The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,37

feel the moss and pine and dirt beneath my boots, the give of earth, and also its resistance to my steps, the way it protected its boundaries, and I felt filled up as I walked in the crisp air, across streams and up switchbacks. I felt the singing in my legs as we climbed up, passing only a German or Austrian or Dutch couple, in lederhosen, carrying crooked walking sticks, their long white hair pulled back, as they hiked the Appalachian Trail, which intersected here with our local one. We nodded hello and then Harriet and I walked along the perimeter of the hilltop, in the sun, occasionally stopping to sit and look out onto the lake and the lakes beyond, the rise and fall of the uneven trees.

Hiking gave way to thoughts of being in that upstate town for graduate school, all the time I spent alone there in the woods with Harriet, growing stronger again after my surgeries, and with it that feeling that I might not be a stranger to myself forever. I remembered my mother seated next to me in the hospital, holding my hand. It is one of the few memories I have of us touching. I thought about the mothers as I drove onto the bridge, toward home, and I remembered Harriet, just today, running down the hillside, bounding ahead of me, the splash of her entering the water, and then smiling as I came upon her, so happy in all that blue.

12

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Winter came on suddenly. An icy draft I hadn’t remembered from the previous year curled around my ankles and wrists; a raw numbing cold filled up my office as I tried to plan the following semester’s classes. Gearing up for the new semester, I had every intention of creating innovative, mind-blowingly wonderful classes, courses where students would learn about feminism and women’s diverse and global histories in creative ways, which would somehow reflect all the research I’d been doing on women’s activism in rural communities. And yet, the deadlines came and the deadlines went, and I found myself sending off the same syllabus I’d used several semesters in a row, the same books, the same supplemental reading material, my ingenuity sapped.

How had this happened to us? my friends and colleagues asked one another, not the mothers, but those of us who had never left our careers, not for a single moment. Perhaps it was poor strategizing or lack of proper planning, or the ignominious notion that we were always on the very cusp of our most significant work, an opus that would be widely recognized, placing us far above the standard academic fray. Whatever had caused it, we marveled at where we were, midlife really, up for varying contract reviews in non-tenure-track jobs, our futures terribly unsure.

But life, my grandmother had always told Lucy and me, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Sure enough, Ramon got laid off, along with the rest of his department. He had begun freelancing for what at first seemed like more pay, until work appeared to be something he was doing little of. I was still appointed on a contract basis, just when money seemed like it could be the answer to so many of our problems. I had visions of defying those beneficent Hague laws and just showing up in a developing country, throwing a bag of cash at someone who would run behind some bush—perhaps an African wanza tree—and return to me with a child.

I don’t know if my grandmother knew she was quoting John Lennon, but she said it again after my grandfather died, and she said it when I got sick, and then we said it without her when she died, just before my final surgery, the one that attached what was left of my intestines together.

My poor mother. She wept when I went in for that surgery; she wouldn’t let go of the gurney they wheeled me away on, and I know she was thinking of her mother, too, and all that could be lost.

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In the time between the training in Raleigh and the information session in White Plains, we worked on our birthmother letter. Oh, the birthmother letter. The editorial suggestions that came from the offices of Crystal or Tiffany were endless and nonsensical. As I made each correction, I longed for the editors at scholarly journals, whose comments I often laughed at as I read them aloud to Ramon. But we believed now that Crystal and Tiffany