The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (15 page)

At the river, we made up rhymes.
Pollywogs, almost frogs
. In the spring, the banks had flooded.
All one leggy, all one army
. The waters had receded, leaving pools on the land, pools full of stranded creatures.
Little huddle in the puddle
. My mother walked from puddle to river bank, refilling the wine bottle with water, pouring into the puddle, while we squatted in the mud drawing her initials.

On dead days, we could change the radio station as often as we wanted. On dead days, she lay on the beach with her feet splayed. Every so often, we ran our fingernails along the insides of her arches. She kicked and mumbled. On dead days, we rubbed her: four little hands and a bottle of sun block. Then we let her sleep and hoped that when her body filled back up with a person, it would be the person we wanted back.

Once a man in a black Speedo came and threw the stick for our dog. Each time, we watched to see how far our dog could swim. Each time, the man turned to see if our mother had moved. We had put mussel shells over her eyes as sun-guards.

“What time do you eat lunch?”

“When she wakes up,” we said.

The man moved off down the beach, not far, settling against a log that gave him us for a view. We moved into the shade under the umbrella. You blew up my beach ball. The man was standing, leaning against the log.

Your breath hisses and echoes inside the plastic, then stops, suddenly, as you pinch off the nipple and narrow your eyes. I look then too. The man has himself out, is pumping his penis like a jack handle. I expect him to grow taller. Our dog is standing at attention, whining, wagging wildly, waiting for the man to stop shaking his stick, waiting for him to pull off his penis and throw it. “Fetch it!” we shout, sending the dog at a dead run. “Fetch it!”

My father surfaced and requested us. The letters he'd sent were loving, longing, full of deprivation.
Wars on foreign shores keep me from your arms
. I made them up. Wars and letters.

My mother always sent us with gifts, tins full of German Christmas cookies, bags of coffee, dried figs, avocados. She sent gifts to placate an angry god. The possibility of reviving his sadness made her feel safe.

She would walk us onto the plane … the days before security gates. Once she was too long in saying goodbye and they had to lower the stair again to let her off. She chatted with the man next to us as she waited for the door to become stairs again and I saw how she was for a whole weekend without us. She tickled the air with her laughter and he strained against his seat belt to join her, and she made him feel she was brave by amusing him with our hardships. More kisses for us and she vanished with a hydraulic hiss.

We forgot our parents as fast as we could and busied ourselves with what everything would do at our command. Foldout trays, flip-up ashtrays, lean-back seats. I tried to stick my bubble gum onto the air nozzle. My brother leaned down and let the avocados go, one by one, to see if they would roll to the back of the plane.

I slept on a couch at my father's, near a window over-looking a bunch of wounded trees. He had many hobbies and many children, taken up and put aside, with regularity, only then I didn't have the vantage point of a lifespan. And I didn't make the connection between my stepmother's silences and my father's profusion of hobbies.

Incisions and leaking sap, props and slippages, bound limbs and green stumps, all so he could pick two fruits from one tree. I didn't make any connections back then. I walked with clumps of leaves in my arms to his burning pile and we made the day grayer.

Everywhere in that house, interruption was imminent. Someone might come upon me, remind me that I did not belong in that place. It was the way my stepsister went quickly to the piano bench, and lifting its lid took a sheaf of music or some mysterious notebook; it was in the quick look she gave me, that clicking shut of herself as audible as the lid meeting the latch.

The kitchen overlooked the den, the hallway was open to the living room. Anyone on their way from one end of the house to the other made me shift and twist, wondering whose chair it was I sat in.

I liked my father's workbench out in the garage, a surface of incongruent tools and materials, evidence of the last project merging with the next. He was a finisher of things, but he had a borrower's mind. He switched subjects in search of transformation; the balsa wood airplane suggested the next limb of the Bonsai, the Bonsai needles a setting for the tiger's eye in silver, so on and so on.

I would stand out there while he was at work, feeling the coldness of the cement even through the crepe soles of my shoes, flipping the handle of the vice and watching the weighted end drop. I was not aware of wrongs done to me, only his loneliness out there with the diesel and dung smell of the lawn mower and the coldness spreading in his arches, and my sure-feeling that if he were with us, his projects would have had a place, he would have been warm and watched over.

