The Mothers A Novel

17

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

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

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

_______

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey,” he said.

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

“You’re hardly a stranger to screaming.”

“Too true.”

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

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

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

“Oh! So sweet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______

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

And then that birthday was, thankfully, behind me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.





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