The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (9 page)

So how much Mom-bashing did Jessica do in his presence? Was Nigel merely playing along? I can imagine her impassioned invectives; it even moves me. I don't care now. My bargain was with the God who sends girls home—anything I might have said against Nigel would only have been perceived as more of my rapacious need to bind her in a pact between disabled women.
Come home darling and we'll hate men together
.

It hurts to make the noise of laughter. To be like me is condemnation. She can't afford it. Will there be a day I can tell her the measure of my loss was the depth of my loving? And that there is nothing that could have guarded me against the loss. Nothing.

I'd been at the county fair all day, brushing horses, braiding manes, showing in the 4-H arena. My father was to pick me up at the exit by the livestock tent, when the tractor pull was over. A man his age opened the back of a van and asked me to give him a hand lifting a crated ewe. When he tossed me in after, I banged my head on the wheel well. He pulled the doors shut and trussed my hands right there in the bed of the van. What had anyone seen? A girl helping her father, loading her lamb. I could hear the roller coaster, the Ferris wheel, screams turning on a wheel; no one heard mine.

By the river where the man takes me, the cottonwood seeds float across the water on a warm wind. Old bait containers litter the beaches, bright orange salmon eggs glimmer in the shallows. I can still hear the screams of the children on the roller coaster at the Fairground, a sound pulled up and down the air.
Watch your step
, he says. Taking my hand to lead me up over logs and river wash, things I don't need help over. In the van, his thumbs had put marks on my neck shaped like clusters of grapes. The calloused ridges of his fingers are lined with black oil.

I see myself everywhere in the river. I will be a woman who comes up in a river. So this is the reason not to do … all those things. This is the reason and I know it now. The white limbs of logs lying lengthwise in the river are my fleshy reflection. The shine of jars along the bottom are my eyes looking up as he strangles me. Lures hooked to the bottom are my earrings chinking against the stones. I will stare through the water with dulling eyes at the mottled rot of leaves. Then I will just be a body in the river. But first we have to get there, wherever it is, wherever he chooses.

That's what you say
, he says angrily, as though I'd lied to him about something important.
That's what you say
. Each time accentuating a different word with menace. If I could have figured out the nature of the crime, I'd have confessed to it. I haven't said a word since he let me out of the car.

I'm sorry
, I answer. Anything else and he strikes me down.
That's what you say
, he says again.
I'm sorry
, I answer. Every step trying to save my life, every step trying to save my life.
That's what you say
, he says again.
I'm sorry
, I answer.

We come to a wide, waterless wash, an abandoned meander full of twisted willow wood.
Pee here
, he tells me. I pull down my shorts, my purple knit shorts with orange flowers, and I squat.
No, stand up and do it, damn it. You don't have to squat. You none of you have to squat
. This makes me cry, of all things this makes me cry, and I cry red in the face looking at him as I do it. Yes, I can pee like a mare with my legs wide apart, I can pee like a mare in a long hissing arc but I can't pee my initials to save myself, I can only make a trench in the sand. When I finish, he strikes me down. I see a red-tailed hawk. Lying on my back, a red-tailed hawk. I feel my skin burst dryly like burlap to a blade. His head blocks the sun. Big dark head, lumpen head like a charred walnut. I see the birds. Cottonwood seed floats like feathers, like angel down. The women are singing. The women bringing gingham and pie. The women who save me when he lumbers off through the underbrush and leaves me to bleed on dry sand.

That's a story that doesn't tell. It rewinds and it plays, but it doesn't tell. There's another that comes after.

That next spring Carson got his draft card, would soon have his diploma.
I know everyone has asked you lots of questions. Don't talk about it if you don't want to
. Was he begging me not to? The only question asked of me from the first and thereafter was
Are you all right?
What if I wasn't? What then? If I cried, would pity seal him to me? Anything I might have said was reminder of my defilement. Our loving was so untimely, I wish I could reset it like the hands of a clock.

