The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,3

explained that his mother, Paola, had grown up in Terracina, which is a town in the region of Lazio. “But she’s just come back to live permanently only recently,” he said.

Ramon had described his experience of living all over the world due to his Spanish father’s work for BP. He told me about living in West Africa and Argentina, about Holland and Colombia, about how his mother held him so close, afraid of what lay beyond the confines of their company-provided homes.

“Where’s your father?” I asked as we made our way down the pitted road.

“He’s still in Jakarta,” he said. “Now they’re temporarily separated.”

“Jakarta!” Did I even have an image to attach to this place? Had my mother ever brought me a gift—a hand-painted puppet made of paper, batik cloth—from there? I saw a city with the tallest building in the world. I saw women covered head to toe. “Temporarily?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s just temporary.” Ramon looked straight ahead.

I glanced at him, but he did not turn to catch my eye, and so I sat back, my bare feet on the dusty dashboard of his navy blue VW Golf (the car of a Nazi, my grandmother would have said, just as she told my father when he bought his used Volkswagen from a hippie in Arlington). The road was bumpy, and edged by high stone walls and swaying cane, so that we could see only straight ahead, an endless path of loose dirt and gray stones.

“Anyway, my mother’s family is from here,” Ramon continued. “Their old stone house is actually on our lot, but now there is the new house,” he said. “Long story, but my mother told everyone in the village I was an architect. In order to keep up the ruse, she and my father asked me to design the house, like an architect would.”

The car thumped along, and Ramon kept his eye on the road. I loved his profile. Like a man on a nickel.

“Seriously?”

He turned toward me. He stopped the car and took his hand off the gearshift. “Yes,” he said, placing it on my knee. “She thought a graphic artist meant painting billboards, like the ones in Rome, which made her think that I would have to stand on a ladder to paint them, which of course meant that I could fall, and not only that I could fall, but that I most certainly would fall, and so, better to be an architect, leave New York, and come back to Terracina and build up the village.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yes.” Ramon removed his hand from my knee and began again to drive. “And so it was built and so the house makes no sense.”

“You mean to tell me you actually drew up the plans and then someone just built the house?” A little ways up a truck was making its way toward us rather speedily, alarming, as there was only room for one car on this road.

“The point is, this is not what you would call an American family situation.” This seemed to be an insult of some kind and I thought of the earlier girlfriends Ramon had told me he’d brought home to Paola: a Swiss ballerina, a Mexican painter, and most recently, a photographer from Brazil who had visited Java with Ramon. They had taken a trip into the jungle and had hiked down into a special cave and Ramon had opened an umbrella in front of his face to keep the bats away.

I looked at Ramon. What did he see when he looked at me, aside from my Americanness?

What he didn’t seem to notice or care about was the pickup truck barreling toward us. “Also,” he said, “you need to get rid of everything before you come in the house. Cigarettes, condoms, any kind of alcohol.”

I pointed at the truck. “Alcohol? And all my firearms?”

Ramon put the car in reverse and began backing up at an uncomfortably rapid pace.

“Ramon!” I grabbed what I thought was the armrest on the door but turned out to be the manual window crank. It promptly fell off in my hand. “Shit.” I felt my anxiety rise.

Ramon had backed into a little patch of flattened cane and we watched the truck scream by, its wheels rattling as they spit dust and stones at us.

“Close the window!” He reached over me.

“Here.” I handed the plastic contraption over to Ramon.

He leaned over me again, sticking it back on with a focused push. “It has fallen off for years,” he said. “You