The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (6 page)

“You might pass the exam if you took it.”

He feared my candor. “But you haven't taught me anything.”

“I've explained the problems over and over.”

“Yes, but always the same way.”

“Look, I'm trying to be a nice guy here.”

“No, you're not. You don't want administration to hear why I refused to take the final.”

He snorted, scoffed before swinging his rear around on his boot heel. “I'm not worried about my standing here, but you ought to be.”

I didn't follow him back in, and he left me staring at the whole green playing field in front of me.
Standing where?
The chain link hood over the pitcher's mound looked like a net holding me from the sky.

When my mother called Mr. Flotre, he told her that he was terribly busy.
Of course you're busy
, she said,
I expect you to be busy
. But she was battle weary by then, decided to let me go to junior college and bang out my own consequences.

I became man-eating to keep my mother at a distance. In a man-slather. So I could say,
Look, I get along with all these men. It wasn't the men. It was you
. The summer I turned eighteen, I slept with every man at the motel who'd have me. Ever seen those check-out time questionnaires that come with their own envelope?
Tell us how we're pleasing you
. What could she do? Close the motel?

She used to wait up under the porch light swirling with insects. I could smell the smoke of her cigarettes as I crunched across the drive.

They won't make you happy
.

What makes you think you look so happy?

Maybe you'll be luckier than me
.

I intend to find out. I'm not the bellhop of love you know, I don't have to drag your Samsonite up and down stairs for the rest of my life
.

Well, don't get pregnant. Unless you want to be a suitcase
.

One morning as she was putting away my laundry, she found the crumpled tube of Ortho-Gynol nesting in my underwear. I watched from the bed. She picked it up between her fingers the way you would a dead moth, by its wings.
Getting a lot of mileage out of this, I see
. Then she dropped it back in and closed the drawer.

My mother had her little ways of getting even … all the little ways she needed me. Even in high school when I tried having an honest-to-god boyfriend. If she had a compliment for one of them, it also turned out to be a slight. Oh, she took them into her confidence, and they liked her. Nellie. Nothing like their mothers. Thin, rangy, smoking, leaning over the motel front desk, offering them her cigarettes. Still sexy too, the way her front teeth push forward like a flock of birds in V-formation, that permanent, indeterminate sort of smile her lips have to close over to extinguish. And the boys swaggered a bit in her presence: woman with a motel. It was almost as good as being in a bar, and they couldn't go to bars yet. Oh, she genuinely enjoyed them too, even as she found ways to make them know they were exchangeable, disposable.
Jeremy, I think I like you. I think you might be alright. Maybe the finest man to come along
. And sometime later his mind would jog the implicit words into the blank her smile had cleared:
finest to come along
(after all the others).
Tim, you're the first man around here who can fix things, not just jerry-rig 'em
(among the many who've tried). And all the while she told them how much she and I were alike, how much she understood her daughter's needs and so granted total freedom. Until finally the fellow himself had to wonder why the others had failed. And the more I tried to make myself different, the more mystery my mother accrued.

On two occasions, my mother had to resort to the photo albums because the boys simply weren't bright enough for her technique to succeed. She patted the couch cushions to signal the most comfortable spot for him to wait while I finished dressing. The albums she chose were full of prom-dates, beach kissing, camping trips, boyfriends in shape and size as different as a batch of blocks. Sometimes I found my desire for men all dried up, and in its place, the tart sweet taste of my mother's love like the dart of a thorn on my tongue.

V.

