The Mothers: A Novel by Jennifer Gilmore

I had not told him for days that, no matter how many times I checked it, no matter how I saved each strip, comparing it with the one the following day to see if perhaps it had darkened just the slightest bit, the answer was still the same. It was after the fifth day of silence—a disposition uncommon to me—that Ramon had woken to my steady weeping over the bathroom sink. I had not heard him outside the door, and I turned as he opened it, and we both knew in that moment that everything had run out.
    “I can’t think about this anymore right now.” Ramon stretched out his arm and turned out the light, signaling that not only couldn’t he think about it, but he wouldn’t be talking about it either. “Can you just wake me when all of this is over?”
    I lay in the hotel bed and thought of other hotels I’d been in with Ramon, that first night he had run his finger along the deep grooved scar. I enjoyed what I now see as his disinterest in my scars. On the beaches of Italy I saw evidence of bodies ravaged by wars and childbirth and socialized medicine in scarred torsos, steel limbs, keloid cuts, eye patches, exposed without shame. I was just another war-torn body. But the ravages were also inside, where they had gone in several times and cut out the cancerous section of the colon, then sewed it back up, almost precisely enough for me not to notice. Each time they thought they had it all, something would be left behind and in they’d go again, and the scar tissue that grew out from those internal wounds coiled around me, an unstoppable moth vine or creeper, wrapping tightly to all the parts meant to stay open, strangling me on the inside where possibility breathed.
    “But what if I want to sleep through this too?” I asked the dark now.
    I could hear the cars moving along the highway. I could hear the ice machine cracking in the hallway, the ding of the elevator traveling inside the building. What would my life be like? I wondered, as I had lost my earlier clarity, and with it, my power to imagine. If I could see the face of the child that would be ours, I would know even a little. There in the dark rose the magic pot. I felt Claudine hovering over me, her substantial arm around my neck, the other in front, holding the book, her deep odor of sweat and musk, and the strong timbre of her voice. She turned the thick pages and I can’t say I wished for my mother then, but I wished to see her now, as I could see the magic pot drawn in that book, on the ground of a farmer’s dusty field at dusk, lacking enchantment. It grew in my imagination, so massive and black, a pot to be stirred by a coven of witches, a cauldron in a forest in winter, cold and oh so empty.

5
    __
    T he next day we were exactly on time. We were the second couple to arrive, and I felt confident and assured as I pulled my chair up to the pretend wooden table, a packet—the yellow logo of a sun beaming along the agency’s name—placed neatly at each space, like a table setting.
    “Good morning.” I nodded to the other couple. “Anita!” I said, because I remembered her name. She was a veterinarian. There has never been a vet I haven’t liked or couldn’t talk to.
    Anita’s eyes cracked into whiskerlike laugh wrinkles as she smiled.
    “Mornin’,” she said.
    Ramon nodded. He never remembered anyone’s name, ever. And this was compounded by the fact that, though he worked in graphic design and was a visual person, he could not recall faces either. Suffice it to say, it was great fun to go to a party with my husband.
    “You guys, you and Paula, ” I said, loud enough so it would somehow imprint on Ramon’s brain. “Remember, Ramon?” I asked.
    Ramon leaned over and shook hands. “I think we need to put our name tags back on,” he said, after which one of the delicate-skinned social workers hustled over to a table and shuffled through some papers for blank name tags. She sat and began to painstakingly write our names again, the tip of her