The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,45
I spoke the language or could claim the culture as our own.
On the F train back, it all grew incrementally familiar again, each of the eighteen stops bringing us closer to home, the language shifting from Russian to Mandarin to Spanish to English. The factory buildings whipped by and the train left the outdoor track and dipped into the station. Ramon and I shivered and for a brief moment we knew we had traveled together, again, to another country.
_______
When we got back, we were both invigorated and in a good mood. Ramon rushed Harriet out, and I phoned Lucy for the fourth time, at the new number she’d given Ramon.
“Lucy?” I screamed into the phone.
“I’m right here,” she said. “Right here in the twenty-first century.”
And yet, Lucy had no computer to video-call, there could be no visual telegram between us, and so it did remind me of the past century, the few strained conversations we had with our mother when she was away on a special occasion. Hello? she’d shout. Hello! The shouting was necessary then. In addition to the exorbitant cost, lines were often crossed or suddenly cut, and her serrated voice made me feel the panic that the conversation might end with each sentence. I stepped on the place that divided the earth in half, she’d said once, calling from Kenya. At the equator, she’d screamed. I had imagined my mother walking the line I saw drawn across all the maps my father pulled out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to explain to us where our mother was. Upon her return there’d be a grand showing of her slides of the trip, and sure enough, there was our mother smiling alongside a yellow sign with a crude black silhouette of Africa, EQUATOR in red, like a warning sign, slapped across it. And then the words: THIS SIGN IS ON THE EQUATOR. Just a crappy sign along a road.
“Where are you?” I said.
“El Salvador,” Lucy responded.
“What?” However long it has been—nearly twenty years now—I will never not associate that place with a war. “What the fuck are you doing in El Salvador, Lucy?”
She paused. “I’m here with some surfers. In Punta Roca. It’s actually kind of touristic.”
“Touristic. You’re being a tourist in El Salvador.”
“Kind of,” she said.
I was silent.
“There are a lot of surfers here. This is a famous place for surfing.”
“Well, I’ve never heard of it.” My good mood was dissipating.
“Jesse, did you call to berate me again? Because honestly, I’m tired this morning.” She was silent.
“Are you okay?”
There was a brief silence.
“Lucy?” I said.
“I just haven’t been feeling great.”
I closed my eyes. Latin America. She probably had some worm, a bug, some terrible disease. “Have you been taking, I don’t know, anti-amoeba pills? Whatever it is you’re supposed to take?”
“Please, Jesse,” Lucy said. “I’ve been traveling for a long time. I know what to do.”
It was true. It had been over two years since I’d seen my sister. Where was she staying? I wondered. In what kinds of places did she sleep? How did she get around? Was she still strapping on that REI backpack I watched her leave with? She had tried to look so assured, so grown-up, but she had gotten caught in the doorjamb and Ramon, who had come home with me for the weekend to see her off, had pushed her through it.
“Tell me about Punta Roca.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine. I was just calling to check in.”
Did she sound weary? Perhaps, I thought, she was almost finished with this part of her life. El Salvador, though war-torn and gang-ridden, was at least a bit north, was it not?
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s sweet. Your Spanish must be awesome.” I should tell her about the baby, I thought. About the Hispanic baby we might one day get to parent.
“It’s good. I mean, Ramon says it’s pretty good. How are you?”
“You guys speak in Spanish?”
“Sometimes. How are you anyway?”
“Fine. You know Ramon and I are doing our paperwork to adopt.”
I could hear Lucy breathing. “That’s great, Jess. That’s so great.”
“You didn’t know?”
“No, I did.”
“Who told you?”
“Ramon.”
“Ramon? When?”
“A while ago, I guess, a month or so?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, you never said anything.” I wondered if he told her in Spanish and suddenly I thought of my sister and my husband and my hypothetical child all sitting around and having a blast in Spanish as I ran back and forth from the kitchen bringing regional snacks and trying to understand.