The Mothers: A Novel (11 page)

Did she sound weary? Perhaps, I thought, she was almost finished with this part of her life. El Salvador, though war-torn and gang-ridden, was at least a bit north, was it not?

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s sweet. Your Spanish must be awesome.” I should tell her about the baby, I thought. About the Hispanic baby we might one day get to parent.

“It’s good. I mean, Ramon says it’s pretty good. How are you?”

“You guys speak in Spanish?”

“Sometimes. How are you anyway?”

“Fine. You know Ramon and I are doing our paperwork to adopt.”

I could hear Lucy breathing. “That’s great, Jess. That’s so great.”

“You didn’t know?”

“No, I did.”

“Who told you?”

“Ramon.”

“Ramon? When?”

“A while ago, I guess, a month or so?”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, you never said anything.” I wondered if he told her in Spanish and suddenly I thought of my sister and my husband and my hypothetical child all sitting around and having a blast in Spanish as I ran back and forth from the kitchen bringing regional snacks and trying to understand.

“I haven’t talked to you much.” Lucy cleared her throat.

“There’s also e-mail.”

“I thought we’d be able to talk,” she said. “There’s not a lot of e-mailing here.”

“Anyway.”

“I think this is good news, though.”

“You think?” I asked her. “Well then it must be!” I was becoming furious, but I could not say why that was.

“Yes,” she said. “I do. All those hormones, after everything you’ve been through, I just don’t know if that was good for you. Being pregnant could be difficult too for you, I mean, if all that stuff had worked.”

“Stuff.”

“Okay, treatments.”

“Hmm,” I said. The sound of judgment. I guess I didn’t like it much either.

“How are you feeling? Can I help with anything?” she asked.

“You mean physically?”

“Both,” she said. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes,” I said, tensing up. “I feel just fine.”

“How’s your stomach? Are you able to eat okay?”

“Yes.” But I no longer wanted to discuss it with her.

There was silence.

“And how about the adoption? Are you excited?”

“Excited? No. Feeling hopeful,” I said. “Cautiously optimistic,”
I told her, though this was just something I had read that I was supposed to feel.

“Being positive is important.”

I didn’t respond. People were always telling me such things. Had this all happened because I had been negative? Like Ramon and I just had fantastically awful karma? I made another mental note not to send my hypothetical child to school in California. “Yes,” I said. “It is. Anyway, you’re surfing in El Salvador, right?” El
Salvador.
It might be a fascinating place. Our future baby could have biological parents from there.

More breathing. But I noted that it seemed quiet, in Punta wherever. I tried to picture my sister, tan, her legs smooth, the color of Bambi, and easy on a board. Instead I kept picturing her at her eighth-grade dance, a huge corsage strapped to her wrist, waiting for her date to arrive. Now I didn’t hear the sounds of people or traffic or the sea breaking hard on the shore. “I’m not surfing, but yes, there is surfing here. It’s actually the largest break in Latin America.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

Lucy laughed. “It’s good is what it means. People come from all over to catch the waves here.”

“Okay!” I said. “Dude.”

She laughed. “In any case, all’s well. Seems like we’re both fine! I should get going, but maybe we can talk again soon.”

“Okay,” I said. “Talk to you soon then.”

“Kiss Harry for me,” she said before hanging up.

I smiled when she said this, but I had the worst feeling, when I hung up, that I had missed the purpose of our conversation, that we both had. We had been apart for so long and no longer knew how to speak, other than as strangers. How are you feeling? we said, but what we meant was, Where are you? Who are you now? Are you still in there?

_______

The next day, Ramon and I were back on the road—albeit this time just for a forty-five-minute jaunt to White Plains—for our information session with the organization that, as our agency did not have an office in New York, would be handling our local paperwork and doing our home study. The moment we got on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, we hit traffic.

“About tonight,” Ramon said now. “Let’s try and let other people talk a little tonight, okay?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Other people need to talk,” he said.

“Well, I’m sorry.” Wounded, I gazed longingly out at the road.

“Me for instance. Or anyone. You could really just let anyone talk.”

“Oh sure!” How easily can hurt become anger? Far too easily. “Sure. And why don’t you try and not say something completely stupid then. Okay?”

