The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (2 page)

The cottage is olive green with a rust red trim, which sounds ugly, but it's not if you think of marigolds, which are the flowers planted in the sandy soil all around the house. A stand of birch and maple separate the cottage from the neighbor's to the south, supple trees that can take the winds rolling directly off the great lake. Beyond the house to the north, the graveled road ends on a bluff. The front of the cottage is sliding glass doors and a porch big enough for a picnic table. A long set of weathered grey stairs leads directly off the porch down to the shore.

The beach has been enclosed in a wooden frame; it's the same for the neighboring houses and their beaches. I guess otherwise they would wash away. From above they look like adult-sized sandboxes.

The remnants of previous jetties are made of logs, not boards, and look like old fences submerged. The Macpherson jetty is warped, bucked up at the center. A couple of slats are missing from the middle, making a child-sized door frame to the lake. At least, this evening, it was child-sized; by morning, it might require a bellycrawl. I imagine children going in and out that door the day long, forgetting the drift of high tide toward afternoon and hitting their foreheads where before they had run through. Dinosaur Band Aids. Grandchildren. The sky turned the color of an apricot freshly broken open and the water was as violet as blown glass. Yes, I tell myself, like all the summers before, these are the sunsets we love. But there is no we; there are no summers before. These are not my memories. They are someone else's.

The cottage decor tells me something about my father that makes me like him. He finds luxury wearying. Luxury not only has to be maintained; it demands appreciation. The place is simple. I imagine that it is his, in other words, his wife has decorated the house in town but this is the tradeoff. Old Naugahyde La-Z-Boy recliners, a nondescript tweedy couch, a mirror framed in the shape of a wooden ship's wheel over the fireplace, and on the walls those faintly colored paintings of famous landmarks that look like they were made with a 69 cent sponge—the Eiffel Tower and Westminster Abbey in thin gold, gilt frames—a blue afghan in the couch corner and a Hudson Bay blanket over a wicker rocker, round rag rugs on the floor in mallard duck colors. He'd like my mother's motel.

III.

This morning, there's a rim of fog over the water and above the coastal mountains. The sky above is a slender oval of blue. In another month, the afternoons won't be sunny. The fog will seal off that blue oval like an eyelid shutting for sleep. I hear the rumble of laundry machines on the other side of the wall. The maids sit on the washers above the cement floor and smoke, talking about which man will turn his life around and which man won't. Their conversations always dwell longer on the man that won't. I shuffle through reservation forms for the day's arrivals, then set them aside. The old Smith Corona Electric vibrates the pens in the jar on the desk when I flip the switch. An incriminating hum.

Jessica has been gone for three days. She is forcing me to know her father in the only way she can. If I write her letters, I have nowhere to send them. She presumes feelings of loss on his part, or of a vague haunting at least. Now I'm the one who doesn't know where she is. A chill comes with autumn and the lowering sun throws each branch and stone into sharp relief.

Alone, I dread the coming of winter. Seven a.m. winter light is white, fibrous as rice paper. We were always up together. My new-born daughter smelled like pepper tree leaves. There was no horizon line. Nothing to separate us. Not the night or the day, all gray, all gray and together. The sun when she came was like mother of pearl encased in lead caming. The days were swaddled in soft cotton, pale receiving blankets. I prayed to remember the soft time together against the time to come when she would hate me. In the early evening, while she was napping, I had a ritual. Outside it was raining. I filled the bath, closed the door to the lit hallway, opened the other to the dusk blue room and lit a candle. Let blue meet gold and water thunder. I was sound and color in there alone. I turned to flesh when Jess cried for me.

I had her to bind myself to myself—for the same reason that a woman will try to bind a man by keeping a baby or another will abort the child of a man she loves in a savage irrevocable action so she can't go back. Acts of salvation. I gave birth to her but she saved me. That is her terrible responsibility to love. I can't undo that with words. Even my actions to free her only bind her back to me with gratitude, or its replacement, resentment. She had to leave in fury in order to leave at all—the adrenalin pumped autonomy of anger. It's not that she fears my being alone. She knows I am good at it, too good at it, and she wants to prove me wrong, wants me to feel it as an affliction not a free choice. She may well succeed. All morning, I have memories of who I was before she was born.

