The Mothers A Novel

20

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November 2010

The first birthmother to call was Katrina. It was just before midnight on Thanksgiving.

All that waiting, and when I saw the number coming in, I wasn’t prepared.

“Ramon!” I shook him awake. “It’s a birthmother!”

“Well answer it!” he said. “Before it goes to voice mail and we lose her.”

“Hello?” I could not still the crazed hysteria in my voice.

“Hi,” a voice said calmly. “I’m Katrina,” she said. “A birthmom. I found you online.”

“Wow,” I said. “Thanks so much for calling.” I got out of bed and went into my office/closet for my pen and notebook.

I sat down at my desk. “Hi,” I said, and before I could ask her what she liked about our “Dear Birthmother” letter, as I was trained to do (was it our many travels? our diverse community?), she began speaking.

“Let me tell you about me,” she said. “Because I’ve done this before, and I know what a gift this is for a family. I’m forty. I’m a grandmother.”

“Wow,” I again said. Forty, I wrote. Grandmother. “A child is a generous gift, absolutely.” A generous gift? One thinks of golf clubs. A trip to Paris. What gift could be more generous? “What can I tell you about Ramon and me?” I asked. “What would you like to know about us?”

The agency told us not to ask for any information we could get from them directly, as it could be construed as pressure. This is what the agency can later tell us: what color she is, what color the father is, if she has been to the doctor, if she has taken drugs, if she is on drugs now, how old she is, if she has a job, if she has a mental illness or if anyone in her family has a mental illness, if anyone has a clubfoot or a cleft palate. How open she wants this adoption to be. Will she want to come for Thanksgiving, for instance? Like tonight. Where had she gone for Thanksgiving? Or will she only want photos? How open?

Our offering of openness was our first and last names on our profiles. I’d spent countless hours fretting over students’ coming upon Ramon’s and my letter and profile along my Google trail of academic articles and disgruntled Rate My Professor reviews. But what was open, really? What would it look like? And feel like?

“I want to know,” Katrina said, “why you want my baby. I know,” she said, “that I have what you want.”

“I can tell you that we want to be parents.” I doodled in my notebook. Jagged stars. “Very much.” How desperate, I wondered, was it cool to appear?

I pictured this faceless woman holding her stomach. We, I wrote. I. Each of the birthmothers is a “we.” There we were, our different lonely women’s bodies. But the birthmother one becomes an

“I,” too.

“I’m not selling my baby,” Katrina told me. “I’m not.”

Which made me think, Is this person trying to sell me her baby?

“I’ve got four kids. My youngest, Connor, is three. My oldest just had a baby of his own. But let me tell you something. It’s only with a daughter if you really know that baby is your grandchild. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“I think I do,” I said.

“How do I really know that baby is not some other boy’s?” she said. “Some shitty f*ckup like the one my seventeen-year-old got knocked up with? I have five children. The last one—Davis—I gave him up two years ago. This will be number six. I see the light in that family’s eyes.” Katrina began to cry a little. “I see what they couldn’t have without me, and I am happy that I made the decision. It was two weeks before the birth and my boyfriend left. What was I supposed to do? One minute you’re preparing for a kid, and then the next? Well.”

“I hear you.” I pictured the CHILD PROOFING! sign at the gynecologist’s office. They would have had a field day in here.

“I have a three-year-old at home, and a girl, Cassie, and even though I told my boyfriend, ‘You do so much as come on my knees I’ll get pregnant,’ he didn’t listen, and so here I am.”

“Here we are,” I said. “How lucky.”

“But this time I want to be there. Last time, the decisions were made for me. I’d checked out. Emotionally I mean. But not this time. I’m talking to a lot of people. I’m going to do it right this time,” she said.

“Of course,” I said. “We want to be here in whatever way makes you most comfortable.”

“In April,” Katrina said. “I’m going to do it right.”

“You’re due in April?”

“The twenty-second.”

“I understand,” I said. “You have to be sure you get what you need. We want as open a relationship as you want to have. Whatever you need.”

“I need to bond with my baby.” Katrina was crying harder now. “I need to have that time in the hospital to just see him again. Last time I didn’t even want to hold him.”

“That must have been so hard. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.” I couldn’t think about what that would be like. Holding a baby. After.

“I need to get the hell out of this trailer,” Katrina told me.

I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to answer this with reassurance of some kind. I didn’t know if she was asking me for help moving and I didn’t know if that was right or wrong. I had lost sight of a lot of things.

