The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (4 page)

The boys are sitting around a large mixing bowl on the floor. The eldest has secured the bowl with his feet. The toddler is curling his toes as he sucks frosting from his fingers. The youngest is tracing over the glitter whorls in the linoleum with one chocolate coated finger. My mother has pictures of me like this, straddling a bowl with frosting on my face.

I have to admit I don't like the pictures with my father's wife in them, but I make myself look. She's sitting on the beach in a one piece suit, broad-striped as a beach chair, and she's wearing a straw hat with a brim that curls up ridiculously. But I'm not being unkind. I can see by her smile that she's terribly self-conscious, even about having her picture taken, and that her self-consciousness is her charm. She's so modestly genuine, she could never be stylish, not for a minute, and she knows it. A pained admission to the camera's eye. The baby in her lap looks toward the water, unaware of her embarrassment.

There are endless pictures of the boys on the beach, digging dog-style, dripping sand castles into spires and turrets, scampering in and out of the little doorway. Then there's one of my father at twilight, sitting on a log with his arms around the shoulders of the son who looks like me, the baby newly on his feet. The baby stands with his heels together, his stout legs bowed from locking his knees. He's clutching a fold of pant fabric with one hand while the other rests at his side, slightly curled. The image arrests me. The fisting and unfisting hands of babies. It's easy for me to cry, wishing I were the one guarded in the enclosure of my father's arms. It's easy for me to idealize him; we have no family history of ambivalence.

Pictures of a white-muzzled family dog with a beach umbrella clenched between his stubby teeth. Suddenly, I know there's no one that would look at this album and sob but me. A person might look at my mother's photo album and wonder the obvious: Where is the father? Who is this other woman? A relative? Of course it's Angie, my other mother. But whatever they thought, they'd sit back, fold their hands and say: Well the child looks happy enough. She was. She's digging trenches, dog-paddling to shore, smiling while her mother pushes her around in a wheelbarrow. She's doing all the things these children are doing. I could glue most of the pictures together in the same book and you'd think it was the same beach. That would be one way to have a family get-together. Maybe there's something to it. Why his was the sperm that took.

In this one, they're building balsa wood gliders at the kitchen table. There are cookies on a platter. The glider decals are collected in a shoe box. My father and his first son are using a nail file to deepen an insert slit. The other boy stands behind my father's chair rubbing his eye. It's taking too long for anything to happen. The youngest is holding onto the table ledge, back for another cookie. My father's face is in profile. Back lit, it looks less harsh, less bullet shaped. Long, like the patient profile of the crescent moon in nursery rhymes. Hey Diddle Diddle. I recognize something in the softening. It's only love that makes me pretty. My face has the charm of a dark urn by candlelight. I lengthen the flame.

My father stands in a field of sand and scrub grass flying a model airplane on a string. His youngest son, the one who looks like me, stands knee-high beside him. A series of snapshots take the plane full circle. My father keeps a fierce eye on the plane, even when it flies across the sun. He has stopped trying to make out what his son is saying. He is flying the plane. He has gone to the sky. Upwind, the sound bursts about the boy's ears; downwind, it fades to a buzz. He is not looking at the plane. He is looking for a way out of the panic circumscribed by noise. The father squints; the boy winces. Upwind, downwind. My ears ring from the picture. Is this too what I missed?

I search the closets upstairs and find an old playpen, toys in a laundry basket. A string of wooden ducks made of thread spools with wings like little paddles that go round when you pull the string. Six miniature milk bottles that fit into a carrying crate with a handle. A ballasted bird with a convex underside; she'll jingle but she won't tip over. I sit on the floor remembering when my hands fit the shapes of these things.

My pre-school was in a converted brick warehouse. Huge windows began six feet above rows of cubbies and coathooks. I was happy at my projects: gluing macaroni to kleenex boxes, rolling marbles over blobs of paint in a box top, shaping little bears out of cinnamon and applesauce that the teacher later baked. And dreamily I looked up at those windows, where because I couldn't see their trunks, the branches of the trees seemed to float by on a current of cumulus clouds.

