The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,21

had spent most of the afternoon in the bathroom alone with my personal bottle of champagne—listening to the shrieks of Michelle’s friends as they smeared microwaved chocolate bars into diapers and bobbed for nipples.

I knew then that soon Michelle would be one of the neighborhood mothers, so exhausted and overwhelmed and cheered by their children that, no longer working, they all got together, the way we had once done as respite from dating in our twenties, cutting out from our jobs early in the roaring start of our thirties, and now, now?, the mothers sat together along a farmhouse table in someone’s tricked-out kitchen, sharing war stories of croup and incessant crying, night panics, time-outs or no time-outs, the protocol of the playground, as they wondered when they’d ever go back to being the women they once were. Once we were such girls, remember?, the mothers all said as they picked at their kids’ organic chicken nuggets and poured themselves pinots, their children coloring beneath their feet like good dogs, or sucking organic yogurt out of little plastic strips, or playing make-believe in their mother’s dresses and lipsticks and high-heeled shoes, or napping, or watching Bob the Builder DVDs, or screaming their fucking heads off. Remember bars?, they’d say with a giggle as Michelle and I avoided each other. Why not unhitch myself now?, I had thought when I told her. Because I knew that in eight months Michelle would be pushing a child of her very own and the mothers would welcome her. Come!, they’d all say, opening up their front doors, hiding the gorgeous chaos behind them. Welcome!, they’d say. And I’d be drinking alone.

And yet, when Zoe was born, I went to the hospital. And I held her and heard about Michelle’s C-section and the horror of what led up to it, and I passed Zoe back to her and watched her bring her to her chest.

I did not know that I could opt out of that visit, or that I needed to. I did not know how to protect myself. I still do not know what will, as Zoe’s birth had, undo me.

“Let’s just start with the best-case scenario,” Ramon said again.

Was there a wrong answer? Martin and James were already done with their forms. They were the ones who turned in their marked-up SATs long before the monitor called for hands up, the ones who set down their pencils and left the testing center, the ones who made us all wonder, as we watched them, longingly, slip out of the auditorium, if they were geniuses, or if they were the mythical students, boys mostly, who would merely write their names as instructed on the top and then shoot the moon.

Leaving the drug-and-alcohol section blank—which meant that if anyone claimed to have taken any substance at all, our profile would not be sent to them—I continued down the form.

Comfortable with twins?

Ramon shook his head.

It was likely our only chance for siblings. I checked yes.

Comfortable with rape?

I shielded the form from Ramon with my left hand.

Check.

Everything, I remind myself, and everyone, has a story. I am a student—and a teacher—of history. As facts, history does nothing; it merely lies there on a timeline like any number. But a girl’s diary, a found scrap of speech, a president’s letter, the map of a changed city? These are the ways in which we understand what has come to pass.

How could I choose a child without knowing the child’s story? And to know the child’s story, one needed to know the story of the mother.

And what, really, I wanted to ask Ramon, was the best-case scenario here?

All I had were questions. What I did instead of ask them, though, was surreptitiously go to Crystal or Tiffany and request the form back. Then, hastily, before anyone could see, I checked all of it—alcohol, methamphetamine, marijuana, heroin—in the first trimester. I would, I reasoned, deal with it later. If someone called us and she explained it to me, and she told me about who she was before she knew she was growing a baby, the baby that could make us a family, if she explained all that to me, it would make more sense.

Because everyone has a story. Even me.

6

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We were relieved to leave the agency that evening. I’d thought we might ask Gabe to join us for dinner, or maybe Anita and Paula, but as we shut our happy white folders and gathered our collection of papers and books into the