The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,73
than they were. They swatted at the air, their bodies spinning around, as the balls went by.
Behind me, Ramon cracked open a beer and headed down to the dock by the pond. There he stood, beer bottle in the air, drinking it down, his Adam’s apple lurching along his stretched throat. I came down to meet the two of them, nodding to several other families we knew, including Belinda, who’d had the surgical abortion at seven months and who appeared to be pregnant again.
“Go on, Pea,” I said.
She wagged her tail and made this growling sound in the back of her throat that signaled she was excited. Once she would have leapt off the dock, body outstretched and beautiful, but now she stepped into the water almost tentatively and pushed off.
I watched as she made her way around the pond, and when I turned, Zoe and Michelle stood at the edge, Michelle’s belly full and round, but the rest of her slim, her legs smooth in her short jersey sundress.
“Hey!” Michelle went to hug me. “Harriet still is such a good swimmer.”
I nodded. “You going in?” I asked Zoe.
She shook her head and scrunched up her nose against the pond and its non-chlorinated waters, its algae, and the slimy squish of its bottom. Even I knew she only went into the pool, with its gleaming blue floor.
“Hi, Ramon,” Michelle said.
He saluted her.
Zoe looked up, and then, she took my hand.
“Guess what, Jesse?” she said. “In four days I will be three.”
I smiled at her. “Oh my God, what a big girl you are! Soon you will be driving! And swimming in the pond.”
She laughed and let go of my hand.
I did not think then that Zoe’s birthday meant that in two weeks I would have had a three-year-old. I only remembered this after I looked down at Harriet, shaking herself dry, and when Zoe squealed with delight at Harriet’s spray, and then she and Michelle began loping up the hill toward the barbecue, that we had nearly escaped everything. I didn’t care if all I ever spoke of again was mashed carrots and day care and how long each and every woman should breast-feed. I watched Zoe bound up the hill scissoring her arms to assist her up the slight incline. I had to look away. But look where?
There were so many layers of the noise of children screaming, it was hard to think, but I chatted with a bunch of Michelle’s friends—two of them pregnant—as I watched Ramon drink beer after beer on the deck. We ate a lot of meat and some of the salads the guests had brought, and I sat on the blankets and oohed and aahed at the children; I tickled their bellies and made funny faces as I tried to keep Harriet from stealing unfinished hot dogs from plates, or worse, from an unsuspecting child’s hands.
Children were proliferating year by year, and so were the mothers. Our friend Helen, with Ryan, whom she’d had the past December, breast-fed her child as she asked me about our prospects.
“How is it going for you guys?” she asked, with meaning, looking up from Ryan, who was pumping away, grunting at her nipple.
“It’s okay,” I said. Sometimes I wanted to talk about it all the time, like there was nothing else I could bear to discuss, and so was angry—outraged—when people did not ask me, and in other moments, like this one for instance, I wanted to zip my mouth closed and just lie back and watch the clouds pass over. “Not much to report.”
“You know,” she said as her son sucked on, “holding babies really helps.”
“Holding babies? Helps what?”
“With getting pregnant. When we were trying, I couldn’t get pregnant for like six months and in addition to acupuncture, I just held a baby whenever I saw one. They say it helps for some reason. Do you want to hold Ryan?”
It took me a moment to register this. I closed my eyes. I opened them and checked my phone. SOS, it said. Helen popped Ryan off her breast, which for some reason didn’t make him howl, and she held him out to me. I had no choice but to take him, cradling him in the crook of my arm, as I looked out at the party.
“You know what else helps?” She popped a pacifier in the baby’s mouth and it moved comically in and out as he sucked.