It must have been around Christmas time. We were cutting chains of angels in construction paper and trying to peel the points of stick-on stars out whole. Our mommies were the chain of angels that wound around our days. Our mommies dropped us off and kissed us goodbye and picked us up and kissed us hello, and our teachers were altogether mommy-like and Jesus in the picture belonged to all the children. I went to hang my vinyl apron on the wall and I saw a man standing beside the alphabet chart, and a boy named Courtney disengaging from the group to run to him.
Poppa, you came to get me!
And the man went down on one knee and gathered him up and carried him legs dangling to collect their things from the cubby. My mother told me my poppa was with God, that he died in the war being brave, and she showed me a picture in a rosewood frame. I wanted to make angels wearing pants. I know now the picture was of Carson, her high school sweetheart who died in Vietnam. Even though she lied to me, her tears were real.

Daily, my mother filled my pockets with raisins and dried apricots. Once I snuck my hamster out of his cage in the kitchen and put him in the pocket of my pea coat. By recess, he'd eaten through the sweetened lining, and I could feel him bunching his little body to sleep along the hemline. At home, my mother laughed as she stripped the seams to find him. He was groggy from dehydration but she didn't scold me. At dinner, we had contests to see who could suck up the longest noodle. Her laughter and mine. I hear it still buffeting against the bones of my skull. This last year we've laughed together so seldom. I long to forgive her as one locked in a cell longs to find a loose brick, fingers tracing the seams of mortar in the dark, over and over.

When I nap, I dream of fish. The moon is full and the tide is low and the grunion are running. Thousands of them. Slivers of silver on the sand. I have to say the tongue twister, over and over.
Slivers of silver on the sand
. And I have to rake them all up. Another wave comes in shimmering with fish, and faster than I can rake, they mate.

I wake to the rhythmic lapping of Lake Michigan, not the crushing growl of the Pacific. The image of the fish still twisting from light to dark. I remember the first time I made love in the neon light of the motel sign, the room turning off and on, the man a black body in a strip of light. Blink, off, blink, on. Each time I imagined it was a different man—always trying to create a memory I don't have. My mother lay on a paper covered table with her knees up and a plastic straw inside of her while the sperm of many sloshed in and sloshed out. When I was eight and we went to pick Aunt Becky up at the airport, I watched each man who disembarked, especially those with families to greet, though I didn't look at the families. I kept my eyes on each man's face and let it be the moment before he greeted me. Even if he was balding and stooped and untidy, I let my heart lilt a little so I would know how it felt.

The next morning, I wake early. It's six o'clock, the hour my mother usually rises. The shadows between the ripples on the water are silver. In the distance, red leaf maple, sumac, and birch cast color over the water though the still air has a sheen of black.

Nigel once asked me if my mother and I were close. We are and we aren't. Every statement I make about her has to be like that. She is and she isn't. We are and we aren't. I've longed all my life to feel one solid thing about her, even to disregard her as a pleasant boredom would be relief. She never apologized for anything without finding a way for me to apologize too. So I had to take my anger away with me again. At twelve, I would capture bees in a jar and then shake the jar and watch while they stung each other to death.

My mother's lies were high drama, scenes to make me weep. The poor Nellie stories. She told me Carson's parents lied about the funeral date because they couldn't bear the public shame of my illegitimacy. I used to picture her standing alone over the grave with me in her arms; it was always windy. She told me Carson's parents asked that I be christened. My Aunt Becky loaned my mother the family christening dress. That part's true. It was the one my grandfather was baptized in, layers of fine mesh linen and hand-crocheted collar and cuffs. She said they went to the church believing Carson's parents would come, but only my aunt was there to stand up with her. Then there's the story about Carson's brother who supposedly came to the motel and tried to seduce my mother. She told me he hung around after dinner, dropping big hints.
You must get lonely, a woman like you
. She knew he was there to snoop around and if he couldn't find something, create it, so they could bring charges of unfit mother against her.

For me, the stories had the strangeness of fairy tales or fables. My illustrated Aesop's showed a picture of a crane with its beak down a wolf's throat, dislodging a bone stuck crosswise. When I was seventeen, I got a long look down my mother's throat. Angie, who had just moved out, helped me find Carson's parents in the phone book. They told me he had died a year before I was born and offered to show me the death certificate. They were so sorry. Sorry I had a crazy mother? Sorry I wasn't his kid? I spent the rest of the summer with Angie. When I'm angry, the whole world isn't enough room for me.

