The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,31

My father cleared his throat. “You guys have been through quite a lot and I just want to say that of course we are comfortable with any child in this house and we will be thrilled to be grandparents to any child you have.”

“Absolutely,” my mother said. “And remember how much time I’ve spent in Africa.”

“Fabulous,” I said.

“You can discuss this with strangers and not your family?” Ramon asked me.

“Yes. Exactly.” I realized he was getting me back for all the talking I’d done this weekend. Ramon, it turned out, had felt left out.

“It’s a postracial world. Obama has changed everything,” my father said, passing some meat to Harriet. Right in front of my face.

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Oh yes, it certainly is.” My father straightened in his chair. “Do you know what it was like before? In the fifties? Yes it is. So I do happen to agree with you that a mixed-race child—in this day and age—is hardly a risky proposition.”

“I can’t do this.”

“Jesse. We want to know what’s going on. You’re our daughter,” my mother said.

And yes, even that hurt me. Daughter. I wanted to obliterate the very word. In every language.

“We do,” my father said. “And frankly, this is our grandchild, our only grandchild, you’re talking about. If you don’t want us involved, why don’t you just keep him or her in New York then?”

“Don’t threaten me,” I told him, standing, and only after I did so did I feel myself stand. “Don’t threaten me, do you understand me? Because I am done. Because everyone has a limit. I have reached my limit.”

I ran upstairs to the attic and I sat on my twin bed, my chest expanding and contracting. I heard my father begin to yell at Ramon.

“You go and talk to her, goddamn it, Ramon, you need to fix this now,” he was saying, and I could hear my mother trying to use her mobilization and managerial skills: what Randy is saying, Ramon, and Ramon might be feeling a little pressured right now, and Jesse has been through so much with her illness, too. I imagined her brushing her silver hair from her face as she enunciated clearly.

I heard Ramon come up the stairs and then he was there, and begging me to go back down. “Please,” he said. “Your father is freaking out on me. You have to go downstairs and talk to him,” he said, and I did, wordlessly, brushing by him, touching him gently enough to hurt him, and I gathered myself up, the way I knew even then that I would continue to on nights to come, nights when the phone sat silent and the birthmothers didn’t call, or the nights they did call and we talked for hours but then they did not choose us, on nights when, if we ever got that child, that child had grown up to hate us, as much as I had told my parents I hated them, as much as I had run from them, as much as I had thwarted them for only being themselves, but I did not know that as I made my way down the steps to talk to my father that night, I did not know that my parents were only human; I had not reached that level of humanness that would allow me to forgive them. For that, I knew, as I opened the door to the den to see my father weeping, for that, and because of that, I knew, I would have to have children of my own.

10

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My parents’ introduction is an American story. They were set up on a blind date by friends of their parents, who lived in the Watergate building. That American story. On their first date they had dinner in Georgetown—roast beef and potatoes, my father thinks, though perhaps it was chicken cordon bleu. My mother has no recollection of the meal at all.

Ramon’s parents’ meeting was otherworldly. His father, Ramon Sr., was studying to be a geologist. He was researching the Pontine region, and I believe, though this is merely my historical take as Ramon is vague on the story, it was to assist in the work that Mussolini had begun maintaining the road over the marshland. Did the Italians hire him? Had he come from Spain? Ramon says only “researching the region,” but what I can still see so vividly, as if I had been in the brush at Lake Fogliano myself, is Ramon Sr. coming across Paola walking