The Mothers A Novel

13

__



In 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 f*ck 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.”

Did she sound weary? Perhaps, I thought, she was almost finished with this part of her life. El Salvador, though war-torn and gang-ridden, was at least a bit north, was it not?

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s sweet. Your Spanish must be awesome.” I should tell her about the baby, I thought. About the Hispanic baby we might one day get to parent.

“It’s good. I mean, Ramon says it’s pretty good. How are you?”

“You guys speak in Spanish?”

“Sometimes. How are you anyway?”

“Fine. You know Ramon and I are doing our paperwork to adopt.”

I could hear Lucy breathing. “That’s great, Jess. That’s so great.”

“You didn’t know?”

“No, I did.”

“Who told you?”

“Ramon.”

“Ramon? When?”

“A while ago, I guess, a month or so?”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, you never said anything.” I wondered if he told her in Spanish and suddenly I thought of my sister and my husband and my hypothetical child all sitting around and having a blast in Spanish as I ran back and forth from the kitchen bringing regional snacks and trying to understand.

“I haven’t talked to you much.” Lucy cleared her throat.

“There’s also e-mail.”

“I thought we’d be able to talk,” she said. “There’s not a lot of e-mailing here.”

“Anyway.”

“I think this is good news, though.”

“You think?” I asked her. “Well then it must be!” I was becoming furious, but I could not say why that was.

“Yes,” she said. “I do. All those hormones, after everything you’ve been through, I just don’t know if that was good for you. Being pregnant could be difficult too for you, I mean, if all that stuff had worked.”

“Stuff.”

“Okay, treatments.”

“Hmm,” I said. The sound of judgment. I guess I didn’t like it much either.

“How are you feeling? Can I help with anything?” she asked.

“You mean physically?”

“Both,” she said. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes,” I said, tensing up. “I feel just fine.”

“How’s your stomach? Are you able to eat okay?”

“Yes.” But I no longer wanted to discuss it with her.

There was silence.

“And how about the adoption? Are you excited?”

“Excited? No. Feeling hopeful,” I said. “Cautiously optimistic,” I told her, though this was just something I had read that I was supposed to feel.

“Being positive is important.”

I didn’t respond. People were always telling me such things. Had this all happened because I had been negative? Like Ramon and I just had fantastically awful karma? I made another mental note not to send my hypothetical child to school in California. “Yes,” I said. “It is. Anyway, you’re surfing in El Salvador, right?” El Salvador. It might be a fascinating place. Our future baby could have biological parents from there.

More breathing. But I noted that it seemed quiet, in Punta wherever. I tried to picture my sister, tan, her legs smooth, the color of Bambi, and easy on a board. Instead I kept picturing her at her eighth-grade dance, a huge corsage strapped to her wrist, waiting for her date to arrive. Now I didn’t hear the sounds of people or traffic or the sea breaking hard on the shore. “I’m not surfing, but yes, there is surfing here. It’s actually the largest break in Latin America.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

Lucy laughed. “It’s good is what it means. People come from all over to catch the waves here.”

“Okay!” I said. “Dude.”

She laughed. “In any case, all’s well. Seems like we’re both fine! I should get going, but maybe we can talk again soon.”

“Okay,” I said. “Talk to you soon then.”

“Kiss Harry for me,” she said before hanging up.

I smiled when she said this, but I had the worst feeling, when I hung up, that I had missed the purpose of our conversation, that we both had. We had been apart for so long and no longer knew how to speak, other than as strangers. How are you feeling? we said, but what we meant was, Where are you? Who are you now? Are you still in there?

_______

The next day, Ramon and I were back on the road—albeit this time just for a forty-five-minute jaunt to White Plains—for our information session with the organization that, as our agency did not have an office in New York, would be handling our local paperwork and doing our home study. The moment we got on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, we hit traffic.

“About tonight,” Ramon said now. “Let’s try and let other people talk a little tonight, okay?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Other people need to talk,” he said.

“Well, I’m sorry.” Wounded, I gazed longingly out at the road.

“Me for instance. Or anyone. You could really just let anyone talk.”

“Oh sure!” How easily can hurt become anger? Far too easily. “Sure. And why don’t you try and not say something completely stupid then. Okay?”

“I said let’s. I did not say you. God, Jesse.”

“Yes you did,” I said. “I know what you meant. I know exactly what you meant.” I felt the anxiety filling me, water poured over ice, crackling, in a tall glass. Please, I thought, let us just not be late.

