The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (17 page)

He nearly fell over the phone cord getting to the door, but by the time it swung open, he knew what he was going to say: “Where's Marcos?”

Marcos was at his father's for a month. “We're divorced,” she hastened to add, and it started that simply, the exchange of stories about single parenthood. He described to her the difficult early years, his dilemma in restaurants with Annie who declared she couldn't pee with strangers.

“Try finding a sitter for three boys when you've got a bath tub full of lizards,” she said. “Try going on a date with them.” She laughed and added, “The boys, not the lizards.”

So he told her about having someone to dinner with Annie, and all her stuffed animals at the table, and the way she sucked her thumb while rubbing an old pair of Carter's cotton underwear over her lip.

“My youngest kisses the dog, right on his black hairy mouth. It doesn't matter what I say. He loves him.”

She leaned against the door frame, and he admired the ease with which she laughed. That weekend, he brewed a whole pot of coffee, and quit the click and hum of his computer for the garden full of bird sounds and Lynette's laughter.

When they started back down the beach, he recognized Lynette far ahead—the bright pattern of her suited shape against the colored square of her towel. Randall and Kyle kept to the water's edge, apart from him. Anthony watched Lynette set aside her magazine and get Marcos a sandwich from the ice chest. She bent from the waist, holding out first one sandwich then another, and Anthony's eyes lingered over the backs of her brown legs. At three that morning, he had awakened swollen as a summer squash against the small of her back. She was like sun-warmed ground. His arms wrapped around her waist, he pressed the curve of himself into the curve of her lower back, and believed he dreamt. Soon he was fully awake, amazed that desire, like pain, could wake him. In her sleep, she made noises like little birds, and even sleeping, opened to him.

She'd been a bit cranky that morning, gathering up the paraphernalia of children, packing the lunch, finding the sun screen, the tar-remover, the mattress patching kit, but he could hardly blame her.
Family vacation
. As he fed the dog, and took out the trash, and started the dishwasher, he marveled at the contradiction in terms. Still, nearly every night, just before they fell asleep, Lynette would whisper to him, “Thank you again.” It had gotten so he mocked her, sometimes saying, “thank
you
again,” and starting the love-making all over, but secretly it pleased him. She'd cried when he offered to rent the beach house from his uncle. She said she couldn't remember when she and the boys had had a real vacation.

It was Annie that he worried about. At night, she would carry her dozen-odd stuffed animals up to bed and tuck them in. Folding back the spread, she covered them, and said goodnight to each by name. Her animal family. It seemed to him that she felt more family in their odd assortment than in the arrangement he'd created. He hoped he hadn't been too hard on her last night.

Sometimes he wished Lynette would make a special effort, but in this he wasn't sure he knew best. Children sense artificiality so keenly. Perhaps it was right to let things happen naturally. Sometimes, when he and Lynette were up watching TV, he'd find Annie curled up on the floor of the hall with her blanket, as though she needed to hear their voices and feel their closeness but feared to enter in. He would pick her up then and carry her to bed, and the softness of her cheek against his would stir in him an unbearable tenderness.

Later, in the dark of their bedroom, he smelled Lynette's body oil floating slick and warm on the cedar scented dampness of the house; her heat and her rustling displaced the pocket of cold shut-in air where he coiled beneath the covers. He shamed himself in the dark, not answering to his name, trapping her wrists in his hands and pushing them up her back. She would not fight him, and afterwards he would stroke her lightly as though he could give her new skin to live in.

“It's loss that makes you cruel,” she would tell him. “I'm not going to leave.”

He would reciprocate in whispers, knowing even as he gave them—reassurances, apologies—that it was an adult bedtime story. He was the teller, left to find his own way to dreams. He got up to urinate and then stood in the doorway, staring at the gently sloping mound of blankets on the bed, the wind chimes in the garden striking a melody aimless and insistent. He walked down the hall. In the boys' rooms, the shadows crisscrossed the floor, feeding darkness to the hummock shapes of bodies beneath blankets. He stood before Annie's door, listening for breath, hearing only waves and wind chimes.

