The Mothers A Novel

22

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January 2011

Another new year, and I started to recognize a pattern. We waited, until inactivity panicked us. Then someone made contact. It could be the agency, telling us someone would or should or might or could be calling, or the birthmother herself, like Katrina, or even the birthfather, like the nameless man from Cairo, who had found our profile online. We tried to protect ourselves. Let’s be cautiously optimistic, we’d tell each other over (several) beers in front of the television (this might be our last few weeks of freedom! I mused). We thought, again, that we had been the lucky ones. And then, when the call did not come, or the call that came said we had not been chosen, when we traveled that vast terrain from almost, practically three to merely two, we grieved.

We grieved differently. Ramon railed at the agency for not vetting people, and at me for choosing this place and for screwing up with the mothers. I wept. And then, as he railed, I wept again, for being married to someone who railed instead of being supportive in times of grief. I thought of the men I knew and felt sure they would not behave this way. I thought of Anita, and her care and feeding of all those gorgeous animals.

“This hurts me too,” Ramon said, many times. “It is not just you who wants this.”

And now I see that I knew this was true but I did not care. The loss of these birthmothers was unbearable to me. They were the loss of everything.

But inevitably, after a day of chaos and misery, I got up and went to teach my classes. I met friends for drinks or coffee or dinner. I attended a colleague’s book party, a lecture. I went to a movie or to hear live music. In this way, I moved on.

Until we were fortunate enough to be contacted. And then, well, as my grandmother used to say, it was déjà vu all over again.

_______

It had been several weeks since the Cairo Incident, as we had come to call it, when Ramon and I went to meet several of his cousins who were in New York on business. (Business? I’d asked, and was brushed off.) On the train uptown, I removed Katrina’s flower icon from my phone. As I heard the swishing sound of the deletion, I thought of Katrina’s heart, as big as a cloud, and it seemed to me the bigger the cloud, the more bad weather it could hold.

We were out to dinner at their hotel, an Italian place—why must Italians always eat Italian cuisine when not in Italy? So they can say how terrible it is by comparison? Will they die without a plate of pasta?—when another call came in to the 800 number.

“Hello?” I was breathless, crazy, as I always am when I know it might be a birthmother calling.

Just from that first ring our percentages of becoming parents went from zero to a hundred.

“Hi,” the young woman said. “I’m Heather.”

I went out to the lobby, opening my purse and struggling to get my pen and a pocket-sized Moleskine as I walked. “Hi!” I said.

“I saw you and Ramon online. I’m having twins.” She said all this at once, a torrent of rain. “Are you open to twins?” Heather asked.

Am I open to twins? Not really. We live in a fourth-floor walk-up, for one. But twins, we know, is our only chance for siblings. I had, after all, checked the box for twins on our client profile form.

“Of course we’re open.” I sat down on a bench against the wall of the hotel before a window facing the street. I thought of Carolyn and her forthcoming twins and I imagined us blocking all the nonmothers (suckers!) with our double strollers on our neighborhood sidewalks. “We love twins.”

“Oh,” she breathed out, relieved. “Great.”

I wrote that down. Twins, I wrote. Great. “Thank you for reading our profile. What was it you liked about our letter?” I asked Heather.

“Your education,” she said. “And the way you and your husband spoke about each other. You have a beautiful relationship.”

I snorted, but silently, as I wrote down: Jan. 18, 2011. Heather likes our education and our relationship.

“Thank you, Heather,” I said. “We are fortunate. Can I ask your last name?” Several couples walked in and out of the shining lobby, the women’s heels click-clicking along the floor.

“Sure,” she said, and she told me. I wrote it down. We love to cook! I told her when she asked what we do together. Big meals for our friends and—I coughed—family. And go to museums! And the movies! Also, lest she think we spent our lives inside, I told her, We really love to hike!

“I’m in Westchester with my parents,” she told me. “Well, we’re in Westchester,” she giggled.

This is all so good! Suburban, young, with prenatal care. “I hope they’re being supportive,” I said. And, in imbuing all things with magical thinking, I thought that by excising Katrina’s flower, I had lighted a path for Heather to get to us. For Grace.

“Absolutely. They’ve been awesome. We were on a cruise to Mexico over the holidays. I realized after the cruise, actually, because I thought it was being on the boat that was making me so sick.”

“Right!” I said. “Of course!” The only red flag here was the grandparents, who were edging in like the shadows of circling birds. “And how are you feeling now?”

“Tired,” she said. “But done with the morning sickness. Thank God. It would wake me up in the middle of the night. Not sure why they call it morning sickness.”

I laughed. Lucy had told me the same.