One week, seven days, no phone call, no letter, nothing from Jess. I've started talking to myself as I move through the day.
I talk to myself because I like to hear a sane person think
. That's what my mother used to say. I want a way to explain things to Jess that won't sound like I'm blaming my decisions on bad advice. She wants to hold me accountable. Somehow what I've done is worse than unplanned single parenthood, marriages scattered right and left like demolition derby hulks. I spared her that but she spares me nothing. Why is it so much more threatening that I should
choose
to be a single mother, well-prepared for it I might add. I guess divorce, desertion, and death are preferable; I could claim victimhood and cast myself in some softer light. But I was raised not to speak of what I endured, that was part of triumphing over it. Later, in the Seventies, we newly lesbian read Mary Daly, theological maverick of our collective:
Beyond God the Father
. I remember the joke:
Madonna, Madonna, why are you crying? Answer: I wanted a girl
. Well I have one and she is unforgiving as flint. So much for female nurturance.
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one
. Lucky mom. You get it first …

There's a distinction, I realize, between losing a father and never having one. Have I tampered with God's creation? Will she be the only one in class to read Frankenstein as a family history?

No father
. For my mother it was tantamount to saying there is no god. My daughter wants to break me down into simple wrong and right. She wants to break me down like an interrogator. Alright then. Hear my confession in your bulb-bright room. Hear it all. How my father viewed your creation as immoral because I'd combined the double whammies of masturbation and adultery. I wanted to speak the truth even though I was counseled by the doctor to secrecy. My father was dying and I told him, because he
knew
me; he knew I'd been raped and he knew I'd loved Carson. I'd been away so long I'd forgotten the heroic family code of pretending. I violated it. My mother treated me as though I'd killed him with my news. My brothers joined her. They pee a fine mist, that lot. Isn't it all so sad? How do I make Jess believe that I haven't constructed this to exonerate myself? I don't want pity. I gave her the happy story so she woudn't have to pity me.

What does Jess really want to know? I used to dream I carried the child of my attacker and delivered it dead through my mouth, spitting out the black blood clots and smiling because I'd won and he'd never enter me again. I'm like a man who refers to the baby in his wife's belly as “it” because he can't bear to say the word baby. I can't bear to use the word “father.” Does she want to know how it felt years later when a doctor told me that postmortem sperm retrieval is possible. Yes, sperm production is the last bodily function to cease in a man. I shouldn't wonder that Jess is so driven to find him. Spermatazoa. Little vehicle of him that once swam to me, little summary in a squiggle. Does she want to know now that I dreamt of Carson's body torn open the way you can pull apart a ripe peach and me in the mud with my seventy-nine cent eyedropper and his last words delivered in black and white like a World War II movie:
You have to do it
.

It hurt me—like disloyalty to Carson—when she rejected the story I'd raised her on. She can't see me as a child with him on the harvest beach, not far from the mud flats and oyster beds. Low tide, the eel grass lying flat, the clams squirting into the heat at intervals, old couples in canvas hats carrying shovels and digging. We searched for the barnacled siphons of horse clams protruding through the sand. Though they look like sea anemones, when you start digging they're feet long. They squirt and pull away from you as fast as you can dig. It's no wonder they're called horse clams; their siphons wrinkled, reminiscent, just the right size. We shrieked and taunted each other.
You grab it! No, you grab it!
The tip retracting like a barnacled foreskin, the muscular strength of the thing a match for us, and the whole situation some strange archetypal mix-up, the way dreams patch images upon each other and reverse them—being pulled into a hole by a penis in reverse. Then a kind of delivery, pulling forth a two or three pound clam: blue brown in its shell, milky and opalescent at its rim. How shyly we looked at each other over our prize. After Carson died, I would dream the memories, and it was hard not to believe I hadn't conceived in my dreams.

Jess wants me to admit I need someone other than her. And I want her to admit that the others can't replace me. If she had to sleep with an airplane load of men, (a boat full, a motel's worth!), I'm glad actually that I could provide them. Of course she did it right here thinking only to make me mad but it gave me the chance to watch over her. I finally told her one night she couldn't be the whore of healing. After Vietnam, my whole generation of men were wounded, whether they went over or not. I spent hours with J.T. who used to threaten suicide regularly, playing Russian roulette on the phone. I could hear the click of the hammer when he pulled the trigger. Then his sister told me he was just flicking a Bic lighter into the receiver. You tell me which was worse—his suicidal tendencies or his sick humor—since you think my pessimism is so depressing.

