The Mothers A Novel

4

__



We were headed into a new world. Also, we were rattled from the accident. And because Raleigh is a city of hotels, especially the little enclave of them on Arrow Drive where we drove in circles until we finally found ours, when we got back in the car to go to the adoption agency, to this mixer, we were already behind schedule.

“We’re going to be late!” I turned frantically to Ramon. “Why are we the only people on earth without a GPS system?”

Ramon resisted, along with medical treatment, most of life’s newest conveniences, which also included microwaves and light dimmers.

“It’s no big deal,” Ramon said. “Please, just check the directions again. What street is this?”

“I am checking, Ramon, I am. Oh wait.” I rolled down the window. “Excuse me! Excuse me?” I screamed out into the evening air, vaguely toward the median strip, where two men in baggy jeans walked, hands shoved into pockets, their heads pitched down.

Ramon did not slow down. “Are you f*cking kidding me?”

“What?”

“You’re going to ask two homeless people how to get to the mixer?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am. Because two homeless people—who are not homeless by the way, they’re fine—know more about how to get to the mixer than we do.” I started to cry.

“Please tell me you’re not crying.” Ramon looked straight ahead. “Honestly, Jesse, you have to pull yourself together.”

“Thanks for the help.” I crossed my arms.

“We are going to this thing and we need to be pulled together.”

“Actually,” I said, “what we need to be is on time.”

Or we’re not going to get a baby, I thought. I did not say it aloud, as I did not count aloud, or add up the years passing us by aloud, as if saying it out loud would make it so, but I did what I could not help, which was infuse absolutely everything with magical thinking. If we arrive on time for each event this weekend, we are that much closer to being parents. If we are late? Well, who knows what that means for our file. Perhaps lateness—along with being a bad baker, say, or cursing—would make becoming parents impossible.

“Perhaps you could look at the directions instead of crying and maybe we would get there sooner,” Ramon said. Very loudly.

“I can’t believe you’re yelling at me,” I sniffled. “We’re going to a goddamn adoption party and you can’t even be nice.”

“Adoption party. Now that sounds like a whole lot of fun.”

“I know,” I laughed. I tried again. “So, what if an adoption party was like a Tupperware party, where people brought babies and women showed up and bought them, in sets of ten say, with color-coded snap tops.” I pulled down the sun visor and checked for tear-smudged mascara. I wiped the corners of each eye with the tips of two fingers. “Color-coded,” I said again.

Ramon sighed, turning the car around.

I looked at the directions and then at the road. I had no idea where we were.

Ramon stopped and tore the directions out of my hand. He shook his head. “It’s right over there,” he said. “It’s been right there, the whole time.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“That it was over there the whole time?” Ramon pulled into the lot. “Here?”

“Yes.”

“Just what I said,” Ramon said.

“Mmm-hmm,” I said. But I knew it was some kind of metaphor. For what, and why it even mattered, who is to say?

_______

The mixer. It was in a little mall-like stretch of buildings around the corner from a gas station and a Subway, about ten minutes from Arrow Drive, a trip we managed to stretch into thirty minutes. The mixer consisted of Ramon and me; five other couples; two twelve-year-old social workers, Crystal and Tiffany; and the branch director, Nickie.

Ramon and I were the last ones in, which I noted with anxiety as Nickie, tall and mahogany colored, stood up and handed us name tags, white stickers framed in blue, our names printed in childlike letters with a red marker. With a gesture, she invited us to sit at the table, which was really several tables, like we had in grade school, and nothing like the modern tables of Smith Chasen, pushed together. I could see the mini squares of light in between the fake wood where the corners of the tables met up.

“Hi. I’m Jesse, and this is Ramon.” I pushed Ramon forward. “We’re from New York.”

He nodded his head. “Hi.” He put on a smile.

I unpeeled my name tag and pasted it over my heart.

“I’m Tiffany,” one of the blond social workers said. “I used to live in Manhattan!”

“Neat,” I said. “We’re in Brooklyn. Lots of babies in Brooklyn!” I laughed, too loudly.

It was impossible not to notice that the others, all of them, were same-sex couples.

Nickie stepped forward and reached out her hand. “We spoke on the phone. I registered you for this weekend.”

“Yes.” I shook her hand, which was dry and strong.

The lighting—bright, fluorescent, buzzing—was not the kind of lighting I associate with getting to know anyone in a civilized manner. I could see Ramon’s pores, the size of dimes, and the little pubic-like hairs springing from Nickie’s chin. And it illuminated all too clearly who was around the table: one set of lesbians and three sets of gay men. Ramon and I appeared to be the oldest by at least five years. At least.

Being the only heterosexual pair, while anthropologically fascinating, lighted the fear and panic-in-constant-waiting that we had come to the wrong place. Of all the agencies outside of New York, why, I wondered now, had we not chosen the one in Vermont, another popular agency with New Yorkers? Vermont would be beautiful right now, with the leaves, and the maple syrup, and the inns, and the straight couples, I thought, as I put aside that the Vermont agency’s sessions were full through the year and that Ramon and I had been anxious to begin. And so here we were in a strip mall off a highway, in this place I now feared would not get babies for straight people in New York City, no matter how punctual they were.