“I’m due on June eighteenth.”

My heart flipped, that goldfish slippery in a hand. Here was a date, five months from then, and three days from my own birthday. Hannah would be four months old; it would be like having triplets in the family. I pictured my digital calendar with the June 18 date embroidered in pink: Baby. No. Babies. I thought of all the showers I’d been through in the past five years, women’s faces pitched into bowls, biting at nipples, sipping on strawberry sparklers. No matter what happened, I had resolved not to have a baby shower. Now I instantly revised this: I will not have a shower until I’m holding a child in my arms.

I looked out at the street. They were calling for a storm but now snow was just beginning to fall, ever so lightly. Fairy dust. I watched people look up at the sky, their faces smiling, catching snowflakes, arms outstretched to the weather. Twins.

“Look,” I said. Already I was having memories and making memories, simultaneously. My father, my sister, and me building a snowman. Big black buttons for eyes set in the packed snow. Ramon and two blank-faced children padded up in purple snowsuits. “Look,” I said again. To Heather. “It’s starting to snow.”

_______

Heather’s story was this: She was taking a year off between high school and college. Her boyfriend (part Caucasian and part Hispanic, she offered) had broken up with her before the cruise, and though she had tried to get in touch with him since discovering she was pregnant, she’d had no response. She’d heard from friends he was overseas. Perhaps, she said ominously, fighting in Iraq.

When she told me that she’d considered keeping the child, but with two there was no possible way, I thought of her leaning over the rail and looking out at the Pacific on the deck of a massive ship strung with fairy lights.

I love the ocean at night, how it meets up with another darkness at a horizon point I cannot recognize. I thought of Heather, before she knew her youth would be cut short. She looked out and dreamed of this boy who had stopped calling. Perhaps she was sad about those promises not kept as she gazed out at the sea, heard it breaking against the boat, heard the tinkling sound of people eating and drinking, caught the sound of her future.

Twins. We will have to move but no matter. I was fed up with this apartment, with its pocket-sized bathroom, its gapped floorboards, the scratch of mice in the bedroom walls. Besides, I’d heard from a colleague there would be an opening, tenure-track, at a small liberal arts school upstate; I could apply for that job in the fall. I’d heard a friend from graduate school would be on the search committee. By the summer, the five of us could be in the country.

I thought of a house with open sunlit rooms, copper pots hanging over a gleaming steel stove, pies bubbling in the oven, a pair of toddlers with their too-big mittens attached to the sleeves of down-stuffed little parkas, giggling as they lie back, moving their arms and legs, angels in heaps of snow.

_______

I called the agency the following afternoon.

“I just talked to a Heather from Westchester who’s having twins. Did you do the intake with her?”

Crystal said she was the one who talked to Heather when she called in, but that Heather from Westchester was Heather from the Bronx; she lived with her boyfriend, who was half African-American, half Hispanic. She was attending college online, studying to be an accountant. She might have smoked pot once before she knew she was pregnant. But remember, Crystal said, this is a self-report.

“That must be a different Heather,” I stated after I had written the information down.

Crystal was quiet. “It isn’t, I’m afraid. Sometimes the birthmothers say what you want to hear. Just like prospective adoptive parents.”

“That’s bullshit.” I stopped myself. If we are the sorts of parents who curse, who will give us a child? Panicked, I continued. “We have never lied about anything.” Had we? I wondered. “Why would she lie? I don’t care if she’s from Westchester or the Bronx. What a terrible way to begin a relationship.” My heart drummed so hard in my chest it was in my ears, but I was not hearing that there was anything necessarily wrong with Heather. Perhaps she was trying to impress us, which sounded positive.

“Birthmothers often feel that the adoptive parents, the women in particular, look down on them. Everyone wants to feel loved and approved of,” Crystal said.

Really, I thought. “That’s just awful. I’m sorry to hear they might feel that way.”

I was sorry Heather felt she had to lie about her situation. That she told the agency the truth, however, showed authenticity and ambition.

This is what I informed Ramon of when we were out to dinner in our neighborhood, at a place that puts popovers sprinkled with salt and glazed with honey on the table as soon as you sit down.

“Ambition?” He was incredulous.

I could see he was letting go of Heather, heading to the rage part of what had become an unbreakable cycle, but I was still in our cautiously optimistic stage.

“Yes, she wants a good family for the child. Wouldn’t you call that ambitious?” I bit into a popover: eggy, light, sweet, delicious.

“No,” Ramon said. “I would call it untrustworthy.”

“Don’t.” I looked hard at my husband. “It’s maybe a little weird, yes, but her boyfriend is part Hispanic. See? The Spanish stuff is working!”

