The Mothers: A Novel (2 page)

The car thumped along, and Ramon kept his eye on the road. I loved his profile. Like a man on a nickel.

“Seriously?”

He turned toward me. He stopped the car and took his hand off the gearshift. “Yes,” he said, placing it on my knee. “She thought a graphic artist meant painting billboards, like the ones in Rome, which made her think that I would have to stand on a ladder to paint them, which of course meant that I could fall, and not only that I could fall, but that I most certainly
would
fall, and so, better to be an architect, leave New York, and come back to Terracina and build up the village.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yes.” Ramon removed his hand from my knee and began again to drive. “And so it was built and so the house makes no sense.”

“You mean to tell me you actually drew up the plans and then someone just built the house?” A little ways up a truck was making its way toward us rather speedily, alarming, as there was only room for one car on this road.

“The point is, this is not what you would call an American family situation.” This seemed to be an insult of some kind and I thought of the earlier girlfriends Ramon had told me he’d brought home to Paola: a Swiss ballerina, a Mexican painter, and most recently, a photographer from Brazil who had visited Java with Ramon. They had taken a trip into the jungle and had hiked down into a special cave and Ramon had opened an umbrella in front of his face to keep the bats away.

I looked at Ramon. What did he see when he looked at me, aside from my Americanness?

What he didn’t seem to notice or care about was the pickup truck barreling toward us. “Also,” he said, “you need to get rid of everything before you come in the house. Cigarettes, condoms, any kind of alcohol.”

I pointed at the truck. “Alcohol? And all my firearms?”

Ramon put the car in reverse and began backing up at an uncomfortably rapid pace.

“Ramon!” I grabbed what I thought was the armrest on the door but turned out to be the manual window crank. It promptly fell off in my hand. “Shit.” I felt my anxiety rise.

Ramon had backed into a little patch of flattened cane and we watched the truck scream by, its wheels rattling as they spit dust and stones at us.

“Close the window!” He reached over me.

“Here.” I handed the plastic contraption over to Ramon.

He leaned over me again, sticking it back on with a focused push. “It has fallen off for years,” he said. “You really have to be careful not to pull it at all, just push it, gently.”

“Have you thought of fixing it?” I asked, afraid now to touch the handle.

“Why? If you handle it gently, properly, there’s no problem,” he said. “Anyway, listen, here’s where you need to dump any cigarettes, condoms, anything of this nature.”

“Yes, but I don’t have any of those things.”

“You sure?” Ramon pulled out onto the road. “Do you have any lingerie? Because my mother will go through your bags. She will search everything,” Ramon said.

“First of all, had I backpacked through Europe alone, with lingerie, and met some Italian-Spanish guy who lives in New York who I’d been sleeping with for three nights, don’t you think he might have seen it by now? The lingerie, I mean.”

He smiled.

“And second of all? That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You’re how old, thirty-five?”

He nodded again. “Well, thirty-three.”

I was twenty-nine then.

He couldn’t be serious, I thought as he slowed down to a stop in front of a large metal door, sea blue, a color I have only seen painted on toy boats and the twirled domes of the churches on Greek islands. Pink and pinker bougainvillea and twisted bright green vines climbed up the sides and over the doors.

Ramon took a key out of the clean ashtray. He went to the door and pushed it open: a flash of light and then the tips of citrus trees with their green waxy leaves, branches heavy with lemons and oranges. Then he returned to the car and drove us slowly inside, gravel crunching beneath our tires.

There was the house, the house that Ramon had planned, with a red clay roof and wooden shutters, opened wide (the windows, I soon realized, were sealed shut), and a marble staircase leading up to a small terrace overlooking the driveway. Mountains rose up, hazy, in the distance.

There at the top of those stairs stood a stout woman, her black hair swept up, her tanned arms folded across her chest. She was screaming in Italian, a language I could barely make out even when it was not being shot off like artillery fire. And then there was wild pointing, at the car, or at me, perhaps both, as I pushed my way out, as if I were defying gravity, and then, before I could greet her with an Italian
Buongiorno!
I’d been practicing—inwardly—in the car, there was more screaming. Ramon opened his arms wide, his head tilted as he walked up the steps to her and took her in his arms.