Once when he was lying under the car in the garage changing the oil, he'd overheard a conversation between Annie and Kyle. They came in to get popsicles from the freezer and stood a moment ripping the wrappers off. “What happened to your mother?” Kyle asked, and from the way he whispered, Anthony knew he'd been forbidden to ask.

“She died in the war,” said Annie boldly.

“Really,” said Kyle, sounding impressed, and then they had gone out, leaving Anthony feeling as if he were frozen to a sheet of dry ice. Her explanation was as accurate as any he could think of.

“Hiya,” said Lynette to him and the boys. “You want egg salad sand or P.B. and J.?”

“Let's eat the cherries,” Anthony said, smiling, “then Marcos and I can spit pits at each other.”

“Oh don't worry about him. He'll get over it. Did I tell you already? Your mother called. She wants to come up for a visit. Honey, I know she'll only stay a few days, but I can't eat all that fried food she makes. I get sick. I don't know how to tell her.”

“Where's Annie?” he asked, scanning the beach.

“She went swimming. Take your sandwich, Kyle. She came and told me like you told her to. I saw her a few minutes ago. Anyway, maybe you can tell your mother.”

But he wasn't listening. He was searching the bobbing heads in the roped-off swimming area for the one he would recognize as his tow-headed Annie. Seeing that she wasn't among those in the shallows, he focused farther out, near the float. That's where she would be. Annie loved to swim, paddled around 'til her lips were blue and her throat sore.

“Anthony?”

“I don't see her, Lynette,” he said, walking now toward the water and the shrieking children. Their splashing slid down the air, which hardened in the light 'til it looked like a pane of glass. By the time he reached the water's edge, he saw Annie, or somehow he was sure it was her, outside the confines of the swimming area, way beyond the float line and getting smaller by the second.

“Jesus, Lynette,” he said, though she could not hear him.

The lifeguards had seen Annie now as well, and he ran to where they stood.

“No, don't go in. We don't want to have to haul both of you out of the riptide. Here.” The one wearing Ray Bans and a red visor handed him the binoculars, and the other, the barrel-chested one with red fur on his back, dove through the waves.

Anthony put the binoculars to his face, searching for Annie and the telltale arc of the tide, but his eyes were too full of water and when he tried to focus he saw instead his first wife in a sea of blood, the way he'd found her on the tile floor, her hair floating, her wrist open, but no breath in her. And then for no reason he could think of, he was babbling about the shark … Marcos' shark. Even as he heard himself repeat it, “His shark is out there!” he knew how inane it sounded.

“Take it easy, man,” said the lifeguard, “we pull people out of rips all the time.”

He waved his arms helplessly on the beach, hoping she would spot him. The lifeguard ducked a breaker and came up powerfully through the next. He wondered then why he'd run to them, why he hadn't gone straight into the water himself, why he'd spanked Annie the night before, and not Lynette's boys. She ran to her bed to get away from him, and raged as he sat at her side: “It was their idea. Not mine!”

It had started with that stupid board game, Operation, the funny man full of plastic bones and rubber bands. But the wire to the tongs was broken and it wasn't fun anymore because the buzzer didn't go off. So they used the tongs to take Monopoly houses and plastic bones from her underpants. And then it was fingers, Marcos' fingers, peeling her back to look inside. That's how he found them.

“I wanted them to like me,” Annie wailed.

And he'd had to explain that those places were private, that men and women used them to love with, that that could be a wonderful thing, but not until children were grown up.

“I want my mother,” Annie sobbed.

He took her in his arms then, “I want her too, Annie, but she's gone.” And he rocked them both.

The lifeguard was out beyond the breakers, closing in. Did Annie know by now that her legs going round could do nothing against the tide but keep her afloat? “Keep swimming, Annie,” he said, “keep swimming.”

He took the binoculars again—the lifeguard was now no more than an arm's length from Annie—and his heart sickened as he watched her turn and swim toward the empty horizon.

“What the hell is she swimming away from him for?” shouted the other guard, snatching the binoculars back. And then, raising a fist in the air: “He's got her!”

