The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (13 page)

“I should look familiar even though you've never met me.” I can't help it. I want this moment to extend, to lengthen and slow the way people who have been in accidents describe it. The thrill is quite close to total panic.

“Why's that?” He's tosses the towel he's dried his hands on and crosses his arms.

“I'm your daughter by artificial insemination. I found you in the yearbook. Class of '69. You're my father.”

His eyes are wild for a moment, like a horse's rearing, and he holds the countertop he's leaning against. Then he focuses hard on me.

“What makes you so sure it's me?”

“Do you have a mirror we can stand in front of?” I pick up a lock of my hair. “Or shall I get out the picture of you when you were almost my age.”

He takes a long, deep breath. “I may be your biological father, yes, but the man who raised you is your real father.”

“What if I told you he was some asshole macho who never got over having defective sperm, always intimidated his kid to prove he was a real man, treated me like the product of an affair? What if I was never able to love him and wished to hell he wasn't my father and felt guilty. And nobody ever told me.”

“People can feel that way about their biological fathers anyway. The one you want to rail at is him not me.”

“My mother raised me alone, but don't worry, I'm used to not having a father by now. I didn't come here to acquire a parent.”

“Good,” he said, “Because you won't.” His look assessed me for some toughness he found and of which he was approving. I couldn't believe I was being so predictably adolescent. Because I only had this once? I had to know him now, sting him and be stung? Determine his patience, his tolerance, his threshold in three minutes?

He walked to the shiny metal cabinet and looked at himself, his reflection in the dulled matt of scratched metal, a face entirely stilled. He laughed brusquely after a moment, as if to throw a stone into the stillness, saying, “I always wanted to know how I would look, receiving the kind of news I deal out.”

“I'm not a disease, you know.”

“No, you're not. And not all the news I deliver is unhappy tidings either.” He looked at me kindly then, with great curiosity. I smiled to see it. Our brief flash of anger had refreshed us both—fear purged. “You were afraid I would regard you as some achievement of my own, suddenly unveiled with the wisk of a sheet.”

“Yes, that would have been the worst, worse than not finding you.”

“What drove you to it?”

“She didn't tell me there was a semen donor. Someone else told me last year.” It wasn't what I wanted to say. The end of secrecy had driven me to it. Secrecy was the one thing he and my mother had agreed to even though they had never met.

“Who told you?”

“My mother's ex-lover. After she moved out. Maybe she thought I had a right to know, maybe she was just pissed off. But there I was, all the stories I built myself from suddenly untrue. My mother had told me I was the daughter of her first love, a guy who got killed in Vietnam, and she had all these other tragic stories to go with it.”

“But you can understand why she wanted you to believe that.”

I started to laugh, but it came back at me fast in that little white and metal room. It had sounded so odd to hear him speak of her, counseling me as though he knew her. For a moment I felt that I could just put them on the phone together and then go on home.

“Christ! Of course I can understand. But isn't anyone supposed to try to understand me?”

“I'm sorry. I can see why you laughed. I spoke with such familiarity.”

Suddenly I felt the need to defend her. “It's not that she wasn't a good mom. She is. She owns and runs a motel. Before that, she was a school teacher. She's brave and tough and funny.”

“Did she help you find me?”

“Yes, after our explosion.”

“Well, that says a lot.”

In the glare of his curiosity, I feel all my love for her flood to the surface, like a massive opening of capillaries, roaring in my ears. I've waited all this time to find my father and suddenly I want to shove him aside and find a phone so I can at least call her. But he's talking again.

“I understand now why you didn't put the gown on. I'll get one of my partners to examine you, if you like.”

It's clear to me now how it might look to her … how easy for me to come in here for fifteen minutes and like him … how easy for me to live with her all my life and be mad.… I resist him with a new fount of rage.

“Can you imagine if you had examined me? Can you imagine if we slept together? I've slept with men as old as you and I've wondered if I might sleep with one of my brothers by mistake. You know, there's no central registry in this country.”