“Mama!” he said.

Her voice was muffled now, but still, she made wild gestures with her hands, even as she hugged her son. I could see a sliver of her mouth curve into a smile:

The Mother.

2

__

I
had always thought about what a mother is in relation to what she is not. I knew, had I the choice, for instance, that I would not choose to be my mother. My mother was stretched thin. My
mother was nervous. She grew up in the fifties. For her, working was a political act. Being a mother was both the equal and opposite of a political act. As an adult I believe in my mother’s politics, and I understand as a chronicler of history—women’s history in particular—that making a choice was necessary. But as a kid, I did not care about postwar American society and the myth of the feminine mystique; I just wanted my mother to take me to soccer practice.

Claudine used to call me home to read to me at 4:30
p.m.
, when other kids were still eating cereal together in front of televisions or kicking the can along tar-pocked streets.

It was always winter, and twilight, and I remember leaving my friends’ houses and crossing the darkening street for home. Lucy would be waiting there, and Claudine would read us the story of the magic pot, a folktale about a poor farmer who found a magic pot that would multiply to the hundreds whatever anyone placed inside it. My mother heard the story on one of her trips to Kenya and later found a book that illuminated the tale with batik-like illustrations. The pot kept giving and giving but soon the king heard about it, and, being king, wanted it for himself. Fighting ensued, which eventually led to the unjust death of many villagers, and the pot grew dusty, its magnificent talent wasted, the villagers still unfed but with the knowledge now of the luxury they were missing. Lucy would be curled in Claudine’s lap, and I, propped on my elbows, imagined our mother doing what she described in her postcards like testing the water supply or showing women how to make milk from U.S. government–provided nutritional powders, a property almost as astonishing as the magic pot’s.

Once my mother asked me what I would put in the magic pot. Candy of course, I told her, but what I’d meant was her love. And now? I have wished on every eyelash, each ladybug touching down on a bare freckled shoulder, for all the grade-A fertilized embryos a girl could hope for. Or no: actual babies are what I want. A magic pot full of babies, one for every childless mother, two for me so they can have each other, the way Lucy and I once did. A magic pot filled with a chance to fix the past. Because that is also what a mother does. She fixes the past from the future. If you cannot be a mother, how do you fix the way in which you were mothered?

_______

Ramon and I were back on 95, heading south toward the adoption agency. Every state has different adoption laws and practices, and it turns out New York is one of the most difficult places to adopt in. National adoption agencies, with offices in the baby-making hubs of our country, were what many of the people we’d spoken to had chosen, and so here we were, going to the closest office, that magical place that held our future. We were to arrive at six o’clock for an initial meeting—a mixer! the informational packet had said—that would begin our weekend of adoption training. Should I bring sneakers? I’d asked Ramon while packing. This training, will it involve a track? A long jump?

To his credit, he’d laughed. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was really just a grueling boot camp? he’d said.

“I wonder what this is going to be like.” Ramon looked away, out his window at the red brick buildings off the highway, nearing Richmond.

“Me too,” I said. “I’m excited though. Are you?”

“I am. Relieved, too.”

By “relieved,” Ramon meant that we had finally jumped off the in vitro fertilization journey—and by “journey,” I mean path through the fairy-tale forest to hell—and had moved on to a newer gamble, the gamble now not being
whether
we get a kid, but
when
we would get a kid, and what that child’s genetic makeup would bring. Why gamble on science, Ramon and I reasoned with each other, when our luck has always been suspect?

Ramon had wanted out of the science before we’d even begun, believing my body, which had undergone surgeries and chemo, had withstood enough. Ramon’s mother, who had perhaps taken three Tylenols in her entire life, was against any shred of medication, and Ramon had inherited her resistance. He bludgeoned his hangovers with an occasional Advil and his bouts of depression with drinking. He had never told his mother about my illness—when we went to the lake or the sea with her, I wore a one-piece suit to hide my scars.

