The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (5 page)

Fuck you
, I answered,
You don't want to be happy
.

Rise and shine
. I rise all night in my father's house, like sourdough starter. On top of the refrigerator, there is a cookbook, its binding held together by strapping tape gone yellow. Recipes typed on tracing paper and two tattered newspaper articles fall out.
Sherry Party for Museum Patrons
by Maggie Nygren, Society Editor and a column entitled
Please Make Me a Better Worrier, God: A Woman's Considerations
. The book is full of color photographs, the flat gleaming color of grade school textbooks that makes every subject look like plastic. There's a chapter devoted to Leftovers that recommends Spaghetti Roll Ups: leftover canned spaghetti rolled up in a thin slice of ham.
Yum
. My mother has her mother's cookbooks, pots, pans, and jelly jars. With Angie, we made applesauce. How I loved the old devices—pushing the center of the apple onto the prongs of the peeler and watching the red ribbons spiral downward; or turning the adze shaped blade that pressed the mush through the ricer, and trapped the peels against the sides. With Angie there, my mother could let on to some of her hurts.
This is obscene!
she said one night, pointing to the chapter called “When He Carves” which included drawings of a pair of thick, stubby hands dancing around all variety of meat cuts. It was ghoulish—distinctly man hands disembodied but carving merrily.
I'm going to rip it out
, my mother said.
Do it
, Angie answered, and she did.

I turn now to a picture of a root cellar with a big bin of potatoes and a sand pit for burying turnips, beets and rutabagas so they won't freeze. I try to imagine my grandmother in the picture of the root cellar, or in the picture of the kitchen with white steel cupboards and a big pan of bread rolls cooling beneath a sill where tomatoes have been lined up to ripen. These could have been her cookbooks, original copyright 1942. My mother seemed to always be angry at her, said she could have been a piano teacher or she could have been a librarian if she hadn't always been taking care of Him. But I liked my grandmother because she was calm and smelled of baking and swayed on her feet and hummed all the time.

My mother says she was never allowed to get ambitious about anything. Just when she was beginning to achieve mastery—debate team, drama, piano—she was hauled off to do something else so she'd be well-rounded. Wanting to be a lawyer, actor, concert musician; not realistic. It was a danger for a girl to cut herself off socially, to find absorption and intensity in pushing herself. My mother is still frustrated, and she doesn't think I'm serious enough. She wants me to go into some hard-core men's profession—electronics, architecture, industrial engineering—not anything as typically female as teaching or nursing.

The book advises: “When company comes at odd hours, don't be trite. Serve something that justifies your reputation as a smart hostess.” Company picnics, company dinners, a new foreman. How many Liberty Bell Cookies did my grandmother bake, Deep Dish Peach Pies, Blueberry Drop Biscuits? My own mother could transfer crust into a pie dish from wax paper without so much as a fissure and press a perfectly fluted edge in record time. Baking pies conjures all the right associations, makes a woman safe, and she knew that when she baked them and took them to my school functions. But in the summer, she covered the garage door with butcher paper, so I could make mud prints with my whole body. My friends all wanted to come to my house. Buttock prints, hands and feet, we even made our heads into mudbrushes. My mother was the most fun.

Even as I say that about her I have to contradict it. The familiar boil of bile and dread in my intestines. Before Angie lived with us, there were days she didn't dress and the dogs slept in her bed, and I'd stay home to try and run the front desk so people wouldn't see her in that maroon velour house dress, unzipped and covered with dog hair. Beneath her eyes two blue half moons floated like boats, the marks of sleeping with her mascara on. I didn't know what depression was then. She was asleep when I left for school, and asleep in the afternoons when I came home. The maids took reservations in the morning, and I returned calls when I came in. I knew how to make my voice slow, melodious, and womanly.

She used to leave money under the butter dish and I got off the bus downtown to do the marketing. I shopped with a bitter heart, no one to care for me, and I bought whatever I wanted: Pop-Tarts, Spaghetti'O's, Captain Crunch, fruit rolls, canned pudding, beef jerky. When my mother appeared in the the doorway, I'd look up, guilty yet praying she'd be angry with me for doing such a dismal job of caring for myself. But she ate whatever she could find, pulled up a chair in front of a bowl of Sugar Pops.
Are you going to go to school today?
Her question was perfunctory; mine was unkind.
Are you going to get dressed today?
She brought her fist down onto the table. The spoons danced, the demons out between us now.
You look like your father. You act like your father
.