Anthony felt Lynette behind him, felt her touch on his shoulder, but he could not move.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

He heard the tremble in her voice. He felt her need. “Me too,” he said, though he wasn't sure why or for what. He breathed heavily, but did not look at her. Annie was hanging onto the lifeguard's neck, but kicking on her own, swimming back to him. He felt his new wife's eyes bore into his back, and he knew his inability to turn to her might destroy them. The lifeguard was in the shallows now, where he swung Annie from his shoulders in one easy motion and set her on her feet. A moment passed before Anthony recognized the woman who had stepped in front of him and into the water, arms out to Annie.

Moonstone

The realtors call the hills golden. I say the hills are brown. If it gets hotter, they will burn and later look like mangy hide. In the thick air and glint bright light, they shudder … poor creatures taking shallow breaths.

I stand at the back door and wave at my husband, then I go inside to write a letter to my lover, Evan. One of my eyes is hooded, the other longer and wide. I have two faces when I say goodbye to Corty at the back door, the dark and the light … the weak and the strong if you like. Nothing comes of the transaction. This is the child he has taken in. Two-faced. There isn't one that I trust.

I try not to remember my childhood. No, I wasn't sent to the cellar. There simply was no thread through; there were too many introductions. I couldn't locate my mother's charge account at the hardware, already there were three married names, and she'd gone back to her maiden name in between. By the time my father was done marrying, I was done explaining. The day we did a population study for a sociology class in high school, I could have stood in all four corners of the room. I make up terms now, and I think former is nicer than ex: ex-wife, ex-step-brother, ex-step-sister-father-mother. That is if you want to keep them in your permanent collection.

I could talk about my “my halfmother,” my father's “stepwife.” She exists … his fourth wife, and they don't live together. I think they are too tired of marriage to divorce. I could talk about my “other mother;” my own mother turned to women after her three strikes you're out. It doesn't help me understand why I got married, a year ago. “Oh, you're newlyweds!” people say. And I've heard myself respond: “Yes, it's our first marriage.”

I learned to make a drink from one of my mother's suitors who was sitting across the room. A Salty Dog. I'd like one now but I'll wait an hour. I was eleven and didn't know what
can't
meant. “BULLSHIT!” he roared at me as I wept about the fate of the Indians. I don't cry much now. It makes my blood vessels pop. I think I had seven stepbrothers. One of them got mad that I burned out his water bed vibrator. I ran everything high in those days. One of them tried to seduce me in a pile of coats. I smelled Rive Gauche, Norel, and Nina Ricci—dark chocolate and tobacco. I dream about piles of people writhing, people I knew. Some of that head count is my own doing.

I wanted the baby, but I would have talked to him differently if I'd known whose he was. Not for myself, for his understanding. My sister thought to comfort me. She believes she's psychic; for her, nothing is lost. She said children have told their mothers, “I tried to come to you once but I had to go back and wait.” I can't believe that. I want to love a man.

Evan, I mistook your signs, the crumbs, corks and shoelaces you dropped on the forest floor. I thought you emptied your pockets so I would trust you. You emptied them so you could find your way back to your wife. In the hotel room, the underside of your tongue flashed like a silver leaf, and the city in the rain below us shed light like a lotus blossom, opening, opening, opening. I love you forever you said, but you made no place for me. Where was I to stay, in the crook of your knee, the hollow of your armpit? And whose fingers would find me there?

My husband sits over my life like an enormous temple Buddha—calculated waiting. He has his suspicions but he would rather not have them. I don't give mixed signals. I don't wait to be found out, and I don't confess. I tell him nothing. If I can't live with it, I can't do it. So far, I haven't done anything that has prevented me from coming home. I'm the eggshell he keeps floating. There's no poetry to steal from him. He shouts, and I tell him I won't tolerate it. Then he shouts louder. When he goes away, he calls me every night at a certain time, sometimes again later, though I'm not always there. It's a weight I can live with. It's his weight I suspend from, he gives me a radius. I suppose I sound back to him, distorted as a fog horn, though resounding for some time. I try to be like that. It's the best I can do.