The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,10

as if we were on our way to Club Med. I looked out at the road. We had just left 95 and now were on the diminutive 85, which made us feel like we were headed somewhere undiscovered. “But also, I’m nervous.” What had the sign said? Martina? I’d just seen a sign that said RALEIGH 100 MILES, I do remember that, as I remember thinking how close my parents were to Raleigh and how strange that seemed, as I consider my parents staunch northerners.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Ramon, still the fingers gripping and ungripping the wheel. “I’m going to speak Spanish to the child, no matter what the ethnicity. I’m going to speak Spanish and Italian.”

As he said this I felt a combination of psychotic rage and unbearable sadness. At first my violence-bordering anger was against all Europeans who, as we uneducated isolated Americans know, speak so many goddamn languages. It quickly, however, honed in on Ramon. “Really?” I asked.

“Of course! I’m Spanish and Italian. My mother spoke to me in Italian for my entire childhood, and that’s important to me to pass on.”

“But I don’t speak either of those languages, Ramon.” It was my great shame that, as many years as I’d been going to Terracina, I had never learned to speak Italian. The old farmers who lived next to his mother thought I was an idiot. Here comes the illiterate Jew who killed Jesus, they said to one another as we pulled in each summer. I don’t know that they said this, as Ramon is the worst translator in the history of translators, but I’m quite sure it was something to that effect.

“Well, that’s not my fault, Jesse.” He looked straight ahead. “What will you do then? What will you pass on to the child?”

I didn’t know if I would burst into tears or tear my husband’s head off. What would I do? Take our African-American, Italian-and-Spanish-speaking baby to Hebrew school?

“What will I pass on to the child,” I said, more to myself than Ramon.

I remembered Passover at my great-grandmother’s house in Cleveland, all the cousins rushing to find the afikomen as if it held the key to something besides Nana Sadie’s checkbook. Great-Uncle Sid with his magic quarters, his colored silk scarves pulled out of the most unfathomable and, I now see, inappropriate places. There were long dinners and a photograph of Ronald Reagan my father had gotten for his grandmother-in-law, who, for some reason that no one could fathom, had cast her vote for him, the first and last Republican vote in our family.

“I blame Cleveland,” my father had said, laughing, as he slid macaroon after macaroon off Sadie’s delicate three-tiered dessert tray and dropped them down his gullet.

Three generations dipping our fingers into salted water, passing the bitter herbs and the charoset, three generations, piling the horseradish high on the gefilte fish, leaving the door ajar for Elijah, even if Sadie lived in an apartment building. It was three generations singing “Dayenu” as if our lives depended on it, my grandfather the attorney, bent and birdlike; his wife, three times larger than he, belting it out; even Great-Aunt Sylvia, who was deaf, sang, in her low sad voice. And Lucy asked the four questions. Wherever we were, always, Lucy was the youngest of us all.

Three generations. All at one table. I will be the one to break that.

“Yes,” Ramon said. “You have to think about legacy.”

My child would be heir to what? I closed my eyes as we drove, and I thought of Harriet, asleep at my mother’s feet as she moved around the kitchen, before a new stove she had not used until three months ago. She’d had to go downstairs to the fuse box to figure out how to turn it on. I thought with regret how we had spayed Harriet, and so we would never have her puppies, and just the thought of never seeing her or her likeness again made me breathe heavily, tears collecting at the corners of my eyes. And beneath all that was this: where do I fit in here? Most women become pregnant and they carry their babies and then they breast-feed their infants, who need them to survive. Ramon and I were the same. We were two bodies. The baby would need us equally, and yet Ramon would have his seventeen languages and his countless rich cultural experiences to share. I didn’t know what I could offer, and while I began to ponder