“I know I am a good woman,” she said. “I know what I am on the outside. I know what people think, all the tattoos. The bad boys. But that’s not necessarily me on the inside. I read a lot of books. Self-help books and books about God. I am going through a spiritual change and I know who I am now. On the inside? I have a heart as big as a cloud. And also? Jesse? I have a heartbeat that isn’t just my own.”

_______

When I hung up with Katrina, I climbed back into bed next to Ramon. I lay on my back looking up at the ceiling, convex, as if the pressed tin were a bowl that held the weather.

“Do you want to know about the conversation?” I asked my husband.

“Sure, though I heard the whole thing. You were great.” He patted my leg, anticipating my next question. It seemed like he might want to wait until morning to discuss this, which was an abomination as far as I was concerned. Here was progress. I thought of Carmen, the perfect birthmother who never called, and how now we were moving forward. For one split second I felt time stop. I imagined going up to Fishkill next year, holding our own baby. It was hard, I’d say, rocking her in my arms, kissing at her ear, but so worth it! I imagined Lucy and I leaning on two strollers, moving through the neighborhood we grew up in, smiling at the neighbors whose houses we once ding-dong-ditched, whose gardens we once plucked lily of the valley and lilacs from.

“She’s forty and a grandmother. But it’s her second adoption. I know she’ll go through with it. That’s what the agency said, remember?” I said to Ramon.

“Remember what?”

“The best birthmothers know how hard it is to parent.” I would be lying if I said I didn’t picture parenting as finally peaceful, mother and infant together on a giant bed, two spoons. But I do know—my head does, anyway—that an infant doesn’t quiet from only having been wanted.

Ramon was silent. “Well,” he said.

“She seems smart.” I sighed. “She said she had a heart as big as a cloud.” I smiled in the dark. Outside I could hear the tires of a bus singing down Smith Street. Several people were laughing out front, and then a car door slammed. Families home from dinner, far away. Families, I thought, and I did not feel like the word would make me cry. “I like that expression.”

April, I thought. Already I could smell spring.

_______

The agency was closed for Thanksgiving weekend, and Katrina called several times in the next few days. Katrina and I talked—she did mostly—for hours on end. We talked about her children, about California, the ocean, the desert, about God. She told me she wore her heart on her sleeve, an uncomfortable place for a heart, she said, laughing, and she told me she was looking for a real connection with someone, though I was not sure then if she meant someone who would parent her child or just someone who would understand that she looked to the world like one person, but to herself she was someone different.

My phone plan had one feature: I could talk to five select people for free. That weekend, I exchanged my mother’s cell (calling it amounted to listening to her trying to talk and drive, a terrifying, one-way conversation) with Katrina’s, using a flower for an icon. Even though it felt like an emoticon, which I would never use, and even though my phone had a nearly unreadable cracked face, I liked that this flower represented the birthmother. It felt like Katrina was growing something beautiful.

On Saturday morning, Ramon and I looked for Katrina online. But we couldn’t find her. It was strange and wondrous for someone to leave no digital footprint, as if she had wings or was merely physical flesh, only the mother of a fetus that could one day grow to be our child if we simply answered the phone late at night and listened to her body talking. Her body: a green growing place. Her body: lodging for the tiny beat of a pulse, the pin-sized black spot, the finger curled at the mouth, a curved floating form attached by corded rope, tightly tethered. Finally, the birthmother.

_______

Katrina told me she lived in her trailer in the desert, in Joshua Tree, a place I consider magical. The first time I went, after giving a paper at a conference in Los Angeles, I got my teaching job in Manhattan. The second time, when I was visiting a friend who loved extreme sports and had rented a house there, I found out I was pregnant. Even though the latter didn’t stick and the job was not tenure-track, that Katrina lived there was an intimation of magic.

The desert was extraordinary to me with its blind white heat, the flowering beaver tail and prickly pear cacti nestled between rocks, the rock daisies blossoming out of scorched earth. I was as shocked by the desert as I had been by the New York skyline, the lights switching on at twilight across the water from Brooklyn. The desert was as breathtaking as stepping onto the surface of the moon, the sudden drop to freezing, the ceaseless howl of the coyote as its night soundtrack. As Katrina talked about her children, her boyfriends, her tiny-ass trailer, her good looks and young skin, I wondered how the desert had formed her, the way the city has formed me. Surely it makes you something, I thought as I imagined Katrina leaving her trailer while we talked, looking up at the stars—the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the crescent moon suspended from an invisible string—her robe gathered at her throat, the silhouette of a Joshua tree at her side.