Had we unlimited finances, there is no telling what we would have done, but Ramon and I had come to terms with not being genetically linked to our child. And sometimes, we agreed, too much choice gives you, well, too much choice. I remember thinking of the march on Washington senior year of college, how I’d held that round blue sign high:
take your laws off our bodies!
I thought I’d never be able to use a surrogate for this reason. We are not, I used to scream at the boys in sociology class,
incubators
!

Looking at Ramon in profile as he drove, I could register my own sadness that we would never see his dark face and long nose replicated. Other parts of him that I have blamed on Spanish and Italian temperament, I reasoned, I would be glad to never encounter in my children.

And there was also the cancer. I would be happy not to pass that along to anyone.

Relief. I wasn’t sure I could use that word. I was relieved to be done with my body as Western: a place where the fertility cowboys, spurs of their boots dragging in the sand, tied their horses to my body’s rotting post. They kicked open its rusty-hinged doors, guns blazing, dead bodies and cracked eggs left behind them in clouds of red dust. And either you won the shoot-out and ran off with your own kid swaddled in your arms or you got shot down in some horrible haunted ghost town, ended up with nothing but a moonshine hangover.

When all the science we could muster had failed, we thought we’d adopt internationally. Ramon was international, after all. We went to a very fancy adoption agency—Smith Chasen, on the Upper East Side—for an introduction to international adoption. It was as if we were applying to prep school. The chairs lined up perfectly, the metal of each arm touching the next just so, and pristine forms on clipboards were fanned out on tables, which made us feel we needed to be special, chosen even, for entry into this arrangement. And so we sat, straight as pins, poles up our hopeful, anal-retained asses, as we waited for the social workers to illuminate us about what countries we might plunder for a baby.

This was 2009. The whole world was on the verge of financial collapse, and in regards to international adoption, I had the sense that, like going to college in the eighties, I had missed a quintessential moment. While I still banged around Washington, DC, shaking my fists, it was hardly the age of protest. The Freedom Riders, beaten, had already come home. Civil disobedience was long over. It seemed we had missed the opportunity to adopt a child abroad by a hair as well. Ten and twenty years previously, due to the one-child policy, Chinese girls were easy to come by. There were so many Chinese girls in New York City schools that our friend’s child, Zoe—the third Zoe we knew—thought anyone Asian at her school had been adopted. Now I knew that the removal of all those Chinese girls had clearly taken a toll on the country: China was now a rich country of young men. It would be quite difficult to get a Chinese child, we were told, under the age of five.

A five-year-old. I had gotten Harriet at eight weeks old; she’d been teenier than a loaf of bread, and just as soft and delicious. I’d adopted her in part to recover from illness, to take care of instead of only being cared for, a final escape from the invasiveness of having been opened and basted closed.

Harriet. I was in graduate school then, with more time than I would ever have again in my life, and so I did obsessive obedience training with her—sitting, staying, handing over the paw, a game where I shot her and she played dead—all to prepare her for future visits to sick children in cancer wards, places she would never go because I could never go back.

Commands aside, it had been important to me to raise a puppy as my companion, and I felt similarly about a child. I could let go of the genetic link quite easily, and with it release a child from inheriting my mighty nose, my proclivity toward migraines, my rash rush to anger, but I could not let go of the prospect of mothering an infant.

Given my family, a heady combination of Eastern European Jews, I was inclined to choose a child from Russia. When the criteria for adopting a Russian child went up on the screen at that first meeting at Smith Chasen, we found we made the cut—bravo!—but what the country was offering was hard to bear. Children in orphanages, the environments unclear, and I thought of a child perhaps untouched from infanthood. The long wait for a Russian child flashed on the screen, along with a chart of how orphanages tried to adopt those children out first locally, in the town or village, and then state-wide, and then nationally. So by the time the possibility of that child arrived here, she was often three or four, and, I could not help but wonder, passed over
why
?