The roadside fields were full of fireweed, Queen Anne's lace, foxglove and tansy, a petit point of color beneath a tranquil sky. Goldfinches dipped their wings between the spiny violet disks of Bull Thistle blooms. Snowberries and elderberries tangled on the fences and further out in the field, where we went, islands of Nootka rose and blackberry bushes locked thorns and climbed each other. Rose hips gleamed a wet red.

He walked to the fence line and turned his back to me to relieve himself. When he bent his head to take himself out, I saw the tendons of his lean neck and the protective hunch of his shoulders. I was watching him as though I'd never see him again.

We crushed a place for ourselves in a profusion of oxeye daisies. With the soft flannel of his shirt against my face and the sun heating the crown of my head, I felt sleepy. I could forget we'd grown up. I'd used up days following Carson around with a tackle box and a can of worms in my hand. He fished, I read. We knew when to look at each other. But he was flushed with desire and anxiety. We had been waiting so long. We had been good and the bogey man had come anyway. Now Carson had to make the bogey man of nightmares go away. Of course we didn't say those things. We said other things.
If you don't want to.… I do want to, I do
. With all my heart, to this day still.

I studied his face, the inward turning tenderness of it, his lips always pooched out a little as though he were about to blow kisses. He pressed his lips against the pulse beneath my eyelid, stopped there, feeling it. After each touch, he stopped to register my response, my response registering in him. We knew each other well enough to enjoy our awkwardness. Pauses, small smiles, weight shifts, breath released with a satisfying sound. The total concentration of two on a blouse button as he worked it one-handed through. Tension, triumph, laughter. Then he pulled back a little to look at me. I had my hands around his forearms. I was trying to say
don't
. He pulled back and the features of his face flattened while the sun burst behind his head, his head a black blot against the sun. The moment of rigidity traveling down my spine inflicted a puncture; the desire seeped out of him all at once.

Maybe if I could have said why. Maybe if we could have been together in a well-lit room. He rolled away like a man taken by a bad wound. Then he lay on his back with his eyes closed.
I'm not strong enough
, he said after awhile,
I'm not strong enough
. I scratched at a thistle in my sock, noticed the erratic blooms of asters up and down the stalk. I was determined not to cry. My nipples chafed against the heavy starch of my blouse. He wasn't going to say more.

You've always been strong enough for me, you're strong enough now
. But as I spoke my voice diminished, I realized it wasn't ourselves we were speaking of, our strength or desires, but the power of the event itself. My voice was diminished by the magnitude of the task I'd brought him to. Who could be strong enough to counter what had happened to me? I remembered seeing the small figurines Japanese women once carried to the doctor in their modesty, to point to what was the matter, and just as quickly slam the lid of the box shut. My body was an ivory figurine shut away in a box. I could point to what was the matter and Carson could try, but my whole body was the hurting thing. Carson kept his eyes shut, and for the first time I was afraid to touch him. It had never been an effort to be happy before. I saw a tear leak from one eye, trace its way down toward his temple. I leaned forward and put my lips to the tear, drinking it.

When basketball season started, Carson went with the women who would have him, one after another. It made him popular. There were terrible accusations and nasty rumors, but the way I saw it, he went off with whichever one fought hardest to claim him. I can't say there was any helping it. He couldn't look at me without seeing my hurt, his failure. Our pity for each other was so acute, it extinguished all desire.

My love for Carson is a weeping child I shut in a room at the end of the hall until the crying ceases. I am trying to teach my love a lesson, but long after, the sound quavers in my ears.

VIII.

This morning I decided I was actually going to call my father. I've been having breakfast with Donald Duck and Pluto Dog, two Disneyland mugs I turn to face me—same era as the Dinosaur Band-Aids. I found them at the back of the cupboard behind the cocoa. I've asked myself whether I keep using these things that belong to his children as a way to psych myself up or because I'm lonely and it really is comforting to look at their stupid faces. Anyway, I got up from the kitchen table, then suddenly I had to hold onto it. I thought I was going to go deaf or stop breathing. I heard this terrible noise, like a cave talking when the tide comes up, water sloshing in and air buffeting out and this low gurgle that gets louder … like I was trapped inside the giant's belly, rank air and briny water. To make it stop, I tried to quit breathing, forced my tongue to bulge up in the back of my throat till it hit my gag reflex and the Cheerios came back out, skewed upon the table in my own froth, looking like some unrescued shipwreck scene—tiny life preservers broken up, all heads bobbed under.

