The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,35

looked at Ramon, who was hanging his coat, and I felt so fortunate and content. Out our window, past the square backyards of brownstones on Second Street, past the windows of those brownstones, and into the distance, the back of the red Kentile sign obscured by the F train slowly rolling by, the sun was setting, and I felt light, for just one moment liberated from the reason we’d left Brooklyn. I ducked my head to look out and see if the balloon wasn’t in fact hovering above our fire escape on its long white string, waiting to be held.

“We’ve got voice mails.” Ramon held out the phone. “Your parents.” He twirled his index finger, a gesture to rush the message along. “And Cheryl,” he said. “You have a department meeting tomorrow. Oh.” He smiled. “Anita and Paula.”

“That’s nice.”

“They’re happy they met us,” he said, hanging up the phone. The living room was illuminated in the late-afternoon sun. Harriet lapped up three-day-old water in the kitchen. Everything was cozy and sweet and good.

“I’m happy we met them, too.” I sifted through the mail and threw it on the dining room table.

“They want to know if we’re going to use the designer the agency recommended,” Ramon reported. He went into the kitchen and began opening and closing cabinets. “For the brochure. Which I can do, you know. Easily. Why should we pay someone when I can do it?”

“Hmmm.” I wanted to do exactly what the agency said, just follow the plan, down to the designing of the brochure, the right smile, displaying teeth, evergreens behind us in the correct-size photo. There was no room for error here. I could feel my heart rate speed up, running toward something or away from it; what is the difference if it’s all just a circle anyway?

“We need to make an appointment tomorrow with social services for the visit,” I said.

“We will.” Ramon stood in the kitchen doorway. “We just got in. Relax.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“It will get done.” He went to the couch and tipped his head back, touched his head to the exposed-brick wall.

“By magical fairies? We need to get on it.”

Ramon closed his eyes and sighed.

I looked at my watch. “Look at the time,” I said to Ramon.

Neither of us moved. In the hallway the scream of our downstairs neighbor’s child shot through the house. A car alarm went off on our street.

I sat down on the couch next to my husband, my elbows sharp on my knees. “It’s so much later than I thought,” I said, and just like that, the afternoon light slipped out of the living room, and the gray of winter crept in.

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Part 2

THE APPLICATION

11

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Winter 2010

If everything about being a mother is a memory—the memory of your own childhood evoked by the sounds and smells and touches of your child and the air and water and substance that surround her—then working hard to become a mother is about the imagination, an unknown future. All the mothers have wondered: What will it be like? Who will I be if I become a mother? What will be gained and what will be lost? Will I be the same woman to myself? To the world?

My mother’s water broke while she was shopping for coats on sale at Garfinckel’s. There was a small dark spot in the outerwear department until I was three years old, and my mother used to take me there to show me the history of my birth, evidence that it had taken place, that the story she had told me held truth. Then one day the carpets were changed, and that little spot—substantiation of my birth story—was gone.

But still I have this story.

What story will I have to tell? When one doesn’t know if or when or how or from where a baby will emerge, the questions change. Where will my baby come from? Who will grow him first? When? How will I know she will be safe until I find her? It is all invention, and the endless possibility of it—all the things one cannot know, and so cannot unknow—can make for a world of fantasy, thought with no end or resolution.

Which is why details can offer comfort, however cold. The week after returning from Raleigh, I was relieved to be busy with work and meetings and grading student papers on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the suffragette movement. Men say we are ever cruel to each other. Let us end this ignoble record and henceforth stand by womanhood,