The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (18 page)

I used to get a kind of glee out of other people's accidents. I remember the boy who tried to put his body straight out from under one of those chin-up bars that fix between doorways. The suction gave, and he fell, hitting his head on the floor and his chin with the bar. I laughed to tears in the tension. His mother was livid. I know I wouldn't laugh now. Some decisions I've made have become accidents. Evan, for instance. I'd give my husband hell if he had an affair. There is no such thing as mislaid. Miss Took, I've met her. And, yes, I've been Miss Taken too. But am I Mrs. McDaniels? I go to the mailbox and wonder where my first name went.

I told my husband before we went camping last week. I said I couldn't go hiking and I couldn't swim. I sat still while he fished. The sun reached inside the cracks in the granite. The marmots came out and watched me. Private meanings.… Is that lying? I told Corty I'd had a miscarriage. I said the word very carefully for him: mis-carriage. And even slower to myself, I miss what I carried.

I told the people at Planned Parenthood I was going to keep the baby—that was before I found the pay phone in the parking lot. They called it “the fetus.” I might have loved Evan, before that phone call, before that click like a door shutting against my ear drum. All along, he thought we were playing a game of Spy. He expected me to be better at putting together the clues.
It happened in the parlor with the revolver.… No, it happened in the kitchen with the hatchet
.… No, it happened in the parking lot with the pay phone. The doctor I went to a few weeks ago explained the surgical procedure to me. He didn't use the word fetus. He called it “conceptual matter.”

I've heard that people who live together and supposedly love each other become telepathic.
Ah honey, I was just thinking of iced tea
. If Corty knew my thoughts, I'd be in a cab right now. It's not that he wouldn't forgive me. He wouldn't recover. I don't tell him and I don't recover what's lost. Seems fair.

That day we stopped by the river, Corty, you fell asleep and I went to get the bag of picnic supplies from the car. I hadn't known I wanted it until I saw it—the axe we'd brought camping, used to cut low dry branches from trees. I saw you in my mind's eye, the shadows of leaves playing across your face. I saw that I would cleave your head open from the back so that afterwards I could sit in front of you and pretend it hadn't happened. But beneath your skull, I wouldn't find what it was that I wanted, just more muck and mush the same as that part of you I'd had removed while the machine gasped for air. I'd expected something else. Maybe a moonstone with a clear vein disappearing at its misty center, maybe a soft gray pod with a little sing-song inside—something I could keep anyway, and look at, and say, this was.

Evan should have called me yesterday. He knew when I was coming back from camping. I got ready to see him. I burned my ear on the core of an electric curler. Then I dumped the whole set in the sink and turned the water on, steamed up the mirror so I wouldn't see my red shrieking face.

At night, I dream about his children. I rescue them. I find them lost on a highway in a flat landscape, shifting shades of gray, deserted factories to the east and to the west a churned up sea that washes over the road in places. The wheels begin to slide and I have to keep steering. Even when there is no traction, I have to keep steering.

You …
cream butt, mushroom tip, dark curls, darling
.… I cannot write you a letter. I cannot bear the humiliation … more need and no answer. If I get angrier, I'm not sure that I won't kill you. I know now that I have the capacity to kill.

I get up from the typewriter and go into the kitchen where I make orange spice tea with honey. Then I pour so much brandy in it, the honey won't melt off the spoon. I will write you the letter I wish I'd received. I will write a letter from you to myself. We were close enough that I could do that, exchange myself for you. You were more prudent. Have your caution and your pining then. Me, I hang onto my anger like it was a guard rail in a whirly-gig seat, lest I fly out and hit the hardness of your decision. I deserved better. I will give myself what I deserved. I tried to get the truth from you, and I must have looked like a fool, like a child blindfolded swinging at the air while you yanked the pinata up and down. I don't know what you deserve. Maybe your wife will open the letter.

