The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (3 page)

“Didn't you hate each other?” Paul asked, incredulous. Yes, we did, we did for awhile, but we were so taken in by his terrible misfortune—loving us both. Remember, you had to have a boyfriend in those days. It was bad enough to be serious scholarship girls. We had a bond: terror of him choosing one over the other. This was what we told Paul, laughing as we told it. But I remembered how it had made perfect sense that either one of us alone was inadequate. Hadn't we always felt it? We feared we were the surviving species of an otherwise extinct line, and we knew, we
knew
there were girls out there with all the glorious features of adaptation built in, something their mothers had given them along the evolutionary trail. At night I cried to hear Stuart and Monique, not because he'd broken my heart, but because she made the sounds of real pleasure I'd never made. Her cries burst into the darkness of my sleep with the suddenness of a night bird, Monique whose cries had a melody.

“So how did it end? How did you get rid of this schmuck?” Paul was insistent once our hilarity had ebbed. After about a week, Stuart couldn't come over one night. Maybe he had to do some studying. Maybe he was tired.
His pecker was petered!
Paul roared. We giggled wildly.

We told him something about the end of Stuart, nothing about the beginning of us. I studied Monique's exquisite, expressive, unpretty face across the table. Her mouth was no longer sensuous because it was held in place by tension, one lip stacked upon the other. In conversation, I used to prick her and console her just to see the passage of pain to pleasure on her mouth. We ushered at the campus symphony performances. She wasn't ashamed the night I cried openly, and after awhile she set her flashlight on the floor and took my hand. It wasn't the music that moved me, nor the grandness—coattails, chandeliers, clapping—it was the man who turned pages for the pianist, the two together. One leaning into sound, his shoulders rising with the surge till it was all he breathed, and the other uncurling the paper so tenderly, with such apprehension of disturbance and such care for continuance. We made love like that, she and I.

I suspect Paul would still consider such emotions an indulgence. And maybe Monique lives a life too tired for them, now that she too is a full doctor. We failed finally at Christmas cards. Emotional triage. They talked about it at the table. For the parents of the malformed children who were under her charge in the hospital, she felt a vigilant pain, but the rest—colleagues, neighbors, relatives—were relegated to being abstract case histories, medical or social problems when she could get to them.

I couldn't do what she was doing unless emergency required that kind of courage from me. Wave upon wave of the cursed, the incurable, the maimed, the frightened, the scarred, the panicked, the undeserving. Monique had gone under, stolid as a mountain beneath the surface of the sea. All that evening, I sent signals like a sonar and when a reverberation came back to me felt relieved. But she was able to smile because I remembered her smiling. The evening together laughing was possible as a part of her past, not her future.

I didn't like Paul's stupid flirting. He admired the moon and stars airbrushed onto my sweatshirt. He consulted with Monique about the planet. “Is it Jupiter or is it Venus?” She walked past with an armload of dishes. “Ah, there's Venus,” he said, flipping up my sweatshirt. He seemed pleased that I stared hard into his eyes, haughty and assessing. I still wanted to like him. If he would have touched Monique, just once, I could have laughed and thrown an arm around him, as though we also had a nostalgia to renew between us. Monique pretended to take no notice of this flirting, or in fact didn't. For a moment, I pitied him. He already lived in the kitchen of her life. If he slipped out the back door one night, she would bake bread not to notice. Each day he tried leaving a little more in hopes that she would notice.

After dinner, he held Jessica in his arms and when milk foam burbled from her mouth, he tipped her back like a glass of beer he could prevent from overflowing. “Here,” I said, “she's got to get it out,” taking her and mopping madly at the curds on his shoulder with a cloth diaper. Monique was laughing and so was I, but Paul's face had closed on a downward glance. She called to him as he went into the other room. “It was funny, you know, don't take it that way.” He called back from the kitchen. “I'm making a drink, anyone else?” Thereafter, he excluded himself from our conversation. His laughter was confined to wryness and sarcasm. This open-palmed pleasure was the foolishness of girls, and he'd have none of it. The nostalgic roommate would be gone soon enough.

