The Mothers: A Novel (17 page)

Who is a birthmother? What we were told by Crystal or Tiffany that day, almost a year ago, is this: a birthmother is eighteen to twenty-five years old. Fifty percent of birthmothers are in relationships. The birthmothers are scared. They fear the unknown. The birthmother might have wanted to terminate her pregnancy, but it is too late. Or she might not believe in terminating a pregnancy. The birthmother has love for her unborn child, big big love, which is why she wants to make a plan for that child. But at the same time she is detached from the child, to protect herself from the sorrow to come. The life of the birthmother, this rare bird, tends to be chaotic.

In other words, the birthmothers are only women.

What we were waiting for now was the birthmothers.

I did not move for forty-eight hours, but to drag myself to the table to eat. And while extreme emotion—depression, wild happiness—often puts people off food, this sort of thing has never, ever, made me lose my appetite. I am not one of those wan, depressed people listlessly wandering drugstores; I am the depressed person listlessly wandering the aisles of the pharmacy with a rosy plumpness in my cheeks that comes from sustained good nutrition.

I heard Ramon’s moving about and working in the dining room, so much weather. He peeked his head in to check on me.

“You alive?” he said.

I nodded into my pillow.

“This is the first one.” Ramon sat on the bed. The weight of his body, how it moved the mattress in the slightest way, hurt me. “We were lucky to be called so quickly,” he said. “Sometimes it takes months and months.”

“Not helping,” I said. “And remember. We were not called.”

Had I had the opportunity to speak to Carmen, perhaps my very charm would have made her forgo California and choose us. Was being picked over—scenario number two—better than scenario number one, not being contacted at all? Was it better to be bludgeoned with a club or assaulted with a cleaver? Which, I wonder, would you rather?

I heard the landline ring and I heard Ramon speaking into it and I heard him and Harriet come and go for her walks, her return signaled by the
click click
of her nails on the wood floors. She arrived to check on me and then departed quickly—was she skipping?—to get to her meal or her biscuit, depending on the hour. She always gave a little yelp before her meals, cries, I imagined, of uncontainable joy.

After two days, Ramon came in and dragged me up by both arms and, as if it were my leg, not my spirit, that had been broken, he placed my arm over his shoulder, gripped that hand hard, and helped me into the bathroom. He shoved me into the shower and I held my face up to the spray of water and washed up and dressed myself and then we were in the car heading upstate to Fishkill on the Hudson for Michelle’s annual family summer party.

_______

Going to that party started out as a good idea, a sure diversion. It was an hour-and-a-half drive out of town, and just leaving my bed, and the apartment, felt pleasant and fresh and like a brand-new day. I turned on the CD player. Our car had one of those old players where seven CDs get loaded up in, of all places, the trunk. It defies explanation and logic, and because of this, the same seven CDs had been in this contraption in the trunk since we purchased this car, used, five years previously. Despite this, each time I turned on the CD player, which was rare, I was surprised and grateful to hear the first few electric bars of
Blood on the Tracks
. I reflexively skipped “Tangled Up in Blue” and went to song number two:
He hears the ticking of the clocks / And walks along with a parrot that talks . . .

Fishkill was Harriet’s second-favorite place, after my parents’ house, with its abundance of food and love (not the same thing, I tried to show Harriet, but how do you teach a dog this lesson?). Michelle and Jacob used to invite us several times a year, and often, during the week when it was empty and I wasn’t teaching, I would go up with Harriet and stay alone to work. Harriet could spend the day in that pond, flinging herself jubilantly off the dock, chasing a stick I’d throw for her. When I tired of this repetitive exercise, I would often turn to find her swimming the pond in circles, her little tail a propeller, her paws paddling her along. She looked like one of those old ladies in the community pool I belonged to as a kid, the ones who emerged from the lounge area during adult swim, hair tucked into rubber bathing caps with straps under the chins like gaping smiles. When the pond bored her, she’d step out to shake herself off, always as close to me as possible, and after she’d dried in the sun, often we hiked up to the summit of a small mountain.

Now, as Ramon and I drove north, I put out of my head that, because of the spotty cell service, I would have to take a break from my phone, and as we pulled up to the house, as if to reinforce this point, the
SOS
came up in red. Indeed, I thought, this ship is sinking. Send flares.