“Of course you did. Because you take over every conversation we ever have. Stupid?” Ramon was incredulous, his hand thumping the wheel. “What, may I ask, do you find that I say to be so stupid?”

“Let’s see.” I placed a finger to the side of my cheek, replicating a person deep in thought. “Calling people who are in charge of getting us a child the wrong name? Stupid. Telling the entire group that we didn’t agree how we were going to raise our children with regards to religion? Also stupid.”

“We agreed when we signed on for this,” Ramon said, “that we were going to be ourselves. Isn’t that what we agreed? It’s the only way I can do this.”

“Let me explain something to you.” I turned toward Ramon, whose hand rested on the gearshift, waiting for traffic to abate. “This?” I pointed from myself to him and back to me again. “Not therapy. We are not here to explain everything. To understand ourselves. We are here to present ourselves in the best possible light.”

Ramon grunted. “We said we were going to be honest.”

“To each other!” I curled my hands around an invisible giant bowl, playing to an invisible audience. “And yes, in the letter, we didn’t want to misrepresent ourselves, absolutely. We want to be natural—and this is hard because there seems to be a format for it all—but not so that people question us. As parents!”

Ramon stared ahead. More traffic.

“You know what?” I sat back in the seat. “I’ll just try not to talk too much.”

“That would really be best, because sometimes you’re exhausting,” Ramon said.

We were silent. I had lost it then, the memory of Ramon, beautiful Ramon, coming toward me in that café in Rome; his whole body silvery and smooth and filled with light in the dark cave of the Grotto; seated across from him in the restaurant in Brighton Beach, his cheeks red with steam and winter. How susceptible I was to the way good memories can slide away.

I turned up the radio. Today’s news: a woman had recently been incarcerated for throwing her baby into a Dumpster. She’d given birth in a bathroom, unaided and alone, and had then thrown her baby out the bathroom window.

We wondered—I know Ramon did, too, because we were for just one moment not cruel to each other—why that couldn’t have been our baby. Why couldn’t the baby in the Dumpster have been our Grace? Perhaps, we thought, that infant, thrown into the air and landing in a cushion of New York City garbage, had been the baby meant for us.

_______

When we arrived in White Plains, we parked in a mall, in front of a blazing Bed Bath and Beyond.

“Hurry up, Ramon.”

He fretted. Tonight, leaving the car involved a series of inspections. Were the windows secured? The sunroof shut? (It had not, as I reminded him, been opened since September.) Was the moon roof that covered the sunroof also closed tightly, its shroud pulled over the smoked glass like an eyelid? Was the heat set to off? The radio? Best to turn it on and then off again and then on and then off, and the lights too. There are countless dials and knobs and switches to check before leaving an automobile, should you be the obsessive-compulsive person Ramon had become.

“Look,” he said.

I sighed loudly.

“The car has to be left correctly.” In order to enrage me and prove his point that I did everything in a negligent and cavalier fashion, his inspection was more drawn out than usual.

“Seriously?” I could feel my jaw clenching, my hands curling into fists. “Why are you doing this?” Again we would be late and all the babies would be taken by the sane and the prompt.

“Hmmm.” Carefully he rose from his seat, looked again inside the car, running his hands along the driver’s seat—feeling for what? A time bomb? Did he not know he was looking at one right here?—before he straightened and then leaned over the top of the car toward me. “Jesse,” he said. “You really have to be more patient.”

I was like sound. I was faster than sound; I was light. I was not aware that I was at his side of the car until I was there, and once I arrived, I pushed him by the shoulders, hard, slipping on black ice and then catching myself. “Are you kidding me?” I screamed. “We’re going to be late. Again!” Already I felt our possibilities diminishing, candles on a birthday cake, burning out.

Ramon looked up at the nameless, faceless office tower we were headed toward. The building was dark except for a large room about six floors up, bathed in warm light. Several people moved around inside, pouring coffee and greeting one another.

“Nice.” Ramon shook me off. “I hope you realize that everyone can see you. Everyone just saw you.” He smiled.

I closed my eyes. Then I turned away from my husband and made my way to the building. I pulled open the door and stepped into the cold, sterile, and empty lobby, where I waited for him so that we could take the elevator up to the sixth floor and enter the agency office together. Led by the sound of chatter, we walked toward a conference room with a wall of windows that looked out onto the black parking lot, nearly empty but for a few scattered cars, including ours.

“Hello?” I said.

Ramon walked past me. “Hi!” he exclaimed to the room. “I’m Ramon, and this is Jesse! Did we miss anything?”