“Yes, I know that. Still, it's a remote possibility.”

“Statistically speaking, yes. But you've never felt what it's like to wonder about it. How would you like it if I wanted to meet my brothers, the three boys you have.”

“They're old enough that I think they could handle it … if you wanted to make the trip. One's in California, one's in Detroit, and the other's in the Peace Corps in Namibia.”

“How about your wife?”

He shrugged. “She already thinks the worst of me. We divorced years ago. My boys were four, six, and eight when we ended the marriage. Leaving my boys was the hardest thing I ever did. Last year, when Scott was about to start a family, he wanted me to talk about that time, and I realized that he needed to know that was the hardest thing I ever did. But I don't have a story like that for you.”

“I know. You sired me instead of parented me.”

He sighs, rests his elbows on his knees and stares at his hands. When he looks up his eyes are level with mine.

“Does it help to know that I wondered about you, just as you did about me.”

“What kinds of things did you wonder?”

“I hoped, like any parent, that you would grow up relatively healthy and happy, undamaged by the million and one dangers of the world, that you would have a passion for something you could arrange your life around so that it would make sense to you.”

“I'm just mad all the time. That seems to be my passion.”

“Maybe social reform is your calling. It requires steady outrage.” He smiles at me softly.

“So you think that even if I'd had a father, and he was a bad father, I'd still grieve for a good father. You seem like you've been a good father.”

“My kids made me into a good father; I didn't start out that way. I'd be good now from the beginning but I don't get that chance.”

I shut my eyes for a moment. I'm wondering if my mom feels that way, whether she can help me avoid feeling that way. I never thought that seeing my father's face here in this tiny room would make me see my mother's face, where she is now, I imagine, in that old patched La-Z-Boy with a book propped on a pillow and a bag of Hershey's kisses to crinkle through.

“Try not to be too hard on your mother. Not much was openly discussed in those days. You can imagine I've kept up on the subject. And not only because I advise couples with fertility problems. It's beginning to change. At some clinics, the donors authorize release of their names and addresses to the children when they're eighteen. Of course they can't be minors or there'd be legal paternity issues. I was such a youngster when I did it. No idea really. It was good pay for a scholarship boy. I'd like to paint myself in some altruistic light, tell you it meant something to me that there was a family out there someplace raising a child they otherwise couldn't have. But I was so tired I was numb most of the time, and it was a meal ticket to me then, in my exhaustion, just another bodily fluid. I don't mean to hurt your feelings. I'm sure your mother wanted you very much.”

“I was a meal ticket. And what am I now?”

“Just who you are. Though I don't think I can invite you into the bosom of the family. I don't have that sort of modern sensibility.”

“I know that. I mean, you're single, so I have an urge to introduce you to my mother but it would never work out.”

He started laughing. “Thank you. I'm flattered.”

“She might not be. She doesn't like men much.”

“What about the father of your baby. Where's he in the picture?”

“I don't know. I don't know if he's in the picture. Maybe that's why I had to find you.”

“Well, he doesn't know what he's missing. That's all. And maybe he'll wake up to it one day.”

While my father goes to ask one of his partners to examine me, I sit in the room alone, facing down the instruments on the metal tray, feeling their chill and longing for the chaotic world where germs thrive. I wrap my arms around my belly, around this baby I'm certain is a girl. I let myself envision the delivery and Nigel is there. He is there when she comes into the world and opens her fearless eyes upon him, and I watch him take up her kicking body and hold her close to him, bring her to the beating warmth of his own. I know that he will go down the hall with her to the place of further testing, a room again like this, where he will volunteer himself to feel her pain wholly even as he can't feel mine. These are the things that will make him her father and she won't have to grow up in a world devoid of good men, perhaps even a world I have made devoid of good men.

At the bus station, my father told me about the people I come from. Irish Coal miners from West Virginia. Polish steel workers from Chicago. Later teachers, preachers, and doctors.
If I tell you your great great grandfather drove a jitney or that your great grandmother spoke Menominee and Chippewa or that your great aunt was a physical therapist who worked with convalescing soldiers, I can only give you the sketchiest details. The rest you have to fill in with literature, history, biography, or your imagination, like anybody else
.

