The Mothers A Novel

Part 3




THE BIRTHMOTHERS





18

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August 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my God!” the woman gasped.

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

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

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

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

I, however, did not need the childbirthing class.

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

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

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

I didn’t hear a response.

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

_______

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A sign of what?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

Who is a birthmother? What we were told by Crystal or Tiffany that day, almost a year ago, is this: a birthmother is eighteen to twenty-five years old. Fifty percent of birthmothers are in relationships. The birthmothers are scared. They fear the unknown. The birthmother might have wanted to terminate her pregnancy, but it is too late. Or she might not believe in terminating a pregnancy. The birthmother has love for her unborn child, big big love, which is why she wants to make a plan for that child. But at the same time she is detached from the child, to protect herself from the sorrow to come. The life of the birthmother, this rare bird, tends to be chaotic.

In other words, the birthmothers are only women.

What we were waiting for now was the birthmothers.

I did not move for forty-eight hours, but to drag myself to the table to eat. And while extreme emotion—depression, wild happiness—often puts people off food, this sort of thing has never, ever, made me lose my appetite. I am not one of those wan, depressed people listlessly wandering drugstores; I am the depressed person listlessly wandering the aisles of the pharmacy with a rosy plumpness in my cheeks that comes from sustained good nutrition.

I heard Ramon’s moving about and working in the dining room, so much weather. He peeked his head in to check on me.

“You alive?” he said.

I nodded into my pillow.

“This is the first one.” Ramon sat on the bed. The weight of his body, how it moved the mattress in the slightest way, hurt me. “We were lucky to be called so quickly,” he said. “Sometimes it takes months and months.”

“Not helping,” I said. “And remember. We were not called.”

Had I had the opportunity to speak to Carmen, perhaps my very charm would have made her forgo California and choose us. Was being picked over—scenario number two—better than scenario number one, not being contacted at all? Was it better to be bludgeoned with a club or assaulted with a cleaver? Which, I wonder, would you rather?

I heard the landline ring and I heard Ramon speaking into it and I heard him and Harriet come and go for her walks, her return signaled by the click click of her nails on the wood floors. She arrived to check on me and then departed quickly—was she skipping?—to get to her meal or her biscuit, depending on the hour. She always gave a little yelp before her meals, cries, I imagined, of uncontainable joy.

After two days, Ramon came in and dragged me up by both arms and, as if it were my leg, not my spirit, that had been broken, he placed my arm over his shoulder, gripped that hand hard, and helped me into the bathroom. He shoved me into the shower and I held my face up to the spray of water and washed up and dressed myself and then we were in the car heading upstate to Fishkill on the Hudson for Michelle’s annual family summer party.

_______

Going to that party started out as a good idea, a sure diversion. It was an hour-and-a-half drive out of town, and just leaving my bed, and the apartment, felt pleasant and fresh and like a brand-new day. I turned on the CD player. Our car had one of those old players where seven CDs get loaded up in, of all places, the trunk. It defies explanation and logic, and because of this, the same seven CDs had been in this contraption in the trunk since we purchased this car, used, five years previously. Despite this, each time I turned on the CD player, which was rare, I was surprised and grateful to hear the first few electric bars of Blood on the Tracks. I reflexively skipped “Tangled Up in Blue” and went to song number two: He hears the ticking of the clocks / And walks along with a parrot that talks . . .

Fishkill was Harriet’s second-favorite place, after my parents’ house, with its abundance of food and love (not the same thing, I tried to show Harriet, but how do you teach a dog this lesson?). Michelle and Jacob used to invite us several times a year, and often, during the week when it was empty and I wasn’t teaching, I would go up with Harriet and stay alone to work. Harriet could spend the day in that pond, flinging herself jubilantly off the dock, chasing a stick I’d throw for her. When I tired of this repetitive exercise, I would often turn to find her swimming the pond in circles, her little tail a propeller, her paws paddling her along. She looked like one of those old ladies in the community pool I belonged to as a kid, the ones who emerged from the lounge area during adult swim, hair tucked into rubber bathing caps with straps under the chins like gaping smiles. When the pond bored her, she’d step out to shake herself off, always as close to me as possible, and after she’d dried in the sun, often we hiked up to the summit of a small mountain.