Red blotches floating on gray. Why not boats on blue? Why not black on snow? Even so it's mine, I can't alter memory. My childhood is locked in one season. Red dress, gray sky, I'm up on a fence. Tree branches, black scratches against the sky. All the bark is wet. Wood smoke thins, thickens, wends its way around the trunks, whispering, all the time, whispering about dying.

You and the neighbor child are far ahead. I cried getting up on the fence, and I bunged one knee, and I left scuff marks on the mossy wood. You straddle it, moving along by rocking up onto your hands and swinging your legs forward. My spit is thick with rage, and when words come out they skid on the air, too fast, too loud. You don't look back. You don't wait. I stiffen my arms and lock my elbows, getting ready.

My father's eyes are hazel limned by a silver line. Close up, very close up, like islands of earth floating in a sea of ice. He is that close to me, extracting splinters from my thighs. He could hold his hands so still. I remember the steadiness of his hands. Staring at them made the walls of the room ripple. The half-moons of his fingertips looked like the tips of petals, purest white.

His face was dignified by the moment of consummate attention. I had never seen him before without his sadness, and my amazement made the pain seem very far away, a siren coming through a pinhole, high pitched but stretched very thin. His sadness was the way he sat in that house with his knees together and his feet apart, the way his socks wrinkled around his ankles and there wasn't enough hair to comb across his head; it was the way he stopped hugging me before I could really get inside his hug … all those little warning pats. But his face was flushed now with concentration and his hands were so still, and he was so skillful at this, minimizing pain as he caused it, that I wished there was some other part of myself I could offer up for hurting.

She beat her hands against the steering wheel. “I hate everybody, I hate everything, I hate the world.” I looked at the circular fracture lines my head had made in the windshield. I was still gripping my school books in my lap.
No two snowflakes are alike
.

“Mother,” you said, “Move the car.”

She pulled over next to a steak house because it was the first place she saw people. Our car was still making a noise like scales sliding over sand, only it was tires on ice. A man was buying a newspaper from one of the machines. He had a beard, and a face that gave the impression of concavity, not unpleasantly, like a wooden spoon worn palm smooth from much stirring. And he had an accent, maybe Kentucky or Alabama, his words anyway were tacky on his tongue.

He didn't ask her what was the matter. She asked directions. He offered for us to follow him. His “if you like” was swallowed up by the river filling with keeled over corn stalks and busted open pumpkin heads. He was afraid for what some man might have done. He was afraid to harm her with his help.

That simply, that quietly, Russell entered our lives. He had the disposition of a priest in a working man. No labor too low. If they laid him off, if they promoted someone else over him, if he stayed in cold storage till his balls ached, each was an occasion for transcendence. His achievement was humility, but he loved my mother like a jewel, like the heirloom finery of some Charlotte or Scarlet or Odette way back when, reminder of a grander time enacted in his head, something he could sacrifice for. She pawned herself. She had depressions, she had lovers. She allowed him to keep taking her back. Then it didn't matter that she made boeuf bourguignonne to his pot roast. Then she begged him to blow on the spark, begged him not to spit on it.

I had on my party dress, eyelet lace and appliqued swans. Russell let me carry the cake from the car, the cake my grandfather had ordered. I fell flat on my ballerinas, my frothy frosting ladies on toepoint nothing but a mud-chocolate squish.

My noise had no effect on Russell. He was thinking of solutions to mess. He stripped me on the lawn, sashes sodden, bows unstrung. My mother would have sung to me in bubbles, but she was gone. Holding me by one arm, he hosed me off while the dog licked my knees, my sweet knees. Cold water, warm tongue. Russell's fingers left marks on my arms, those red blotches.

You stood in the house and watched. I saw you behind the curtain, and I tried to be the one watching. It was worse to be the one watching.

We were in the pantry with all the food his coupons had bought. Mother and Russell were in the kitchen. He was hitting her with a rolled newspaper. He was whacking her on the head, whacking her with a rolled newspaper like a dog. She was laughing.

“It makes a lot of noise, but it doesn't hurt.”

“What does hurt you?”

“Nothing, nothing anymore.”