Mr. Ramirez, the principal, poked his head inside the classroom door while we were singing counting songs.
Let's go riding in an elevator. 1st floor, 2nd floor, 3rd floor. Down, Down, Down
. I motioned to my aide and she took my place as they began the next one. He smiled at the children who were craning their heads around but his eyes were flat as a matt finish when he turned them to me. “Nellie, could you come to my office after the last bell?”

Maybe it was the Mooney child again. Her mother on a winning streak in Reno. The teenage sitter's parents had taken the girl in for a week last time. Or someone had called Child Protective Services. Perhaps this time Alejandro's parents were unable to get back over the border without their papers. Or maybe it was an outbreak of lice. My head was singing a lullaby to my heart, a looping melody to go round and round on, but Mr. Ramirez's look made me feel like a corpse laid out on a marble slab—so cold, blue and bare.

I never took a last look at homeroom seven. But I can still see the model city we made, cereal boxes covered in construction paper: high rises with yellow window squares, all the lights turned up bright and heads and hands inside waving out. My adult's view is nearly aerial. That's the city I remember leaving. And I still hear the sweet, bright chime of their voices, loud on flat notes like the clanging of cans, some child unabashedly in or out of tune on each note.
One lonely bird sitting in a tree, she was so lonely didn't want to be; So she flew away, over the sea. And brought back a friend to live in the tree. Two lonely birds sitting in a tree
… Impossibly sweet. All of them doomed to self-conscious gestures someday.

In Mr. Ramirez's office, I tried to laugh off his suggestion; instead I heard the screeching that air makes drawn over a hummock in the throat. On Monday, my class was told I was sick, too sick to finish out the school year.

One of my student's fathers had seen me at the movies, holding hands with Julia. I tried to make the principal, Mr. Ramirez, believe that we were just two women offering each other comfort: Myself, a widow, friend and counsel, Julia just divorced. He sat back in his chair appearing to listen, but he was only waiting. He wanted to humiliate me with my own lie, to get even for all the compliments on appearance he once paid me. The child's father had followed us to the parking lot, where we kissed goodnight. A kiss like children imitating movie stars, experimentation. I was the lesbian suitor, idealized beyond possibility. She was waiting for me to be the catalyst, for the test tube to fill full of silver vapor.

I never became Julia's lover. I still missed Monique. And Julia told me about her childhood games with other girls.
I'll close my eyes and you be Matthew
. She still wanted that with me, to believe the kiss of a woman was rehearsal for the right man. Or more impossible still, she wanted a woman's love to compensate for the inadequacy of her husband's, to be perfect, unblemished. She wanted me to be the seducer with telepathic hands.

Monique had a voice that sang words. A voice for a picnic. She said “summah” instead of “summer.” Her New Orleans Creole accent sometimes made
oy
of
er—
nothing like the exaggerated drawl of Vivian Leigh—so that she would say General Poyshing for General Pershing, the same vowel as
soyez
and
voyez
. Her skin was pale as a Spaniard's but her thick hair had a tight wave and made a wedge off the back of her head and her green eyes were limned by lines of brown and silver as though there were two other colors beneath the lens. She was another scholarship girl in Ann Arbor, pre-med to my elementary ed. We liked the rhyme. She told me she'd renounced Catholicism to accept a moment of grace. It ran in her family: to be either alcoholic and Catholic, or sober and renounced. I'd never met a girl who took herself more seriously than the pursuit of a man, who always talked about serious things but fed them into the furnace of her humor. I told her the religion in my family was work, that my father happened to be Lutheran because his Swedish forbearers were, but what we really worshipped was their work. Just as with Jesus, we could never suffer as much as they did, though we could certainly keep trying.