Now, as Ramon and I drove north, I put out of my head that, because of the spotty cell service, I would have to take a break from my phone, and as we pulled up to the house, as if to reinforce this point, the SOS came up in red. Indeed, I thought, this ship is sinking. Send flares.

Ramon snapped Harriet on her leash and she hopped out of the car, ready for her day of fun. He pulled the six-pack out of the backseat, and we all headed out to the backyard. First we passed the pool and the sounds of screaming and splashing and laughing children. I looked timidly at Ramon, who did not look at me, but swung the beer in his right hand.

“Hello!” we both yelled when we saw Mrs. and Mr. Sanders standing, wide-legged, on the deck.

Down below, Jacob manned an enormous grill that they rented each year for the party. I could see chicken and sausages and hot dogs and burgers already done and placed in front on platters, dripping with blood.

“Hello!” Mrs. Sanders hugged me.

I expected to hear the splash of Harriet, freed now from her leash, running into the pond, and when it did not come, I looked out at the lawn that sloped down to the water, just over from the clay tennis court. Harriet stood tentatively at the edge of the water. Several friends with their new babies, people from the neighborhood, friends of Michelle and Jacob we’d met here over the years, were all spread out on blankets, already eating and drinking. Every blanket held either an infant in someone’s arms, an infant splayed on the blanket, a toddler whom someone was trying to contain, or a kid who kept running from their parents to their screaming friends and back again.

Some kids threw a Frisbee, and the tennis court was packed with kids and two adults who had clearly tried to have a game but had given in to the screams and cries of the children, who now held rackets bigger than they were. They swatted at the air, their bodies spinning around, as the balls went by.

Behind me, Ramon cracked open a beer and headed down to the dock by the pond. There he stood, beer bottle in the air, drinking it down, his Adam’s apple lurching along his stretched throat. I came down to meet the two of them, nodding to several other families we knew, including Belinda, who’d had the surgical abortion at seven months and who appeared to be pregnant again.

“Go on, Pea,” I said.

She wagged her tail and made this growling sound in the back of her throat that signaled she was excited. Once she would have leapt off the dock, body outstretched and beautiful, but now she stepped into the water almost tentatively and pushed off.

I watched as she made her way around the pond, and when I turned, Zoe and Michelle stood at the edge, Michelle’s belly full and round, but the rest of her slim, her legs smooth in her short jersey sundress.

“Hey!” Michelle went to hug me. “Harriet still is such a good swimmer.”

I nodded. “You going in?” I asked Zoe.

She shook her head and scrunched up her nose against the pond and its non-chlorinated waters, its algae, and the slimy squish of its bottom. Even I knew she only went into the pool, with its gleaming blue floor.

“Hi, Ramon,” Michelle said.

He saluted her.

Zoe looked up, and then, she took my hand.

“Guess what, Jesse?” she said. “In four days I will be three.”

I smiled at her. “Oh my God, what a big girl you are! Soon you will be driving! And swimming in the pond.”

She laughed and let go of my hand.

I did not think then that Zoe’s birthday meant that in two weeks I would have had a three-year-old. I only remembered this after I looked down at Harriet, shaking herself dry, and when Zoe squealed with delight at Harriet’s spray, and then she and Michelle began loping up the hill toward the barbecue, that we had nearly escaped everything. I didn’t care if all I ever spoke of again was mashed carrots and day care and how long each and every woman should breast-feed. I watched Zoe bound up the hill scissoring her arms to assist her up the slight incline. I had to look away. But look where?

There were so many layers of the noise of children screaming, it was hard to think, but I chatted with a bunch of Michelle’s friends—two of them pregnant—as I watched Ramon drink beer after beer on the deck. We ate a lot of meat and some of the salads the guests had brought, and I sat on the blankets and oohed and aahed at the children; I tickled their bellies and made funny faces as I tried to keep Harriet from stealing unfinished hot dogs from plates, or worse, from an unsuspecting child’s hands.

Children were proliferating year by year, and so were the mothers. Our friend Helen, with Ryan, whom she’d had the past December, breast-fed her child as she asked me about our prospects.

“How is it going for you guys?” she asked, with meaning, looking up from Ryan, who was pumping away, grunting at her nipple.

