The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (22 page)

“He's spoken so highly of your work,” she said to me warmly, as though it were better praise to give your praise a second time, and I was touched by the esteem in which she holds you. Clearly without jealousy of me, without need of your praise for her own work.

I looked at the swell of her bosom in your old shirt and imagined her filling up your arms, imagined the two of you together at night. Though your hands haven't worn grooves on each other's bodies, your minds have, and it was effortlessâthe two of you flowing together from different sources like spring run-off.

She said you were out helping a neighbor find his lost pet, and suggested I wait a bit. “The poet is talking a parrot out of a tree,” she said laughing. I imagined the parrot sidling out to the end of a branch towards you, his orange and black eyes spinning like pin wheels. I hoped it would take a long time. I wanted to stand in the kitchen with your wife and lick her mixing spoons and scrape the last batter from the bowl. I wanted to be her initiate, I wanted to learn how to rub color into wood grain, and how to deal with an obstinate child, and how many thorns to count before cutting a rose, and how to make beeswax candles burn longer, and how to stay married to a man maybe a bit like you.

I asked for paper to write you a note, and while she was turning off the sprinklers, I put it in your study. I didn't think she would mind. Your desk was covered with papers and the papers covered with your writing, which looks the way an itch would if you could see it on skin. Your scribble suffers such vertical displacements, it reminds me of a seismographic chart. I realize now there are many trembles and ripples in the ground you walk. My note was absolutely like any other note I have written to you, except that I told you I was going away for awhile and I knew you wouldn't suppose I went alone, and I signed it “with love,” which I hadn't ever done before. I didn't mention that I took the small picture of you and your wife and your two daughters, took it right off your desk in the frame and put it in my purse. It was the last thing I did before leaving the room and I didn't stop to ask myself why.

In the front hall, your wife took my hand, as if to shake it, but instead she turned it palm up in her own. She banded my wrist with her thumb and pressed back at my pulse in time to the throb of my blood. “You have a strong heart,” she said, stepping back from me. “I know, because I have one too.”

“Yes,” I said, letting her words steep in silence while I found a commonplace that was safe but true. I wanted to tell her that you had given me back my heart, instead I said, “I'm glad to have met you at last.”

“He will always be pleased to hear from you,” she said, opening the door for me.

I admired her for that, for not using “we” falsely, for not saying,
do come back and see us
. Perhaps she doesn't know about you and me, but she knows anyway how we've felt. And she knows I love you, and that I'd come to see her.

It won't be easy to go away with someone else. I am afraid to say his name, afraid if I say it I will write it down, submit him to the dangers of my art: losing him in life, gaining him on paper. My poems are never longer than a page. I trace the lines of his palms, wondering if memorizing them might not replace the need for a name. I know I will miss you. I know I will feel like saying to this man, “pull over at the next rest stop and read all of my poetry.” Artists are always mooning around over other artists, because their work has no absolute value, because no one can say of it, “See the water coming through that tube, see this cylinder turning, see the electricity flowing through that wire, see it works!”

Interpretation is so personal. People will speculate about your life, disagree with your morality, send your narrators to institutions. I've grappled with my need for you, tackled it with a bone-crunching weight. I've reviewed it in the context of my life as though my life were a manual I could remove from the glove compartment, and flipping to the index, shed some
how-to
on an abstract idea. The index of course is full of musicians and painters and poets, would-be musicians, painters and poets, and the drugs that disconnect people from themselves, that allowed me to find “creative process” in the stammer and rubble of free association. I needed to find in the world what I feared was lacking in myself. Children are taught to stay put if they get lost in the woods. I circled around the search party in panicked circles. My poetry could not find me. You put a stop to all that.

“X marks the spot,” you said, “X is your work.”

So this weekend I will seal over unasked questions with a silence thick as sap, like an old tree healing a burn. Yet this man surprises me with his inquisitiveness and a gentleness that assumes nothing, and the little animal in my heart lifts its head to the wind and sniffs:
something for me, something for me
.

His eyes are pale with churned particles of stone, opaque and silvery, pure and blue as glacial tarns. Your wife with her strong heart is in a basement full of tools. Suddenly I feel serene and secure, joyous at the thought of the great abundance of inventions free of their owners and not subject to interpretation. And it seems right the way I left your neighborhood, the picture in my mind like this: a young woman going fast in a bright car passes an old man talking a parrot out of a tree. He doesn't notice her, and she only notices him for a moment, though not unkindly.

Acknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks to my grandmother, my mother, and my father, each of whom encouraged my life choices in indispensable ways; and to my husband for his grace under pressure. Earnest appreciation to the readers of early drafts who saw me through, Margi Fox, Scott Driscoll, and Noel Parmentel; and to friends Laura Kalpakian, Meredith Cary, and Mary Byrne for much needed humor. Special thanks to Mary Alice Kier for her long term belief in this book and help with research. And finally gratitude to Martin and Judith Shepard who gave me the chance.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The stories in this collection have appeared in the following publications:
Cimarron Review
, “Riptide”;
Jeopardy
, “In Refrain”;
The Before Columbus Review
, “Moonstone.”

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2869-1

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