The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (10 page)

“So what happened over the weekend?”

“Nothing.”

“Don't give me that.”

“I'm telling you, nothing. The woman has no lips. I couldn't find anything to get a purchase on.”

“You should go out with Sheila. Talk about lips. She could swallow a Frosty Snowcone.”

“Is that a personal recommendation?”

“Maybe.”

“Man, I don't want to get wet where you've been.”

Then the conversation turned on Lyle, the youngest of them, not yet eighteen. I hadn't known he was an expectant father. But why should I? I don't hang around the P.O. boxes with the townies. He was quiet while the others enjoyed themselves at his expense.

“Any day now, huh, Lyle?”

“Yep, she's a week overdue.”

“Boy, the tit fairy sure waved the wand on her.”

“Jugs, man, milk jugs.”

“I remember when my cat leaked milk all over our house.”

“Gross out.”

“What flavor do you think it'll be, Lyle? Chocolate, strawberry, vanilla.”

“Hey Lyle, the demands are never gonna end now. Fu-fu needs a golden rattle and a silver spoon.”

“How much are you gonna make an hour after you get your wages garnished? Think about that man.”

“Look at the bright side. Maybe it'll be born mentally retarded and then the state will have to take care of it.”

They all stopped in their tracks when I came around the corner shouting. “I heard that! Every word.”

Randy and Chris exchanged glances, prepared to endure me and get it over with, but Lyle met my eye. I was shouting after all.

“I heard that! You little shits! On TV it may look like men run the world but this is my motel and I'm the reason your sorry asses have employment, except that you, Randy and Chris, no longer do. That's right. Get out of here.”

Randy dropped his brush in the gallon of sealant and I watched while it sank. Chris said, “Shoee, Ms. Political,” as he stepped off the deck of number 8. “Bet she never gets any.”

“Shut up,” said Randy as they headed for the truck.

I was so mad my scalp was sweating, and my eyes were stinging with tears. Then Lyle said quietly “Mrs. Friberg, you're going to have memorial tennis shoes on this patio if you don't move soon.”

I was standing right in the damn sealant, the cheap rubber of my Payless sneakers on the verge of meltdown adhesion. I started laughing. “Aren't I a woman who won't budge?”

“Set in your ways, as they say,” he ventured and smiled. Then he stepped off the patio and walked over the crab grass to my side and gave me a hand.
Scritch, scritch
, and I was free, standing close enough to him for a moment to see the cuts he'd made shaving. He stepped back respectfully and was silent, watching the blinker lights on the truck as it pulled out of the driveway. Then he spoke, his head slightly to one side, as though I might not want to look at him. “I was tired of those two jawing all day about what they could do to women. Thank you ma'am. I need this job.”

I nodded, “You're welcome, Lyle. I'll keep you on as long as I can.” Then I
squitched
my way to the office in as dignified a manner as I could manage. I sat on the steps unlacing my shoes, the image of the small lacerations on the underside of Lyle's neck so sweet and painful I wanted to run to him and tell him about Jess and the baby, but I didn't. And why not? A soda, some solace, a break. With the right timing it amounts to a lot. I didn't used to think so. It was the kind of thing Jess would have done.

At The Albatross, there's a sign taped to the cash register:
NO BRAINS, NO SERVICE
. The massive back bar was brought down from a hotel in Alaska; black walnut cherubim frolic around the mirror, little rumps of innocence in love with temple columns and falling blossoms. It could make you maudlin except the place is so loud, there's no way to fall into a romantic reverie. Pool balls clack and roll on the table, the bartender dumps a lug of ice and swears, a man shouts over my head. The sounds keep me nervous, shaken up like salad dressing.

I know the bartender, Maynard. He's a tile and mortar man, did a bang-up job on a bathroom when the black and pink tile floor buckled. He's got snappy blue eyes, and he's never let anyone bother me. His reputation for having a temper is local lore—supposedly he left a spade in some guy's head years back yelling “Want a piece of pie?” Now he's so swollen with booze and bellicosity, his red cheeks look like they've been pattied up for the grill.

“How're you?” I ask.

“F.I.N.E.” he answers, spelling it out. “Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional. How about you?”