Like Monique's father, my father would have shelled out ten or twenty grand to give me a wedding, but the college money was reserved for the boys, who could bring the improvement in themselves home. Girls were the ones who really left home, pitted by rice and baby pearls. I went to my father's lumberyard for the first time when I was eight-years-old. He was building me a playhouse with a pine panel finished interior. I sat in the slope of a propeller blade as big around as our car while the forklifts jacked their loads around me. I could have watched the cranes all day: gears and levers, the lurches of machinery, cables triangulating towards their targets, the huge steel hooks descending, the lumber swinging up and over, dwarfed in the distance so that it looked almost like paper wrapped parcels, then the slosh of the barges taking the weight and the clank of the suddenly slack line. A forklift operator moved piles of roof tiles on palettes. The curved tiles seemed to slump as the weight shifted towards the back of the machine. My father returned with a white bread sandwich, which we ate together. Then we stood at the center of the propeller and he hoisted me to his hip so we could see together. I relished his touch and the sound of his voice. He could wax eloquent about the way things worked.

Our lunchtime conversation had tapped his word reservoir dry and he drove me home in silence. A man comforted by the sounds of engines, who in everyday life spoke only what might be heard shouted over them.

I read my way through childhood. A.B. Guthrie's
The Way West
and
The Big Sky, The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth
. There had to be words for what people felt while they worked, even if they weren't much spoken at my house. I remember my mother's voice in the kitchen floating up the stairwell. She and Carson's mother were canning, pickling, preserving, always putting something up, always putting up.
That child lives in a book. I swear, the last time I read a whole book was on vacation
. Reading was a luxury indulged, like childhood. It was understood that time would take it from me, when I married and ran a household of my own.

I left Michigan when Jessica was six months old, a heavyweight baby who sat wherever I put her and toppled over whenever she reached for something. It was the last time I would cross the Great Plains on my way to Washington state. I was going home to see my father who had had the first of his heart attacks and portioned out the lumberyards in a will I had yet to read. Even before he died, my brothers whispered about buying me out. Family traitor. I had proof of it in my arms. They wished me luck when I bought the motel though I know they said under their breaths, she's going to need it.

On the way home, I stayed over a night in Monique's suburban Chicago home and met her husband Paul. Monique and I hadn't seen each other in three years, since graduation. We were all paying off student loans. The interior of the house was completely incongruous with its tidy, middle-class exterior: rattan furniture, batiqued pillows, apple crates for books cases, posters tacked everywhere, Maxfield Parish in sublime light and M.C. Escher with his ad infinitum perspectives. The white guy afro was in, Dylan with his Rainbow hair and Rob Tyner of the MC5 in granny glasses.

Monique and I drank Thunder's Mouth tea, stole a few moments together before Paul came home. We constructed the story I tried out on him, the story I was supposed to take home and proffer as a peace offering to my brothers. We granted paternity to Carson, who was dead anyway. When I think of Carson, I think of the years as children that we were lined up and marched—his slender head bobbing in front of me—then the roll call to Vietnam that didn't include me and the request for attendance that killed him. In a crowd, I still look up ahead of me as though I might see him. In 1969, I was grieving, and the lie felt like a tribute. Carson should have been Jess's father. According to Monique, my brothers wouldn't mind the lie if it would make me normal. So when her husband Paul asked me all those questions about “my husband's” regiment and his maneuvers, I was ready with answers. I simply gave him the news of Carson's death, as sent to me in the clippings from my mother. “Paul,” Monique pleaded, when he asked about the wounds. “I can't help it,” he answered, “I was a medic.”

My sadness at their house was real. In the kitchen, they moved around each other at a calculated distance, like naval officers of different rank in the galley of a ship. At dinner, Paul performed surgery on his steak, disengaging meat from bone, and although very attentive, his rhetorical questions formed a kind of examination: “Half a cup only? Tired so early? Still breast-feeding?” The doctor through and through. I played the part of the nostalgic college roommate. We told him half-truths and looked at each other over our wine glass rims when we tipped our heads back. We told him about the college apartment, shaped like a T, the living room and kitchen then a bedroom on either side. My boyfriend, Stuart, who claimed he took a wrong turn one night and went to bed with Monique. The next night, he came back to mine and it was her turn to listen and cry.