I'd threaten to leave forever, with each step toward the door making a proclamation.
I'm leaving. I'm going. I didn't ask to be born
.

Go then!
she shouted.
I put you back where I found you! I quit!

I hid in the garage once, where we had an old chest freezer, and I ate one popsicle after another listening to her scream my name.
Jess? Godamn you. Jess?!
My heart was hard as a peppercorn. I wanted to hear fear and repentance. The screen door slammed twice before I heard the slap of her slippers on the drive and the jangle of keys in her hand. I watched the steel wheels in the track over my head jerk towards me as she flung the garage door open.
There you are
, she said. Her arms were crossed, gripping the excess material of her sleeves, then I saw she was shaking.
Why didn't you come when I called?
But I was the one who bawled, trying to find words for the ways she used my love against me, fruit juice dripping down the front of my pajama top, my bare feet cramped and cold on the cement floor.
Get in the car
. My face streaming tears.
Please get in the car
. She fired on all eight cylinders of our Chevy Malibu with a terrific blast of gas, then shoved the fan and heat levers forward.
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, sweetheart. But you mustn't say those things. Your father left and never came back. I couldn't stand it again
. She would apologize but somehow it was always me hurting her. The fact of my existence. Born to hurt others. That's who I am.
I'd do anything for you. You know that. I'd die for you
. I heard proclamations of need not loyalty. There was something she wanted said. Not that I would die for her. That I would be born for her.

After I found out my father was a semen donor, she never blamed my bad behavior on him again. Though for three years I went to great lengths to make her do so. No, in her mind, this donor was merely a catalyst, something as scentless and innocuous as water poured over a seed. Sometimes I love her for this, for claiming all my badness.
Do you think my father had depressions or rages?
I'd ask.
Do you need so much to know? You come by it honestly enough on this side
. So I'd take another tack.
Do you think he's a journalist or a historian and that's why I love to read so much?
But she refused to imagine him into being with me.
Well I'm the only one in my family that devoured books, and no one ever told me where I got it. Remember I was a teacher, you know?
Sometimes I hate her for this, for seeing herself as a blueprint for me, giving me no room to surprise her, for making me hers through and through. I refused to discredit or dismiss him, though I knew no qualities of his to defend.

Every man I ever loved left me, I figured insemination was a shortcut. It's not the kind of thing I hope you'll understand someday, I hope you'll never understand. Carson's death was a leave-taking I didn't recover from. I told you he was your father so you'd have a good story to grow up on
. But he'd proved to be a disappointment too. He wouldn't marry her before he left for the war, at least that's what she says. Sometimes I say to myself: disappointment is my father.

I don't consider my story so odd. My friend Jackie's dad was sent to jail for selling cocaine and he used to beat up on her mother. Jackie has some memories of her father. One time her parents were fighting and her mother ran to lock herself in the bathroom but her father was too fast. He shoved her backwards into a tile shower stall where she fell and cracked her head. When he went to jail, Jackie's grandfather helped out. He mowed the lawn and paid the bill when the utilities company was about to shut the power off. After the divorce, her mother married her ex-husband's father. Now her grandfather is her step-father. How would you like to explain that? This is my grand-step-father? I say my father was gone by the time I was born.
Ever hear from him again?
No, it's like he vanished into thin air. Kids like Jackie envy my situation.

There are snapshots of Carson and my mother standing on a stone bridge in the wind. Carson was chubby, crew-cut, wearing chinos, a windbreaker, a big metal watch. My mother was wearing a heavy loden coat, the kind with a hood and wood toggles. She was closer to the edge of the snapshot frame, but he had his arm clamped around her. My mother was pulling hair out of her mouth and laughing at the same time. Carson was looking straight at the camera and smiling, as if to say, “This is the first frame of forever.” I don't know what it's like to lose love, only that most of my friends' parents lost it anyway, and that's not an observation my mother ever factors into her loss total.

