Free The Mothers: A Novel by Jennifer Gilmore Page B

the USA for Africa infomercials, “We Are the World” playing in the background, flashes of the video, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen baby-faced, Cyndi Lauper, dewy and pudgy—even Dylan was young then.
    How had I ever had the right to want?
    “Can you just tell me where you got this meat?” I asked again.
    “Honey, where do you think I got the meat?” The waiter crossed his arms. “From the kitchen,” he said, laughing.
    _______
    In the bathroom, surrounded by cartoon renderings of pigs and cows, I gathered myself up like so much loose change, coins I had collected on countless other nights, evenings when someone announced their unexpected—and unwanted—pregnancy, or when an acquaintance showed up at a party nine months pregnant, or when my cousin’s child answered the doorbell all grown up, offering, in a fake English accent, to take my coat and hat. I gathered myself up, and after I’d splashed cold water on my face and reapplied lipstick, painting on a smile, I went back to the table, ready to hack at my mountain of chopped pork.
    “Welcome back,” Anita said, patting my leg as I sat down.
    Paula bowed her head, slowly and succinctly.
    And I was grateful then that we had all dined together. Anita, I had learned that night, spent an inordinate amount of time on the insides of dogs, exhuming objects from their intestines, patching up torn hearts, while Paula mixed up TPN—milky nutrition dripping through an IV for the sick and the elderly. I did not mention that I knew what that was, how I’d lived on it for weeks at a time, but I felt understood more deeply by them than I had been understood in a while.
    The rest of dinner was a daze of food, and then the dessert, a banana pudding Anita insisted we at least taste . It came topped with marshmallow and meringue, four Nilla Wafers standing in the sugary soup of it. Everyone else tasted, and I ate most of it, and then we slapped two credit cards down to split the cost, which wasn’t really fair to Anita and Paula as Anita hadn’t had a drink and they only ordered half of what Ramon and I had ordered, and this, along with the amount of food I’d personally consumed, is one of the many things I would feel guilty about as I lay awake at three in the morning.
    But I didn’t know that yet when they dropped us back at the hotel, where, in our unremarkable room, my husband and I undressed without speaking in the near-dark, two moving shadows in a foreign space. I could feel my stomach distended from the excessive dinner, a stomach not unlike a starving child’s.
    We got into bed, between the cold white sheets, and we lay there in the dark. I could hear us breathing but I could not reach out to touch Ramon’s hand, not even to tell him, tomorrow will be better, or to make a joke about the Killers. Or to tell him I loved him. And I did love him that night.
    For hours I lay that way, unmoving, until the strange fingers of an orange-streaked dawn made their way into the room, illuminating the synthetic hotel curtains and then the polyester blanket—the first thing we had done upon arrival was remove the comforter from the bed due to its germs, its semen, its chemicals and killants!—in fuzzy gray light. Finally, in the blurry sunrise, I turned on my side and watched my husband asleep, acutely aware then that I did not know what brings two people together, what divides them, what can possibly let them reconnect. How elastic is a marriage?
    Likewise, we could not get back that time wasted on failing. We could not turn around those awful moments of not succeeding in having a child, and I did not know that night and early morning if Ramon’s and my relationship had already given out from it, the resilience of our connection worn thin without snapping. I did not know if it would soon split, or if we would manage through this, remain somehow supple, but I rose anyway, and in the glare of the fluorescent bathroom light, I turned on the shower to the highest heat,