pull my underwear down, one by one, unclipping the cruel wooden teeth that left bites in the mesh and cotton, I tried to think about the societal conventions that would make a woman do such a thing, the history of women in what I could see was an agricultural community, that would make one humiliate another in this fashion.

Paola stood on the terrace above me; I could see her out of the corner of my eye, her head pitched down. I could not see her face, but I caught her crossed arms and the wild, loose pieces of her black hair, her bright rustling housedress.

“Ramon,” I said. “Please tell your mother that if she doesn’t think I’m clean enough for you, perhaps I should leave.” My underthings were gathered in my arms, cradled there. I wasn’t sure what to do next, as I had shocked even myself; I have always had such an unbearable need to please even—perhaps especially—the people who hurt me.

“Stop,” Ramon said. “Jesse.” He came up to me, and beneath the clothesline, now empty, he put his hands firmly on both my shoulders. “I’m sorry. She didn’t mean it that way,” he said. And then? “I did tell you not to bring lingerie.”

I stared at him for a moment, speechless, and then I looked up to see his mother above us, a smile of understanding, like sunlight, spreading across her face.

“It’s underwear. Pantalons,” I said, because I had taken French in high school and somehow this is what came to me. “Sous-vêtements,” I corrected myself.

“Mama,” he said, and then he said something as angry and beautiful as anything and everything else they’d told each other since we’d arrived the previous day.

“What?” she said, again in clean, barely accented English, five fingertips at her breast. “Okay!” Now she brushed her hands together swiftly. “She may clean her own clothes then.”

“Yes.” My eyes, caught in the light, squinted in her direction. “Thank you, Paola. I think that would be best.”

_______

That day, I did not get an apology but I did get the larger shank of lamb that evening, and, the following morning, my own full glass of fresh-squeezed juice.

Back in America, in Virginia, my father, when he was all cried out, had told me how troubled he was for me, how he’d only ever wished for us to be happy, that my happiness had been all he’d ever wanted, Lucy, too, and look at us, one of us living hand-to-mouth without so much as a telephone—“I mean, where is Lucy?” he’d asked—and then you, he’d said, you so busy with wanting all these things you can’t have.

“All these things?” But the rage, it had receded. In that way, the manner in which it arrives and leaves, rage is like love. It is unclear to me what brings it to me, what takes it away, and how I will know if it has permanently disappeared. “Only a child,” I’d said quietly. “I only want a child, which everyone deserves.”

He had straightened himself up. “Whatever you need us to do, we want to help you,” he said. “Not get in the way.”

And I had shaken my head, and I had believed him; I believed him as we threw our bags into the trunk and made our way to the highway.

And now, returning to Brooklyn, I thought of the red balloon following our car as we double-parked in front of our building

and dumped out all our stuff on the wrought iron–enclosed front stoop, and then circled the block looking for parking, and then found it, and then let Harriet out to pee, and then walked back and up the four steps and in and then up the four flights and then: home.

Harriet wagged her tail. She didn’t hate it there, really. She knew—and she did know—that tomorrow she’d be walked and fed and petted and loved, and I knew that tomorrow I would teach for part of the day and I would meet with some students and then I would return home to this place I was lucky enough to call my neighborhood. I looked at Ramon, who was hanging his coat, and I felt so fortunate and content. Out our window, past the square backyards of brownstones on Second Street, past the windows of those brownstones, and into the distance, the back of the red Kentile sign obscured by the F train slowly rolling by, the sun was setting, and I felt light, for just one moment liberated from the reason we’d left Brooklyn. I ducked my head to look out and see if the balloon wasn’t in fact hovering above our fire escape on its long white string, waiting to be held.

“We’ve got voice mails.” Ramon held out the phone. “Your parents.” He twirled his index finger, a gesture to rush the message along. “And Cheryl,” he said. “You have a department meeting tomorrow. Oh.” He smiled. “Anita and Paula.”

“That’s nice.”

“They’re happy they met us,” he said, hanging up the phone. The living room was illuminated in the late-afternoon sun. Harriet lapped up three-day-old water in the kitchen. Everything was cozy and sweet and good.

“I’m happy we met them, too.” I sifted through the mail and threw it on the dining room table.

“They want to know if we’re going to use the designer the agency recommended,” Ramon reported. He went into the kitchen and began opening and closing cabinets. “For the brochure. Which I can do, you know. Easily. Why should we pay someone when I can do it?”

“Hmmm.” I wanted to do exactly what the agency said, just follow the plan, down to the designing of the brochure, the right smile, displaying teeth, evergreens behind us in the correct-size photo. There was no room for error here. I could feel my heart rate speed up, running toward something or away from it; what is the difference if it’s all just a circle anyway?

“We need to make an appointment tomorrow with social services for the visit,” I said.

“We will.” Ramon stood in the kitchen doorway. “We just got in. Relax.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“It will get done.” He went to the couch and tipped his head back, touched his head to the exposed-brick wall.

“By magical fairies? We need to get on it.”

Ramon closed his eyes and sighed.

I looked at my watch. “Look at the time,” I said to Ramon.

Neither of us moved. In the hallway the scream of our downstairs neighbor’s child shot through the house. A car alarm went off on our street.

I sat down on the couch next to my husband, my elbows sharp on my knees. “It’s so much later than I thought,” I said, and just like that, the afternoon light slipped out of the living room, and the gray of winter crept in.





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