“I said
let’s
. I did not say you. God, Jesse.”

“Yes you did,” I said. “I know what you meant. I know exactly what you meant.” I felt the anxiety filling me, water poured over ice, crackling, in a tall glass. Please, I thought, let us just not be late.

“Of course you did. Because you take over every conversation we ever have. Stupid?” Ramon was incredulous, his hand thumping the wheel. “What, may I ask, do you find that I say to be so stupid?”

“Let’s see.” I placed a finger to the side of my cheek, replicating a person deep in thought. “Calling people who are in charge of getting us a child the wrong name? Stupid. Telling the entire group that we didn’t agree how we were going to raise our children with regards to religion? Also stupid.”

“We agreed when we signed on for this,” Ramon said, “that we were going to be ourselves. Isn’t that what we agreed? It’s the only way I can do this.”

“Let me explain something to you.” I turned toward Ramon, whose hand rested on the gearshift, waiting for traffic to abate. “This?” I pointed from myself to him and back to me again. “Not therapy. We are not here to explain everything. To understand ourselves. We are here to present ourselves in the best possible light.”

Ramon grunted. “We said we were going to be honest.”

“To each
other
!” I curled my hands around an invisible giant bowl, playing to an invisible audience. “And yes, in the letter, we didn’t want to misrepresent ourselves, absolutely. We want to be natural—and this is hard because there seems to be a format for it all—but not so that people
question
us. As parents!”

Ramon stared ahead. More traffic.

“You know what?” I sat back in the seat. “I’ll just try not to talk too much.”

“That would really be best, because sometimes you’re exhausting,” Ramon said.

We were silent. I had lost it then, the memory of Ramon, beautiful Ramon, coming toward me in that café in Rome; his whole body silvery and smooth and filled with light in the dark cave of the Grotto; seated across from him in the restaurant in Brighton Beach, his cheeks red with steam and winter. How susceptible I was to the way good memories can slide away.

I turned up the radio. Today’s news: a woman had recently been incarcerated for throwing her baby into a Dumpster. She’d given birth in a bathroom, unaided and alone, and had then thrown her baby out the bathroom window.

We wondered—I know Ramon did, too, because we were for just one moment not cruel to each other—why that couldn’t have been our baby. Why couldn’t the baby in the Dumpster have been our Grace? Perhaps, we thought, that infant, thrown into the air and landing in a cushion of New York City garbage, had been the baby meant for us.

_______

When we arrived in White Plains, we parked in a mall, in front of a blazing Bed Bath and Beyond.

“Hurry
up,
Ramon.”

He fretted. Tonight, leaving the car involved a series of inspections. Were the windows secured? The sunroof shut? (It had not, as I reminded him, been opened since September.) Was the moon roof that covered the sunroof also closed tightly, its shroud pulled over the smoked glass like an eyelid? Was the heat set to off? The radio? Best to turn it on and then off again and then on and then off, and the lights too. There are countless dials and knobs and switches to check before leaving an automobile, should you be the obsessive-compulsive person Ramon had become.

“Look,” he said.

I sighed loudly.

“The car has to be left correctly.” In order to enrage me and prove his point that I did everything in a negligent and cavalier fashion, his inspection was more drawn out than usual.

“Seriously?” I could feel my jaw clenching, my hands curling into fists. “Why are you
doing
this?” Again we would be late and all the babies would be taken by the sane and the prompt.

“Hmmm.” Carefully he rose from his seat, looked again inside the car, running his hands along the driver’s seat—feeling for what? A time bomb? Did he not know he was looking at one right
here
?—before he straightened and then leaned over the top of the car toward me. “Jesse,” he said. “You really have to be more patient.”

I was like sound. I was faster than sound; I was light. I was not aware that I was at his side of the car until I was there, and once I arrived, I pushed him by the shoulders, hard, slipping on black ice and then catching myself. “Are you kidding me?” I screamed. “We’re going to be late. Again!” Already I felt our possibilities diminishing, candles on a birthday cake, burning out.

Ramon looked up at the nameless, faceless office tower we were headed toward. The building was dark except for a large room about six floors up, bathed in warm light. Several people moved around inside, pouring coffee and greeting one another.

