The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (20 page)

“Maybe,” she said, “but that's over now.”

The application listed thinking as an activity right along with hiking, sailing and skiing. I told her I would check only that box. I said it to cheer her up, but I would have done just that, and waited to see who I got. It was the closest I could come to a mystery box.

Once out of the forest, I walked along a path through the marsh grass until I came to a beach where I saw a row of bathhouses, all of them boarded up. I knocked at the first one anyway and saw myself as in a dream: one of me watching, one of me doing. The other of me stepped lightly from the bathhouse in a black knee-length bathing suit with bloomers, and a silk bathing cap adorned with a pink rosette.

“And who will go for a swim with me?” she shouted, and when she saw that the beach was empty, she disappeared.

I knocked at the next bathhouse and saw the door fly open so forcibly it banged against the side of the building, and myself in seven layers of raw linen and a waistband of gold and serpentine, my hair bound by a sinew of green willow.

“Where is his ship?” she shouted, and when she saw that the sea was empty, she disappeared.

I didn't bother to knock at the next bathhouse, and the only version of me that wouldn't disappear ground a deep pivot in the sand with her heel and headed for the stretch of beach where all sign of humanity had long since been erased by pattern of wind and wave. I was drawing on the air with the tip of a feather when I saw a bolt of silver break the water and Anders emerge, shedding light droplets from his shoulders, opening his fingers skyward. Young, lean, smiling at me, he dove. And I waited. I waited for the longest time. Then I walked till I imagined I was just a speck of the girl that had started off.

All the phrases in Swedish that I no longer wanted in my head and which were never there when I needed them kept busting in on my thoughts.
Nei tac, jog har en kupp kaffe just innen jog komma hite. No thank you, I had a cup of coffee just before I came here
. I said the phrases aloud and after awhile was rid of them, content to concentrate on the hum of the wind against the white feather in my hand.

Kjell was nearly abreast of me before I heard the soles of his feet squeak against the sand. He was red in the face from exertion, and his eyes radiated such fierce concern, I couldn't look at him. It was as though I'd never seen him before, as though he'd been a rock to me, and I'd thought to myself whenever I saw him: that rock is boring black and white. But then the sun had emerged from behind a cloud and picked up all the tiny particles of mica in the stone and thrown their light like glitter in the air.

I stared at our bare feet in the sand, both of us making furrows with our toes. I stared at our feet hard, in expectation, hoping to find clues in the conversation our toes were having for the one we should start.

When finally Kjell had gotten his breath, he asked, “Are you all right, Frances? Why did you leave?”

I looked up at him then and felt something hideous rising from the bottom of my stomach, some gargantuan beast about to crash and heave through the underbrush. “I hate your friends!” I shouted.

He let me breathe awhile after that. I had to. The tears that came to my eyes flowed fast and freely no matter how I mopped at them with the cuff of my sweater. He reached out to touch my face but I pulled away.

“Let's walk,” he said quietly, turning towards the house.

We both looked at the water, listening to the gentle overlap of waves and the accompanying motif our footfalls made.

“I'm sorry,” I said at last.

He shrugged, appearing aggravated, and said, “You don't have to be. I've known them all forever, and I've hated each and every one of them at a different time.”

I looked at him, incredulous.

“No, it's true,” he said, looking away. “I went to Tunisia once with Jonas and Birgitta, on vacation, except there was a flood, and the two of them, Jesus, they sat around in the hotel room drinking all day and sulking like babies. And Roger, he got fat since I went to the States, and turned chicken shit, sold his sailboat for a motor boat. And Krista, what a case, seeing a psychiatrist three times a week, all the time telling everybody she wants to divorce Murre but she's too afraid. Then when they go on vacation, she threatens to jump overboard and kill herself.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, I'm not,” he said, “and I could tell you worse.”

“Well then who do you like?” I blurted out.

We stopped before the dark tunnel of trees that led back to the house, and when he turned his eyes towards me, I was stunned again by their brilliance, but I didn't look away.

