The Mothers A Novel

9

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At the dinner table Ramon talked to my parents with an easy manner he rarely possessed in social situations. For him there was a divide between family and non-family, and tonight he seemed natural in his skin as he chatted casually with my parents about the weekend.

“And then”—he gestured with his fork—“we had to choose colored pom-poms. And deal with a lot of forms. Wait, let me back up. We have to get this eight hundred number. Randy,” Ramon said to my dad, “can we do it from your business line, which would then be forwarded to our cell? But anyway, that’s a whole other thing, basically, the mothers—”

“The birthmothers.” I could sense it gathering itself up in the pit of my stomach, the past, dinner, a tight fist, a ball of hair and bones; I could feel all of it amassing.

“Sorry,” Ramon said, “of course, the birthmothers, the birthmothers, well, they call us directly on this eight hundred number and we talk to them. Well, Jesse does. We’ve decided it will be Jesse.”

I smiled broadly and sarcastically. “Yaay.” I lifted my shoulders to my ears and kept them there for an extra beat.

Ramon looked at me very deliberately, and I could feel my parents’ excitement in receiving so much information. “We did this role playing.”

I began shoveling food into my mouth. I had to hand it to my mother; her famous tri-mushroom risotto was tri-fabulous.

“So we had these made-up cards of who the birthmother was—her identity, like where she was from, what her situation was, if she had other kids, which is a good thing as she knows how difficult it is to parent then . . .”

My mother nodded her head knowingly, and I wondered if she was also thinking about the help she got with parenting from Claudine.

“Anyway,” Ramon continued, “we had to practice what we would ask the birthmother on the phone.”

“If they call.” I watched Harriet come out from beneath the table and head straight for my father, always the softie when it came to table scraps. “If.”

“They’re going to call.” Ramon turned first to my father at one end of the table, and then to my mother. “We have a very good chance of being called,” he said.

“Wonderful!” My mother beamed. “That just sounds wonderful.”

“Wonderful,” my father agreed.

“Can we talk about something else please?” I asked. “I am really tired. Of this. I’m very tired of talking about this.”

“But, Jesse,” Ramon said, “we need to discuss the race of the child with your parents.”

My mother perked up. “Oh yes, let’s talk about that! I would love to talk about it. What are you guys thinking?”

“Absolutely,” my father said. “We are here to talk to.”

“No, I’m tired,” I said. “And come on, Ramon,” I said.

“We need to discuss this,” Ramon said. Was he smiling?

The three of them looked at me and I thought of Ramon in the car on the way back from the training, after we’d hugged everyone good-bye and gotten into our car and driven away. As we’d entered Virginia it had begun to grow dark on the highway, and in the gloaming Ramon had turned to me, as excited as he was tonight with my parents, and he’d brought up the issue of languages again. Of legacy.

“The child needs to be Jewish, too,” I’d told him. I had looked out at the highway growing so quickly dark.

“No, f*ck you, Ramon,” I said now.

My parents gently set their napkins down at the same time.

“Stop it,” my mother said. “Jesse, please.”

“Okay then. What would you like to know? We are open to many many races. We’re not totally in agreement, as Ramon seems to think a child born in a meth lab—a white child—might be more appropriate for us than an African-American child because he doesn’t think we have black friends. Ramon is very happy with a Hispanic child, though, as that speaks to his origins. My origins, ours . . .” I swept my hands to encompass the dining room with its muted yellow walls and white molding, the African art and the tea set that had been my great-grandmother’s, the one my father was always hoping someone would break in and steal so we could collect the insurance. “Our origins do not seem to be relevant. But, as you’ve asked, we’re sorting out the race thing. We’re deciding on drug use and mental health and physical deformities and if I have to make one more decision I’m going to pitch myself out of a window.”

“We understand,” my father said.

“Seriously, Jesse?” Ramon asked.

“Seriously.” I turned to my parents. “So, Mom, Dad, how comfortable are you with a child of color in our family?”

“Stop it.” Ramon folded his hands in his lap. “This is not the way we want to have this discussion.”

Color. What is it? I thought of Ramon adjusting the brightness on one of his designs. Turn it up, tone it down. Color. “Me? You had no right to just bring this up. When does this get to be private again?”

“Okay,” he said. “I get it.”

“It’s okay.” My mother picked up her napkin and dabbed at her mouth. “It’s okay, Ramon.”

“It seems I can’t control a thing, can I? Because normally, making a baby is between two people, so I don’t really care what my parents feel about a child of color.”

“Look.” My father cleared his throat. “You guys have been through quite a lot and I just want to say that of course we are comfortable with any child in this house and we will be thrilled to be grandparents to any child you have.”

“Absolutely,” my mother said. “And remember how much time I’ve spent in Africa.”

“Fabulous,” I said.

“You can discuss this with strangers and not your family?” Ramon asked me.

“Yes. Exactly.” I realized he was getting me back for all the talking I’d done this weekend. Ramon, it turned out, had felt left out.

“It’s a postracial world. Obama has changed everything,” my father said, passing some meat to Harriet. Right in front of my face.

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Oh yes, it certainly is.” My father straightened in his chair. “Do you know what it was like before? In the fifties? Yes it is. So I do happen to agree with you that a mixed-race child—in this day and age—is hardly a risky proposition.”

“I can’t do this.”

“Jesse. We want to know what’s going on. You’re our daughter,” my mother said.

And yes, even that hurt me. Daughter. I wanted to obliterate the very word. In every language.

“We do,” my father said. “And frankly, this is our grandchild, our only grandchild, you’re talking about. If you don’t want us involved, why don’t you just keep him or her in New York then?”

“Don’t threaten me,” I told him, standing, and only after I did so did I feel myself stand. “Don’t threaten me, do you understand me? Because I am done. Because everyone has a limit. I have reached my limit.”

I ran upstairs to the attic and I sat on my twin bed, my chest expanding and contracting. I heard my father begin to yell at Ramon.

“You go and talk to her, goddamn it, Ramon, you need to fix this now,” he was saying, and I could hear my mother trying to use her mobilization and managerial skills: what Randy is saying, Ramon, and Ramon might be feeling a little pressured right now, and Jesse has been through so much with her illness, too. I imagined her brushing her silver hair from her face as she enunciated clearly.

I heard Ramon come up the stairs and then he was there, and begging me to go back down. “Please,” he said. “Your father is freaking out on me. You have to go downstairs and talk to him,” he said, and I did, wordlessly, brushing by him, touching him gently enough to hurt him, and I gathered myself up, the way I knew even then that I would continue to on nights to come, nights when the phone sat silent and the birthmothers didn’t call, or the nights they did call and we talked for hours but then they did not choose us, on nights when, if we ever got that child, that child had grown up to hate us, as much as I had told my parents I hated them, as much as I had run from them, as much as I had thwarted them for only being themselves, but I did not know that as I made my way down the steps to talk to my father that night, I did not know that my parents were only human; I had not reached that level of humanness that would allow me to forgive them. For that, I knew, as I opened the door to the den to see my father weeping, for that, and because of that, I knew, I would have to have children of my own.