The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (8 page)

When I was still there on a temporary basis, my job was mostly to open his mail and stack it in piles for the executive secretary away on vacation, whose head was probably still ringing from four phone lines. I offered to do more but no one could be bothered to show me. So I made no pretense of being busy with their paperwork. Mr. Tobin seemed to like that. One lunch hour, he offered me the mini-TV he kept in his office, but I told him I liked to read. One afternoon, I'd set down my copy of
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir to answer the phone.
Hello, can you be helped?
That was just how it came out. Mr. Tobin passed my desk, then he saw the book. “It's not what you think,” I called out as he was closing the door. He held it open a crack, for just a moment. “Sure, sure,” he said still chuckling. I didn't bother to explain. If Mr. Tobin wanted to think someone could write a 500 page porno novel about a second of sex, let him. Maybe it got me the job.

I became a front line receptionist in the warehouse where the sales people showed the different lines to the buyers. The receptionist station was this twelve foot long half arc that faced the elevator bank where I sat with three other women answering phones and filling out requisition orders. Nigel had dressed me all wrong and they didn't like me. They wore sharply tailored magenta blazers with black skirts or checkered blouses over black skirts, with gathered waists and Victorian flounces to swish behind. Their smiles were brittle sugar as I took off my camel hair coat. Who did I think I was? Dressing like one of Mr. Tobin's college bound daughters. It wouldn't have helped to tell them I'd cleaned motel rooms all my life. I wouldn't have liked them any better if they'd liked me.

Nigel let me keep all my money. He's a mechanical engineer, specialty robotics, and he travels to tool and die companies to design swinging arms, automated drill bits, conveyer systems. Everything with an automatic shut off and restart. He said I should go to a real college. He also said he wanted me to go to Europe with him in the spring when he would travel on business. He wanted me to be free to go with him. He also wanted me to be free to go. From the beginning, I was saving against that day. But I didn't mind that I didn't like the job. My mother raised me on women's biographies. I knew that to be an interesting woman, I had to have an education in heartbreak. I had to fail in love to absolve myself for other things, though I don't know what these other things are yet, only I feel the portent of them like a lead keel, an everyday weight. I was determined that my readiness to leave him, my preparation and my vigilance, would mean
not
having to leave. Sometimes I got up and went walking in the middle of the night; I wanted him to startle in the dark alone. I wanted him to know how ready I was; how alike we were in that way. I used to think that Nigel wanted to be known … by someone … by me.

The last time I saw Nigel, he drove out to the motel one more time, and I had him meet me in that same room where we'd made love in the beginning. Except it was morning and the beach light was white as the insides of the curtains that trapped it against the window sill. I remember thinking, this beach light is white as a newborn, as the undersides of your arms where I will go seeking our youth when we are old, and still find it. But Nigel was old already, and I didn't know it, if being old means to foreclose on possibility.

Too much regret, not enough time, never enough money, should have, could have, would have.… We were a duet on dissonance. He tocked off losses on his fingers while my voice buoyed up all the things to look forward to. He did not, in this mood, want to look forward at all. He was begging the world not to require anything of him—the way children determine to stay in their rooms forever. He had locked up inside. I dreaded anger even as I felt heat at the roots of my hair. Odd I should remember the day I snuck into his basement while he was at work: geraniums set to winter years ago now yellow on a tin table, the wicker chair with peeled legs, stacks of black drum cases like cake boxes and guitar cases too, leaning like women waiting to dance.

I don't know why I thought there would be a grand gesture of reconciliation. I needed him to dream and he was being careful not to dream. The quiet ones in families endure, they make it look easy. They go so far toward secret lives that dreams become a means of hoarding safety. He had come to give me all his reasons why I should go through with an abortion—something
he
wouldn't have to do—while I would be left anyway, empty and scarred. It was clear to me then, I would have left him if I had gone through with an abortion. Threatening to be done with me if I didn't do it wasn't much leverage. There's a sound the heart makes just like dry twigs snapping. And I could look at him without recognition, blankly, as though a magic coat of paint had been rolled right over the wall where we once cast shadows.