Ramon looked back at me. Big almond eyes; that dimple; wavy black hair that was nearly gray. When did he get so gray? He shook his head. “You know, Jesse, we’re not desperate. We’re not.”

I felt my face grow hot and I imagined being plunged like a vegetable into a pool of cold water to stop my cooking and retain my vibrant color. “Speak for yourself, Ramon,” I said, waving the waitress down to order.

_______

Walking back to our apartment, Ramon disappeared, and then reappeared in the fluorescent-lit threshold of a deli on Smith Street holding a clutch of wilting little daisies.

“A flower for my flower,” he said, and I hugged him, taking the sad bouquet.

When we got back to our apartment, I put the flowers in one of the vases on the mantel, beneath a print of Guernica Ramon had insisted on hanging.

We sat on the couch beneath my daisies, and Picasso’s depiction of war, searching the web for Heather. We found a young blond woman guzzling beer on Facebook, but that was Manhattan Heather, and apparently we needed Bronx Heather. Soon we came upon a young woman in a local paper. At eighteen, she’d been arrested for prostitution, a year ago almost to the day. There was a mug shot of this Heather and a friend of this Heather, young girls whose faces were ravaged. Their hair was stringy; their skin was thick and their eyes were dark, set deep in their sockets.

Before Ramon could say anything, I said, “I don’t care.”

“You don’t care,” he said. “That’s just brilliant.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. As long as she’s not doing drugs while she’s pregnant.”

“Look at her!”

I closed the screen.

“If she wasn’t doing drugs, why else would she be a prostitute and a liar?”

“That was a year ago!” I said. “She could be a totally different person now.”

I thought of myself a year ago, which hardly reinforced my point. I was unbearably the same: filled, as ever, with want. “She could be seriously reformed. Which is why she didn’t have an abortion. Maybe she went to Narcotics Anonymous and found her higher power and now she’s religious, Christian religious, and so she doesn’t believe in abortion anymore.”

Ramon sat back and closed his eyes. He took off his wool cap. We hadn’t even removed our coats, and the snow—the big wet flakes we stomped off our boots in clumps before walking in—was melting. The wool of our coats and hats and mittens smelled like honey and rosemary and hot wax.

“Wait,” he said in that way that means he’s going to say something disingenuous. “So are you thinking that the father is her boyfriend or are you thinking that—and please tell me you’re at least entertaining this idea—it is some horrible guy who paid her to have sex with him sometime after being arrested for soliciting undercover detectives at a Best Western in Queens? And you remember, this was the girl who told you she got knocked up at her prom in Westchester.”

“She did not say it was her prom, okay? There is never going to be an ideal here.” I closed my eyes. “There just isn’t.” I won’t lie. Once we had thought the girl on her way to Princeton who got knocked up at the prom was a likely scenario.

“She’s lying to us,” Ramon said.

“To me, you mean,” I said. “She’s lying to me. Because I’m the one who has been talking to her.”

“Yes. She is lying.”

“Don’t be so negative,” I said. “Please?”

“Seriously?” Ramon turned toward me. “You think I’m being negative? This is a child. You’d be more cautious about buying a used car.”

“Used?” I got up and paced the living room. “Used.”

“A car,” he said. “Jesse, just a car.”

If I pressed this I knew we could lose Bronx (prostitute) Heather. “Why isn’t the agency helping more? What are we paying them for?” I was gesturing wildly, as I often do while lecturing in the classroom. “I don’t understand. We’re getting all these calls. So many people aren’t even getting calls. They don’t even get seen.” Again I wondered which was worse.

“To vet the prostitutes and the Nazis,” Ramon said.

“Stop it. And anyway, they’re not even doing that,” I said.

“Remember when Nickie asked us if we would be comfortable adopting a child of rape?”

How could I forget. How could I—would I—ever forget any of this.

I crossed my arms. “Having sex for money is not rape.”

“Prostitutes and Nazis,” he stated again. “What did people do before the Internet?”

I headed into the bedroom. “I can’t do this,” I said, trying to slam the door, but it was a cheap, hollow, piece-of-shit door that wouldn’t slam.

I flopped onto the bed. Here we go, I thought. Here is the cycle again, but how do I break it? Then I heard the scrape of a chair moving out from the table, the padding of my husband coming to the door.

“Jesse.” Ramon knocked, quiet as a mouse. “Okay in there?”

I rolled over onto my stomach but didn’t say anything.

“We are going to get a child,” he said. “We are. You have to believe.”