“You know we look alike,” Katrina said. “I’m dark too. And like Ramon, I’ve got some hot Italian blood. There’s a lot of me to love, but we all look alike.”

All of us? I thought. She had access to our information, the many happy pictures of Ramon and me smiling broadly while cooking with his cousins in Terracina, pictures of us seated around a massive bowl of pasta in his mother’s hot kitchen, us in profile looking out over the Hudson with Harriet, the changing leaves bursting into flames below.

“Can you send a photo?” I asked timidly. No pressure! the agency told us at that session. The birthmother, they told us, that most fragile bird, might fly away. We don’t want them to change their minds, the agency said. We don’t want to hurt them, Crystal told us. Which made us realize that the agency was there mostly to protect the birthmothers.

For our protection, Ramon and I only had each other.

“I’m on Myspace,” Katrina said. Myspace. I forgot that was even still a thing. “Trina,” she said. “No one ever calls me Katrina.”

“Oh, Trina.” We’d been searching under the wrong name. “Thank you so much for calling us. We will find you.”

_______

I was ready with my laptop on the coffee table when Ramon came in from his run, smelling of dried leaves and sweat. He sat next to me on the couch, breathing hard.

There she was! And she was pretty. Dark hair and green eyes. And there were her gorgeous children. Gorgeous children who might look like the child who could become our child.

“Why didn’t we do this earlier?” I pointed to the child on the screen. “Gamble on the place where you are guaranteed to be a parent.”

“I tried,” Ramon began, but he stopped.

I paused and looked up at him now and saw him in Michelle’s gazebo, weeping. The fathers, he had said.

Flipping through the images on Katrina’s page, we came across photos we assumed were of her daughter, and the grandchild, and then some animated flowers spilling out from between animated spread legs, a lot of mermaids and fairies, and then a block of text that said: SS. White Girls Only.

“Whoa.” Ramon touched my shoulder.

“What?” I shot three images ahead, to a photo of a kid flipping the bird at the camera.

“Go back,” Ramon said.

I closed my eyes. I could feel the tears escaping from under the lids, so I closed them tighter. “No.” I moved ahead, confronted now by photos of heavily tattooed men with shaved heads, one with a swastika on his bicep.

Ramon edged the laptop toward him with the tips of his tapered fingers and flipped back several images. Of course it was there again, in that special font reserved for all things Hitler: SS. White Girls Only.

“Who cares?” I said. I’d spent days on the phone with this woman. I haven’t felt this kind of connection with anyone else I’ve spoken to, she’d told me. I had been silent, but it had been a while for me as well to talk to someone without interruption. With new hope. “It doesn’t matter. Nurture over nature, right?”

“We have to deal with these people.” Ramon stood up. “They are going to be in our lives, remember? Open adoption.”

“It’s always you seeing the negative! It’s nurture over nature,” I said. “All the research says so.”

“Jesse,” Ramon said. Now he bent down and held my wrists. “What is the positive here? She’s forty years old. We want someone young and healthy and who isn’t a fascist.”

“But she chose us!” I was crying; I couldn’t stop it. And forty, it was only six months from now. “That could be anything. People put stuff online without knowing what it means all the time. She might not even know what it means.”

Ramon went to take a shower but our bathroom was tiny and right off the living room, so he couldn’t leave the conversation.

“I’ll call the agency, and they’ll be able to tell us more,” I said, sniffling.

Ramon turned on the shower.

“She’s chosen us, Ramon,” I said, louder. “She told me we are her first choice.” I could hear him step into the shower. “We had a connection. I don’t think we should just let this go.”

_______

On Monday, I finally talked to Crystal at the office in Raleigh. Crystal said Katrina had done an intake already and she was: Caucasian. Her boyfriend was: Caucasian with some Native American. She lived where she told me she lived, and she was the age she told me she was. Her last child, however, had been adopted through another agency. The real red flag here, Crystal said, was that she could be talking to more than one agency. And? Crystal said, we don’t have a confirmation of her pregnancy.

