The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (14 page)

… And Other Tales of Modern Family

In Refrain

Moss on the rooftops is the only greening thing of this season. Wood smoke chugs from the chimneys without making a difference to the sky: gray, gone gray, all gray. Every leaf has fallen from the apple tree. Clusters of apples cling close to the trunk, and the brown of the branches quivers like a violin next to a young girl's cheek. Blots of brightness held aloft, another smarter of color rotting on the ground. I fill my pockets, a woman no longer young, looking like someone's wife except she isn't someone's wife and for her it's twilight not suppertime and she's alone on a road on an island floating in a sea, it doesn't matter where, it's all one sea and somewhere there is another woman, her mother, bundled and walking alone. I polish the apples with my muffler, readying in my mind the wooden bowl where I will make the colors sing the image in refrain. It sings now still, this song for my brother, strains of a violin aching like tree limbs in the wind.

The moon when she comes is not kind. She takes a shaving off the landscape with the lens of her eye. Nothing is so black and white as the shadow of a man sliding across a picket fence. Even though the man is my neighbor I take to the house; the shadow he owns tonight is gargantuan. All the dogs take up the chorus, all the dogs laugh when she does. The moon has smeared lips; she pours my drink.

Your hands are scarred by metal and your clothes smell of engine oil, do you make anything of this? I always ask you because I know you don't and then things can just be themselves again as they are to you and I sleep better. I know I am too old for this. Don't worry. Jack will return soon and I won't call and for a time it will be all right. I count the times you cut me or bruised me. A brother's love. There's no man on earth I'd laugh about this for, except you. Your need to hurt me was the need to hurt me first, before anyone else could, because you felt the inevitability of it. And afterwards your ministrations were so tender, coaching me in lessons of survival. I count memories on an abacus, not for totals, but because I need to give the numbers weight and sound.
Clack
and
Smack
, I redeliver the blows.

I still cannot stand to be too happy. Like the hummingbirds at the window sill, their beaks stuck in the too sweet syrup, I whiffle my feathers against the air, batting atoms at ecstasy, returning but never staying at the source. Love is for me a nervous disorder; it makes my hands shake.

I'm older. My memories are out of order. My mind shuffles without grace, a newcomer at this table. I have someone now. Jack has put a stretch of time between me and all those others, those days and nights, to the next to the next to the next, one ticket one round, one ticket one ride, torn ticket stubs, half names, half numbers. Try to remember. Give gills to the snake, wings to the wolf. The lamb bleats with a forked tongue. Men call, years later, to tell me that I really meant something to them. They want to know if my hair is still long.

The succession has stopped succeeding, like escalator stairs that lower their teeth and disappear. I have chosen a man who leaves me on a regular basis. His profession, my safeguard.

Sometimes we can't talk and I am grateful. He doesn't exacerbate my discontent. I study the way our shoes have fallen on the floor. One clog lies sideways on the oriental rug, a capsized boat, buffeted by pattern and filling; the other moored in the corner. Jack's boots dropped side by side tilt on uneven heels away from each other.

We nap, stir, stretch, lap at each other like kittens. Love unconscious dreaming. We are buoys bobbing under and out to a wind of two breaths.

You help girls. You unclog carburetors, hook up water heaters, build dog kennels, loan tuition money, drill in deadbolts and don't fall in love. You climb in and out of beds wondering if you've done anyone a favor. You're still thinking about the woman you saw at the phone company, years ago, the day you waited in three lines. You waited in front of her. You waited behind her. You fell in love with the way she carried her body, as though she would own it always. You don't want to know her. You want to watch her in line after line, unconscious of what it is you are waiting for.

We were traded as children, though I don't know what went into the bargain. I try to imagine our two grandmothers together, one gaining and one giving up children, one elegant and spare with legs made for waltzing, the other stout with hands of care swollen around her wedding bands. We were children of parents who had split, were splitting themselves again with new people somewhere far away. You stood in the shuttered study, spinning the globe, spinning it, spinning it.