I didn't do well my last year of high school, which effectively cut me out of the scholarship scene and all my mom's hopes. What a relief to be cut loose. Jackie's brother was hyperkinetic and had bottles full of ritalin. We ate most of his prescription that year. God knows how he got by. I had to recite the elements chart in chemistry, fill in the blanks. Mrs Wallia was Pakistani and her bindi became the red center of my whirlpool.
Strontium, barium, uranium, red dot
.

I could see the names in my head but they looked like pieces of clothing in a washer, a centrifuge that spun around the red dot on her forehead.
Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, red dot. Try again, concentrate Jessica
. She asked me if I felt well, placed her pretty hand on my forehead. If she'd placed it on my chest, she would have heard my heart skipping like a scratched record.

My English teacher, Mrs. Sundquist, devised tests for the kinds of cocktail parties she had to endure, the official functions.
Match the quotes to the correct authors
. Quoting snippets to display erudition while eating hors d'oeuvres was obviously important to her. Not a damn for what I thought of geese as rapists, immortals descending, Zeus and Danaë. Wasn't I the product of an immortal lust? I daydreamed constantly. Mrs. Sundquist would turn from the board in her dark gabardine skirt, hand prints of chalk on her hips. I imagined my mother, bent over and kicking, unable to refuse an immortal. Her hubris had earmarked her for such a lesson in humility. Oh I was vicious, and full of longing too, sometimes a sorrowing Persephone returned to her mother from the underworld.

What of the hubris I inherited? I tore up Mrs. Sundquist's final exam. It was satisfying to hear that slow ripping in the silence, to do it slowly so that it destroyed each student's concentration; the girls dared not look up, only glanced at me sideways. “Sheez,” one boy said, shaking his head. Gina Giannini passed me a note: “Jesus loves you anyway.” I slipped one back to her: “I am the miracle of immaculate conception.” By then the whole room had paused, and Mrs. Sundquist was glaring at me with the obvious question, so I told her that what she'd seen and heard was in fact what I'd done. Torn up the exam. “Jessica, Are you going crazy?” For once, it was not a question in patronizing tones while she withheld the answer, not rhetorical either. All heads snapped up. “Yes, Mrs. Sundquist.”

“Then you may be excused.”

I smoked a cigarette under the cement stairwell and cursed that brick Taj Mahal with its textbooks full of prick-less statues.
Chipped off
. It became a code expression between Jackie and me. I see myself, standing in my school issue wool kilt, a bit tilted back—the spine of a child, the breasts of a woman.
Every man dreams of saddle shoes
. I dreamed of myself that way … saddle shoes over my head, bucking for a brooding storm. My mother would later fight it out with the principal's office, earning no points with them for saying they couldn't keep up with my restless intelligence.
The class spends three months covering one novel with those bloody mimeographed discussion sheets while my daughter is reading three novels a week. How does Mrs. Sundquist expect to keep her interest?

I admit I made a practice of being intractable. It seemed important. I thought the world was ending. I warded off most everybody with my bad case of weltshmerz. I prided myself on knowing what the word meant.

Mr. Flotre was one of those unfortunate men with the affliction of having a fanny, set off the more by the short man's propensity for wearing cowboy boots. He taught Algebra the way he coached basketball—barking all the time and throwing erasers, reserving himself for the few stars. He began each hour with the hardest problems on the board—inside of fifteen minutes successfully humiliating the peons, goading those who kept up at all, and separating out his A-team for the rest of the hour. His reputation outside of school was for the tequila bottle, and his voice sounded like he'd swallowed a few worms—hoarse and nasal at the same time.

I could manage the word problems with their variables for X and Y, but without the words the numbers and letters looked like cuneiform or Sanskrit, some language rubbed off of a stone.
Zero doesn't divide into infinity at all but infinity divides into zero endlessly
. When Mr. Flotre said things like that I never heard the rest of the hour. I wondered what practices the people of such a language used to ritualize it. What they carved or built to signify it. All my nothing and not being in that room still a part of something and forever. Whatever knowledge I gained he had no part in, and I refused to take the final exam. Never mind the afternoons I cut out with the juvey boys to go condo-hot-tub-hopping, I didn't consider myself unteachable. Mr. Flotre took me out behind the modular after giving the class problems to work on. Ours was of a different nature.