The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family

The Sperm Donor's Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family

Kathryn Trueblood

New York

For my original mentors,

and the whole B.C.F. gang,

my literary home away from home.

In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea. Its dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made.

Lawrence Durrell

Justine

Contents

The Sperm Donor's Daughter

In Refrain

Riptide

Moonstone

One of Me Watching

Talking a Parrot Out of A Tree

Acknowledgments

The Sperm Donor's Daughter

I.

Yesterday Jessica left. This morning the tide is low and the neighborhood smells of minerals. I walk to where the road dead-ends onto mounds of oyster shells high as roof tops, piles of calcified petals clicking in the wind. Far out on the mud flats, the men from the Rock Point Company are forking oysters into wire baskets, walking slowly between the whittled marker staves. It is so quiet I can hear them sinking into the mud then breaking the suction at their heels. I smell the cranberry bogs—peat, rot, citrus and rain.

At a time when I thought my daughter's beginnings would matter least to her, I've found out the past matters most. What did I think? That she'd thank me for giving her no father? That she'd accept my record of disappointments as her own? I really don't want vindication on that score. But she's testing me. An especially truculent toddler, she would yell “One more last time.” And I used to say, “This is the last last time.”

It's true, she has some things to be mad about. I lied to her. I didn't tell her who her father was. Donor I.D. Number 228? I couldn't very well tell her that. His blood type perhaps? Darling, you came from the sea? And human blood is so like sea water—sodium, calcium, potassium. Who doesn't long for the Great Origin? She yearns for yearning itself; she's that age.

I gave her a love story to grow up on. Better yet I gave her a love story that would stay a love story because Carson died young and had me to miss him. Dearly beloved, dead on an airfield at Danang in '65. The shine gone out of the brown eyes beneath pale hair. How long did it take to find him? On the West Coast, we're fifteen hours behind Vietnam. And I'd gone on living those days as though he were living too. Later, by telling Jess that Carson was her father, I kept him with me.

My version seemed more humane at the time, a story, not a donor insemination form. Death, birth, it seemed so random at the time. Why not tell her Carson was her father? There were plenty of fatherless babies this side of the war. But it's the deus ex machina of novels … the Lost Dauphin, Little Lord Fauntleroy, King Arthur, Jesus even. She believes that by uncovering her heritage suddenly a true self will be revealed: nobility, power, fate. It's a fantasy route, I told her, class and position were once pretty rigidly set. She persisted.

I still want to know who I am
. I asked her: what of potato peelers who give birth to geniuses?
I want to know who I am
. Perhaps she'll come back with an answer for me too, like Moses gone up the Mount. I'll finally know how to live.

I got tired of myself as subject long ago. Having Jess taught me that all those years of therapy and ascribing who-I-was-to-what-happened-when could be excised in a moment. She behaves the way she does because that's who she is: insecurities and excitements in place from Day One. I had to toss most of my carefully worked out theories that gave my parents their drubbing due. I'm sure she's working out these theories re: me right now. Maybe her father can shoulder some of this blame. Step forward, my man, we'll pin the bull's-eye right on you.

I walk the railroad tracks in my creosote-coated sneakers, passing between sand dunes and back out onto the windswept expanses. I trace my lineage through the women in my family, with my feet. I thought it would be enough, giving this to her. My grandmother once walked here; she chopped and stacked wood to resupply the train. The railroad ran on tidal time: high seas allowed the steamers over the bars at the mouth of the river. When the steamers docked, the trains ran. Like me, she waited to hear the whistle blow through the tumbling air. And before her? Before the road came? My great-grandmother rode in the horse-drawn carriages that traveled on the hard packed sand of low tide. The wheels on the sand made the sound for silence, like
shhhh
pressed out between your teeth.

It comes to me; Jess has no sense of modern time. It's not built into her. She waits quietly for the surges in people, and she can feel them coming long before they arrive. So she never makes the nervous peremptory gestures that amount to deflection. Without meaning to, my daughter has become a woman who invites trouble in.

I round the point and head for the old rescue station. It's white shingle and green trim with low sloping eaves and dormer windows on the second floor, but the whole front of the ground floor is wide doors—for getting the boats out. We came here often when Jess was small, still small enough to settle between my legs and lean against me so that sitting, we formed a triangle within a triangle. I would rest my chin on the top of her silky head while her hands drummed out patterns on my knee caps. And we would imagine the horses that pulled the lifeboats through the breakers and the men who rowed the boats to the vessels foundering on the bars. Manes of foam whisked back by the wind and forelocks flying, prows of foam pushed vertical against the topside of a swell. And always, always, in Jess's stories everyone was saved.

I'm back at the motel within the hour, eight little board and batten cottages on the bay side in the tidal pastures. Like all the older buildings, the Getaway Motel faces the bay and not the road. Real news once came by water. I wait for something more immediate, the squeak of the mail box hinge, the trill of the telephone. But I know it won't come. Odds are, she's still riding that bus. The day will be overcast and I'll doze through it hoping for her voice to break me from this spell. I watch in the flat light as the view bleaches into a band of white sky.