I shrug. “My daughter's helping me build character, I'm developing a Mt. Rushmore brow. Can you see the scaffolding on my forehead, the little guys pinging away with ball-peen hammers.”

He squints at me smiling. “Right, another goddamn growth experience.”

“She's putting me through changes.” I banter, because he knows I'm not here for specifics.
Just the red red robin bob bob bobbin along
.

After he's fixed my brandy, Maynard suddenly reaches across the bar and lands a handshake next to my shoulder. “Frank, how's it going?” From my perspective, the handshake looks like a moment of miniature thumb wrestling. When it's over I look down the length of arm anchored to man-bulk, this
basso profundo
standing behind me and stirring up the hair on my neck.

“Me?” Frank fairly shouts, “I'm putting 30,000 dollar nets in the water and bringing up nothing. I own the boat and I haven't made a crew share. I'd sell my house but my ex-wife is in it. The bank's about to repossess my boat. That's this season.”

“Drink coming up,” Maynard says, making a long amber pour into a barrel glass.

“Hey, get her one too,” he motions towards me. “I bet you like a man who doesn't try to impress you with money.”

I flicker over him, quick take on the man: an impression of glistening, darkly, green eyes, a moment of engagement.
So what of it? What's it to you?
He juts his jaw at me, looks back to Maynard. Then I try not to look, but I feel the man's weight shifting onto the bar stool. I can hear the creasing and uncreasing of his leather jacket as he gets his wallet out. I keep my vision peripheral, limited to the black jacket which is so old the wear marks show the brown of the original hide, beyond that the belt and the Buck knife sheath and the swell of one buttock.

“Hey,” he says to me, more directly. “You look like a garden party and I look like I'm going to a rumble. Mind if I pull up?”

“No,” I say, shrugging habitually. “I like a man who doesn't try to impress me.”

“Because no man can, right?” He laughs easily. I've seen him around for years.

“It's boring to be a trained seal with a ball on your nose,” I answer. More ice crashes behind the bar and suddenly nothing is funny to me anymore. If I told these guys about my workmen, wouldn't they shrug it off as some foolishness? Bar humor. The down-and-out, the underdog, the disillusioned, the dead-end, the fears self-fulfilled, and my downy cheeked child forced to chug-a-lug her first fill of it. I turn fully towards him, in case that's what he wants: a look.

“Listen, I don't have to laugh at your bitter jokes.”

“Hey, I only laugh at my own jokes out of courtesy. I was raised to be polite.” He puts one elbow on the bar, effectively shielding himself from me and lights a cigarette.

I sigh in a long stream of smoke. “I'm sorry. I don't like men much in general.”

He turns back to look at me. My age is enough to let him know I'm not trying to be cute and challenging; I don't try to gauge my looks much anymore. I'm a weather vane, still recognizable. His dark eyes are set too close together, his rather large nose actually has a divot in it, he's got vertical wind lines on both cheeks and a jaw like an icebreaker's prow—a face made for flinching.

“I'm one in a multitude, darling,” he says, up-ending his drink until the ice cubes crash against his teeth, down-ending it with precision. “And I'm not going to try to
im
press you or
de
press you or
com
press you or even
press
you. I don't like pressure myself.”

“Were you in Vietnam?”

“Bingo. But you won't find me shouting about buddies and bodies in your ear. I don't like to talk about it.”

“So what do you shout about?”

He raises an eyebrow skeptically and smiles. Clearly, the subject is off limits. Then he goes on. “Let's talk about this. When a lady looks at you like she's got to be afraid. And some son of a bitch has given her good cause. Most you can do is look at her before the light changes to green and gun it.”

“It's true. Anything you say only makes you more suspect.”

“So all that's left is how you look when you're saying it. No impression you can make, only one she can take.”

He snorts and looks at me then back at the bar mirror. When he shouts, I twitch.

“Hey, Maynard, Gallon up. Bring the lady a refresher.” The bartender spins back from the bottles and gives me a bemused, flattering look. Frank turns back to me; he's on a roll.

“What's the smartest thing I can think of? Don't analyze other people's pain. Don't assume it's going to make sense.” His nostrils flare and his eyes are stark and wide. “One guy was my neighbor, lost part of his head in 'Nam. They filled it up with putty or something, covered it over. When we got back, he used to go to this one spot and just watch the water, you know, for hours. Then this business man comes along and builds a big old house. One day, they find the whole family dead, knifed. That's why he did it … cause the guy blocked his fucking view. What does that tell you about war?”

