The Farm

by Joanne Ramos

“Ate” means big sister in Tagalog,

“Three Filipinas. Three babies. Three stories.”

The nannies, "the help," are of such a lower caste in their minds that the do not have any right to privacy.

The “gestational retreat” is Holloway’s newest venture and, in Mae’s mind, its future.

when she made the bet that mastering the mother tongue of the world’s fastest-growing economy would someday pay dividends.

Finally someone acknowledges this.

Mae’s never understood why people—privileged people especially, like Reagan and Katie—insist that there’s something shameful in desiring money. No immigrant ever apologized for wanting a nicer life.

It’s a factory, and you’re the commodity.

You want the mother to feel good and, even, virtuous about having you carry her baby. You want her to want to have another baby with you and only you.

She sounds a bit like Ate here.

“Surrogacy—this kind of surrogacy!—is a commodification, a cheapening! Everything sacred—outsourced, packaged, sold to the highest bidder!”

It’s not about the money but the freedom, that’s the thing. The freedom to do something real and worthwhile. “But freedom requires money,” Reagan says, almost pleadingly. “And the weird part is too much money is the exact opposite. It’s a cage in and of itself, you know? Because you end up just wanting more and more, like my dad, and then you lose sight of the whole point…”

If you don’t notice, you can’t care, and you won’t do anything that matters, Mom used to say. Reagan now thinks maybe it was a jab at Dad.

Because in America you only have to know how to make money. Money buys everything else.

Lisa, oblivious, is prattling on about her Clients. They’re total fakes. They act like they’re so low-key—making fun of their friends who summer in the Hamptons, driving a beat-up station wagon that is ten years old. But they’re just like every other rich person sticking their fetuses at the Farm.

The Clients thought living on a working farm, even just on weekends, would be good for the Boys—teach them responsibility, build up their immune systems.

Plus, there’s a tax break.

She walks quickly to her room,

Do she and Jane no longer room together?

An unsettling sense that the Farm is a set piece created for the Client on the other end of Dr. Wilde’s wire, and behind its pretty façade lies the truth. She’s just not yet sure what that is.

the swell of loneliness in her chest

Weightless is how she imagines Mom: bobbing alone in the inky black. Tethered to reality by the thinnest thread.

The way the baby inside Reagan’s womb exists, even though it is unreachable.

Black girl from the ’hood doing right, working hard, playing by the rules. Making good. Meritocracy, dig? Except that Macy’s grandmother was smart as a whip and educated, too—a middle-school math teacher who owned a home, however modest, back in Trinidad, which Macy visited most summers of her life. Macy’s mother’s early death was a tragedy, sure, but her life was a cakewalk compared to, say, Jane’s. Jane was truly poor—developing-country poor, not American poor—and she was abandoned by her dad and mom only to have her grandmother die on her. Jane works her butt off at least as much as Macy ever has—but you won’t see her winning any awards.

Macy is the right kind of poor.

Ate never told Jane that Ms. Yu pays for her help in finding Hosts, not only because of the nondisclosure agreements she signed, but because Jane would not understand.

Ate is not really so magnanimous as she first seemed or as she she believes herself to be.

She needs to draw out Reagan’s true motivations, which she may not understand herself. Reagan is someone desperate to do right and who, though she doesn’t like to admit it, is also driven by self-interest.

She’s more surprised that Reagan’s surprised. It’s a reflection of the bubble Reagan lives in that she finds this so shocking.

The invisible hand doesn’t always work,” Reagan says after a long pause. “And anyway, this isn’t abstract to me. It’s about Jane.”

Tracey’s face breaks into a smile. “And that’s when I knew we had her.”

They really have no shame.

The problem is that she is too pretty. When you are too pretty, the other parts of you do not become strong.

“Angel will ask her client if there is an agency for these special guides. Perhaps this agency can help with your visa. Perhaps they will hire you when I bring you to America.

Do Ate have to use everyone around her as a business? Or has she been in some way corrupted by the capitalism? She has and owns 3 houses but lives in an immigrant dorm and is building an entire complex for her family.