“It’s okay,” I said. Sometimes I wanted to talk about it all the time, like there was nothing else I could bear to discuss, and so was angry—outraged—when people did not ask me, and in other moments, like this one for instance, I wanted to zip my mouth closed and just lie back and watch the clouds pass over. “Not much to report.”

“You know,” she said as her son sucked on, “holding babies really helps.”

“Holding babies? Helps what?”

“With getting pregnant. When we were trying, I couldn’t get pregnant for like six months and in addition to acupuncture, I just held a baby whenever I saw one. They say it helps for some reason. Do you want to hold Ryan?”

It took me a moment to register this. I closed my eyes. I opened them and checked my phone. SOS, it said. Helen popped Ryan off her breast, which for some reason didn’t make him howl, and she held him out to me. I had no choice but to take him, cradling him in the crook of my arm, as I looked out at the party.

“You know what else helps?” She popped a pacifier in the baby’s mouth and it moved comically in and out as he sucked.

A new addition to the chaos of the lawn was a woman about my age, spooning food into the mouth of a child in a stroller. I cocked my head and watched her, leaning in and smiling close to the child’s face.

“No,” I said, “what else?”

“If you go to a bris and if you are the one to give the baby to the rabbi. That helps. It’s good luck. Just do it. It can’t hurt.”

I rolled my eyes and shifted Ryan toward my chest as the woman took her child out of the stroller and rocked him to her. I watched Helen look at this mother we didn’t know.

Helen turned to her husband. “That’s the kid from Ethiopia, right?” she asked.

He shrugged, shoving food into his face quickly, before his baby was returned.

“I think it is. I think one of Michelle’s mom’s colleagues or something adopted it. In any case, she’s single.” She reached out and let Ryan grab her index finger. “And she went to Ethiopia three times or something.”

“That’s great!” I wanted to know what agency she went through and how long this woman had to wait. I wanted to know what the age of the child was when he or she arrived.

Helen looked at me. “That seems hard.”

I cocked my head. “What does?” I asked. “Which part, I mean? The going to Africa three times? The singleness?”

She nodded after a moment. “Mm-hmm,” Helen said. “Both.”

“Huh,” I said. I remembered the single woman being forced to leave that meeting at Smith Chasen and I felt happy for this woman who subverted those rules.

But I don’t think that was what Helen was referring to.

I looked out to the lawn filled with white people and white babies. And two or three Asian girls, each over ten years old. And then I saw Harriet sniffing around in a pile of dirty plates next to several mothers and children I didn’t recognize. I handed Ryan back over and stood up. “Gotta prevent a disaster here,” I laughed. “I’ll be back!” I said as I went to remove Harriet from the food.

Just as I had pulled her off of a plate of chicken legs, I saw our friends Carolyn and Michael, who, Michelle had told me, had placed three embryos—that joined donor eggs and Michael’s sperm—into a surrogate.

“Hey,” I said, trotting up to them, pitched sideways, as I held Harriet by the collar. “How are you guys?”

Carolyn was beaming. Michael too.

“Good news?” I asked, sitting down. I forced a wet Harriet, who wanted only to have a go at every plate of food on each blanket, to lie down next to me.

“Our surrogate is pregnant.” Carolyn straightened her lean tanned legs out in front of her and shook them. Her red patent flats flashed in the sun. “Eight weeks.”

“Oh, great!” I leaned in on her legs for a moment, emphasizing gladness. “I’m so happy for you guys.”

And I was. There is, after all, room for everyone. Maybe there is a magic pot after all. As Carolyn proceeded to discuss the drugs that this donor, her donor, had taken to stimulate her egg production, and the spas Carolyn had sent the surrogate to in order to prepare her for pregnancy, I thought, first, about how Carolyn was married to a man who worked in finance, and second, that she and I were really the lost generation. Because soon, technology would be perfect enough to tell us which of our eggs would work, and soon it would be efficacious and cheap enough for all twenty-year-old women to freeze them. It would become a rite—a right—of passage, and soon these women would be stomping through boardrooms and trading floors like warriors, unconcerned with that thirty-five-years cutoff our gynecologists began to warn us about when we were still in training bras. Single young women will freeze their eggs, and suddenly their clocks will tick as steadily and calmly as anyone else’s. They’ll start drinking whiskey and smoking cigars in back rooms. We’ll grow a pair and we will not be afraid to use them.

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 f*cking 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.”