The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (21 page)

“I want … I want … I want to go …”

“Where?” I asked cheerfully, supplying him with “to the sauna, to the boat, to the porch.” But he didn't begin the teaching game, and the muscles of his face stiffened as he tried again.

Finally he managed: “I want … to go … fast.”

“All right, Anders,” I said. “All right, let's go fast for once.” I took the rope attached to the sled and moved a little farther up the hill. The children stood back in a semicircle, giggling at the prospect of their great-uncle and me on the sled. I lay down on it first and discovered that the handles also functioned as brakes, having a metal tab which could be brought to bear on the rubber tires.

Anders stood behind the sled and let himself fall forward. I was amazed at the strength of his arms as he caught and held himself above me. Then he covered me with his body, and I watched the tires sink into the ground.

He arched his back and removed my braid from under his chest. For a moment, he held it between thumb and forefinger, feeling the thickness of the plait, moving along it towards the nape of my neck. Then he tucked it gently under my chin, and placed his hands over mine on the controls.

Off we went, the grass occupying nearly the entire foreground of our view—a strip for water, a strip for sky. We hit a bump. The pier seemed to tilt upwards out of the water into the clouds. The boat's mast punctured the sky, and we came to a halt.

The children and I dragged the sled with Anders on it back up the hill. His cheeks were flushed, and the children had him laughing with their exaggeration of the strain. At the top, he refused to get off the sled, saying, “Myself … this time alone.”

The second time, he went down full speed. I watched him take the jolts of the uneven pier and soar off the end of it still holding onto the controls of the sled. I remember the moment fractured from time, hard as crystal, as though my own stillness could suspend him in the air, but I must have been running. After the splash, at the center of the widening circle of water, I saw Anders' pale hair spread like a dazzling quick bloom, then vanish. I dove for the glimmer of his white shirt and the flash of the sled's silver rail.

My fingers cramped with cold around a mug full of coffee and cognac, I told my new family that I had had Anders' hand in mine—that I'd let go when I could have saved him. The tears dripped from my grandmother's chin onto the table.

“No,” Lena said, “he was seeking an oblivion. It was his will, not his weight … those useless legs.”

Then I remembered clearly and kept quiet. Anders had found my hand in the black water, though it was me that pulled away, for lack of air, yes, but mostly because of the shock of his firm grip. I had tried to shout my name into the water, swallowed the sound of it and choked. I still don't know what made him realize I wasn't Marthe, his wife. But it was he who released me, not the other way around.

The plates in the kitchen were piled next to the sink, crawfish shells scattered along the counter. My grandfather paced between doorways, refilling his cup, leaving the kitchen, returning—stopping to run his hand over the back of my head. The room was humid from our tears and rank with the smell of fish. I got up to wash my face and came upon Kjell and my mother, standing in the foyer hugging.

I turned to walk into the other room, but Kjell had already seen me. He reached out with one arm and called my name, and I moved slowly into the center of their embrace. Before I closed my eyes and let my breath out against my mother's shoulder, I thought of Anders, swimming in the dark current where I hoped he'd find his wife.

Talking a parrot Out of a Tree

Knowing when to bare your soul and when to bare your teeth, you said that was wisdom. If only I'd kept my clothes on. You were my teacher, my mentor, unsparing and cherishing at the same time. You spent long solicitous afternoons with my poems, you rolled up your shirt sleeves and went at it like work, just plain work, squinting your eyes and sighting down the lines like they were newly planed boards. You were so much older and so married and we were so impossible, it made me feel I had a heart again. I have always been so good at making men fall in love with me, I don't know where or why in me the penchant for it, childhood vengeance of a kind, I suppose. I was always being told to love people, passed like a shuttle from side to side of a loom, a base color to offset the zigzag design of my parents between lovers.