Everyone smiled at him. “Everyone” included a social worker—dark hair escaping in curled tendrils from a scarf she’d wrapped around her head—and her assistant, who, pudgy, with white-blond hair and watery blue eyes, looked uncannily like Tiffany and Crystal. They both stood at the front of the room by a dry-erase board and before them were two couples and a woman seated alone.

I smiled shyly and pulled out a chair.

“I hope we haven’t kept you waiting,” Ramon told the room.

“Not at all,” the social worker said. “We’re still waiting on another couple. We were just introducing ourselves. I’m Lydia, and this is our newest addition to the White Plains family, Marie.”

Ramon flashed me a triumphant grin as he sat down. “So nice to meet you, Lydia!” he said.

Lydia smiled. Her freckles twitched and she straightened her head scarf. Marie waved wanly.

I cleared my throat and looked around the room. One couple was Caucasian, easily pushing fifty, and the other was an Asian woman and an African-American man. There was also a woman alone, also black, with short, cropped hair and bright red glasses. I sat back. I love New York, I thought as another couple walked into the room.

_______

When everyone was settled around the table, Lydia stood at the front of the room.

“I’d like to just take a second to speak about the history of adoption, if you don’t mind. I’d like to give some context of where we are now.”

She had me at context, and already I liked her for her attention to scholarship. And also? I could tell she was Jewish. I registered this, as I registered all the ethnicities we had discussed, because Lydia was likely the first Jewish person I had encountered in this adoption process. I also wondered if the birthmothers were making their decisions to bring a child to term based on their religious beliefs, would they ever give their child to a Jew, even if her mother-in-law, a strict Catholic, went to mass each Sunday and stood in line at the Vatican for seven hours in order to be the proud possessor of rosaries blessed by the Pope himself? Even if her father loved Christmas? Lydia’s presence created and alleviated that anxiety, simultaneously.

She shuffled through her disordered stack of papers, as if she were giving a paper at a conference. And I was waiting: for a lecture on how we got here, as a people.

“So, adoption in this country,” she began, her voice gravelly and deep, tremulous, perhaps from nerves. The best listeners get the best babies, I thought, rapt.

“So the first law recognizing adoption and its regulations was in 1851, in Massachusetts. In the next twenty years several placement agencies were established, and soon adoptions really began to climb.” Lydia scratched at the side of her head and looked out at us. And then she continued. “A new culture in America started to place a premium on the innocence and vulnerability of children, and helping them, which was at odds with the more dominant idea that a poor person’s child would disrupt a superior gene pool. So began the rise of eugenics,” Lydia said, looking up from her notes. “You know eugenics?”

Five out of seven of us knew eugenics.

“It was a ‘science.’” Lydia used her fingers as air quotation marks. “It was used to ‘improve’ genetics. When the Nazis used it, well, then it really fell out of favor.”

I smiled. She said Nazis.

“And so, soon homes for unwed mothers became safe places for pregnant women, and often an adoption could take place just after the child was born, especially as the use of formula was becoming quite common,” Lydia told us.

Everyone in the room had a physical reaction. The single woman bobbed her head furiously, as did I. Of course the invention of formula would have this effect, just as one small thing—the zipper, for instance—can alter history’s meandering course. Perhaps this process could become interesting to me so that I might get through it, heart intact, I thought. I imagined building a class around this material—“For Safekeeping: A History of Women and Adoption in America”—as Ramon sat back, legs spread, head tilted in listening position.

“Also during this time,” Lydia continued, “there was something called the orphan trains.”

“Oh yes,” someone said. “I read about these just the other day.”

I glared. I did not care what anyone but Lydia had to say about the orphan trains.

“Well, these trains brought children from the industrialized East Coast out to the plains, the dust bowl, so they could be placed in foster homes. Some of these children, mind you, were not orphans; their parents simply could no longer care for them. Some were street kids. The fortunate ones found loving families, older couples that could not have children. Others, though, were thought of more as cheap labor and were treated very poorly, almost like indentured servants. As attitudes in the country began to change and move toward keeping families together, new laws began to prohibit out-of-state placement, and the orphan trains stopped in 1929. Now,” Lydia said, “what else in this country affected adoption?”

We all looked at one another. “The Great Depression?” someone offered.

“Well, yes, that’s true, the economy always has an effect, but that’s not what I’m thinking about,” Lydia responded.

“War?” Ramon said.

Lydia nodded.

Go Ramon! I thought.

“War always affects adoption, as it affects families so profoundly. And war orphans in the fifties really set the stage for international adoption. But in regards to domestic adoption, which I suppose is more our concern tonight, what happened later?”