There were so many systems to learn and everywhere we walked we walked around her. Our father's mother. She closed sandwich bags with wooden clothes pins, arranged camelias in vases, kumquats in bowls. We were good children and suffered her arrangement. She taught you to play cards. She showed me her high school yearbook and turning the pages told me who was dead and who was living and I looked closely at the youthful faces there as though I could detect the difference. We weeded in her garden and she paid us a penny a weed. We had to count the weeds. I don't remember more. Except that I was glad to leave. The darkness in her house was an olive green, hard green, green that lives in shadow and smells like linen in an old woman's closet.

I remember your bright voice in the morning air, the seriousness with which you snapped on your seatbelt at our grandmother's request, then turned to the back seat and made sure that I obeyed yours. I looked out the window and let the neighborhoods slide by, expecting from the car the same calm disinterest I'd felt when the airplane wheels left the runway in Germany. I prepared for air, for clouds, for more of nothing while you displayed an alertness that, if those who look for early signs are right, showed you were the one who bore the burden of mistrust. You watched for freeway signs and asked about distances, for all I know, you memorized the way back.

“Here fishy, fishy.”

I ignored you. I was curled up in the wing chair in my grandfather's study. It was a black, massive, patent leather beast with brass rivets, relic of a time when rooms were made to be masculine or feminine. My bare legs stuck to its glossy surface and I slid into my grandfather's deep dent. The footstool curled back like a genie's slipper. The wallpaper vine curved and twisted on the walls, its leaves delicately shaded in near perfect realism. The card table bore a petit point mandala of geometric design and its feet were bronze bird claws clutching globes of solid glass. On it lay an elephant tusk, elaborately scrimshawed, two rows of holes marking its purpose as a Scoreboard. I marched the pegs up and down, first mother, then father: mother father mother father.

On the mantel stood a collection of old piggy banks, the hunter who stood erect with a penny balanced on the barrel, the bird whose wings opened at the shot and drop of the coin; at the other end a heavy forlorn Negro head who lifted the penny to his lips and swallowed with a roll of his eyes. I was cranking the hand up to his lips when I heard your voice again, in the front hall.

“Here fishy, fishy.”

Just tall enough to hold the fishing rod over the banister, you smile at me as you bounce the line. I let you make me want the hook, round like a dandelion, composed of many barbs. It isn't enough to invite me, you have to make me want it. I am beguiling even then, holding out the skirt of my pinafore, twirling beneath your hook … maybe, maybe not. “Fishy,” you call, sing-songing it, “fishy, let me catch you.” I take it in the fullness of my lower lip, feel the thin barbs catch, sting and tug. I may have cried when my grandfather removed it, but what I remember is the beseeching tone in your voice. It is the tone I've responded to in other men's voices, the hook that cannot be cut out.

I liked Angelina's voice; I always associated it with the warm sugar smell of cakes baking. I liked her mouth full of turned teeth and black gaps and gold. The house belonged to my grandmother, but the kitchen was Angelina's. She named the animals: the dog was Blackie, the cat was Whitey, nobody thought anything of it. Maybe she told her friends and they laughed at us. I don't know. I had never seen a black person before I met her. She reached her hand towards me and I took it and licked it firmly from one side to the other. Then I heard her laugh. “She thinks I'm chocolate!” I didn't think she was chocolate, but something about her had permitted it. You hung back, watching. I didn't know anything about watching. I wanted to reach out and taste people.

I was about five then, almost as tall as the fifty pound bag of dog food on the back porch, which I regularly dipped into. You found that it wasn't hard to persuade a sister who ate dog kibble to eat snail pellets. You told me they were tootsie rolls.

I never thought you were cruel, and I don't believe you are now. I cried when I heard you being spanked. I crept in your bed that night and you put your arms around me even as you slept. What I remembered was the jagged spoon the doctor held out to me, shadowing it with his other hand. The edge was serrated, all the way around. My first impression of calculated cruelty. I don't know what he would have done if I hadn't swallowed the root-bitter syrup. My grandmother waited in the waiting room. I took it solemnly. The belly of the spoon was smooth and familiar against my tongue; the ridges of the spoon tickled at the corners of my mouth.