I felt my stomach flat against the mattress, the pillow at my turned cheek. What I thought was: When oh when will this story end? I could not bear the smooth rounded belly of one more friend, not one more curly-haired cherub of a child reaching out with the teensiest hand, not one more person saying the wrong thing to me. Let it end like this, I thought then: We will get those twins and I’ll get that job upstate. I saw a meadow spotted with wildflowers, and two children seated there, facing the sun, holding buttercups beneath each other’s chins, just like Lucy and I had done behind the stables, the smell of horse and hay and sweat surrounding us.

What I thought was this: What if the cancer comes back? Maybe the cancer will come back, and if it does, all of this will be over. I will not be able to adopt a child. What a relief that would be, I thought, turning on my back.

“Do you hear me?” Ramon was still outside the bedroom door. “We are going to be parents. I promise. Please,” he said. “Let

me in.”

_______

The next morning, our neighborhood was blanketed in white. Harriet stood on her hind legs at the window, a child waiting to get to play in the snow, when Heather called.

“Hi, Heather!” I said. “How are you feeling?” I didn’t know how to broach the subject of what I had come to think of as conflicting stories.

“Hey,” she said. “I talked to the agency and I’ve chosen you guys.”

“Really?” I said. “Heather, that’s amazing!” I pushed away that she hadn’t talked to Ramon yet, a red flag, though likely not more so than the lying and the prostitute issue.

“Yeah,” she said. “You guys are totally great.”

“Thank you! We really look forward to getting to know you better. I just want to let you know,” I said, “that whatever you want to tell us is okay. We understand this is a hard time for you.”

“Thanks!” There was a sunny barrier of false happiness in Heather’s voice. No longer could I picture her, a heartsick teenager beneath a splash of stars leaning out onto the water, listening for her future on the waves. No longer were Heather and I versions of each other; I could not see myself in her, or her in me. “So I’m going to the doctor in two weeks. And I’ll send in the pregnancy confirmation then. But for now I have the ultrasound photos. Do you want me to e-mail them?”

“Sure,” I said. But I did not want them.

“Awesome!” she said. “I’ve got to run, Jesse, but I’ll talk to you soon!”

Please don’t send those photos, I thought.

When I heard the ping of my computer, I clicked on. The ultrasound. Nice Talking To You. The text said, enjoy :) And there it was: two fetuses, stacked little birds, one in silhouette, one looking straight on. Even my body has been inwardly imaged, that snapshot marked along the top with my name and the date, on all those mornings when hope was an entirely different animal. I had seen Lucy’s ultrasound too, the profile of her daughter already forming, a curled fist at her mouth, the stamp of my sister’s name above the developing head. Heather’s blurred photo was framed by no such information. The information that did arrive did so the way memory does, as knowledge I have always held: These babies were not real. None of the babies had been real. There will be no snow pants and mittens in the coming winters, fields of light come spring, and if I apply for that job upstate and out of the five hundred applicants, I actually get that job, I will likely be going there alone. Ramon might not leave New York. If Ramon is at ease in European cities, and less so in New York City, in the country he is a tourist. He wears street shoes on our hikes. In the woods his elegance reads as small, as if he could too easily get lost there.

The birthmothers have only been women.

The door was closed.

“You just don’t know,” Ramon said when I told him. He looked up from his computer. “Maybe she had a really messed-up scanner.”

“Maybe,” I provisionally agreed. But by his impulse to mollify I realized: he knew too.

He turned back to his work. “Why do they all keep telling us the babies will be here for spring? What,” Ramon asked, “is it with springtime?”

_______

The next morning a call came in from the agency.

“Hi,” Crystal said. “So I’m not sure if Heather told you yet, but she lost her babies in the night. She left a message on the office machine. I’m just calling to let you know. Sad.”

I laughed. I put down my pen.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is hard. For many prospective adoptive parents, matching takes a while.”

God forbid she said adoptive mothers. If she used the word mother on us, what would we women do? Start a riot so big and angry that no amount of tear gas, Tasers, or armored vehicles could hold it back? “You know she didn’t, like, lose two babies in the middle of the night, right?”

“Not likely, no.” Crystal sighed.

“So it was a scam then, right?”

“Yes, it appears to have been. Though a scam tends to mean you gave her money, which you didn’t, thankfully. But I am flagging her profile.”

The red flagging of the red flag. “I can’t help but wonder if all of these aren’t scams. We haven’t talked to one viable birthmother.”

“It’s usually one in, say, thirty that’s not real. But with the economy as it is, we have seen a rise in them.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Very interesting,” I said. “Okay, thanks for letting me know, Crystal.”