“Nice.” Ramon shook me off. “I hope you realize that everyone can see you. Everyone just saw you.” He smiled.

I closed my eyes. Then I turned away from my husband and made my way to the building. I pulled open the door and stepped into the cold, sterile, and empty lobby, where I waited for him so that we could take the elevator up to the sixth floor and enter the agency office together. Led by the sound of chatter, we walked toward a conference room with a wall of windows that looked out onto the black parking lot, nearly empty but for a few scattered cars, including ours.

“Hello?” I said.

Ramon walked past me. “Hi!” he exclaimed to the room. “I’m Ramon, and this is Jesse! Did we miss anything?”

Everyone smiled at him. “Everyone” included a social worker—dark hair escaping in curled tendrils from a scarf she’d wrapped around her head—and her assistant, who, pudgy, with white-blond hair and watery blue eyes, looked uncannily like Tiffany and Crystal. They both stood at the front of the room by a dry-erase board and before them were two couples and a woman seated alone.

I smiled shyly and pulled out a chair.

“I hope we haven’t kept you waiting,” Ramon told the room.

“Not at all,” the social worker said. “We’re still waiting on another couple. We were just introducing ourselves. I’m Lydia, and this is our newest addition to the White Plains family, Marie.”

Ramon flashed me a triumphant grin as he sat down. “So nice to meet you,
Lydia
!” he said.

Lydia smiled. Her freckles twitched and she straightened her head scarf. Marie waved wanly.

I cleared my throat and looked around the room. One couple was Caucasian, easily pushing fifty, and the other was an Asian woman and an African-American man. There was also a woman alone, also black, with short, cropped hair and bright red glasses. I sat back. I love New York, I thought as another couple walked into the room.

_______

When everyone was settled around the table, Lydia stood at the front of the room.

“I’d like to just take a second to speak about the history of adoption, if you don’t mind. I’d like to give some context of where we are now.”

She had me at
context,
and already I liked her for her attention to scholarship. And also? I could tell she was Jewish. I registered this, as I registered all the ethnicities we had discussed, because Lydia was likely the first Jewish person I had encountered in this adoption process. I also wondered if the birthmothers were making their decisions to bring a child to term based on their religious beliefs, would they ever give their child to a Jew, even if her mother-in-law, a strict Catholic, went to mass each Sunday and stood in line at the Vatican for seven hours in order to be the proud possessor of rosaries blessed by the Pope himself? Even if her father loved Christmas? Lydia’s presence created and alleviated that anxiety, simultaneously.

She shuffled through her disordered stack of papers, as if she were giving a paper at a conference. And I was waiting: for a lecture on how we got here, as a
people
.

“So, adoption in this country,” she began, her voice gravelly and deep, tremulous, perhaps from nerves. The best listeners get the best babies, I thought, rapt.

“So the first law recognizing adoption and its regulations was in 1851, in Massachusetts. In the next twenty years several placement agencies were established, and soon adoptions really began to climb.” Lydia scratched at the side of her head and looked out at us. And then she continued. “A new culture in America started to place a premium on the innocence and vulnerability of children, and helping them, which was at odds with the more dominant idea that a poor person’s child would disrupt a superior gene pool. So began the rise of eugenics,” Lydia said, looking up from her notes. “You know eugenics?”

Five out of seven of us knew eugenics.

“It was a ‘science.’” Lydia used her fingers as air quotation marks. “It was used to ‘improve’ genetics. When the Nazis used it, well, then it really fell out of favor.”

I smiled. She said
Nazis.

“And so, soon homes for unwed mothers became safe places for pregnant women, and often an adoption could take place just after the child was born, especially as the use of formula was becoming quite common,” Lydia told us.

Everyone in the room had a physical reaction. The single woman bobbed her head furiously, as did I. Of course the invention of formula would have this effect, just as one small thing—the zipper, for instance—can alter history’s meandering course. Perhaps this process could become interesting to me so that I might get through it, heart intact, I thought. I imagined building a class around this material—“For Safekeeping: A History of Women and Adoption in America”—as Ramon sat back, legs spread, head tilted in listening position.