The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,5

in Claudine’s lap, and I, propped on my elbows, imagined our mother doing what she described in her postcards like testing the water supply or showing women how to make milk from U.S. government–provided nutritional powders, a property almost as astonishing as the magic pot’s.

Once my mother asked me what I would put in the magic pot. Candy of course, I told her, but what I’d meant was her love. And now? I have wished on every eyelash, each ladybug touching down on a bare freckled shoulder, for all the grade-A fertilized embryos a girl could hope for. Or no: actual babies are what I want. A magic pot full of babies, one for every childless mother, two for me so they can have each other, the way Lucy and I once did. A magic pot filled with a chance to fix the past. Because that is also what a mother does. She fixes the past from the future. If you cannot be a mother, how do you fix the way in which you were mothered?

_______

Ramon and I were back on 95, heading south toward the adoption agency. Every state has different adoption laws and practices, and it turns out New York is one of the most difficult places to adopt in. National adoption agencies, with offices in the baby-making hubs of our country, were what many of the people we’d spoken to had chosen, and so here we were, going to the closest office, that magical place that held our future. We were to arrive at six o’clock for an initial meeting—a mixer! the informational packet had said—that would begin our weekend of adoption training. Should I bring sneakers? I’d asked Ramon while packing. This training, will it involve a track? A long jump?

To his credit, he’d laughed. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was really just a grueling boot camp? he’d said.

“I wonder what this is going to be like.” Ramon looked away, out his window at the red brick buildings off the highway, nearing Richmond.

“Me too,” I said. “I’m excited though. Are you?”

“I am. Relieved, too.”

By “relieved,” Ramon meant that we had finally jumped off the in vitro fertilization journey—and by “journey,” I mean path through the fairy-tale forest to hell—and had moved on to a newer gamble, the gamble now not being whether we get a kid, but when we would get a kid, and what that child’s genetic makeup would bring. Why gamble on science, Ramon and I reasoned with each other, when our luck has always been suspect?

Ramon had wanted out of the science before we’d even begun, believing my body, which had undergone surgeries and chemo, had withstood enough. Ramon’s mother, who had perhaps taken three Tylenols in her entire life, was against any shred of medication, and Ramon had inherited her resistance. He bludgeoned his hangovers with an occasional Advil and his bouts of depression with drinking. He had never told his mother about my illness—when we went to the lake or the sea with her, I wore a one-piece suit to hide my scars.

Had we unlimited finances, there is no telling what we would have done, but Ramon and I had come to terms with not being genetically linked to our child. And sometimes, we agreed, too much choice gives you, well, too much choice. I remember thinking of the march on Washington senior year of college, how I’d held that round blue sign high: TAKE YOUR LAWS OFF OUR BODIES!

I thought I’d never be able to use a surrogate for this reason. We are not, I used to scream at the boys in sociology class, incubators!

Looking at Ramon in profile as he drove, I could register my own sadness that we would never see his dark face and long nose replicated. Other parts of him that I have blamed on Spanish and Italian temperament, I reasoned, I would be glad to never encounter in my children.

And there was also the cancer. I would be happy not to pass that along to anyone.

Relief. I wasn’t sure I could use that word. I was relieved to be done with my body as Western: a place where the fertility cowboys, spurs of their boots dragging in the sand, tied their horses to my body’s rotting post. They kicked open its rusty-hinged doors, guns blazing, dead bodies and cracked eggs left behind them in clouds of red dust. And either you won the shoot-out and ran off with your own kid swaddled in your