I thought about how we looked later. Like a father and a daughter saying goodbye … I don't think more awkward in our embrace than anyone else of our age and time. He bought my ticket and pressed forty dollars into my hand as I was about to board.
Count it
, he said softly. It was the exact sum he'd told me he was paid for being a donor. I guess he couldn't find another way to give me cash.
Tell your mother I was an altruistic guy
. His smile was faint; he held it there till it looked half grimace. He didn't stand and wave. He ducked away face downwards so I had no last look. Did he think I would cry less that way? Was he suddenly ashamed? I was going home with a whole new set of questions.

XII.

On the way home. The foothills of the Cascades. Apple orchards in shadow, thunderheads spilling over the ridges above. Hypnotic rows of trees.
The fut fut fut of
the irrigation birds, the spray opalescent in the westering sun, the sound of crickets and evening doves coming up at dusk. Abandoned houses with branches out their chimneys. Barns pulled down by blackberries. Then black and purple buttes, chewed down brush and sage, dolomite shining beneath dry grass. Altitude sun that bakes cedar sap. Cirques full of snow. Steep, so steep it makes the weight of your body drop through your windpipe. Then it's down, down, and down. The coastal farmlands are dusted in a fine grain of color, paprika and curry.

I see tanker cars black in the sun, fat belly after fat belly beneath rows of shimmering poplar trees. The lumber towns reek of mill sewage, harboring pools of rottenness in syrup form somewhere out of sight. In sight, the original magnate's Victorian mansion and downtown the recent addition of a chainsaw Indian. I know these towns.

She cried when I called. Neither of us want to fight anymore. My mother and I seem to have a mechanism between us, a winch wound too tight that suddenly hurtles its line. On the phone she mentioned Frank. I keep trying out his name as though I could make it ring with familiarity.
Frank
. Trusting her to trust herself. I talked about the baby.
The baby. Frank
. Will the new cogs alter the old mechanism?

I told her about hearing the baby's heartbeat amplified:
pong, pong
. Like a badminton birdie whiffling back and forth over a net—aloft, aloft—hurrying up to my heartbeat. She was excited about searching garage sales for Johnny-jump-ups and crib gyms and changing tables, an inventory that seemed overwhelming. She asked about my father, but I heard a different tone in her voice, a longing to be spared. She doesn't want to know enough about him to make him real. Secretly, she must have hoped I'd be rejected by my father, then I could belong to her again. I don't think she's capable of understanding that he might mean something to me apart from her. It's enough that she could understand that with Nigel. Enough for me.

Instead of telling her about my father, I told her a story she'd long ago told me. My mother once found a locket that her grandfather had given her grandmother; it had been stolen years before. She was at an “estate sale” of goods, aisle upon aisle, booth after booth and yet she was drawn to the table where lay the locket: 24 karat gold filigree with a tiny ruby. It had once held the photo of her grandfather, but of course was now empty. My mother couldn't afford to buy it, but she told the woman its origin and let her know that she was displaying stolen property. The woman countered: “There were lots of lockets in this style.”

“That may be so,” said my mother, “but I bit this one when I was eight-years-old, and here on the back is the mark from my tooth.”

I told her that what I have now is like that toothmark—a moment of recognition. Indisputable.

Close to home. The tree farms that link the inland towns to the coast are all new green, a raw, discomfiting color like the pink of scar tissue that comes after a surface burn. But it's not long to the peninsula. If you know to look for it, the light changes first. You can see it on the sky, the way the river opens like a valve to reflection, joining the bay, while the land narrows and loops, west and north. The bay's curve and lambent shape suggest an intimate familiar between breast and arm, a ladle of comfort. At least that's how I feel about it now, picturing my mother at the station, rocking up on the balls of her feet and squinting to try and spot me.