The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,20

the form. For Herman and Alex, the form would be easy. Their pom-poms said: Caucasian. Everything white. Blindingly white. But for us, there were unimaginable combinations of races: East Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern? Check. Native American, Hispanic, and Asian? I nodded at Ramon and he back at me.

Check!

But what did all these combinations mean? The pom-poms sat alone, a single color. What if the mother of an African-American Palestinian child (miraculously) chose us? I thought of all the shades of colors that child might be.

Then came drug and alcohol use, and for this portion there were no props to help us decide. Nickie explained that checking no drugs or alcohol included drinking before the woman knew she was pregnant. We had friends who’d had a few glasses of wine before realizing they’d conceived. That had also, we did not acknowledge as we filled out this form, been me. Four years previously, before all the fertility treatments, I had gotten pregnant nearly magically, as we had been told that, due to my surgeries, my getting pregnant would be impossible. I remember being so confused when my period—the only internal process that works in me with Swiss-watch precision—was late. It had been a stressful time—I was finishing my PhD then, studying all day and well into the night for my defense, and—I can hardly bring myself to admit this now—drinking several glasses of wine nightly.

I try not to remember the joy—pleasure combined with that feeling, what does one call it, when one has narrowly escaped something terrible, has made a clean getaway? Is it cheating God? It is certainly more pleasurable than only pleasure in and of itself, I thought when I got that blood test back with the numbers I would come to covet, high beta numbers, strong, irrefutable digits. And then the doctor, with his arrogant face, some stranger, telling me seven weeks later how that pinprick on the ultrasound was no longer a viable prick of a pin. Nope, he’d said. Nothing happening in there.

One moment unscathed, and the next?

The very opposite, of course. Scarred, damaged, injured, traumatized.

I have tried not to think what life would be like now had my pregnancy not come and gone as quickly as gossip. I tried not to think of this also as the indication of how easy it likely would have been to have children of my own had this illness not undone me. Who, then, would I be now? I would be a woman with a child, perhaps two; one might not even notice me at all. But what I asked myself while choosing the box for the tolerable amount of drug and alcohol abuse was, would we have chosen myself as a birthmother?

I looked at Ramon, who shook his head.

“Let’s start with the best-case scenario and work backward,” he said.

Very quietly I asked, “So many of our friends drank before they knew they were pregnant. Would we not choose them?”

Ramon shook his head again.

“These women are young, Jesse,” he said. “You think they’re having a glass of Chardonnay with their salmon? If they’re drinking, they’re drinking.”

“Ramon,” I started. I couldn’t think about the one chance I might have had to not be sitting here right now. That baby would have been three in August. My friend Michelle, Zoe’s mother, and I had imagined it together; our due dates were ten days apart, and we thought we’d spend long leisurely days at their place on the Hudson, our legs shin-deep in the pool, sighing over all that we were missing, our babies cradled in our arms.

We thought we’d have a double baby shower. We made a list of the friends we shared from the neighborhood, those whom I saw every year at their annual summer party, and others we’d invite separately. And what we would serve. It would be August, and we would be so pregnant, so ickily pregnant and hot and uncomfortable, we’d said, so summer salads, maybe some chilled sesame noodles, shrimp satays.

Now I tried not to think of her face when I told her it would be just her. Alone. I gathered myself up. It is every part of you one assembles, limbs and organs and memories and hopes, every one of your bad choices. Time itself is an imaginary hourglass you carry, lashed to your neck. You straighten yourself against it.

I tried not to think of seeing her in the neighborhood as I walked Harriet, her belly growing rounder. Or at the baby shower, where I