“Your mother was particularly intrigued by Gregory Pincus,” Patricia said. “Pincus co-invented the birth control pill, but before that he was interested in the opposite. Not sex without birth, but birth without sex. That’s what caught her imagination.”
I knew all about Pincus. His white rabbits, quivering and pink-eyed; those fatherless fetuses that had plagued Pincus’s reputation until he’d been forced to give up on them. I just hadn’t learned about him from my mother.
“Pincus passed away in ’67.” Patricia held her cigarette in one hand, clutching her opposite wrist with the other. “But Margaret was taken with his work. She envisioned a world where women could have children without becoming beholden to men. There were a lot of unhappy women in your mother’s life, growing up. She told me she’d once seen a neighbor crying because she’d learned she was pregnant again. This woman wanted the child. But it would mean she had to stay with the man who was hurting her when nobody was looking. Your mother was looking. She always saw those bruises.”
“She told you all this?” I asked, astonished at the intimacy.
“Margaret told me everything,” Patricia said. “Everything. The two of us, we’d formed a close friendship. Very close. I would’ve followed her anywhere.”
With a strange rush, I remembered the letter I’d once found inside the clock in my mother’s bedroom. That agonized mix of love and hate. Signed only T: Trish. My mother had torn up that letter before my eyes, and now I was sitting with the woman who’d written it. You can’t ignore me forever.
Patricia reached into the shoebox. She handed a photograph to me, and I almost didn’t want to accept, but then I did. Patricia and my mother, so young, sitting together, smiling into each other’s faces. Patricia’s long, pale brown hair was tied back into a ponytail with a piece of yarn that made her painfully young. Just a kid. The two of them sat with a sliver of space between them, and when I looked closely I could see their hands resting there, my mother’s fingers looped with Patricia’s. My mother had never been with anybody as long as I’d known her. Not men, not women. She was solitary and self-contained, immaculately lonesome as any saint. In this photo, the openness in her face transformed my mother into somebody else. Into a girl named Margaret, dreaming of creating a new world with the woman she loved.
When I glanced up from the photo, Patricia was examining me. That flash of pain came again, contracting the fine muscles of her face. When it cleared, what was left was a tenderness that made me uncomfortable, like I was accepting something that wasn’t mine to take.
“I understand, Patricia,” Cate said softly. Her thigh was lightly touching mine, warmth radiating against my skin.
“Once I knew that your mother was interested in virgin birth,” Patricia went on, “the idea took over my brain too. I wanted to help, however I could. During my spare moments at the library, I looked into other books for her, dipping my toes into the vast mythology of virgin birth. So many stories throughout history. It had to have come from somewhere, didn’t it? Soon your mother and I were a real team. I brought home books and I listened to her theories and tried to understand as best I could. She’d bring us leftover pastries from her work and we’d eat those stale Danish and Margaret would pace and pace, describing her wild theories to me. I’m sure our roommates thought we were huge bores, hiding away all the time. They had no idea what worlds we were building in there. There was a sense that we were handling something very sacred, very dangerous. Your mother filled entire notebooks with notes and quotes and articles—”
I thought of my mother’s notebook, the manic, chaotic energy of it. Maybe not as strange as I’d first thought. Maybe a return to who she truly was.
“Margaret’s scientific theories expanded to include more metaphysical notions. She’d encountered an old concept: Aristotle, or some other old dead blowhard, had claimed that men provided the soul and the humanity of each child. Women were mere incubators. No more important than nests for eggs. But if a woman was too wild, too independent, she’d give birth by herself. Only she’d give birth to a monster. Your mother heard monster and she thought miracle. She thought if we could go back to a time before memory when women reproduced freely and without obligation to men, we could be powerful again. Better than the trapped and ordinary humans we’ve become.”
Monster, miracle. The night outside the motel, what I’d felt as I held that man inside my gaze. A bottomless, ferocious fearlessness that changed the world around me as much as it changed me.