And yet his body dreamed with mine. I did an experiment one night as he slept—erect and pressed into the small of my back. I would contract my inside muscles, imperceptible, you would think, but for each contraction, he would pulse in return. I smiled in the dark. I still believe he loves me.

After he left, I tried to feel what it must be like to be him. When I was Nigel, the sunset didn't move me because I could tell a story of a much more beautiful one in a strange and far away place. When I was Nigel, I told the story to a young woman who'd never been anywhere, but my words didn't paint pictures for her eyes to see, only rated sunsets, and reminded her of what she hadn't seen. It was easy to convince myself that I was mysterious, unknowable even. Though the buoy lights at dusk were the color of blue roses and the sky was an orange exhalation soft as the sound of breathing, it didn't move me when I was him. I still found a way to be lonely.

I remember another time, early on, when Nigel wasn't yet trying to rationalize us out of existence. But the distance between now and then is like trying to travel backwards on the sound of a train horn after it has passed—the Doppler Shift—when the velocity of approach suddenly changes to the velocity of recession.

The bird we came upon in the sand was black and dull as charcoal dust on pulp paper. The news of an oil tanker spilling in the straits to the north had thinned the summer crowds. Nigel was the one capable of observation. The bird was not covered with oil, its undersides were green with kelp bloom, young with full flying feathers but not flying now, only blinking when we spoke and sleeping between.

“The oil is traveling south,” Nigel said, stroking the bird's back. It stood up then and pitched forward onto its beak. “But I don't think it's here yet. Maybe he got storm-tossed all night.”

“Maybe he's just in shock,” I added hopefully, thinking of all the birds dying somewhere to the north and the headlines that daily gauged harm to humans and reassured. Sometimes I believe all humans should die; I believe it because part of me wants it, a consensus of recognition forced upon us at last, but too late and too bad our own indifference came to kill us off at last. When I was in the sixth grade, I was asked to write a saying for the school year book. I turned in “Man was not the exception, he was the mistake.” They chose someone else to write about “always growing, ever learning,” some sot. I fault myself for grandiose thoughts. You'd think I could stay with the situation for five minutes … in the sand on my knees with the blinking bird before us.

“C'mon,” Nigel said quietly, “we can at least give the little guy a chance.”

I didn't tell him my feelings because supposedly it's not very adult to insist on wondering why we create so much sadness. I followed him and he carried the bird like an offering cupped in his hands as we walked away from the dog tracks on the hard packed sand and the four-wheelers speeding by. It was in our power to give it at least a chance, if nothing more. I watched him walk into the heavy sand dunes, shifting a bit side to side on his slender legs and I was thankful that he was a man who dropped to his knees before small creatures and I was determined that we would not create any sadness between us. Before we left, I looked from the bird to Nigel. As he opened his hands to settle the bird in the sand, he winced. For a moment it was easy to forget that he's older than me. All the baby birds he'd rescued to shoe box nests as a boy and fed with eyedroppers, and when they died anyway, he had this same face, the one I discover in my memory over and over again and always with relief.

VII.

After a few years, it was easy to forget that I was lying to Jessica. Not because I'm devious, it's a trait learned in families. After a few generations, a little elaboration can become accepted record. And anyway memory flows like igneous rock, folding over images indiscriminately. I came across a photo when I was packing my parents' things for the estate sale. I'm standing in a field of daffodils at two or three wearing a pale blue dress with a row of ducks appliqued along the hemline. My mother is kneeling beside me, one hand on the back of my head. I feel her pleasure at our dressed up occasion, the warmth of her hand on the nape of my neck, our mutual admiration of my new white shoes. This is the totality of my memory for that age. But it's not in fact a memory; it's a photo my mother kept for years in an oval frame on her high boy bureau. It shocked me to realize the photo had inserted itself as memory, become memory.

