The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,4

really have to be careful not to pull it at all, just push it, gently.”

“Have you thought of fixing it?” I asked, afraid now to touch the handle.

“Why? If you handle it gently, properly, there’s no problem,” he said. “Anyway, listen, here’s where you need to dump any cigarettes, condoms, anything of this nature.”

“Yes, but I don’t have any of those things.”

“You sure?” Ramon pulled out onto the road. “Do you have any lingerie? Because my mother will go through your bags. She will search everything,” Ramon said.

“First of all, had I backpacked through Europe alone, with lingerie, and met some Italian-Spanish guy who lives in New York who I’d been sleeping with for three nights, don’t you think he might have seen it by now? The lingerie, I mean.”

He smiled.

“And second of all? That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You’re how old, thirty-five?”

He nodded again. “Well, thirty-three.”

I was twenty-nine then.

He couldn’t be serious, I thought as he slowed down to a stop in front of a large metal door, sea blue, a color I have only seen painted on toy boats and the twirled domes of the churches on Greek islands. Pink and pinker bougainvillea and twisted bright green vines climbed up the sides and over the doors.

Ramon took a key out of the clean ashtray. He went to the door and pushed it open: a flash of light and then the tips of citrus trees with their green waxy leaves, branches heavy with lemons and oranges. Then he returned to the car and drove us slowly inside, gravel crunching beneath our tires.

There was the house, the house that Ramon had planned, with a red clay roof and wooden shutters, opened wide (the windows, I soon realized, were sealed shut), and a marble staircase leading up to a small terrace overlooking the driveway. Mountains rose up, hazy, in the distance.

There at the top of those stairs stood a stout woman, her black hair swept up, her tanned arms folded across her chest. She was screaming in Italian, a language I could barely make out even when it was not being shot off like artillery fire. And then there was wild pointing, at the car, or at me, perhaps both, as I pushed my way out, as if I were defying gravity, and then, before I could greet her with an Italian Buongiorno! I’d been practicing—inwardly—in the car, there was more screaming. Ramon opened his arms wide, his head tilted as he walked up the steps to her and took her in his arms.

“Mama!” he said.

Her voice was muffled now, but still, she made wild gestures with her hands, even as she hugged her son. I could see a sliver of her mouth curve into a smile:

The Mother.

2

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I had always thought about what a mother is in relation to what she is not. I knew, had I the choice, for instance, that I would not choose to be my mother. My mother was stretched thin. My mother was nervous. She grew up in the fifties. For her, working was a political act. Being a mother was both the equal and opposite of a political act. As an adult I believe in my mother’s politics, and I understand as a chronicler of history—women’s history in particular—that making a choice was necessary. But as a kid, I did not care about postwar American society and the myth of the feminine mystique; I just wanted my mother to take me to soccer practice.

Claudine used to call me home to read to me at 4:30 P.M., when other kids were still eating cereal together in front of televisions or kicking the can along tar-pocked streets.

It was always winter, and twilight, and I remember leaving my friends’ houses and crossing the darkening street for home. Lucy would be waiting there, and Claudine would read us the story of the magic pot, a folktale about a poor farmer who found a magic pot that would multiply to the hundreds whatever anyone placed inside it. My mother heard the story on one of her trips to Kenya and later found a book that illuminated the tale with batik-like illustrations. The pot kept giving and giving but soon the king heard about it, and, being king, wanted it for himself. Fighting ensued, which eventually led to the unjust death of many villagers, and the pot grew dusty, its magnificent talent wasted, the villagers still unfed but with the knowledge now of the luxury they were missing. Lucy would be curled