When I was sixteen, a man who was older to me then, though not so old as you are to me now, took me to a nightclub in Zurich. It was summer and I was wearing very thin Indian cotton, and it felt, oh I don't know, soft the way a woman's long hair can feel sliding over your arms. I was very pleased with the outfit, all of one piece, little strings tied at my shoulders in bows, Sultan-style pants gathered at the ankle. I felt someone press a finger into the small of my back, and I turned my head to look over my shoulder. A flower-selling crone, her skin blanched and chalky as stale pasta, raised her bouquet of roses to me in salute, then crooking her finger, she ran her knuckle over the notches in my spine. She wanted me, that I knew, and when she raised her roses again, I reared back, afraid that she would touch me with them like a wand and I would have everything I desired in an instant, and in an instant be dropped to the bottom of her boiling pot. Did I do that to you? Did I? I didn't mean to. Most of life is lived in what we don't mean to do.

I seem to get on better with men, making me, I suppose, a man's woman, but it's women who don't get on with me, because I love what is beautiful in them, because I would teach them how to have their beauty. I saw my mother wait for virtue, sweeping spiders into dust pans, throwing old spices away, tying ribbons on balloons—earning the right to be noticed, she thought. I broke my plate when I left home. I won't go round feeling like a dry tack biscuit, tamped flat from both sides by a man's toughened palms, waiting for later to be taken out, soaked to life in his saliva.

Making men fall in love with me required only two things: the declaration that I, of course, could never love, because after my unspeakably terrible childhood (and here I swathed myself in a mystery that normality would never have allowed), I could not believe in love; and the confession that I feared madness, that inaccessibility created by my profound disillusion. It saved me from a lot of boring conversation. Other women, more beautiful than I, constant, compassionate and worthy, sat well in their saddles and watched their men chase the one who clung to the mane of her mount, eyes tightly closed. Desperation is so exciting, it promises extremes men can pretend they weren't asking for, all in the name of rescue, and I didn't allow anything to last long enough to become tiresome. It was so easy, it's laughable to me now. All I had to do was speak in half-lines and go barefoot while the others wore shoes.

You weren't the slightest bit interested. Just for once the game couldn't be played, and I was broken of the habit forever. You were so tolerant and tender and sometimes I could hear in your voice that you were dealing with me and I struggled to hear you through the surge and roar of my pride. If my childhood was unhappy, was it not rich and textured and free and was I not loved and warred over with abundant confusion? And the very experiences I thought were lacking, weren't those the ones that others pointed to as the source of their childhood misery? As for madness, you told me you were only interested in functional madness, and get to work. Clearly I was functional, able to see the world through my portal of poetry. But you didn't diminish me by dismissing my sources of power. Like an old warlock musing on the next order of the hour, you had new and more powerful hexes to teach me. We are the dreamers, you told me, struggling to shake ourselves from the night's hold, sliding on daylight into trances, easily able to spend half our lives there. Probably we did in another age, before profit made shame of dreaming.

Under your tutelage, I dethroned the tragedy queen. You said that if I examined every awful thing anyone had ever said about me and allowed it to be true, I'd see that I was no Jezebel, only that I loved truth more than people. Now that you have been in my bed, I think you excuse me too much. I can understand why you said that, but I'm as banal as everyone else wandering around wanting someone to love them. Don't try to make me stronger than you, don't discount comfort. I didn't know that you ever watched me, my lips meeting the edge of the cup, the furious way I cross out words.

This is what I know about myself and people: I want to reach my hands into their bowels and feel their guts pump, I want them to know that every second, every millisecond, every nanosecond is a spurt of change. “Why? why? why?” a child persists in asking. Our veins pump in time to the question.

All attunedness, all attentiveness, all attraction. I don't resist living. Perhaps in another life, I will be more alive than this.

So many people dam up their depths at either end: inlet, outlet. You can see the turbidity in their eyes. Like lakes without flow, pollen settles on the surface, plankton blooms beneath, less and less can they see into themselves, though they try to find more ways to answer the why of everything, the why of anything, hardening their exteriors with repeated reasoning, thickness upon thickness. I have a talent for divination, a passion for finding fault lines, for breaking people open to themselves, a passion that makes my limbs vibrate in my chosen lover's hands like a divining rod while the waters rise to a point closest the surface, and then, unashamed, I will dig like a dog until I have drunk. But I don't love that particular him or another, though I can say I love them all and want none of them and am willing to be sad over it.