I could not have known at that introductory session that two weeks later, Russia would put a ban on U.S. adoptions as a result of an American woman who placed her adopted Russian child alone on a one-way plane to Moscow with a note that said:
This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues.
The child was dropped by a hired driver at the Russian Education Ministry in Moscow.

I thought about the woman who sent that child back to Russia as we drove south, where babies—babies available for adoption—came from. Because of religion, I thought, remembering the fanatics in front of the abortion clinics we defended in college, who held
Life
magazine’s blown-up pictures of fetuses in uteri, the same photos my mother had shown me when trying to explain how babies were made.

Ramon had spent several years in Argentina and Venezuela, and so a South American child made sense to us. He was a native Spanish speaker, and Guatemala seemed a viable option until we were told that night at Smith Chasen that Guatemala had also recently closed to Americans. The Hague Convention, which prevented organizations from paying women to have children, as well as the trafficking of babies over international borders, had been signed into U.S. law. Of course I didn’t want to take someone’s baby, someone who was being forced into placing their child up for adoption. I didn’t want to buy a child. And yet, I couldn’t help but think of getting here before those laws had started to affect intercountry adoption, in the golden age, when you lined up and paid your fees and got your fingerprints taken and your HIV tests, and then you got in a queue and when it was your turn, you left that country with an infant. And then that infant became your baby. And that baby grew into your child.

We had been cut off from Asian countries, where one was not to have ever had a mental illness—no antidepressants, not a single therapy session, not a one. But for me it was not reasons of mental health that precluded Asia; it was cancer. No. Cancer. Never. None. We were ineligible to become parents of children from an entire portion of the world.

Now Ramon and I passed through Richmond, its factories billowing black smoke, the large buildings almost New England looking in their stoic red-brickness, and I remembered a couple who sat next to us on that row of chairs at Smith Chasen, two men in beautifully tailored suits, crisp shirts with the faintest blue stripes, pastel ties. One was dark—Latino, I think—and the other looked as if he’d spent his first twenty summers on the bow of a boat in topsiders and Bermuda shorts, one knee bent as he looked out to sea, his blond hair feathering in the wind. The darker one raised his hand as we watched slides of orphanages flip by.

“I know that some countries don’t allow gay couples to adopt.” He cleared his throat. “What are the criteria for Russia?”

I want to say the social worker looked uncomfortable, that she shifted her papers and cleared her throat, but she did neither of those things. “I’m sorry no one told you this before tonight,” she said. “But we don’t take on homosexual couples for international adoption. Most countries will not consider it.” She smiled; her one concession seemed to be that she did so without showing her teeth.

The couple looked at each other, stunned. Then, as if on cue, they stood up and tried to leave the row with dignity, but they had to step over Ramon and me, who had not had time to stand and make room for them to pass. We tried to, believe me, but it was badly timed, and so we blocked them rather than cleared a path. When they finally exited our row, knocking several chairs imperfect, I began to cry. I sat down and put my head in my hands as I heard more rustling, the sounds of more same-sex couples exiting the room.

After they left, a single woman, also banned from parenthood, filed out, and then it was Ramon’s and my turn. No cancer, we were told. No matter how long it’s been in remission. Not for Asian countries. There was a ringing in my ears so loud, but I could not answer it. Ramon went to stand, but I jerked him back into his seat. I would not leave the room.

_______

Perhaps, we thought, someone with experience could explain this process to us. A colleague gave me the name of an acquaintance—their kids were in school together—a lawyer facilitating adoptions who had adopted two Russian children, simultaneously, five years previously.

The lawyer was kind enough to meet me for coffee uptown. It was just after she’d had a hair appointment and as she approached my table, I could see her hair was rather purple, like an elderly person’s, and, because it was combed back and sprayed high, away from her face, it revealed two slits at each ear, where her skin had been pulled too tightly and then resewn.

“This is how you get the best ones,” she said, meaning the children, after we’d said hello and ordered. “You send flowers to the people helping you.” She blew into her tea. “You just do it. They say it’s a queue but it’s not really a queue. Send flowers, and you can get better ones than the ones you’re supposed to get.”