I pulled the T-shirt up off my belly and over my head, then I buried my face in it. Cotton softened by salt, it soothed me to smell home. I tried hard to think about the mother I'm mad at, not the one who would bring me ginger ale and saltines.

I dial his medical office and wait for the nurse to come on the line. She wants me to describe symptoms; she wants to have him call me back, but I can't leave him his own number. “I'll hold,” I say, “however long.”

There's a fake duck decoy on the coffee table. I flip its tail feather compartment open and shut. It's full of my father's golf tees. What is it I want to know from this man? For a moment, I feel like I can't remember. The story of my ancestors? How he could have thought it wouldn't matter to me to know who my people are? What difference will it make when I do know?

“Hello?” he comes on the line, an earnest tenor.

“Hello,” I say after a moment.

“I hear you're feeling a little punk.”

“I couldn't breathe for awhile, then I didn't want to, then I got sick.”

My voice sounds like a cross-cut saw wrenched one direction then another.

“Sick in what way?”

“I threw up.”

He asks me a whole series of questions. Have I had morning sickness? A fever? Any bleeding? Is there someone with me? What I hear is the timbre of his voice, like a Bach cello suite playing on my mother's phonograph. His concern reduces me.
Oh Daddy, sob, I'm a do-over. I've lost my age. I can't count money. I can't ride a bus. Come and get me
.

“Don't be alarmed. The internal organs have less and less space as the baby gets bigger. There's a lot of pressure on the diaphragm and that can cause shortness of breath, sometimes dizziness. When was your last pre-natal exam?”

“I haven't had one.”

“You haven't had one?”

I take a bronze boat bell off the table. It has no clapper so I hit it with my fingernail. It makes a tiny ping.

“Well, I went to a clinic to confirm the home pregnancy test, but I don't think that counts.”

“Not if you didn't have an exam. How long since your last period?”

“Four months.”

“So you're five months along and haven't seen a doctor?” He teeters on condemning, lurches away from it. “Can you tell me why? You don't have to of course.”

“I'm afraid. I don't want anyone to look inside me, to let in the light. You know. The way you can't crack a door on a dark room or the pictures will all go black and you'll lose the faces.”

“Well,” he says, patiently, “I don't have to use a speculum. I don't have to open you to the light. But we should draw some blood for tests. You really must, for your baby's sake, get some medical attention.”

Sob, sob, sob. Oh Daddy
. “Oh thank you.”
No speculum. Sob, sob, sob
.

“Honey,” he says, “The hormones do get the better of women during pregnancy. Wild feelings aren't uncommon.”

“I know. I know.”
Wild feelings, wild feelings, wild feelings
.

“Promise me,” he says, “that you'll come in this week.”

I laugh abruptly. “Promise me you'll be there.”

I hear a smile in his tone of voice. “Every day. I'm here every day.”

Daddy 'o, Daddy 'o, promise me, please promise me, oh promise me …

Five minutes after I got off the phone, I found a bottle of antacids and swore at myself. What did I want him to be anyway? It was like hearing Mr. Roger's sing
You're Special to Me
and fantasizing that he was only broadcast to my house. Imagine how many women my father played the paternal role with everyday. Then I imagined his reaction if he knew how many men I'd slept with at the Getaway. And I meant something nice by it every time. I did.

IX.

Yesterday, I was taking inventory of the supply closets and I overheard a conversation between the three young men I'd hired to waterseal the cottage decks. At first I was amused, young men as helpless to their testosterone-pumped bodies as pregnant women are to the estrogen surges. And really the behavior is so similar—eating binges, mood swings, irascibility, grogginess. I was tallying up stacks of Sweetheart soap packages and Kleenex boxes and listening.