That night I made Jessica a bed in a wicker laundry basket and slept on the covered porch off the kitchen. The stove light was on and the shadows of the blinds threw slats of black across my face. I'd been asleep at least an hour when I woke to see Paul standing over me, laying another blanket on top of me. His face in solitude was softened and kind. I reached my hand up to him. I don't know why—to be thankful, to be cozy, to pat him. The waking state is always that of a child; we ask the world to make us safe. His expression changed suddenly. He smiled quick and pained as if he had just taken a splinter in his foot. When he leaned over, it was not to take my hand. He kissed me on the mouth with his mouth open. A flick of tongue and I turned away. His expression was at once fright and rage. He didn't know what to make of the woman's face barred in shadow. He wanted to pry the slats apart with his hands and have me out, have himself out … no telling on whose side the bars lay. His retreat was hasty, angry, and silent.

In the morning, Monique brought me orange juice and sat on the bed with the baby in her arms. Jessica rooted around on the flannel yoke of Monique's nightgown for an opening, making sounds like a little warthog as she searched for a nipple in fistfuls of flannel. We traded orange juice and baby, then I got Jess settled and sucking. Monique looked over her shoulder then down at her tawny feet, spreading and unspreading her toes as though she had something to be embarrassed about. We were both watching the doorway. There was so little time. Then she spoke.

“I still wonder if I'm gay, Nellie. Do you?”

Her expression was so totally earnest, I winced inwardly. I would have liked to touch her, but I didn't want it misconstrued as taking advantage of the moment. I had an urge to put Jessica back in her arms so she could feel the comfort of warm nestling against her, but the baby was firmly latched onto me. The urge to comfort nearly over-rode the need for a careful answer.

“If you're asking whether I still love you, I do. But I don't wonder anymore whether I'm gay or not,” I answered.

“Well, you have a reason to be.”

“Does one need a reason?” I asked gently.

“No, I didn't mean that. It came out wrong.” She shook her head.

“Don't you think some people just fall in love with a person and gender is secondary?”

“Maybe, that would explain loving you then Paul.”

She took my hand off the coverlet, pressed it between her own. “My Nellie Isabelle.” She liked to use my combined names—her soft S and piquant L rounding the sounds till they lingered in her mouth. We smiled softly in separate directions. I knew how difficult it was for her to make declarative statements about love; for her it shifted the meaning from feeling to vow with betrayal implicit. She was grateful I created an opening for indirect expression.

“Will you love a man again?” she asked after a moment.

I balked at the question. I felt a sudden urge to pack. I had to laugh at myself, at the way Monique always pinned me with my own weighty generalizations. I did laugh.

“Monique, when you ask that question, my impulse is to lie … it's such a reflex by now. I've faked it for the outside world so often.”

“But I'm asking you really.”

“Well, I loved Carson, so it's possible. I can't say. The thought of hurting Jessica might prevent me. She has no father and then suddenly I have a lover?”

“You never know, maybe he could be a father to her.”

I withdrew my hand and put both my arms around Jessica. My voice was strident. “Why are you trying to make me so happily ever after with a man? Would it be reassuring to you?”

“You don't like Paul, do you?”

“I'm not predisposed to like him, but it doesn't have much to do with him, does it?”

“He has his tender side.”

“I know.” I answered without thinking, but she wasn't watching my face or she would have seen the admission there that she was working scrupulously to avoid—his flirting, his midnight excursion.

“He understands my ambition.” She sounded more plaintive than defensive. There were sounds in the kitchen of cupboards opening and water running.

“What about your passion?” I whispered.

She shrugged, but it was almost a jerk or a twitch, and she wouldn't look at me.

“Passion looks to me like unnecessary pain, like self-absorption, like selfishness. I can't help how I've changed. I'm going to make coffee.”