I understand more than she thinks. In high school, I had a best friend, Christine. We saw each other off to college, made sure of it. But when Christine came home for Christmas, she set about systematically seducing not only my brother but also Carson, home from boot camp. And seduce them she did, quite successfully. Perhaps in her distorted way, she simply wanted to join my family. Of course I felt like a fire hydrant a dog had marked on his morning rounds. And Christine ran up my phone bill with her weeping, her remorse. A drinking problem.… She didn't know herself that she was going to do it. The latter seems true enough but I think it takes an act of will to stay that drunk all weekend—drunkeness with stamina, with intent. Years later, I wondered if Christine hadn't simply wanted to sleep with me. Less as an act of homoeroticism than cannibalism through sexuality. The cannibal eats the strong heart of the warrior whose strength he intends to have. But I'm uncharitable here. Easier to leap to anger than fall in sorrow, always my flaw. And I still sorrow over Christine, an adopted child whose sister (also adopted) wound up in an asylum for life after which the parents who'd chosen Christine cast her off. Where Christine didn't have blood ties, perhaps she tried to forge them through the primacy of sex. Or she wanted a sister-love, a mother-love that was unconditional and she chose to test mine.

So my little bird, my daughter, you seek to bind a brother to you, or is it a father? Or would you like to eat their hearts for strength? My love seems to offer you so little.

VI.

When I first found out I was pregnant, I felt like I'd been hijacked … someone else was flying the plane, telling me where to land in nine months while down below I could still make out my home town. In the afternoon, the exhaustion comes. I sit in one of the porch chairs with the afghan over me and the weak fall sun on my face. I can barely blink. Stillness. I feel like a lizard waiting for an insect to land on the end of its nose. This morning the lake was absolutely clear. I could see the sand bars, gold bands beneath cerulean blue; now the lake is chalky and pale. Muted like me.

I doze to the lapping of the waves and the pattering of birch leaves, half-conscious, floating in the sounds. Monarch butterflies move lightly on the breeze. These waking dreams are of last year's men, each one a vignette for a goodbye unsaid. These are the truer goodbyes, the images stored up against the mornings of departure. With our clothes off, the mannerisms of self-protection are so obvious. I think my ass is too big so I'm always backing out of rooms or walking sideways. You have to pretend you don't notice their inward flinch even though they know you're pretending; then they're willing to tell you things. You're the one they can talk to.

I wanted to know about the hurt that men hide. There was something about each of those men, even if they were rough with me or condescending or painfully grateful or remembering someone else they still loved. The man who worked the septic lines had carpal tunnel in both wrists. His hands would go numb in the middle of the night and he would wake up and shake them back to life again. Too many years of picking strawberries, picking fish, shucking oysters, and packing meat. He made crude jokes afterwards. “I always say, don't sweat the petty things, pet the sweaty things.” The newly-divorced maritime engineer couldn't manage making love but could laugh at himself: “This rubber needs suspenders,” he said. He cooked me blueberry pancakes … as if he had to make up for it, and I wished for awhile that he would come back. The fat-boy trucker from Kansas constantly apologized for his “great plains manners,” and profusely thanked me for his first blow job. He made trucking sound like mythology: “There wasn't a thimble full of blue sky in that semi loaded with beans.” The ex-logger who limped and waited for the Department of Labor and Industry to settle his claim called his mother and his sisters when he got out of bed with me—to tell them what he would have for dinner. The retired teacher on vacation with his botany books and his telescope recited for me—Shakespearean sonnets, his favorite parts of
Moby Dick
. After his fifth scotch he'd forget and recite them again, always the same passages. The man who ran a salvage yard for boat parts showed me his wallet's worth of snap shots: wives and children strewn around the state like confetti.