Only when I was with my brothers and their wives did I have to feel the lie, because they knew about the insemination. I couldn't follow through with the fabrication I'd tried out at Monique's. Carson's parents were alive and well. Anyway, I cast myself out of the family when I sold off my shares in the lumber company, bought the motel, moved to the coast. I can't live in their sub-divided days, new birdless neighborhoods with deathly quiet views. We saw each other less and less after my father died and exonerated each other too readily.
They could call if they wanted. You could
…
They could
.… The question of Jessica's legitimacy was present in the family watchfulness. There were too many adults intent upon her. The other children felt it too.
Does Jessie have a fever? Is she sick?

My father never touched Jess. Maybe that would have changed if he'd lasted past her first birthday, at least I like to think so. He built things for her, a cradle on wheels, a rocking chair—some way to contain her without having to touch her, a way to touch her but once removed. He'd made things with his hands all his life … but he could not put his hands to her, as though it would have been an admission of participation in my heinous deed. To him, she was worse than a bastard child; she was a mongrel or a mutt. And I tired of my brother's wives holding her in the kitchen and scrutinizing her features for family resemblance, disassembling her face as though she were one of those potato head dolls with snap-on noses and eyebrows.
What will you tell her when she gets older?

I'll tell her her father was a generous man because he gave me his seed, because he knew how much I wanted her
. But that isn't after all what I told her, when she was old enough to ask. The lies I told Jessica were the truth about how I felt, they were my only vehicle … and then it was so easy to forget that she wasn't Carson's child, so easy to see his face in hers.

I can't make my memories of Carson into a story for Jessica. I live by incompleteness, the unfinished narrative. She thinks I am incapable of loving a man when the truth is I love ceaselessly. I am like one of those ghosts that haunt highways because I don't know I've died and no one can tell me. To cut off love at the moment of absolute readiness is sudden death. Only the stories of the supernatural or freak occurrence have any bearing on who I am. Perhaps she could know by analogy. I'm thinking of the Swedish expedition to the North Pole at the turn of the century, three men in a hydrogen-gas balloon, how thirty-three years later their remains were found on a barren island amidst the ice and letters delivered at last to one man's fiancee.

In the way that dreams compress or suspend time, nothing has happened between the time he left and the moment she receives the letters. My memories are a reverie so powerful, I need to be slapped awake. The hands that hold the letters have aged, but not the heart that receives them. She sups with strangers, her own husband and children. Only banal exigency pulls her back in and presses familiarity upon her.

I know Jess went to her aunts and uncles after our blow-out. And also to Angie. I'm sure they opened the files on me, relished the job. Jessica could have asked me herself, but she wanted to punish me. The untrustworthy mother. And punish me she did. It's not over yet. I remember those poison nights, walking the floor as though I were crunching glass beneath my boots. Like an actor trying out lines, countering their version with my version, version with version forever and ever amen. The whole family psycho-analyzing me, breezily finding reasons for things I'm still not sure I understand. I know I didn't want a father there for Jessica to love, their love complicated by my inability to love him, making each day a lack and a loss.

I called over to Angie's. Contrition wore my molars down. I asked Jessica polite questions about her plans and waited to provide counsel, as though it made all the sense in the world for her to drop out of community college and leave town with a man twice her age. Of course, Nigel now provided all her counsel; she needed none of mine. I shook his hand in the parking lot, then kissed both my daughter's cherry cheeks as I had her first day of school, inwardly begging the world to be kinder to her than I had known it to be. She was excited. She was laughing. Our truce was holding. She withheld her disapproval and I mine. We must have appeared to Nigel a pair of chums, my daughter and I. Ironic that. The whole scaffolding of lies she'd brought down resurrected in an instant to hold us up in his eyes: a mother to be admired, a daughter devoted. Or is that merely hopeful on my part? Everyone says I'm in denial. Shit, how do they think I would have gotten through a day after the rape? After Carson's death? After Monique's marriage? I'm all for denial if it enables you to function. Everyone thinks they can cure me of suffering; it's not a disease. Flush your damn pills. I don't want to dishonor my dead like that.