The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,65
“Here’s the plan. Let’s go to the beach. In a coastal town in Italy. Together. Let’s go to the beach, and let’s just this once be thankful for what we have.”
_______
We did go to the beach that day and we swam in the cold, salted sea and we lay back on the sand, and watched the Italians with their racquetball, and their ease, and their elaborate packed lunches, and I read in my book about how women, living in a man’s world, have been cut off from education, culture, life, and Ramon sat beneath his umbrella reading The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and then, after a glass of beer by the ocean, we went back to the house because Paola was cooking dinner.
And then that birthday was, thankfully, behind me.
We stayed in Terracina for two more weeks. I read and made stabs at an article in the mornings as Ramon and Paola divided and conquered, each other and the world, and then, in the afternoons, Ramon and I took a few hours to ourselves in town or at the beach or at the lake, and often we’d come back along the canal after dinner, to drink wine and eat strawberries and fresh ricotta. Once a routine was established and I was able to work, the trip somehow became more relaxing.
Until the moment I realized I was a week late getting my period. There it was: that familiar pingpingping of my heart, the sign of dread and longing. Could this be? I reached, Pavlov-like, for my breasts and squeezed: Had they grown? And had we actually managed to have sex at the right time this month? I had peed on sticks each month to pinpoint the coveted LH surge—the onset of the hormone that indicates the start of ovulation—for so many years, I’d had what I had come to call ovulation syndrome. We both had it. Ramon and I had become two trapped, frantic, desexualized animals, unable to mate. While most months we still managed to have sex when I was ovulating, by my own calculations, it was hardly with much of the gusto of our earliest endeavors.
Oh, the times we thought we were having sex for children in earnest! After, I stood on my head. And then, in those first few months, I was so good! Not a drop of alcohol touched my lips. I ate organic kale and brown rice sweetened with sushi vinegar. I did not jump up and down, not even for joy, lest I risk destabilizing the possibility of implantation. And yet my period still arrived each month, unerringly on time.
Within a few months of this tedious process, sex was transformed into something unrecognizable. I peed on sticks, and we did it on the nights the blank white space was slashed bright pink, but it was the very opposite of those first tries. We were completely lost to each other now; worse, perhaps, we lacked hope. When I began to feel that remove, I wondered what Ramon was thinking, or about whom, and then, at some point later still, I did not care; he could think about whatever he wanted to think about if it would end it sooner.
Which felt like the worst thing ever until it got even worse, as on the high holy days of my ovulation we began to rattle the bars of the cage of our apartment, the chains of our marriage, most fiercely, as we tried, helplessly, hopelessly, to turn our marriage of two into a family. We would fight about who would clean the bathroom or pay the rent or wash the dishes, and in the middle of my yelling, I’d think, Great, how am I going to get my husband to have sex with me now?
Which is why so many women become pregnant when they decide to make that leap from relying on their own bodies to conceive and give themselves over to the bodies of strangers. How many stories—life lessons, really—had been retold to me of the infertile couple who decided to adopt and then, boom!, they became instantly pregnant. Too many of these tales, but now I clearly saw their worth: could that be us? Day after day, moment upon moment, in Terracina, waiting for my period to come and hoping for it to stay away, I thought, This time, it is us. This time, we were the lucky ones. If, however, this was so, had I drunk too much frascati the other night