Then she assured me that despite these few bad dates there would ultimately be a match, and that while we were having all these unusually crazy experiences, when we did get our match, when we found the right birthmother, it would all make sense. And this, Crystal had said, would all disappear, not unlike childbirth.

Childbirth?

The pain of childbirth, Crystal had told me.

I walked the five steps into the dining room, where Ramon was working or playing his hedgehog mouse game or playing billiards or poker or whatever the hell Ramon had been doing. “It was a scam,” I said.

He was silent.

“That was Crystal. Well, we knew it probably was.” I thought to touch his shoulder but did not. “We knew.”

There was a long sigh. “Seriously?” Ramon looked up, his fingers still poised over the keyboard. “When is the part that is mutually beneficial? The altruism part. The goddamn adoption part. Because this is ridiculous. Who does that? It’s like preying on the elderly.”

“Thanks.” I thought, If I get a child right this minute, when that child is my age, if I am still alive, I will be just about eighty. Just about.

“You know what I meant.”

I went to check my e-mail, trying to get far away from this moment, a trick that I can only say I have learned from growing up a girl.

Among my accumulation of morning e-mails there was one from that friend who consistently sent out mass messages about dogs.

I clicked on the link and, as always, there was a dog in need. This one, a beautiful gray pit bull with a creamy white chest, maybe eight months old, had been found chained to the Williamsburg Bridge during the snowstorm the night Heather called. Who would do that? Who would leave a beautiful, helpless animal that way? I tried not to think about Harriet’s ever leaving us. I started sobbing for the dog, abandoned and freezing, all alone on the bridge. What did the world look like to him now? I thought.

Who would do such a thing?

_______

After several hours, I left my office/closet and went to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Ramon and Harriet were on a walk, and while they were out, I noticed that the daisies Ramon had gotten me on the way home from the restaurant two nights previously, delicate as wildflowers, had drunk up much of the vase’s water and perked up. I was about to trim their stems and add more water when my phone rang. Katrina. I had removed her icon but I had not expelled her from my phone book altogether, and now I made out her name through the fractured face and leaking ink. It had been well over a month since we’d spoken, and I didn’t know if she was pregnant, or if she was ever pregnant. I didn’t know if she was looking for a friend or for money, and I didn’t know if she was a Nazi, and still? I was excited.

Because, I thought, Katrina from Joshua Tree might be our birthmother. Because she might hold what we want like a cloud holds the rain. Because perhaps she had her pregnancy confirmation and had talked to other prospective adoptive parents, from many agencies, but she had still decided we were perfect, and, because she lives across the country, we will send photos and letters as our child grows and we will not have to deal with the host of Aryan Nation boyfriends she courts.

“Hello?” I answered in that breathless way I will never be

able to control. I grabbed a pen and turned a bank envelope blank side up.

No one said anything but I could hear movement in the background.

“Hello?” I said. “Trina? Are you there?”

Still there was no answer, but I could hear her speaking. Oh, that looks cute, she said. There was murmuring, and then the sharp knifelike sound of a hanger moving along a rack, the ruffle of clothing, the smack of plastic hangers hitting other plastic hangers. Let me see, I heard Katrina say. Turn around, she said.

I sat down on the couch, where I could see that on the fire escape, the snow was still piled high.

Cassie, that tank top is so cute! I like the way it hits you just here at the waist. Right here, she said, and there was again the sound of movement. I knew Katrina was touching her daughter at the hip. Come on, let me see. We should get that one.

I lay back on the couch and looked up at the bowed ceiling. I held my breath. I couldn’t hang up.

Oh, do you see those boots there? Do you want to try them on?

Something was said that I could not catch, and then I heard Trina’s voice again. Oh, that is nice. Go try that on, honey.

Then there was a voice from a distance. Mom? It was farther away than Trina’s voice but I could hear it clearly; I could hear its youth. Do you think this is too small?, the voice, the voice of a teenager, said. Mom?

I stood up, cradled the phone between my neck and shoulder, and pulled a daisy, dripping with water, from the vase on the mantel. I watched my thumb snap the bloom from the stem. I pulled another and flicked it off. And then another.

There was a short silence, and I pictured Katrina’s daughter spinning around for her mother. Also there is my own mother turning me by the shoulders in front of the full-length mirror in

Garfinckel’s, where I was almost born, in the coat department. There was a spot there that marked that moment. Then the spot was gone. That department store is gone now too, but my mother’s chin hooks over my shoulder, and she’s smiling. Look at you, my mother says, all grown up.

I flicked the head off another daisy and watched it—the face of the sun—fall to the couch, join the small accumulation of the heads of all the little daisies.

What do you think? the girl’s voice said now. Mom, she said. Do you think I look pretty?