You told me we had to let some blood out of my swollen finger. It was turning purple; there was a red line beneath the tin ring, the juice can poptop my grandmother had told me not to put on. I did it because I was marrying in my mind, one day forever … a home … not a man. I couldn't construct a man's face that was fantasy, but I unpacked my home from a suitcase, at the end of a road, miles of jet black, smooth as silk stockings. And my face was not womanly, nor beautiful, nor my mother's blanched by the camera's flash. It was my infant face—bald sleep creased moon. For years, I wore a found key around my neck on a ribbon, so I could be always, anywhere, knowing and going home.

But the finger was dying, and you told me we had to let some blood out. We got up early and padded down the halls of the ticking house. I never questioned our secrecy. You knew more about me than the adults. Your solutions never meant leaving me.

The kitchen is filled with the damp shadow of the garden. The sharpest knife is the biggest knife. You tell me to stare at something, the blue glow of the pilot lights in the black stove. I offer my hand on the cutting board. My mind offers my body for sacrifice. My body would have offered my mind. The body has an intelligence of its own. The body wields fear. I pull away. I pull all four fingers across the blade.

Sometimes I am able to draw people to me. They see an unusual animatedness and mistake it for beauty. I sweep them into my sorrow. It's all so operatic, singing at knife point like Madame Butterfly, holding the blade there yourself. Still I cry when I hear that music. I do.

It happens. The heart becomes swollen from too much blood in it, constricted by some pain, banded round its beating part. We don't want to die, just let some blood out.

When I saw my mother again, she was spotted, head to foot pink blotches like the marks left by kisses or pinches or bites. She'd developed an allergy to everything, not only the foreign land and man she'd been in, with, within, but to eggs and sunlight and elastic. I didn't see the blotches as marks on her skin. I saw them as wounds beneath the skin, visible because her skin had thinned, etiolated, turned translucent. And whatever it was that was wounding her, it was everywhere. We couldn't protect her.

The disease vindicated her family and they paid for it—doctors, tests—the university medical center tracing it to a microbe created when the bacteria of a Mexican fish combined with the plaque of her teeth. In the mornings, she cut up my banana, glaring at the newspaper her father used to shield himself, looking at me when he lowered it. In the afternoons, she came home with needle marks up and down the pale insides of her arms. She came home punctured. Her family felt it was fitting punishment. No one ever said so: condemnation served up with their concern. She had to swallow.

My father had told her that what she knew with her senses was untrue. The body went on with its signals, wielding fear. She had her affair in the open, in the emptiness, the place swept clean of despair. It didn't help to show my father his cowardice. If he could kill her, he wanted her back.

The heart gone black. Victory so often means alone … only alone. She took us in her arms and told us we were hers always, she was ours always. Could we believe her? She is still waiting to hear us say yes, even now, yes.

I don't know if children are cruel or if they act in protest, wishing to be sent back to a place they have a nascent memory of, and killing … it's curiosity about the passage. I had a small Susie Homemaker oven for baking Small Susie Homemaker cakes that never rose to the satisfying heights of those Angelina made. It came with a viewer window big enough for two children to look through if they put their heads side by side, which is what my brother and I did, making audible gasps as we watched our offering of insects and slugs shrivel on a bed of kitty litter.

My mother became a secretary and rented us a small house. We learned to hurry. We drank blender breakfasts of Tiger's Milk, bananas and raw eggs. They were still sliding down our throats as we rode the school bus. Sometimes long strings of egg white, stretching, dropping all of sudden into a bulge and quivering at stomach bottom.

Her parents sent over men who smelled like ice buckets: maraschino sweet, fumy and moist. She went out with each one once. While she was on the telephone, she drew question marks on a note pad. Then she would turn the pad upside down.
Turn a question mark upside down, hook yourself
.

My mother's loneliness was violent. She clenched her teeth on it.
I am not … grunt, strain, sweat … lonely
. She inflicted activity on the world. When vines threatened to tug our little house down by one corner, she bought an electric chainsaw. I watched her slash through the mess, watched the loosed snarl slide from the roof and wrestle with my mother. She came up waving the saw, hacking with a vengeance, severing every vine, kicking the tangle from her feet, whirling around to take the devil's tail, cutting clean through the cord itself. Silence. Finale. She always laughed then.