“Like,” he said slowly, contemplating the meaning of the word. “No one, but your mother I love, and love is all the time, then the rest doesn't matter so much.”

Lena, my grandmother, said Anders couldn't walk without the four-pronged ambulator, but I found out it wasn't true. One morning, I woke at three and saw the sun rising, trailing yellow streamers all across the sky. I knew it would stay that way for hours, that I could turn my back on the moment I longed to savor, and when I turned round again, it would still be there—the light just the same. I went downstairs to the front room with its big windows. The ducks were barking the way they do with too much water in their gullets. Then I heard Anders' door open and the terrible crashing that followed.

Before he could get a foot in front of him, his upper body fell forward. At that moment, he slammed a hand flat on the wall and with the retrograde motion, threw one of his legs out. Although older than Moggens, he had no fear of brittle bones. He wrapped his arms around corners and reached for walls as though they were rings to swing by.

When finally he saw me sitting on the couch, he smiled his side-sagging smile, and leaning over his left foot, he took a huge step with his right. His gait was like that of a child at the age when walking is a precarious gathering of momentum. Watching him, I felt the earth did not go round evenly at all.

I got up and took his arm, and using me instead of the walls to swing towards and away from, he made his way to the couch. We sat and watched the low hummocks of islands come up off the flat horizon as the sun struck them. We watched the light running down the filament of the fish nets stretched out on the rack beside the docks; the air itself like them, full of light droplets running down trajectories. Very suddenly, he touched my cheek.

“Marthe,” he said softly.

Without thinking, I answered, “No, I'm not Marthe, I'm Frances,” and then I saw him wince. And then I knew it wasn't simply a word he'd lost.

During Kräfskiva, the feast in celebration of the early fall and the coming of the small, red crawdads, I sucked dill butter and brine from between spiny legs before cracking open the kräfta with my thumbs. Red was the color of the season: bright change against new cold. The ronne berries on the window sill were the same color as the crawfish we ate, as the lady bugs I shook off the quilt before bringing it in from the line, as the cherry juice on my mother's lips. We picked the last of the cherries together in the orchard behind the house.

“Imagine,” my mother said, “the people who lived here made everything, from the garden to the fish nets. And now we're so worried about becoming specialists.”

“Mom, the pioneers did everything too” I reminded her.

“Exactly,” she said, smiling gaily, the basket of cherries balanced in the crook of her arm. She had a way of assuming anything I said to the favor of her argument—that it might have been a challenge didn't occur to her. I kept wondering how I could be so hateful. ‘Look,' I wanted to say, ‘it's not all that unique here.' But I knew what she would say, and I knew it was no alternative. So did she, which is why she would have told me, “You can go live with your father if you don't like life with me.”

I didn't push it because I didn't want to hear that ultimatum again, and I didn't want to be fixing Bloody Marys for my father on Sunday mornings. Besides, I was just thinking how much I was getting to like my room with its wallpaper of blue corn flowers and the wood burning stove and the fir bench with a straight back like a church pew and the foot pedal organ—even how much I was beginning to like Kjell and the smell of fresh wood shavings in his mustache when he kissed me good morning.

Back in the kitchen, I watched the cherries tumble from my mother's basket into the colander. She handled them with care, and they glistened in the water like dark rubies. My grandmother was sifting flour for a cake while outside Kjell made a saw sing across the boards he'd measured to fix the roof. He came in to drink and stopped for a moment behind my mother. He dangled a cherry by its stem above her head, like a lure on a line, and she went up on her toes after it. I could hear them laughing as I snuck up the stairs to my grandparents' quarters.