As a child, I was happy to have two mothers. Angie was my gentle alternative. For as long as Angie lived with us, my mother and I had a truce that held. Later Angie told me things about my mother, and she helped me see how my mother's stories were metaphorically true, analogous to a memory or feeling she couldn't or wouldn't recount to me. My mother will always stand over Carson's grave with me in her arms asking him to make me his. She will never forgive my grandfather for refusing to love me. She will always be afraid of men.

I was nine or ten when Angie came along. My mom had put an ad in the paper for a motel maid. Angie walked into the Getaway—kept it short and straight—she hadn't worked in thirteen years. Angie's husband had been a football bookie who went crazy slowly. She said that was why she stayed so long. She'd fought leaving him with everything she had. I guess you can only do that once. Her husband had turned paranoid before she left. He tried to persuade her to walk around the house one way while he walked around the other way. Like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. And him with a gun. She made us laugh when she told it, though it wasn't funny. I think my mother liked her immediately.

That first Thanksgiving, we ground cranberries by hand, mixed them with orange rind and sugar. The rains came and the tree branches looked like black scratches against the sky and the light from the lamps inside appeared more gold with each day of lengthening darkness. We made sugar cookies for Christmas and stirred marmalade into our tea. If the toilet sang all afternoon out of key, who minded so long as it flushed? The frost bit into the ground and the great spider migration began. Angie would open the door shouting
Come all ye spiders!
We listened to Old English carols in Alfred Dellar's clarion tenor voice.
Here we come a wassailing upon a midnight clear, love and joy come to you and to you your loved ones too
. Yet I watched my mother closely. She would rest her hands from her task—curling the ribbon with the scissor's edge or twisting tissue paper into roses—and raise her eyes to the window, the sadness in her keening to a sound out of doors, the hard heels pounding in the rain towards our door.

When I was twelve Angie moved in with us, and I saw my mother in relief, a sharp form against billowy, blowsy, stone-washed Angie with her Tarot cards and her pulp novels. I saw the way my mother sized men up as they walked toward the vacancy sign: not their character but their physical prowess, as much as to say, this one I could out-run, this one I could scare with a little hysteria, this one wouldn't stop short of a knife blade. After making the assessment, she could afford to be friendly. Angie was always friendly, always acted as though she were just looking up from a 300 page paperback and the penultimate scene, but of course she would set it aside for you, because you were here and she was glad to see you.

My mother could only be nice to wrecked men, foreclosed men, men who drank resignation and flirted because it was in their nature not because they had a shred of expectation left. Jack was like that. Jack who ran the laundry service. When Nellie and Angie turned forty in the same summer, he took them both sky diving. My mother said she felt the scenes of her past life flying out the back of her head like a deck of cards turning into an accordion and making terrible noise. Angie said she drifted, she drifted down onto the world like a child choosing to be born.

By high school, I knew they were lovers, though when I asked my mother she gave me their standard answer for public consumption.
We're business partners
. On my way out the door to a rehearsal of the school Christmas pageant, I sassed them and they laughed.
See you none-of-my-business partners later
. My mother could afford honesty proffered as humor; humor asks no direct questions.

After Angie began doing the books, the accusations started. My mother suspected Angie of stealing money, sending it to her daughter who was in rehab.
If I needed money for my daughter, wouldn't I ask? Your mother's so afraid of betrayal, she creates it
. I remembered all the anecdotes of my mother's that used to irk me in the telling. Inconsequential and created for humor as they were, they all told the same tale. The plumber tried to gyp her, the mechanic tried to rip her, the traffic cop tried to bully her—gyp, rip, bully. But none of it happened, oh no, because she was far to clever, she saw it coming, she knew what to do. And if I knew the kind of pressure she was under, running the motel, if I knew.… (And wasn't it all for my sake in the end?) I sympathized to try to make her rethink it, to try to make her extend benefit of the doubt. But Angie was already packing.
Don't think this makes me happy
, my mother said.