The Mothers A Novel

19

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Fall 2010

The seasons were changing; time was just going and going; there was no holding back that stream of sand in the hourglass.

We had no calls in September.

And yet, there is nothing as exquisite as that month. Though I taught at a city school, hardly a university crawling with ivy and ringed by old trees, even here, September was about promise and winning. If spring is rebirth, September is for remaking.

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

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

I was.

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

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

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

“You okay?” I asked.

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

“Expecting—”

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

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

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

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

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

_______

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, guess again.”

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

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

“Really?” I said.

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

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

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

“Is she coming alone?” I asked.

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

“Memphis?”

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

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

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

Ramon looked up from his dinner and smiled.

_______

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______

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

“Of course!” I said.

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

“When did you get in?” I asked Lucy.

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

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

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

“Yeah,” I said.

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

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

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

“What?” Lucy said.

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

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

“Go with it?” Lucy said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“End of February,” Lucy said.

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

There was silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______

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

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

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

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

“You lost it?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not saying that’s the only reason, Jesse, but I’ve been away a long time and I started thinking about family, my family, families in general, I guess. We had this big family, you know? I thought of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. All the cousins and aunts and uncles. Even Passover.”

“Passover!” my mother said.

“Yes, traditions. And families in the movies, dysfunctional families, fighting, making up. I realized I wanted all of that and for some reason I was cutting myself off from it. Even its possibility.”

If she said the word family one more time I thought I would stick my head in my mother’s new oven. I looked at Ramon, who was nodding his head earnestly at my sister. My parents, both of them, were smiling.

“Family is big,” my mother said. “Politics is big and the world is big, but so is family. Our family.”

“Excuse me for just a minute.” I got up from the table and placed my napkin, veined with grease, on my chair.

I walked slowly up to the attic—that goddamn attic where I had thought of so many things, not one of them being that I would get sick and not be able to have children. Who cared about babies? I cared about going to my friends’ houses and sneaking into bars. I cared about music, so deeply I wrote the lyrics down to every song I ever loved in the neatest handwriting I would ever muster. I cared about records and talking on the phone and the movies.

I lay down on my bed. I looked at the ceiling, the same dusty track lighting from 1981, just as the blue walls, chosen because I had not wanted to be perceived as girly, had not been painted over.

“Blue?” my father had said when we were picking out the paint in the hardware store. “Won’t that just depress you?”

“No, Dad,” I’d said. I was already exasperated. “You know what would depress me? Pink.”

“These are not the only two colors,” he said. “You realize the color you’ve chosen is called Downpour?”

“Yes,” I said. “Downpour. Let’s do it.”

I thought of those movies too. The ones Lucy mentioned, where people sit around tables and fight. The movies where daughters get carried on their fathers’ shoulders, carried away from the dangers of growing up a girl. Kids throw their caps in the air; they hug one another good-bye. They return, back in through that front door, with their own swaddling. Any one of those frames made me sob silently. I was happy for Lucy. I was happy for us all. She was right; there should be a baby in the family. I don’t know why it had to only be mine.

Briefly I wondered if our child—Ramon’s and mine—whenever she came, in whatever casing he arrived in, would be loved as much as Lucy’s. How could I tell? The moment was only now. Time was slowing and all we knew of the future was on a date in February, Lucy would be giving birth to a baby girl.

I heard footsteps. “Hello,” I said.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”

The treads were slow and heavy and I knew they would carry Lucy to the top of the stairs, where she appeared, out of breath. She made her way—she was beginning already to have the pregnancy waddle—over to my bed and sat down on the end of it. She tilted her head to the side and rubbed my leg:

The Mother.

I nodded, sitting up. “Listen, Lucy,” I said. “I’m pleased for you, I am. I am relieved and happy. And I know it’s not about me. But it’s just a lot!”

She nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “It would have been a shock anyway, but to not tell me before . . . About the miscarriage, and then trying again.”

“I know,” she said.

“I am ashamed not to have had any idea this was even something you wanted.”

Lucy swallowed. “I don’t know why I just couldn’t talk to you. Every time we talked I intended to. I would call with every intention of telling you. First it was about the miscarriage. And then time had passed and I felt I couldn’t. And so, because I hadn’t told you about that, it just grew. And then I hadn’t told Mom and Dad. Because all of those things were connected. The family.”

I swallowed.

“And to be honest, you never asked me. Anything. You would sort of pass judgment on me about everything, and I wanted to explain more deeply about my choices. I started to write you several times as well. But every time I did I still felt you looking down at me, like you’d be grading my letter. I thought in the end it would be better if I saw you. I knew I would be coming back soon, and I couldn’t even explain that to you.”

I smiled crookedly. “I understand.” I likely would have been grading her letter. “I realize I didn’t give you a lot of opportunity. I’m sorry. That’s awful, how long you’ve been trying to talk to me.”