Red flags. We learned about those in Raleigh, too, and not having a pregnancy confirmation would be a major one. Another red flag? If the birthfather does not know the birthmother’s plan to give up the child. Or? If the father does know the adoption plan, because then he can hinder it. If it’s early in the pregnancy, before five months, say, then the birthmother has ample time to change her mind. If the grandparents are involved, they can decide they will parent the child. And if they’re not involved, that’s a red flag too, because the birthmother isn’t getting the support she needs.

“That’s not a problem,” I said. I did not mention the Third Reich imagery. “Trina told me she’d be going to the doctor on Wednesday. We’re set to talk after her appointment.”

“That’s great!” Crystal said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I get the paperwork.”

_______

Katrina did not call me after her appointment on Wednesday, nor did she call on Thursday. On Friday I left her a message, and then I tried her several days later.

“Oh hi, Jesse.” She sounded very faraway. Not just alone-on-the-surface-of-the-night-desert far, but also: gone. As if I had not heard about her mother who never loved her, her daughter’s drug problem, her son’s anger-management issues.

“Hey there!” I was terribly cheerful. “How are you?” I thought then of something Katrina had said in one of our many hours of previous conversations: What would I have been had I the power to choose my own mother? she’d asked. I could have everything you have. I could have been a professor, like you, or a doctor or a musician. I want to choose my child’s mother right.

But she was only choosing by what a mother does. I realized, from where she sat, trying to get herself and her children out of a trailer park I saw tilted on some desert precipice, that was important. A professor? I speak from experience: great hours, summers off, but the world is coming down around us. I thought, My mother was a good person, her job was a job that helped people. But was she a good mother? I thought of all the mothers of my youth—the ones who schlepped us across town, who cut oranges into smiles for our soccer games, who sewed patches on their kids’ torn pants, the ones who were there, station wagons humming, when we got out of school. Who was a better mother? Claudine read to me before my parents came home. But does it really matter who read to me? Because I was read to. I grew up being read to every day.

“I’m in the grocery store, can I call you back?” Katrina asked.

Her tone was changed, dismissive. I wondered if she had found someone else, another person who had what she wanted, for herself or for her child; I couldn’t say.

_______

“Nope,” Crystal said when I called to tell her. “We never got a verification of Katrina’s pregnancy. Sometimes,” she said, “the birthmothers are scared. They’re so young. They change their minds.”

“She’s forty.” The rare birthmother bird, shaking the branches of a leaf-filled tree. I pictured Carmen again, young and beautiful and hopeful, a spiral notebook at her chest as she leaned back dreamily against her locker.

“It’s like dating,” Crystal said now. “You get some duds before you find true love.”

“She’s a grandmother,” I said. I still did not tell Crystal about the emblems of Nazism on Myspace, which would have precluded another date on both our parts.

“She might not have been pregnant,” Crystal said. “She might have just been looking for a friend. Or she might be shopping around agencies. She might have been after money.”

“Why,” I asked Crystal, “am I talking to someone who has not sent in a confirmation of pregnancy?”

“Sometimes it takes a while to get that. Sometimes,” she said, “we have to go on our reserves of faith. You will have a child. It might not be Katrina’s and it might not be the next birthmother’s, but it will totally happen for you guys!”

How many ways, I thought, my breath short, can we fail?

_______

I called to tell Lucy about Katrina, and as the phone rang I could imagine the beat of the conversation. Did I tell you the one about the Nazi birthmother? I would ask her. She goose-stepped right out of the picture, I would say, and we would both laugh.

“Hey, Mom,” I said when my mother answered.

“Hi, honey. How are you?”

“Fine!” I said cheerily. “Is Lucy around?”

“She is.” She paused. “She’s had a few complications,” she whispered into the phone. “Nothing serious, she’s going to be fine, but she’s going to stay here for the birth.”

“Oh!” I swallowed. “Okay.”

“I’ll let her tell you about it. Bye, honey.” I heard my mother put the phone down and call my sister. “Lucy!” she cried. “Mommy! Your sister is on the phone.”

My heart beat quickly. I pictured my sister’s growing belly, stopped. Then I pictured it growing obscenely large, Hannah giving a cartoon karate chop from within, pressing out.

“Hey!” Lucy came to the phone, breathless.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Just some bleeding. I didn’t know what it was. I freaked. I thought it was happening again, but so late! It turned out it’s going to be okay, I just need to lay low. Not run around figuring out where to live and all that.”

“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“Any news on your front?”

“No.” Nothing was funny. Nazis were never funny. “Just checking in on you is all,” I said.

“That’s so sweet, Jess,” she said. “Thank you.”