Dear Madelaine,

It was easier to assume that you understood how things stood between us than to tell you, than to risk losing any of the time I might have had with you. I see that now. For me, ours was a doomed course, but for you, Madelaine, there were no parameters. I told you I didn't know if I loved my wife. That was true. But she and I have a history of love, and for a man my age maybe that is almost as good, better anyway than finding out I can't replace it. You fell in love with the artist in me, and I fell in love with the man you resuscitated. There was no material out of which we could not create each other. We sculpted crone noses and gargoyle grins with leftover mashed potatoes. We illustrated bestiaries of winged and horned creatures jumping from trees. You belly danced in a bed spread, and when you laughed, there was nothing else for me.

I loved you then but I never saw it as a solution. I knew it couldn't keep us aloft forever, hovering above mundane hours, above worry and maintenance. We went on “meeting each other places,” but there was to be no homecoming. I'd like to say that I knew that too, when in reality, it was something I decided. I'm sorry about the baby, but the three children I clothe and care for already have reduced me to a signature. I can't afford to create … I don't experiment … I paint what sells and wait for the checks. Fall in love with your own artist, Madelaine, and cherish the husband that takes care of you.

As ever,

Evan

When I've finished, I seal it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and walk across the street to the mailbox. Tomorrow at this time, it will come back, and I will write in indelible ink marker, NO SUCH PERSON, RETURN TO SENDER.

The sky outside is granular, too blue, like undried paint. I change into my swimsuit and head for the pool. The Yucca stalks clash in combat. Staves pierce the blue and their seeds crawl along my arm hairs. I curl my toes on the rough terra cotta edge of the pool and lean out over my shadow. “Bird of prey,” I whisper, “sink her.” Then I dive.

I stretch out on my towel. At first I think it is those damn seeds again, hairy little burrs crawling up my legs, but it's not. It's a quiver beneath my skin. I turn my head and find the eyes I feel on me. One of the condominium landscapers is sitting in the truck outside the pool fence. The roof of his mouth is too jammed up with sandwich for him to smile, but he jerks his head, acknowledges that I have seen him.

I smile and turn away. Then I cross my legs so my calves won't bulge against the pavement. I lengthen my neck and pull my shoulder blades back. My chest opens to the sky. My breasts widen and settle against my rib cage. My waist grows long and thin. Let him look.

I wake with a shadow across my face and scramble my belongings together. Corty will be home soon, and I have an urge to go to my studio and make a quick mess, as evidence of a creative day. He works hard with all those people who ride the elevator down on Fridays saying, “Well, it's the weekend. Have a good one,” and on Monday go back up asking, “How was your weekend?” and by Wednesday are saying, “It's almost over.” Everything almost over—the weekend, the week, week after week.

If I've created something while he was away, he feels it was all worthwhile. I always see it in his face. I come up behind his chair when he's watching sports, and he lets the weight of his head rest against my bosom while I smooth the wrinkles out of his forehead and press my thumb between his eyes. Then I go and make dinner.

On the way in the door, a piece of paper falls from between the pages of my paperback. I close the door with my heel and open it. It reads:

You're quite an attractive woman! I couldn't help but notice! I'm the guy in the truck outside the gate. If you ever want to have a couple of hours of fun without all the bullshit of relationships, call me at 934-2218, or come by 305 Beechwood. I'm 6'2”, 185 lbs., 24 years old and single.

Signed,

Bruce Brewster

I put the note under my book on the kitchen table and go get dressed for Corty, who comes in right on time, huge in the doorway and still steaming from several sets of racquet ball.

“How are you? honey.”

How am I, honey?
I hug and kiss him and notice he looks me over rather carefully. I tell him I still have cramps. I tell him I'm still tired. He suggests the new Chinese place over by the Dry Cleaner. Then I tell him I'm upset.

“By what? sweetheart.”

I tell him something happened that upset me, and I hand him the note. His face goes red and he drops his gym bag in the corner. He wants to know how hungry I am. I'm too upset to be real hungry.

“Well, I'm going out then.”

I look at the note between his stubby fingers. “Why?” I want to know.

“I'm going to show this guy a couple of hours of fun without all the bullshit of relationships.”