“Roe v. Wade.” I did not ask it. Because I knew. I sat back, professorial, all my fingertips touching.

“Absolutely. Abortion was legalized. When?”

“January 22, 1973.” I practically screamed the date.

“Yes, that’s correct. In 1973 abortion was legalized. And with that, maternity homes began to decline, and adoption was presented less as an option for women. Two Supreme Court cases increased legal rights for birthfathers and a few states enacted laws requiring birthmothers to name the father of the baby. This made things very complicated. And so international adoptions increased well into the eighties and nineties.”

The invention of formula, the pill, a wire hanger, a court decision—we are all changed by it. This is why I love history. We are a living, breathing part; it affects us and we affect history. Even the word—history—is beautiful, I thought, remembering that brief period in college when I insisted on calling my history of the enlightenment class “Enlightenment Herstory.” Herstory, I insisted, would be passed down through the mothers of Diderot and Descartes and Kant and Spinoza. It was the mothers, and not their sons, who made herstory.

“But now, with the Hague Laws, international adoption is terribly complicated. Those in a queue for international adoption can expect to wait about four years.”

We all nodded gravely. I did the math and a sack of butterflies let loose in my stomach.

“Most adoptions—international and domestic—up until about the nineties were closed. The research shows how negative this has been for the children who have been adopted, as well as for the birthmothers, even the adoptive parents, who want more information about their children’s backgrounds, their medical histories.” Lydia paused to look around the room. She smiled. I could see a space between her two front teeth. Before it closed naturally, I had this space too, and everyone told me that it meant good luck. “You are all here because you believe in some way in open adoption—and how open it will be differs with each situation—but now over eighty percent of all domestic adoptions have some degree of openness.”

Lydia looked up, her minilecture complete. She asked us all to introduce ourselves, by way of how we came to adoption, if this was something we were comfortable with.

Ramon sat up straight and tall, which seemed to indicate that he was going to speak.

First.

“I was not a fan of IVF,” Ramon began.

As he started to speak my neck and shoulders grew tight and I gripped the sides of my chair to calm myself.

“It was Jesse who really wanted to do these treatments, and so I relented. But so many times! I really didn’t want to, I felt that it was wrong, when there are so many children who need homes. Also, it’s just not healthy and I felt it was terribly bad for her, for Jesse, and, to be honest, I’m not sure how all those hormones and drugs affect her and these children.”

Inside, I was a crazed lunatic. This was not the beginning of our story. It was not the beginning of my story anyway. Inadvertently I placed my fingers, ice pack–like, over my left eye.

“That’s not really the beginning, though,” I said, removing my hand. Would he mention that we were out of money? Because that could preclude us from getting a baby. Would he mention that word—cancer—because that could very well do it too. I couldn’t remain silent. “I mean, that’s not really exactly why we came to adoption, because you didn’t want to do IVF anymore, is it?” I asked Ramon.

I could feel the temperature of the room change as people shuffled their feet. Lydia looked at us with unconcealed interest.

Ramon scanned the room. He swallowed hard. I watched his Adam’s apple move along the knobby spinelike track of his throat. “We are so happy to be here.” He looked around the table, eyes glistening. “And very relieved.”

My limbs loosened, the tension in my body draining. Perhaps this would not be a mutiny after all. I nodded my head. “We are really really relieved.”

“Everyone here is coming from a different place,” Lydia told

the group. “But I think we can all recognize that adoption is not always everyone’s first choice. That’s the reality, and everyone’s journey here is different. Even those in couples often feel differently about it.”

I nodded. The tone was so all-encompassing that I could see us dabbing patchouli behind our ears, joining hands, and breaking into “Kumbaya.” And while I was grateful Ramon did not mention our finances or my illness, I understood his urge to discuss them both. Ramon was making less money now, and we owed an irresponsible amount for doctor and hospital bills. My job was not secure. I was a cancer survivor—it was only because the cancer had been in remission for almost fifteen years that we were even entitled to pursue domestic adoption at all—and I wondered if that could be considered an ethnicity of some kind, if there could be affirmative action for the almost-died.

I remembered it then, that moment just before I was to have my first and rather sudden surgery. My mother led the surgeon by his elbow, out of the room. Doctor, she’d said—I could hear her, and she was so plaintive, my mother, who up until that moment, I had always seen in charge—will she be able to have children?

Yes, of course, he had said, and even through the haze of pain medication I’d thought he was one of those doctors who can close a woman down with a mere nod of the head.

My mother had come back into the room. You can still have children, my mother told me, taking my hand.

