The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,1

no falling-out to speak of, no argument that had divided us, and yet we rarely communicated now; we had not spoken in ages when we caught each other on the phone last week.

“Jesse?” I had heard birds squawking in the background; had there also been the sound of the ocean?

“Lucy!” I cried on hearing her voice. “How are you? Where are you?”

“Panama?” she said. “With a friend.”

A parrot screamed in Spanish, ¿Dónde está la carne de res?

Last time we’d spoken, my sister had been in Costa Rica. Now, in Panama, she was doing some sort of community outreach with an animal refuge and making jewelry with disabled young mothers. All this she’d told me with a sigh of exhaustion, as if she’d acquired seventeen companies or traveled to the moon; and she was also helping this friend open a café specializing in Greek food. And she was surfing, too, which was why she had originally landed in Costa Rica. She had become a surfer, my sister, Lucy.

As she spoke I made a note to never send my hypothetical child to college in California.

My sister and I knew so little about each other now. The last time we’d talked I told her I was about to embark on my final fertility treatment. I hadn’t followed up to tell her it was unsuccessful, and she hadn’t called to find out. She was off, out there, somewhere; it was hard to fix an actual image of her that held still, that wasn’t in motion.

My mother, however, was here before me, before a backdrop I knew well, but she too had become unrecognizable. My whole life, she’d worked, traveling for months at a time. It was our housekeeper, Claudine, who raised us by day. She kept her entire wallet stuffed in her brassiere and wore an Afro wig of fake, gleaming black hair that she would take off when she was in the house, revealing that her head was bald in parts, the remaining hair straightened, greased with pomade, and pinned back.

“Just one minute, let me make you a sandwich for the road,” my mother said, as if she had been feeding me lunch and milk and cookies every day of my life.

“And coffee,” I called after her, enabling her fantasy—and mine—that she had always been here just to serve me.

_______

What is a mother? I have asked myself this often. As Ramon and I hauled back into the car, waving good-bye to my mother and Harriet, who didn’t give a lick that we were leaving, I thought about my own mother’s arrivals, her unpacking, Lucy and I anticipating our gifts. We sat cross-legged on her bed watching her remove her travel kits and her perfectly folded garments as we waited for our packages to emerge from the depths of her suitcase, which smelled of saffron, or cleaning solution, or used bookstores. She would then turn to face us. That was back when my mother let herself go out into the sun without the sunscreen that could protect her from a nuclear explosion, and her face was several shades darker, her nose and cheekbones sprinkled with the freckles I have inherited. Why, I wondered then, was the developing world, where I knew my mother went, always in the sun?

The gifts were regional and various: small woven baskets, iron figurines, wooden napkin holders carved into elephants and giraffes, a cloth envelope containing three clay beads. One particular time, she handed me a small package folded in a wrinkled, waxy brown paper bag and wrapped in one of her long peasant skirts. Inside were several copper bracelets.

“They’re pretty,” I’d told my mother. But in truth I didn’t like them. What I really wanted was a dangling metal heart suspended on a golden chain, tilted on its side, like my Andy Gibb–loving babysitter wore. I didn’t want what was for purchase in a marketplace in Africa.

Now I wonder how she could have left us for so long, what that was like for her.

“Bye,” I yelled, watching my mother and Harriet in the front yard, her waving as we pulled away.

_______

Ramon and I met in Italy when I was traveling there alone. I’d been working on my dissertation—a small portion was on gender and generational politics in contemporary Italy—which enabled me to receive grant money for the visit. I hadn’t known when I planned the trip how anxious I’d be when traveling alone, securing hostels, acquiring proper currency. On night trains, fearing Gypsies, I wore my passport taped to