My new grandmother was demented about her dogs—pictures of her two dachshunds right up there on the wall alongside her real grandchildren, both dogs with that stricken look common to most non-poisonous bat-boned creatures. And Lena was kind. At each new moon, she bent her knees three times and made a wish. And all the wishes she made were for the protection of her loved ones. Still, she was not as honest as my grandfather. I'm sure it was she who sorted through the box of photographs brought to me and my mother; she, who removed Kjell's first wife from the family reunions, looking at each photo before she tucked them away somewhere. But upstairs, that afternoon, I found the one I was looking for, the one that slipped through because it was of thinner paper and had been cut with nail scissors into a heart shape. The wife was just the way I wanted her to be—thin and dark, a real sulky beauty—nothing like my mother.

Moggens didn't purposefully leave the “just married” photo of Kjell and his first wife out on his desk in the study. From the tarnish on the silver frame, I judged he'd never moved it since he set it there. Kjell's older face was more likeable, craggy and a bit ruined.

Back in the kitchen, my aunts clucked their tongues about Anders. It made Kjell fume. He told me that when they were children, he would row across the fjord while his sisters washed rocks with their tooth brushes. “Nothing is changed,” he said.

My aunts told me that Anders used to have a meticulous and conscientious nature. They said that he was good with the children, that he could run a relay with an egg on a spoon clamped in his mouth, and never once lose the egg. They thought it was a shame what the change had brought: how he put his cigarettes out in his coffee cup, and used slang, and swore too much. “I want to piss,” he'd say in the middle of dinner.

For two days, he'd complained of a crick in his back. My aunts humored him, and Lena told my grandfather to turn Anders' mattress, which he dutifully went and did. But in the kitchen Anders started up again.

“Damn,” he stuttered, “damn,” until finally my grandmother said to him:

“Damn crick in your back. That's right Anders. Always something there is with you, always something there will be with you.”

After she left the room, he made a fist and swung at the air, so sharply I heard his arm lock in the socket. Then he said very clearly to me, “There, the crick is gone.”

“Someone is missing,” my grandfather said as he took his place at the table laden with steaming crawfish and bottles of schnaps. “Ah, there she is, my wife.” He made a toast and everyone looked around the table before they drank.

I'd been seated at the far end away from Anders, who stared glumly at his plate, which had been piled with food, precluding the interruption of his requests. I held Moggens' hand while he repeated a joke slowly for my benefit. His callouses felt like the ridges of a dried corn husk. I lost the gist of the joke. It seemed that I had been wandering around for days behind people, not knowing where I was going until we arrived. For days repeating words in Swedish after my grandmother—the words for electric stove, can opener, frying pan—none of them could I remember. I longed to lean my head against Moggens' chest so that I could hear the tones of his voice and cease to impute sense to the words. I didn't get the punchline of the joke, but when everyone laughed, I laughed too, laughed until my face felt like a mask I wanted to hold at arm's length and shake above the fire.

I left to have dessert with my seven tow-headed cousins at the children's table. They asked me to read the mustard and caviar tubes, and we all laughed at my pronunciation—laughed fit to kill. At least I knew what we were laughing about.

The sound of the sea moving back into a marsh is startlingly loud when you come upon it alone. I looked back towards the house and watched Anders slowly making his way to the center of the yard where the wreath of Midsummer still stood, dry and shaking apart in the wind. I thought of Marthe and how long it had been since anyone mentioned her name.

The children were flying past Anders' legs on an old sled that Kjell had fitted with wheels. They rode the sled in pairs. I reached the top of the hill in time to see another two launched. The boy steered while the girl lay beneath him and screamed.

The wind blew Anders' child-fine tuft of hair to the other side of his head, and he smashed it flat with the palm of his hand. Lena opened the back door and called him in. Ignoring her, Anders gripped the sides of his ambulator and whistled as the children went by. I waved to her and shouted that I would stay with him. Still, she called to him again. He turned and bellowed something ferocious, then thrusting the ambulator ahead of him, he took a few more steps away from the house.

The long branches of the birch trees rose up in an arc and snapped back down with the force of the wind. The sky had grown heavy and thick with clouds. “
Vacket vader vi har iyen
,” I said, smiling at Anders.
What weather we have
. It was a phrase he had taught me the day before. He focused on that place in the air where he saw my face and began.