Jesus, Mom, I’d said. I don’t give a shit about children right now. I remember that I said this.

You will, my mother had said, patting my hand. I know that you will.

“Thank you.” I dipped my head to Lydia. I looked across the table at the single woman, so that she might continue the introductions, ensuring our story would end there, for now, willing myself, just this once, to be silent.

“Well,” the single woman began. “I had to make a decision. It was now or never . . .”

_______

The last person to speak that night was Lisa, of the white couple. I learned she was, in fact, in her early fifties. She was tall and thin, and pinched and plain and nervous and sad. The man looked younger and more dapper in his tie and hat, and he was fidgety as his wife spoke, gazing around the room with a glazed expression. I did not like him in the least.

“I’m Lisa and this is my husband, Danny. We are here because we want to foster a child again,” she began, clearing her throat. I watched her long bony fingers work themselves. “We are older, I know, and Danny already has a child, a girl, who is grown.” She looked down at her hands.

Danny’s legs were crossed and the top one kicked vigorously, rocking his upper body. He looked at his watch.

“We were fostering a boy until a little over eight months ago.” She took a huge breath and stopped suddenly, as if her heart had caught in her expanding chest. “He died!” she said, with more emphasis than I know she’d intended. “He was four years old. We’d been fostering him for two years. He had congenital heart failure.”

I closed my eyes and opened them again. And I could feel Ramon do the same.

“We are ready”—Lisa looked down at the table—“to do this again. Adoption is just not an option for us. We’re older now. So we would like to foster again. I would. Danny’s daughter, she never lived with us. She’s all grown up, you see.”

My throat was again tied, as if with a large needle and coarse thread. Everyone in the room nodded, our wobbling heads an affirmation that this woman should—please—be able to foster a child again. I placed my elbows on the table, and my hands, together, pressed at my mouth, and I swallowed hard through that rough, prickly embroidery. I heard Ramon breathing, hard. Like images of dogs suffering at the hands of cruel humans, wounded birds, an old woman alone on a crowded street, I knew this story, too, would undo him. Because about all the things that mattered we were the same, and I was grateful and ashamed.

How many ways can a person feel shame? That night, after hearing Lisa’s story, this unremitting shame was for me like the Eskimo words for snow: varied, numerous, precise, particular to any one aspect of the thing itself. I was ashamed for our behavior in the parking lot out front, for my behavior, and I was ashamed for the reckless way I had often treated my marriage, for my disregard of Ramon, and how I’d buried his want of a child in and beneath my own. Were it not for me, Ramon could have had a family. I was physically in the way of that wish, and I was lucky that he was willing to go through this with me, lucky that the family he desired was the same family I wished for. I was ashamed of my self-pity, and my glibness, the privilege of my relative youth. I was ashamed of kissing Anita beneath a frozen star-filled night. I was ashamed that I had not told Ramon, and now time had passed, and I could not. I was ashamed of the boxes I checked on those forms, of my wishes for a healthy child, for an infant, someone we might bring up from infancy and somehow call our own. I was ashamed of the boxes I had not checked, and I was ashamed of capitalism and this country that fueled it, and so my need to own, for my unwillingness to give that proprietorship up.

The room stirred first with stunned sadness and its effects—cleared throats, shifting seats, the rustle of clothes being pulled and straightened—the sounds of the humbling of humans who had previously had the privilege of shaming others with their own dismal plights.

Then Lydia stood up. “Thank you all for sharing your stories,” she said. “I know it’s hard to do. Now, let’s take a look at the paperwork we’ll need to do for the home study aspect of your process.”

Relieved, we stared at yet another packet of paperwork. I pushed ours toward Ramon. It sat between us for a moment, until, with the tips of his fingers, he slid the folder toward himself, and then, slowly, as if he were creaking open a rusty old door, Ramon turned to the application.

_______

After the training session, we sailed home, no congestion on the road at all. It was a bright, clear January night, still very much the beginning of a new year. Perhaps this would be our year, I thought; don’t we get to have one? I looked up at the stars that punctured through that deep night blue, piercing, glinting, even this close to the city.

I will be good, I thought. I will be positive. I will try to get the life I had before all this happened back. I will hold on to my memories that are so quickly lost but can return as well at any moment, evidence of love. I apologize for my self-pity, for my obscene wanting. I will think about Lisa.

I watched the susurration of the swaying treeless branches in the moonlight, and I had this thought: I am getting closer to you. Closer and closer. I can feel it. I can feel you out there, I thought. Truly, I did.