Ramon snapped Harriet on her leash and she hopped out of the car, ready for her day of fun. He pulled the six-pack out of the backseat, and we all headed out to the backyard. First we passed the pool and the sounds of screaming and splashing and laughing children. I looked timidly at Ramon, who did not look at me, but swung the beer in his right hand.

“Hello!” we both yelled when we saw Mrs. and Mr. Sanders standing, wide-legged, on the deck.

Down below, Jacob manned an enormous grill that they rented each year for the party. I could see chicken and sausages and hot dogs and burgers already done and placed in front on platters, dripping with blood.

“Hello!” Mrs. Sanders hugged me.

I expected to hear the splash of Harriet, freed now from her leash, running into the pond, and when it did not come, I looked out at the lawn that sloped down to the water, just over from the clay tennis court. Harriet stood tentatively at the edge of the water. Several friends with their new babies, people from the neighborhood, friends of Michelle and Jacob we’d met here over the years, were all spread out on blankets, already eating and drinking. Every blanket held either an infant in someone’s arms, an infant splayed on the blanket, a toddler whom someone was trying to contain, or a kid who kept running from their parents to their screaming friends and back again.

Some kids threw a Frisbee, and the tennis court was packed with kids and two adults who had clearly tried to have a game but had given in to the screams and cries of the children, who now held rackets bigger than they were. They swatted at the air, their bodies spinning around, as the balls went by.

Behind me, Ramon cracked open a beer and headed down to the dock by the pond. There he stood, beer bottle in the air, drinking it down, his Adam’s apple lurching along his stretched throat. I came down to meet the two of them, nodding to several other families we knew, including Belinda, who’d had the surgical abortion at seven months and who appeared to be pregnant again.

“Go on, Pea,” I said.

She wagged her tail and made this growling sound in the back of her throat that signaled she was excited. Once she would have leapt off the dock, body outstretched and beautiful, but now she stepped into the water almost tentatively and pushed off.

I watched as she made her way around the pond, and when I turned, Zoe and Michelle stood at the edge, Michelle’s belly full and round, but the rest of her slim, her legs smooth in her short jersey sundress.

“Hey!” Michelle went to hug me. “Harriet still is such a good swimmer.”

I nodded. “You going in?” I asked Zoe.

She shook her head and scrunched up her nose against the pond and its non-chlorinated waters, its algae, and the slimy squish of its bottom. Even I knew she only went into the pool, with its gleaming blue floor.

“Hi, Ramon,” Michelle said.

He saluted her.

Zoe looked up, and then, she took my hand.

“Guess what, Jesse?” she said. “In four days I will be three.”

I smiled at her. “Oh my God, what a big girl you are! Soon you will be driving! And swimming in the pond.”

She laughed and let go of my hand.

I did not think then that Zoe’s birthday meant that in two weeks I would have had a three-year-old. I only remembered this after I looked down at Harriet, shaking herself dry, and when Zoe squealed with delight at Harriet’s spray, and then she and Michelle began loping up the hill toward the barbecue, that we had nearly escaped everything. I didn’t care if all I ever spoke of again was mashed carrots and day care and how long each and every woman should breast-feed. I watched Zoe bound up the hill scissoring her arms to assist her up the slight incline. I had to look away. But look where?

There were so many layers of the noise of children screaming, it was hard to think, but I chatted with a bunch of Michelle’s friends—two of them pregnant—as I watched Ramon drink beer after beer on the deck. We ate a lot of meat and some of the salads the guests had brought, and I sat on the blankets and oohed and aahed at the children; I tickled their bellies and made funny faces as I tried to keep Harriet from stealing unfinished hot dogs from plates, or worse, from an unsuspecting child’s hands.

Children were proliferating year by year, and so were the mothers. Our friend Helen, with Ryan, whom she’d had the past December, breast-fed her child as she asked me about our prospects.

“How is it going for you guys?” she asked, with meaning, looking up from Ryan, who was pumping away, grunting at her nipple.

“It’s okay,” I said. Sometimes I wanted to talk about it all the time, like there was nothing else I could bear to discuss, and so was angry—outraged—when people did not ask me, and in other moments, like this one for instance, I wanted to zip my mouth closed and just lie back and watch the clouds pass over. “Not much to report.”