But she does not like to see it there, resting on her son’s face as if he were a plate of food. “Hijo, there is a fly…” Ate says, her voice trembling. Roy. Do something.

The other day during lunch Reagan had an out-of-body experience. A zooming out, as if in a film, to a bird’s-eye view of everything below: the dining-room clamor, the tables of women bathed in midday light. And in each of them—chattering, chewing, sniggering, sulking, teasing, laughing; black, brown, bronze, pink, peach, cream—a living thing. In an instant, the room was transformed into a hallowed space, more so than a church. No cardboard wafer not-melting on the tongue, no drone of prayers or incensed air too thick to easily breathe. And yet, there was a sacredness in the room’s abundance.

Golden Oaks did make money, probably lots of it, by making a business out of pregnancy. Some of the Clients could carry their babies themselves but chose not to for reasons—vanity or purportedly jam-packed schedules—that Reagan didn’t really respect.

Her sense of purpose is based on an actress stand-in for her client. Does that matter? Is she sanctimonious?

Reagan knows that what she feels cannot be faked—a sense of rightness about carrying Callie’s child. Maybe for the first time in her life: the knowledge that she is doing something inarguably worthwhile.

Ate already owns many properties in the Philippines, but still she thinks only of money.”

Lisa begins pacing. “Evelyn Arroyo. She’s on the Farm’s payroll.”

So she knows.

“Scouts excel at finding prospects who are rule-followers, secret-keepers, nontroublemakers,” Lisa said. A strange sensation rattled Jane as Lisa spoke—as she learned of her cousin’s betrayal. It was as if she were being picked clean and left bare. A brutal bareness, but one that left her clear-minded. Because it made sense. Ate would do anything for money.

"Good workers."

Madame Deng this morning (four-thirty a.m. EST—get me another coffee!). She is pleased with the results from 82 and 84.

Is that Reagan AND Jane?

Above all, she wonders when Ate decided that Jane was a product to sell. Was it in the months after Ate had to stop baby nursing, or earlier? When Ate counseled Jane to leave Billy, helping her move to the dorm in Queens, even paying for Jane’s bunk—was that an act of kindness or part of a bigger plan?

But is this also part of the bigger scheme where all workers are but commodities? And Ate is but a facilitator, who is also one herself.

She never thanked Ate for helping her with Amalia. She didn’t thank her enough for too many things to count. “I am sorry,” Jane whispers. She speaks louder, in case somehow Ate can hear her. “And I understand. Because I would do anything for Mali, too.”

I'm sorry, but Jane forgives too easily.

It is acts of generosity like this that prove to Jane that Ms. Yu is not a bad person, as Reagan insists. Reagan despises Ms. Yu for lying to them at Golden Oaks, for taking away Jane’s bonus, and for her manipulativeness—but could Ms. Yu have done anything differently without losing her job? Jane does not believe people are as free as Reagan thinks they are. Sometimes a person has no choice but hard choices, like the one Jane made to be here, living without true privacy among strangers.

She forgives MUCH MUCH too easily.

“Mae lets you live here because it’s a great deal for her. Not an act of generosity,” Reagan said during her last visit, her voice ugly. “It is both,” Jane had answered. “I am grateful.”

Mae is impressed. She knew Reagan was into photography, but she had no idea she was actually talented.

the last Mae heard, Reagan bought an apartment in Williamsburg and footed the entire bill for her MFA. And yet Reagan’s still fundamentally dissatisfied. It just proves that in life, attitude’s everything. Reagan’s trapped in a cage of her own making.

Oh, Mae

Honestly, and Mae would never say this aloud because she doesn’t like to boast—living with Mae and Ethan is the best thing that could have happened to Amalia. She’ll be exposed to a different way of being. She’ll get to see, every day, what a strong woman and a strong marriage look like.

Jane is fundamentally stronger than the sanctimonious, duplicitous, and manipulative Mae.