The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,11

all the perils of assimilated Judaism, really it was just this, only this: was I the mother?

Wasn’t I supposed to be the mother?

3

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Ellen Beskin was the first adopted person I met. We were eight years old and bored when she told me. We’d made an A-frame house out of giant Tinkertoys, and when we were done, we sat down, Indian-style, inside our transparent home. Neither Ellen nor I was a particularly girly girl. We both played soccer—Ellen had been the fortunate one who got Pelé’s coveted number 10—but we did not wear tube socks pulled up to our scraped knees, nor did we trade baseball cards or walk around reciting hockey scores like a few of the tomboys we knew. And yet, as we were not built for tea parties, pinkies extended as we sipped from pretend china cups, and as my mother had put the kibosh on an Easy-Bake Oven, Ellen and I did not know what to do in the trappings of this Tinkertoy house, this bastion of domesticity, once we’d assembled it.

We were just sitting there, pulling at the stiff shag basement carpeting, when Ellen said, “Did you know I’m adopted?”

I shook my head. “Uh-uh.”

“I am. Adopted. I didn’t come from my mom’s tummy. I came from a different mom’s tummy.”

“Huh.” I couldn’t look at her.

“My brother came from my mommy’s tummy.” Ellen gazed wistfully out of the pretend window. “So he’s not adopted.”

I nodded. And then I stood up. I decided I’d rather be roller-skating.

“Do you want to take this thing down?” I said as I began unscrewing the roof.

_______

It was my mother who made a big deal about Ellen’s being adopted by wanting to discuss it. My mother wanted to discuss a host of concerns, especially regarding disturbing topics, such as an assassination attempt on the president or the firing of a teacher for molesting a child at a local Catholic school.

“Yes, she is adopted,” my mother said when I brought my conversation with Ellen up to her a few days later. She spoke with vigor and enthusiasm, as she had when film of the president being hoisted into an ambulance played on the six o’clock news. “Do you know what ‘adoption’ means?”

“Yes, Mom,” I told her.

She raised her eyes and shook her head encouragingly.

“It means that she didn’t come from her mom’s stomach.” As I stated this I realized I didn’t understand what that meant at all. I imagined the book Are You My Mother?, that poor baby bird searching high and low, turning to all kinds of species and machines for comfort. But I had related to that bird too; my mother was away often. Claudine was the one reading to me. Are you my mother?, Lucy and I would both say together in the places I’d memorized. What, I wondered, did Ellen make of the question the book begged?

“That’s right,” my mother said. “How does that make you feel?”

“Fine?” It was a question that, going forward, I would be asked by her so many times I would begin to dread and despise it.

“What it means is that Mr. and Mrs. Beskin wanted Ellen so much they had to search for her,” she said, and then she went on to explain to me the process of adoption. “Ellen might feel bad about it, because her brother wasn’t adopted,” she continued. “She shouldn’t feel bad, mind you, but she might.”

When Ellen’s mother—the adoptive one—died two years later, from cancer, and I attended her funeral with my mother, I fixated on Ellen and her father and brother, seated in the hard pews, her blond head twitching beside the darker versions of her family. It was my first funeral and the ritual, the flung-open casket, the wreaths of flowers propped on metal stands, fascinated me. Our teachers were there; for the first time I’d gotten to see Mrs. Gross outside of her classroom. Teachers were all we knew then of celebrity, and spotting one now, as one of us, was nothing short of thrilling.

As the minister spoke—so many firsts in one special day!—I thought of how Ellen’s being adopted was surely connected to the death of her make-believe mother. Precisely how, I was not certain. All the kids were saying that if your hand was bigger than your face you had cancer, and I could see many students in the pews that day, testing this out. I wondered if Ellen’s mother’s hand had been bigger than her face. But because Ellen was the first adopted person