Phwack, laughter, phwack, laughter, phwack. You're there with me, holding a knife, waiting for the first sound that isn't hollow. There are rows and rows of paper towels on the shelf, boxes of macaroni, canned fish.

“Kill him,” I whisper.

“Who?” you say, jabbing the air, “Who?”

Then you sink the knife into the belly of a bag of rice and slit it across the bulge. Pearly grains fan out over the floor, like a veil of tears. I am the first to throw them.

I hear the rice pattering on the floor as grains lift off my palms. Your hands are whirling the patterned air. We make a rice storm.
Up coming down coming up coming down
. We're on our hands and knees, scooping it from the floor and flinging it aloft. “Happy New Year!” we scream, “Happy Honeymoon! Bon Voyage!”

The moon when she comes is not kind.… She has smeared lips.…

She pours my drink.

Riptide

The huge cypress tree was the same, scraggy and black, casting darkness all around itself. Beneath it were the three uneven hummocks that from a distance suggested people sleeping under blankets. A moist draft crept up inside Anthony's trouser legs as he stood looking at the Indian burial mounds. They were ringed by stones and shells … the same as could be said of his childhood.

When he was small, his father and three uncles had called themselves the chieftains, and sometimes after family barbecues, they would build a bonfire on the beach and dance in a mock ceremony. He and his cousins would screech and hoot and topple over each other. The men wore towels and seaweed wrapped around their waists, corn husks secured to their heads by string, slashes of lipstick across their cheeks. The chieftains shook their scepters of warped driftwood and commanded silence. “Who knows the secret handshake of the Rincon tribe?” they demanded. And the children pressed their fingers together, thumbs on top, making triangular shapes of their hands. “Then greet your tribesmen!” And the children smacked their cup shaped hands together like the two sides of a clam. “How's the weather?”

“Clammy!” the children shouted in reply.

Every summer the chieftains gave out prizes for the art contest, Japanese scissors and origami kits and cricket cages, sometimes fire crackers and candies. The prizes went to every child who entered, under categories made up for that purpose: best shell mobile, best driftwood rhinoceros, best mermaid mosaic, best shark eggcase collection.

But it was more than what his uncles made of it. Everywhere he and his cousins went, into the slough at night with flashlights to catch bull-frogs or up to the railroad tracks in the fog to break bottles, they felt the presence of the people that came before; they felt the eerie excitement of being watched all the time.

In the field, subdivision markers flagged by bright plastic tape distracted Anthony from his childhood reverie amid eucalyptus trees and pampas grass. He pulled the markers out, one by one, though he knew it wouldn't forestall the final outcome for the land. The backs of his hands were dusted by mustard grass. He chewed a stalk of licorice and spit out the stringy pulp.

The bodies that lay beneath the mounds might now end up with some garbage in a landfill or as build-up for a berm on a freeway. Then he thought about Diana … not living but dead, as she was. And he had an image, Diana dug-up, Diana born aloft in the jagged metal shovel of a bulldozer, her bones in a queenly position of recline, one leg fallen over the other, one straight arm touching the lower knee, the whole posture suggesting protection of the center. For a moment, it was too magnificent, the queen raised skyward in a gleaming silver litter; in another moment, too horrible, the machine lurched into gear and the bones fell from each other as they disappeared into a trench. He sat on a log away from the mounds, drawing long breaths, clearing his mind for Lynette, his new wife.

Anthony unlocked the trunk of the car and picked up a sack of groceries. He was about to heft another when he saw his daughter, Annie. She was up on her toes looking in, her chin lifted towards the kitchen window. He could see Lynette inside at the kitchen sink. Annie backed up a few paces and went up on her toes again. Then she padded around the house and disappeared.

He went in the kitchen door, and after he'd set the bags down, kissed Lynette on the back of the neck. She dropped the vegetables in the sink and twisted around suddenly, putting her wet hands on his cheeks. Often she startled him, as she did now. She was a creature who could turn to camouflage (so that in a room he would sometimes read for hours and forget her), like a heron on an overcast day, stick-like, the blue-gray of driftwood, fog, stones and water, then with an abrupt flap of its enormous wings, in motion. She was thin, an angular and awkward woman, awkward in a way that touched him, like an animal caught in some mid-stage of evolution, stuck with many useless characteristics in a new environment.