Many things feel like they ought to be possible. Flying for instance, and breathing under water. The same with making love to you. You alone knew my work, crafted in contradiction. You understood that I wanted to be more mysterious than the hieroglyphs of a lost language, to have you for my translator, washed with beads of sweat. You, my scholar, burning oil lamps until daylight, measuring my meanings carefully before you poured them into new containers.

I liked the moment that preceded our disaster best. You came to my place, since you were downtown already, and campus was farther for both of us. We sat in the window seat as we did that other time you came over, in the winter when I had had the flu and you came to give me my portion of papers to correct, only this time there was sun on our backs.

Our formality was intact, our pencils sharpened, the coffee service set out. Then you peeled an orange, all in one piece, coaxing the skin from the flesh with gentle pressure, winding the spiral back together and setting the hollow globe in my hands. In that sun filled moment, did the likeness of our minds seize on a symbol to make safe our desire? Stripped down, emptied, made whole again. It doesn't matter now. You placed a section of orange in my mouth, and another in your own mouth, and we sat there with the sun on our backs surprised at how we could look at each other with sweetness flooding our tongues.

I cried afterward, and I still wanted you, even though close up your breath smelled of age, like marsh grass at low tide, the places where ducks wallow, mud stuck with feathers, thick sinking mud. You held my head in your hands, thumbs at my temples. “Your beauty,” you said, smiling gently, “has scared this old body of mine silly.” But I couldn't stop crying. I cried in the way that children cry who've made themselves ache with want for a thing they've been told already they cannot have, inconsolable until they sleep. “My mistake,” you said again and again, rocking us both, and your deep set eyes were vaults of shadow.

I didn't want to add you to the others in my mind, that seemed the worst indignity, the worst that I could do to you. I see now what happened instead; you broke me from the chain. But at the time, I only felt the defeat of our physicality, shame for the bodies that had made us obstacles to each other. My words did not have the power to make you young and desiring. What then were words for?

Trying to sleep next to you, I felt like a child lying in a low-slung hammock, dying to brace its heels against the hemp and lock its knees and pitch all its weight to swinging while the rope groaned slowly, but I feared to, feared the rictus of the rope and the sudden snap and the shudder of my body against hard ground. I stroked your silvery head, watching the twilight come and wondering when your wife Rosie expected you to dinner. You always said those words all together, “my wife Rosie,” as though there could be no wife not Rosie, no Rosie not wife.

When I did sleep, the darkness behind my eyes was an expanse of black sand where I lay staked beneath a sun that swung like a pendulum. And I woke ready to beg, yes, ready to beg for your sweat to pour over me, balm to my burn, but when I touched you, you felt dry like a shed skin, slaked off by some living creature.

Endearment took the place of our working formality, that acknowledgement of affection sans sexuality. It was a rough transition, but not a bad trade-off. You held me loosely at the door and I swayed in your arms like wind chimes hitting notes for no one. When you drew away, your eyes were fierce and teary, and I knew you were angry at being old. “There's no need to talk about it now, is there?” you asked.

“And no poems,” I answered, before closing the door.

I am going away with a man I met, to the mountains, which is why I called your wife today. I wanted to return the books you loaned me, and tell you myself, and put off having another appointment with you, for now, yes, but possibly forever. It's true, I could have taken them to campus, but I wanted to meet her. You couldn't be for me, but it seemed you held out a promise of what
might
be for me, and I wanted to see what you had.

She was wearing one of your shirts and she was covered in paint and she left a white thumb print on your book though she didn't seem to notice. I never knew gray hair could be so thick and curly; I thought it went gray before it went straight before it fell out. I don't know what I expected her to look like, a faded floral print? She had a face like wide open sky, eyes that could eat up acres. She took me to the basement where she had a bench of woodworking tools, and showed me the table she'd been making look like marble. The sprinklers were running and I could smell something baking in the oven. I got the feeling your whole house is her workshop, that she clears a place for you in it in the evenings.