“You know,” she said as her son sucked on, “holding babies really helps.”

“Holding babies? Helps what?”

“With getting pregnant. When we were trying, I couldn’t get pregnant for like six months and in addition to acupuncture, I just held a baby whenever I saw one. They say it helps for some reason. Do you want to hold Ryan?”

It took me a moment to register this. I closed my eyes. I opened them and checked my phone.
SOS,
it said. Helen popped Ryan off her breast, which for some reason didn’t make him howl, and she held him out to me. I had no choice but to take him, cradling him in the crook of my arm, as I looked out at the party.

“You know what else helps?” She popped a pacifier in the baby’s mouth and it moved comically in and out as he sucked.

A new addition to the chaos of the lawn was a woman about my age, spooning food into the mouth of a child in a stroller. I cocked my head and watched her, leaning in and smiling close to the child’s face.

“No,” I said, “what else?”

“If you go to a bris and if you are the one to give the baby to the rabbi. That helps. It’s good luck. Just do it. It can’t hurt.”

I rolled my eyes and shifted Ryan toward my chest as the woman took her child out of the stroller and rocked him to her. I watched Helen look at this mother we didn’t know.

Helen turned to her husband. “That’s the kid from Ethiopia, right?” she asked.

He shrugged, shoving food into his face quickly, before his baby was returned.

“I think it is. I think one of Michelle’s mom’s colleagues or something adopted it. In any case, she’s single.” She reached out and let Ryan grab her index finger. “And she went to Ethiopia three times or something.”

“That’s great!” I wanted to know what agency she went through and how long this woman had to wait. I wanted to know what the age of the child was when he or she arrived.

Helen looked at me. “That seems hard.”

I cocked my head. “What does?” I asked. “Which part, I mean? The going to Africa three times? The singleness?”

She nodded after a moment. “Mm-hmm,” Helen said. “Both.”

“Huh,” I said. I remembered the single woman being forced to leave that meeting at Smith Chasen and I felt happy for this woman who subverted those rules.

But I don’t think that was what Helen was referring to.

I looked out to the lawn filled with white people and white babies. And two or three Asian girls, each over ten years old. And then I saw Harriet sniffing around in a pile of dirty plates next to several mothers and children I didn’t recognize. I handed Ryan back over and stood up. “Gotta prevent a disaster here,” I laughed. “I’ll be back!” I said as I went to remove Harriet from the food.

Just as I had pulled her off of a plate of chicken legs, I saw our friends Carolyn and Michael, who, Michelle had told me, had placed three embryos—that joined donor eggs and Michael’s sperm—into a surrogate.

“Hey,” I said, trotting up to them, pitched sideways, as I held Harriet by the collar. “How are you guys?”

Carolyn was beaming. Michael too.

“Good news?” I asked, sitting down. I forced a wet Harriet, who wanted only to have a go at every plate of food on each blanket, to lie down next to me.

“Our surrogate is pregnant.” Carolyn straightened her lean tanned legs out in front of her and shook them. Her red patent flats flashed in the sun. “Eight weeks.”

“Oh, great!” I leaned in on her legs for a moment, emphasizing gladness. “I’m so happy for you guys.”

And I was. There is, after all, room for everyone. Maybe there is a magic pot after all. As Carolyn proceeded to discuss the drugs that this donor,
her
donor, had taken to stimulate her egg production, and the spas Carolyn had sent the surrogate to in order to prepare her for pregnancy, I thought, first, about how Carolyn was married to a man who worked in finance, and second, that she and I were really the lost generation. Because soon, technology would be perfect enough to tell us which of our eggs would work, and soon it would be efficacious and cheap enough for all twenty-year-old women to freeze them. It would become a rite—a right—of passage, and soon these women would be stomping through boardrooms and trading floors like warriors, unconcerned with that thirty-five-years cutoff our gynecologists began to warn us about when we were still in training bras. Single young women will freeze their eggs, and suddenly their clocks will tick as steadily and calmly as anyone else’s. They’ll start drinking whiskey and smoking cigars in back rooms. We’ll grow a pair and we will not be afraid to use them.