II.

I broke into my father's summer house on Lake Michigan with a butter knife. Not having ever met him, I wonder if he would find that amusing … like breaking into a bank safe with a hairpin. I find it amusing. He swept over his footsteps with great care, my father, the donor inseminator, the modern day mail order groom. The receptionist let slip that the good doctor was at his vacation home until Labor Day. I got here the day after, left the coastal waters of the Pacific Northwest for this inland sea of the Midwest. I rammed the butter knife in the window frame and edged all the way around and the old molding just crumbled away. I jimmied the pane but it wouldn't come, though I could feel it tilt inwards towards the house. So finally I let it fall inward, figuring better it fall inward then out, let the house enclose the noise, and it broke over the kitchen sink. I didn't know where to put the glass, but I found the entrance to the crawl space under the house, a wooden frame covered with chicken wire, so I pulled it away and set the glass under there piece by piece. I'll have to remember to remove it. What if next summer my father went crawling in to set rat traps or something and was disemboweled by a large shard. Terrible where the mind goes if you follow it.

As it happened, I cut my own knee, a piece I didn't see on the edge of the shiny metal sink. There's not much choice about where you put your legs entering head first through a window. You're horizontal so your only choice is to get a purchase on something or proceed chin first to the floor. And I can't afford any belly flops right now, I'm pregnant. So I got a fine gash on my knee about 3 inches long, arced like a beer bottle gash, the kind men wear on their cheeks. As I stumbled off to find the bathroom, it registered with me that I would be pleased later to have this scar. A memento, a curio of my own. And to leave a bloodstain or two on the hall carpet. Next year, he'd wonder how it happened, not remembering any major accidents with bacon grease or red wine, never suspecting it to be his own daughter's blood. What does he know about the permanence of blood, this man who made me with no intention of ever seeking me out?

I found him in the yearbook, University of Michigan, class of '69, year of my birth. After I told my mother I was keeping the baby, she began to help me; she knew that the donors were medical students. Common practice at that time. So it was her idea. There's a chance, she said. In those days, women were inseminated with fresh sperm so the procedure had to have taken place within two hours of ejaculation. All we had to do was find the closest medical school and call up the alumni association for the year books.

My face looks nothing like hers, though I have her hands and feet. Her restless craftworking hands, her calloused beach walking feet. But when a man looks in my face and falls in love, I don't know what it means, never sure what I see there myself.

The little house smelled of chill and cedar, like morning beach fog, also faintly spicy and sweet like sausage fat and maple syrup. In the bathroom, I could only find kids Band Aids with dinosaurs on them. I used damn near the whole box, crisscrossed, a sort of butterfly bandage. I rested on the toilet when I finished, soothed by the soft light coming in the opaque window above the bath. And I smelled something else then, warm like vanilla oil. Aftershave? My father's? I went back to the kitchen and pulled the checked curtains closed over the empty frame.

I have the yearbook with me. My father's face in a two inch square, third row down, one left of center. His face doesn't give away anything of his temperament, except perhaps a reticence to show any expression at all. The guy to his right is grinning like a sap, and the one on his left has his head tilted at an arrogant angle. Perhaps it says something that my father stares head-on, unsmiling, nothing self-congratulatory, no pretension there. I fixed on his face in a matter of seconds, once I'd gotten to the right page. I handed it to my mother, and she did the same. I found him so fast it was scary, but you can always find yourself on the page faster than your friends. The resemblance was that powerful. My mother thought I should double-check so I went to Angie's house and asked her. Do you think any of these people look like me? She didn't hesitate. Yeah, this man. Same man.

I'm lucky to have found this picture of him as a young man. Age might have distorted his features, but there he was, the lean young planes of his face exactly like my own, a chin like the butt-end of an anvil and the blunt Irish version of a Roman nose, a long Celtic face with eyes downwards tilting and a mouth made for hurt. I can't tell from the picture whether he has my hair, red as a copper pot and wavy.

Take your pick of fathers. The father who loved me unfailingly and would have understood my everything had he only known where to find me? Or the father who failed to love me and understood nothing of the nothing where he'd abandoned me?

I propped the book open on the bookcase with a beach stone I found beside the back door, presumably a door jamb. I wanted this young man to watch me move around in his house, as though I were now playing out some uncomfortable, cast-off second thought he might have had years ago, when I was only a gathering density in my mother's womb.
What if she tries to find me years later, what if I come home one day and find her in my house
. His mind plays out these modestly middle-class, midwestern, medical student dreams of townhouses and lake cottages, and I am some vague char-coal-hued shape moving through it. His little, tiny, two inch face is twenty-four-years old, but I speak in the present tense. The future dwells in the past. I'm here looking for it.