I laugh. “Honey, I don't think he could stand more than ten minutes.”

My husband grins, and the door slams. I sit at the kitchen table and doodle on a scrap of paper. The doodle looks like blood under a microscope, like blood trying to coagulate. I run to the back door shouting “Come back!” even though I know: there is no coming back.

One of Me Watching

I awakened on the train somewhere between Amsterdam and Copenhagen feeling sunken into myself like a fallen cake. It was the summer I met the Swedish family my mother had married us into. I took the ferry from Copenhagen to Malmo, the southern tip of Sweden, where I was picked up by my eldest cousin who drove me to the summer house in the archipelago. He played the music very loud—the volume up so high, I couldn't even hear the wind. A new English rock band, he told me. It sounded to me like ten people beating their forks on their dinner plates and chanting the menu.

Driving through a field of raps in bloom was like staring into the sun—yellow until the very lines of your iris felt like splinters of light around a gaping hole. For relief, I looked across the North Sea at the heavy clouds that brooded over Denmark and the hard slate color of the water. Everything seemed brilliant or hard.

Lillasundholmen
, island in the little straits, it's where I arrived. My mother and Kjell, her new husband, were staying on his boat next to the dock. Above it on a hill sat the big house beneath the birch trees. Like the other buildings on the island, the house was a burnished red, its paint a byproduct of a method of copper mining long gone. The property was bordered by a small fjord, beyond it the forest full of sounds feathery and hissing.

I was reading on deck, waiting for the rest of the family to come down for the day's sailing excursion—lying on my stomach because I couldn't get used to the idea of these new relatives seeing me without my top on. I couldn't get used to the idea of having breasts at all. Every time I looked down, I noticed the space between them.

I made my palms into fists and stacked them one on top of the other, resting my chin in the cavity. From this vantage point, I could see everyone on shore whose names I didn't remember yet. My two uncles were inspecting the broken rigging of one of the children's boats. My aunts sat together on the steps of the cabin by the shore, stripping dill, topping beets, and talking. Over the side of the bow, I could see my cousins as they plummeted down into the clear water.

I got up and went to sit above the galley doorway, hanging my feet down over it. “Hand me my T-shirt,” I said to my mother who was fixing coffee in the cabin.

“Hasn't anyone ever told you that it's not polite to hang your feet from the kitchen ceiling?” she said, grabbing hold of my swinging legs by the ankles.

“So what,” I said, “Nobody cares if you eat naked here either.”

I looked at Kjell sleeping. Beneath his mustache, his mouth was small and pursed like a kitten's—fine tilting lines at either side. My mother was watching him too. She stroked her cheek with the tail of her thick braid. It was a signal I knew; Kjell must have been a good lover. I looked at his feet—narrow and bony and in no way warped.

“Kjell has sweet feet,” I said to my mother. She came up from the galley, slapping my calves as she emerged.

“You like him better now, don't you?”

“I always did like him,” I said, which was true. She stood below me, leaning over the hatch and resting her crossed arms on my knees. I tucked a stray hair behind her ear.

“You don't think I'd do wrong by you, do you?” she asked.

“You left Daddy,” I said and shrugged.

“Yes, I did. I left him and he dove to the bottom of a scotch bottle, which is where he was headed anyway. All my fault, huh?”

“I didn't say that,” I told her ruefully, wishing I could back-pedal my way out of what I'd started.

“It's not always what people say, you know. No one ever says a bad word about your father. It's because he has a mean streak a mile wide.” With that, she pressed my legs and stood back.

“Maybe that's where I got it,” I said.

She gave me her hawk-like scanning look. “Maybe,” she said, going down into the galley.

Back on shore, my grandfather and Anders were making their way down to the dock. Moggen's body frame was massive, and I saw in his careful determined movements a latent power. I'm sure he would have liked to pick his disabled brother up, carry him under one arm and the ambulator under the other. I jumped down from my perch and stuck my head in the galley.

“I'm sorry, Mother,” I said.

“It's all right Frances,” she said wearily, and I felt that I had spoiled her mood.