“Maybe he should have just put the guy's eyes out.”

He taps his finger to his lips, looking at me a moment.

“When I came back, I used to touch up old photos, an uncle's business. Once I'm touching up a photo for a family whose son had died. In the picture, his eyes were closed. They wanted me to paint them open. Shit, it creeped me, like prying back the corpse's lids, dreaming about some really terrible accusatory look. And the whole family fighting over what color this kid's eyes were.”

It's a good story. His voice rumbles out a rhythm and my body responds to the bass line in his voice … must be why I feel like fighting with him.

“Eye color's important enough in a family to fight about.”

“I know, I know,” he says, waving his ash over the bar. “Except I couldn't determine it for these people. Here.” He's riffling through his wallet, unstuffing it all over the bar. “Here,” he hands me a tiny portrait of a madonna and child, “that's whose eyes I painted, icon eyes, like all the ones I could remember watching me, watching my back go out that door.” He extinguishes his cigarette by rolling the ember off the end and leaving it to die out, and he won't look at me, determined to watch the last wisps as some ritual of wretchedness.

I snort some of my smoke at him. “Yeah, well, I lost someone to 'Nam, his face is blurry now, all of him really, except his hands.”
I remember his hands as if no one else had ever touched me
.

He turns his eyes to me, a charismatic flicker far off in the darkness, a flame I begin to walk towards across primordial cess. Then we extinguish it by looking back into our drinks.

“So,” he says, looking up abruptly and lighting another cigarette.

“Where's your old man, old rain in the face?”

“I keep him in a test tube.”

“Nah,” he answers, “You're not into that cryogenics and sci-fi dry ice. Bring him back when he's grateful, right?”

“No, I don't want him back at all. I mean it. I had a daughter by artificial insemination.”

He stubs out his cigarette with a lot of unnecessary mashing and says “Yeah but …” then turns to me abruptly. “It belonged to this dead guy right, the one you loved in 'Nam.”

“No, but I wished it did, sometimes I almost believed it.”

“I get it,” he says, nodding not to me but the bar, “I got your number. I dialed it.”

“Talking about the war. Isn't this like carbon dating bones or counting tree rings? Seeing how far back the marks go.”

“I don't care how we do it. Carbon date me if you have to. Count the rings around my eyes. But date me. We'll take a drive, okay?” I look at him long enough to acknowledge the question, then straight ahead. I want to see the side of his face that isn't turned toward me, that's reflected in the backbar mirror, but he's onto me, looking already at us there, as though we were in another room, split-off dream doubles whose intensity and urgency is everywhere apparent. In the mirror, I can't resist it; his face is openly waiting and hurting and blameless.

“Those people,” he says, making a hook of his thumb and gesturing toward the mirror, “They want to talk to us.” But by now I'm rummaging around for more cigarettes, hunting for something ironic to say, but feeling leached of it—the urge toward irony the only bit of residue left.

“Here,” he says, expertly sliding his pack on the bar so that two are exposed. “Have one of mine.”

But in my mind we're still moving around in the mirror-room like sleepwalkers. I imagine Heaven Hotel—a suite in the sky, silver outside our windows, a room that begins with the small pleasures of anticipating pleasure.

“Listen,” I say, “I came here to make myself cry. My daughter ran away. I never normally come here. I usually drink at home.”

“And I'm messing up your plans by making you laugh?” He alternates beats with the thumb and finger of one hand against the wood. “What? You want to be alone? You want to read the paper? Here, I'll get it for you, that'll cheer you up.”

He actually gets up off the stool before I grab his arm, but I've got my purse hooked to my wrist and I'm trying to save my drink. There's too much of the man and he takes me with him. I fall to my knees before he scoops me up by my armpits and deposits me back on my stool. He stays there, heating the air close to my face, and I feel like a child who has been lifted up high and set on a counter to see everything—restful when the fluster passes. He still has his arm up my back, steadying and solid as the back of a chair. “Schucks,” he says, “You didn't have to propose. I'm too old for that shit anyway.”