Forget that there was no ambient music playing, not a single pig resting in a burnt or soggy blanket, nothing skewered—at least not chicken—at this mixer. And forget that everyone sat beneath the glare of the humming light, drinking Dr Pepper from cans. My heart flipped in my chest and I thought of the way this poor goldfish I’d won at a school fair slapped my cupped palms when I held him. I don’t know why I would be so cruel as to take a fish out of water, though I do recall wanting to offer it comfort.

“Sorry we’re late.” I looked around the room, blinking. “We drove in from New York.”

One of the men—Herman, his name tag said—rolled his eyes.

“I just meant it was far,” I said. “And there was an accident.”

“Oh, I heard!” another man, Gabe, said. “I heard Miley Cyrus’s tour bus overturned.”

“No way!” someone else responded.

Gabe nodded. “She wasn’t in it though.”

“Well, thank goodness for that,” he said.

My head bobbed frantically at everything being said. Yes! It was Miley Cyrus! Yes! She wasn’t there! Yes! Thank goodness she was okay. Yes! We were there!

The woman to my right, Anita, her fleece pullover flinty with animal hair, smiled back at me.

Ramon swallowed hard. He had not yet put on his name tag, I noted, as I wondered if, when we returned to the hotel, he would blame me for not signing up with that agency in Vermont.

“I’m Jesse,” I again said, gesturing to my name tag and sliding into one of the two remaining chairs.

“Hi, Jesse!” the room said in unison.

I nodded my head around the room.

Ramon looked at the floor and sat down.

I unpeeled his name tag and slapped it on. “Ramon!” I pointed.

The room bubbled with laughter, and Ramon grabbed my hand beneath the table, with an urgency that startled me. I wasn’t sure if it was to stop me from speaking, to offer comfort, or to receive it.

Herman’s partner, Alex, smiled at the side of his mouth. “Well hello, Ramon!” he said.

This happens all the time: Ramon, it should be noted, is a good-looking man.

Everyone laughed—again! What fun this was!—and said hello, and Ramon said hello back.

My heart flipped again, slippery in a hand. We are old and straight and we have tried a million other ways to have children, and we live in New York, where no one but Tiffany has ever been because, I would learn later, they think you can get shot there. And don’t even bring up Brooklyn.

And then I had another one of my preternatural thoughts: if everyone here was gay and from the South—which in a way meant everyone here was the same—then maybe Ramon and I had a good chance. Maybe, if we did everything just as we were told, if we listened very well and did all the paperwork correctly, in the right order, and if we smiled properly, and didn’t bicker in front of everyone, if we came on time, if we tried to always remember how once we had seen each other in a church and fallen in love, maybe we would get to be parents.

“Well,” Nickie said, standing, leaning in on her spread fingers, her nails long and sculpted and red. “Shall we begin?”

_______

Later that night, after finding our way back to Arrow Drive and the Crabtree Hotel that was not the Marriott Crabtree hotel but was right next to it, we turned on the news and lay back on the bed. Miley Cyrus was on, crying about her tour bus. Correction: crying about the people on the tour bus. She was grateful not to have been on it, but her band and the roadies had been, and two people had been killed. How old is this girl? I thought, doing my math. Could I be her mother? She is seventeen years old, the news tells me, and so yes, it appears that were I a different kind of woman, living in an alternate world, I could be her mother.

I pictured that man from her bus, unhinged in the middle of the road, the rolling hills green as moss against the black asphalt.

“Strange,” I said to Ramon.

“What about this day, I would like to know, has not been strange.” He took three pillows and propped himself up in bed.

I nodded slowly. I tried to be contrary, to find an argument for this day, but came up with nothing. “True,” I said.

“The drive was strange, the place was strange, the people were strange, what is happening to us is goddamn bizarre.”

“The people were nice, though. In the end. The couples, I mean.”

“The mixer-that-was-not-a-mixer was not so bad in the end, yes. I see why they did it. We all got to meet each other before we do the training, whatever that is going to entail.” Ramon punched at his pillows, readying, I could tell, for total obliteration. That’s always the way he does it.

“Yeah, who knows what it will be tomorrow.”

“I mean, training for what? The adoption ten-K?” Ramon turned onto his side, away from me, and then he said something I couldn’t hear.

“What?”

“More like training for more heartbreak,” he said, louder now.

I looked at my husband, taken aback, as I had been when he took my hand earlier that evening. My throat tightened, sewn shut. I tried to swallow.

“We need to stay positive.” I put my hand on his shoulder.

“That’s my line,” Ramon said. “I will use it on you, tomorrow, when you’re flipping out again.”