That morning was the first time I knew I wanted to go home. That I wanted to be away from Monique's questions as much as she wanted to be away from mine. In the bathroom at her house, soaping my hands with a scallop-shaped pink soap, I wanted to go home. But I wasn't thinking of the places I drive by now, every afternoon on my run to town: the old sloped houses with power lines looping from roof corner to roof corner and back across the railroad tracks; the trailer parks that look as much like tin cans washed up shoreside as anything else, plastic butterflies in increasing sizes alongside their doors; the 1920's bungalows converted into motels, teeny weeny novelties to unpack the kids into, 12 coats of paint thickened to their shingles; the downtown converted into a Coney Island of Amusement Park rides and Ye Olde Everything Stores with pull taffy machines and brass sailboats, and the original cannery now a restaurant full of kites. The tourists congregate downtown to buy postcards and T-shirts signifying their trip to a beach they never seem to spend any time on. No, it wasn't this. With the small pink soap in my hands, I remembered the purple snapdragons that grow in the wild wheat grass of the dunes. They fit on my fingers when I was a child. Thumb and forefinger of both hands. I made their velvet and scarlet skins kiss.

IV.

On the bus ride out here, I thought about how it's possible to set out on a journey in America
not
to discover oneself and succeed. From on-ramp to off-ramp, from Burger King to Burger King, Motel Six to Super Eight, Arby's, Bob's, Wendy's, Denny's, every place the same place. Why not be a chain-outlet person? Go home with the first person to mistake me for somebody they know. My father's already in trouble. I don't want him to be like anybody else.

Tomorrow I'll call him, I say to myself as I sink into sleep. I've been at his cottage nearly a week, wrapped head to toe in a gauze of exhaustion. This afternoon lightening and rain. The sky is the color and density of steel wool. The resistance of the air to my body moving through it makes me feel my own shape outlined in sweat. The lawns release fertilizer vapors in the humidity. Fireflies skitter over the dusk-darkened green, up into the black fingered maples. Then it comes, blue heat lightening sheeting across the lake. I stay awake for that.

The baby skims off my energy like cream. I don't ask myself where I'll be to have the baby. I nap. Mid-morning. Mid-afternoon. On the tweedy couch with the Hudson Bay Blanket over me. I don't ask myself what I would do if anything went wrong. Or maybe I do. Pick up the phone like anyone else, but it goes no further than that. I've missed the last train of thought to pull into the station. I can just keep up with feeding myself. My appetite is immortal. A sandwich on a plate looks like a party hors d'oeuvre.

Last night, I felt a slow tightening above my pubic bone, which drew upwards all the way to my breast bone. I felt muscles I never knew I had, crisscrossing like a basket woven around my baby. I went to the index of my
Complete Pregnancy
book. Don't ask me why they can get away with that title. It makes me shudder now to think of any pregnancy less than complete. I feel like my body is a giant cargo plane revving its engines on the runway. I am terrified the signal from the tower will be given too soon. I try not to but I think about my mother, like this, by herself and pregnant with me. And how do you feel after the hours and years of rocking and singing lullabies in that tone that teaches about desires never met, never satisfied.
When you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses
. And dressing the little body day after day and paint sets and play dough and cotton ball bunnies and Christmas ornaments made of two pound dough babies tilting your tree. If I called her, we could talk about the baby: a whole new safe subject. What a relief that would be to her. I don't know how anyone finds anything in that book in the middle of the night.
Rehearsal contractions
.…
Braxton Hicks
. Was he the guy who discovered them like the first man on the moon? As far as I'm concerned the entire index could come under the heading “Fears.” I don't like flipping around in that book. It keeps falling open to those gruesome photographs. Women getting double chins trying to look down there so hard and grimacing to see themselves distended in lurid color—cracked red and wrinkled black—about to shred like wet tissue paper while the caption reads: “The baby's skin is still crinkled up like a rose petal before it has opened,” when you can see its skin has the texture of an old turkey wattle.

I found a family photo album under a bunch of paperback mystery novels and crossword puzzle workbooks. It's incomplete, original intent abandoned. Pictures of the cottage from all four sides, east, west, north, and south. Then there's one with the three boys and their mother standing on the kitchen steps, but it's from too far away: four small white people squinting, standing in a line and decreasing in height like dry goods jars lined up on a counter: flour, sugar, coffee, tea. I'm glad my father is not in this one, the family shot. He's outside looking through a lens, like me. Then there are pictures of every room, all empty. The kitchen wallpaper is the same as it is now, yellow and white gingham. The bathroom is still pink. From the outside, the place doesn't look any different either. Maybe my father's wife had grand plans to remodel. “Before” pictures but no “after.”