The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,84
what?”
“The best birthmothers know how hard it is to parent.” I would be lying if I said I didn’t picture parenting as finally peaceful, mother and infant together on a giant bed, two spoons. But I do know—my head does, anyway—that an infant doesn’t quiet from only having been wanted.
Ramon was silent. “Well,” he said.
“She seems smart.” I sighed. “She said she had a heart as big as a cloud.” I smiled in the dark. Outside I could hear the tires of a bus singing down Smith Street. Several people were laughing out front, and then a car door slammed. Families home from dinner, far away. Families, I thought, and I did not feel like the word would make me cry. “I like that expression.”
April, I thought. Already I could smell spring.
_______
The agency was closed for Thanksgiving weekend, and Katrina called several times in the next few days. Katrina and I talked—she did mostly—for hours on end. We talked about her children, about California, the ocean, the desert, about God. She told me she wore her heart on her sleeve, an uncomfortable place for a heart, she said, laughing, and she told me she was looking for a real connection with someone, though I was not sure then if she meant someone who would parent her child or just someone who would understand that she looked to the world like one person, but to herself she was someone different.
My phone plan had one feature: I could talk to five select people for free. That weekend, I exchanged my mother’s cell (calling it amounted to listening to her trying to talk and drive, a terrifying, one-way conversation) with Katrina’s, using a flower for an icon. Even though it felt like an emoticon, which I would never use, and even though my phone had a nearly unreadable cracked face, I liked that this flower represented the birthmother. It felt like Katrina was growing something beautiful.
On Saturday morning, Ramon and I looked for Katrina online. But we couldn’t find her. It was strange and wondrous for someone to leave no digital footprint, as if she had wings or was merely physical flesh, only the mother of a fetus that could one day grow to be our child if we simply answered the phone late at night and listened to her body talking. Her body: a green growing place. Her body: lodging for the tiny beat of a pulse, the pin-sized black spot, the finger curled at the mouth, a curved floating form attached by corded rope, tightly tethered. Finally, the birthmother.
_______
Katrina told me she lived in her trailer in the desert, in Joshua Tree, a place I consider magical. The first time I went, after giving a paper at a conference in Los Angeles, I got my teaching job in Manhattan. The second time, when I was visiting a friend who loved extreme sports and had rented a house there, I found out I was pregnant. Even though the latter didn’t stick and the job was not tenure-track, that Katrina lived there was an intimation of magic.
The desert was extraordinary to me with its blind white heat, the flowering beaver tail and prickly pear cacti nestled between rocks, the rock daisies blossoming out of scorched earth. I was as shocked by the desert as I had been by the New York skyline, the lights switching on at twilight across the water from Brooklyn. The desert was as breathtaking as stepping onto the surface of the moon, the sudden drop to freezing, the ceaseless howl of the coyote as its night soundtrack. As Katrina talked about her children, her boyfriends, her tiny-ass trailer, her good looks and young skin, I wondered how the desert had formed her, the way the city has formed me. Surely it makes you something, I thought as I imagined Katrina leaving her trailer while we talked, looking up at the stars—the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the crescent moon suspended from an invisible string—her robe gathered at her throat, the silhouette of a Joshua tree at her side.
“You know we look alike,” Katrina said. “I’m dark too. And like Ramon, I’ve got some hot Italian blood. There’s a lot of me to love, but we all look alike.”
All of us? I thought. She had access to our information, the many happy pictures of Ramon and me smiling broadly while cooking with his cousins in Terracina, pictures of us seated around a massive bowl of pasta in his mother’s hot kitchen, us