I nodded at his back. “I know. I have been. I can’t believe this is us. I just can’t. How did this happen? Remember that first night in Rome, when you saw my scars and I told you I didn’t think I could have children?”

Ramon’s head nodded into the pillows.

“And then later when we were engaged? I told you again. You were like, who cares? We both said that. Who cares? Remember? But you know what? I don’t think we believed it.”

I remembered saying the words. I can’t. But back then, what did we think we would not be able to overcome?

“Did you?” I asked him. “Did you believe it?”

“I don’t remember,” he said.

We were silent. “We need to stay positive.” Ramon reached around to pat my hand and got my elbow instead.

I hit him on the shoulder. “You’re right. We do. Let’s try to get through this weekend and see.” And just then I thought of that lawyer, her purple hair, the slit at her hairline, sewn tight. I hadn’t known then the wait that prospective parents endure. I had always thought, in the very back of my head where my past is stored, where hope lies in wait, that we would just adopt if science didn’t work for us. Making the decision to adopt would be the most difficult part, and I believed that the moment I let go of my self-absorbed need to give birth to my own biological child, a baby would miraculously reveal her face.

I did the math at the Crabtree Hotel the first night we arrived in Raleigh. It was roughly the same as yesterday and it would be the same tomorrow. But one day soon that number would radically shift.

“At least this isn’t a gamble, though,” I said.

Ramon was silent. He does this thing when we’re in bed and he doesn’t want to talk anymore, where he puts the pillow over his head and goes to sleep. But he hadn’t done that just yet.

“We get a kid if we do this. Not like with the IVF, where we wait and spend all this money we don’t have, and still it might not happen. This isn’t like that.” I thought of all the women in the waiting room at the hospital on the mornings I went uptown at daybreak for my appointments. Not one looked at another, as if we were competing for the few successes that day held. Statistics were statistics and there were not enough favorable outcomes for us all. If celebrities were there—and they always were, in their baseball caps and loose velveteen sweats and hoodies—we ignored them. Would they take everything due to their proximity to stardom? Would they get all the good luck, all the baby dust, all the magic, or had they too used up their wishes?

When they did call our names—first and last—we put our heads down and we went inside, and we took whatever we had coming, and then we went home or we went to work and we turned to chat rooms on the Internet. That’s where we got the information we needed: drink wheatgrass, it improves egg quality; eat pineapple, it helps with implantation—acts that made us think we were affecting change. As we chatted anonymously, without bodies, about what our bodies weren’t doing, it made us feel, however briefly, that the plans we’d made for our lives might transpire.

Still, I saw his expression when Ramon found out that I was not pregnant from our final course of IVF. I had gotten up for several mornings before he awoke and taken my own pregnancy tests, too impatient to wait for the doctor’s official word, and I had not told him for days that, no matter how many times I checked it, no matter how I saved each strip, comparing it with the one the following day to see if perhaps it had darkened just the slightest bit, the answer was still the same. It was after the fifth day of silence—a disposition uncommon to me—that Ramon had woken to my steady weeping over the bathroom sink. I had not heard him outside the door, and I turned as he opened it, and we both knew in that moment that everything had run out.

“I can’t think about this anymore right now.” Ramon stretched out his arm and turned out the light, signaling that not only couldn’t he think about it, but he wouldn’t be talking about it either. “Can you just wake me when all of this is over?”

I lay in the hotel bed and thought of other hotels I’d been in with Ramon, that first night he had run his finger along the deep grooved scar. I enjoyed what I now see as his disinterest in my scars. On the beaches of Italy I saw evidence of bodies ravaged by wars and childbirth and socialized medicine in scarred torsos, steel limbs, keloid cuts, eye patches, exposed without shame. I was just another war-torn body. But the ravages were also inside, where they had gone in several times and cut out the cancerous section of the colon, then sewed it back up, almost precisely enough for me not to notice. Each time they thought they had it all, something would be left behind and in they’d go again, and the scar tissue that grew out from those internal wounds coiled around me, an unstoppable moth vine or creeper, wrapping tightly to all the parts meant to stay open, strangling me on the inside where possibility breathed.

“But what if I want to sleep through this too?” I asked the dark now.

I could hear the cars moving along the highway. I could hear the ice machine cracking in the hallway, the ding of the elevator traveling inside the building. What would my life be like? I wondered, as I had lost my earlier clarity, and with it, my power to imagine. If I could see the face of the child that would be ours, I would know even a little. There in the dark rose the magic pot. I felt Claudine hovering over me, her substantial arm around my neck, the other in front, holding the book, her deep odor of sweat and musk, and the strong timbre of her voice. She turned the thick pages and I can’t say I wished for my mother then, but I wished to see her now, as I could see the magic pot drawn in that book, on the ground of a farmer’s dusty field at dusk, lacking enchantment. It grew in my imagination, so massive and black, a pot to be stirred by a coven of witches, a cauldron in a forest in winter, cold and oh so empty.