The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,12

I knew, and the first person whose mother—if that was what she had in fact been—had died, then certainly there was something tethering these two moments together, even if it was only in the effect of Ellen’s losing her mother twice.

Ellen was sent to a private school for junior high and high school, and I lost track of her. Before she left, she had grown very intense. She forged personal relationships with our favorite teachers. She seemed to have protracted and fraught romances instead of the timid schoolyard dances the rest of us were having. At the parties we threw in our parents’ basements, while they swilled wine and ate fondue with their friends upstairs, we played Spin the Bottle and Two Minutes in Heaven, and sometimes smoked clove cigarettes on the covered garage tarmac, Ellen would often wander off into a dark corner, alone. I came upon her there as she was being comforted by one of the more fleshy, maternal figures of our bunch, and I was fascinated by Ellen’s vulnerability and the other’s willingness to soothe it, bodily, her arms around Ellen, a pudgy hand pushing back her white-blond hair.

Surely it was her mother’s death that created this need for prolonged connection, for succor, due to this cleaving, a crucial sense of belonging cut. I thought of this flying along 85. As we’d crossed over into North Carolina from Virginia—when the rolling hills and barns and fences, horses swatting their stunning tails, cows asleep against the green of the thick grass—everything had come into focus. I could distinguish where the land met the sky, and I could discern the rise and fall of the earth as we made our way south. It occurred to me only then that I was off the fertility drugs and for the first time in a long while I was thinking clearly, seeing the world not blanketed in fuzzy contours, but in sharp definition. Everything was radiant.

Leaving the city can often make things brighter, the color of the moment, yes, but also the shades and nuances of home, too. The horses were placid and sweet as we drove by, and I’d wished that I had a carrot or some apple for them to eat from my palm. It was a silly wish, and I had given those up, as I had begun by then to think my wishes should be saved, that I’d used them too freely and quickly on lesser desires, like procuring a tenure-track position in New York City, no small feat, or on daily aspirations, like for the subway to just once get me where I needed to go on time. Such replaceable wishes. I wondered, as we passed the horses, if my wishes weren’t all used up. Perhaps it was time for prayers.

My sister was a rider. She used to go with my father to a stable farther south in Virginia, and they would ride together. I remember watching her put on her hard hat, and that blue blazer with the golden buttons. I remember her soaping her saddle, a present from my grandparents, who had never so much as touched a horse. And I remember Lucy slipping a tall boot into the stirrups and sitting up straight and tall, and then the two of them moving, her body matching the rhythm of the elegant animal’s pace. After, waiting for our father, we’d pick the buttercups and dandelions that grew in large patches by the wooden fence of the rings and place them under each other’s chins. You like butter, we’d say, yellow reflected on the pale and delicate skin at our necks. And the deep yellow of dandelions. Mama had a baby and its head popped off, we’d sing, flicking the blooms from their tender stems.

Now, with my newfound coherence, my view of a shimmering world, I thought, Perhaps I will write a poem. “Ramon,” I said, “I’m so hopeful I could write a poem right now.”

He laughed. “A poem? About what?”

“About nature. Isn’t that what poems are about? How now I can see the world again.” I was smiling.

“Okay, shall we write it now?”

“I’m serious!” I said. “I’m feeling hopeful again.”

“I’m glad.” Ramon put his hand on my shoulder.

I tried to picture our child. How strange to have absolutely no idea what she will look like, or when he might arrive, and by what sort of delivery system. I remembered meeting Ramon, and then later that day, seeing him across the room at a café, moving