We sat, silent, for a moment. I could hear the sounds of our family downstairs, Ramon’s and my mother’s laughter overlapping.

“Do you have a name?” I asked.

“Yes,” Lucy said. “I think so. Hannah. What do you think of Hannah?”

Our grandmother’s name. Life is what happens, Grandma Hannah used to say, when you’re busy making other plans. “It’s lovely,” I said.

“I looked it up,” Lucy said. “Hannah was the mother of the prophet Samuel. She was unable to have children, and so she prayed that if God gave her a son then she would give him up to be a priest.”

“Are you giving her up to me?” I said brightly.

“Are you a priest trainer?”

“How did you guess? All this time hanging with Ramon’s mother has turned me into a priest trainer. There’s a lot I haven’t told you as well,” I said.

Lucy began to laugh and then stopped, her smile fading. “Anyway, the name means ‘God has graced me.’”

I laughed, very softly.

“What?”

“It sounds perfect,” I said. “It’s a perfect, beautiful name.” I took Lucy’s hand in both of mine. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

_______

The talking and laughing ceased when Lucy and I arrived again at the table.

“Everything okay?” my father asked cheerily.

“I see you, Dad,” I said. “Feeding Harriet.”

“Her Royal Highness needs some food. She’s too skinny!”

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever.”

And then something unusual happened. My parents turned toward Lucy.

“So,” my mother said. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Possibly,” Lucy said. “In New York. I’ve been talking to people at the Wildlife Conservation Society.”

“Wonderful!” my parents said at the same time.

“Something along those lines anyway,” she said.

“That sounds good,” Ramon said. “You know who else lives in New York?”

“I know,” Lucy said. “Why on earth else would I want to work for an animal conservation organization in New York City?”

“You better figure all this out, honey,” my father said, slipping Harriet more chicken, totally poker-faced. “When are you due exactly?”

“February twenty-sixth,” Lucy said. “To be exact.”

“That was my grandmother’s birthday.” My father gazed away from the table dramatically.

My mother looked at my sister. “Well, you better get cracking,” she said.

I leaned back, watching everyone. And for the first time in a long time, the pressure was off.

_______

That night, after we finished dinner, and my father’s famous apple pie with cheddar, the way Grandma Hannah showed him how to serve it when he first met our mother, after listening to tales of Lucy’s travels, and after several glasses of wine, Ramon and Harriet and I went upstairs to bed. Harriet was reluctant to leave the living room should more food or more love be proffered, but Ramon swept her up and I watched her look out longingly as he carried her upstairs, cradled in his arms.

He set her down at the end of my bed, where she stretched out. So much so that when I climbed into the tiny bed, I could not straighten my legs. I slid her up, parallel to me. I lifted up her ear leather: Grr, I said, and she licked the air.

“Wow,” Ramon said from the other bed, set perpendicular to mine, when we were still, in the dark.

Downpour. What a color. It made the room exceedingly dark, but for the streetlights shining through the spaces in between the slats of the blinds.

“I must say, I was very surprised,” I said.

“A bit of a shock for sure.” Ramon thumped his pillow.

Here we go, I thought. He’s going under. “I was obviously upset, but I get upset when anyone I know is pregnant. You know? I don’t think it was necessarily particular to Lucy.”

“But it is your sister.”

“But because of that I also feel happy about it. I’m glad that she doesn’t have these struggles, you know?”

“Absolutely,” Ramon said. “Look, every time someone else has a child or gets pregnant or whatever, I die a little. I do. And then I get resurrected or something. This took me a second to be happy again.”

“Resurrected? How Catholic of you.”

“Well.”

The pillow was still beneath Ramon’s head, so I continued. “But look, we have everything ready. It could be quick, the adoption. We could have kids at the same time. Lucy and us. Our kids could be almost like siblings.” Of all the things I know, I know I am grateful for a sibling. I am grateful for my sister.

“Especially if she ends up in New York,” Ramon said.

I imagined it for a moment, Lucy finding a place in our neighborhood, walking the streets with her and Hannah, who would resemble us almost equally. If I were to take her out alone, a neighbor might ask me how I lost the baby weight so quickly.

I was glad for Lucy’s child, and for the first time in a long while, an aspect of Ramon’s and my future had a face and a body and a name. Another generation peeked her head around the corner. Someone else would be there to sit at that dining room table, and listen—or decidedly not listen—and grow up there.

Ramon rose out of his bed, a ghostly shape, a darker figure than the fuzzy darkness of the room.

“Hi,” I said as he crawled into bed next to me.

He moved in closer and placed his arm around me. He cupped Harriet’s head. Between them, I could feel two heartbeats. “Do you think it will happen?” I asked.

He bristled. “Do I think what will happen?” he said, holding me close.

“This,” I said.

He didn’t pause. “I do,” he said. “I know it will.”

Close together in my childhood twin bed, I could feel the “we” of our bodies. My family, I thought as the two of them fell to

snoring.