The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (19 page)

“Did I wreck everything?” I asked.

She came up the stair level with me, and gently put her fist to my cheek. “If it were that easy to wreck my everything, then it wasn't much to begin with. No, baby, you didn't.”

“Moggens and Anders are coming now,” I said.

“Well good,” she said, “then we'll only have to wait another half century.”

We stood very close without touching and listened to the halyards ring out against the mast. I took the tail of her braid and wrapped it around my thumb. We were both looking at Kjell, asleep in the sun.

“Watch this,” my mother whispered. “Kjell,” she said in her melodic voice. He smiled a little but did not wake.

“Do it again,” I said.

“Kjell,” my mother repeated even more softly—and again the gentle smile. She sighed. “I hate to wake him.”

“KJELL!” I shouted. He sat straight up and fixed us with his granite gray eyes.

“You rat,” my mother said laughing, and then to Kjell in her most soothing tones, “We thought you'd like coffee.”

“You see,” I said, turning to follow her, “he doesn't love
me
.”

On Kjell's forty-fifth birthday, an hour before we were due at the party, I sat with my mother on the pier, my back against her knees. As we discussed what I would wear, she braided my hair, gathering the stray strands with soft strokes while keeping the plait between the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. I felt the reflection of the sun on the water in the flush of my face and watched the light in the reeds as it shifted between the ridged blades. My mother was talking and I dozed, my eyelashes dividing the fjord in bands of shadow.

“I couldn't ever have afforded to send you to art school at home, or to graduate school for that matter, if you decide later that's what you want. Of course you'll have to start the government Swedish classes soon, but that won't be a problem for you.”

My mother liked to believe in me. I was her vehicle of faith. “You can do anything, Frances,” she often told me, “anything at all,” as though she hadn't had the same option. If I were to have said that she made some choices along the way, she would have reminded me of the letters that supposedly came every Christmas from my father's lawyer, threatening to take her to court, threatening to take me away; and it was this she told me that kept her from going back to school, that kept her at the job she didn't like. I don't remember my parent's divorce, and I never saw the letters.

According to my mother, there were no limitations on my happiness. I could get my Ph.D. if I wanted, become a brilliant professor or museum curator or psychiatrist—all the things she thought she might have been good at. And then I could glow in the knowledge of having rectified her mistakes. My mother picked men like dandelions and blew the hot rage of her unsatisfied wishes on them until they scattered like seed.

The party in celebration of Kjell's forty-fifth birthday was at Krista and Murre's house across the fjord. Kjell's childhood friends came around the house to the backyard where the tables had been set beneath the trees. They came carrying between them a string of candy and singing.

I ended up in the kitchen with Krista and Murre where I asked Murre what he did, and he told me that he sold castors for office furniture. “The little metal balls,” he said, making a circle with thumb and forefinger, shrugging and smiling as if to imply that he'd long ago accepted that there wasn't much to say about it. He fished a cigar out of his pocket, poked it playfully at Krista's ribs and left the clamor of the women who were assembling in the kitchen.

Krista gave me some cucumbers to peel, and after making a sound of annoyance in her throat, explained to me in English, “He smokes cigars all day. In the morning, he spits in the sink, doesn't bother to wash it away.” She poured a heavy cream over a casserole of fish in a glass pan and as we watched the cream rise over the shiny filets, she continued to vent her outrage. “He wears a gun around the house sometimes too, thinks he is John Wayne, the barrel shoved in the waistband of his pants, my God!”

To me, Murre looked as though he might have been as tall as his wife when he was twenty-two, but years of telephone sales had caused his spine to sink. The roll around his midriff was such that standing up, he couldn't possibly have pressed his groin against her. I saw that when he came in and kissed her, a smooch so loud I knew it must have been for my benefit. Krista had a loose eye, like a fish in a round bowl, magnified and looming one instant, the next sliding away. I finished peeling the cucumbers but left them uncut by the sink.

I didn't see anywhere to sit in the living room so I stood by the door. My great-uncle, Anders, was the only other person standing, leaning against the far wall by the dining room table. His face had the look of a jack-o'-lantern abandoned on the back porch, smiling crookedly into a swirl of leaves, and slumping further. His eyes too, it seemed, bore the weight of rotten pulp, though it was booze and cigarettes that had swelled his lids so that they hung down into his field of vision. And no one in the family was quite sure what Anders' field of vision included. My grandfather, Moggens, had explained to me that when Anders looked at your face, he saw only your shoulders, but that when he looked above your head, he saw your head. I had gotten used to him staring at the air above my head. From the change in his expressions when we talked, I knew that was where he saw my face.

The faces of Kjell's friends were marked by weariness, not striving—good faces all the same. His friends were people who had made themselves content with what they had found, who hadn't gone far looking for it. They asked about Kjell's travels, becoming both intimidated and jealous, and marveled at how he had retained his youthful looks. “People who keep the world running,” my mother said of his friends, “the ones we should be grateful to for keeping home the same.” I didn't know what she could have meant by that for us, considering the number of places we'd lived, but my grandparents still lived in the house where she was born, and I almost could have found their faces at that party, if I'd looked.

My mother was waving to me across the room and I headed dutifully in her direction, steeling myself for another round of introductions. Everyone kept telling me how lucky I was, as though I'd been waiting my whole life to become Kjell's stepdaughter. They didn't know what else to say. They wanted to see if I was nice, and they hoped Kjell wasn't unlucky for having gotten a package deal. I was very nice. It didn't mean anything. Social pleasantries are like worry beads: everyone fidgeting with them incessantly, clacking them together.

I drifted into the dining room where a group of men were sitting at the table discussing the economy or cars; I couldn't tell which because the only words I recognized were Volvo, Saab, and
huit
, the latter being the Swedish word for shit, close in sound to its English counterpart and said with the same vehemence. I looked at my grandfather's cigarettes on the table. I knew I should stop stealing from him and just ask for one in private.

I liked going to find Moggens, alone in his study. As we talked, he'd rub his eye with his thumb while holding a cigarette between his first two fingers, from time to time singeing his forelock but too intent on the conversation to be much troubled by it. He was the one I knew to ask for Anders' story, the one who told me that Marthe was the name of Anders' wife—headstrong, young Marthe who took her daughter to swim in the rough waters on the west coast. Anders tried to rescue them, one under each arm, then one lost—Anders not knowing which it was. That's when his head met the rock and his wife went to sea. That's how he got the brain hemorrhage.

Moggens caught my questioning glance (I was trying to figure out how to make off with one of his cigarettes), and mistook it for curiosity. The men at the table were still laughing over a joke he'd just finished. “Come over here,” he called, “come over and I'll tell you.”

“Yes,” my Uncle Hasse said, wiping his eyes, “tell her the King of the Shit House story.”

“Ah, now you've ruined it,” Moggens exclaimed, dropping both hands to the table.

“No, he hasn't,” I insisted, “tell me.” I leaned against Moggen's chair and he put his arms around my hips.

“Well, once there was a maintenance man for apartment buildings, and as extra work on holidays—you understand this man worked all the time—he worked at the train station bathroom. This fellow, he was a very straight fellow, never let bums loiter or slide down walls, never was afraid to approach drunks or toughs, never even considered being afraid …”

“And me,” my uncle interjected, hitting himself in the chest with his thumb, “I become a professional so the government can take eighty percent.”

My grandfather put up his hand at which Hasse downed his schnaps and grunted.

“So one day the railway station manager approached this man because he'd heard that the government was accepting bids on the leasing of the bathrooms. ‘No' the man said, ‘they would never choose me,' but his wife, she forces him to put in a bid, and he gets it. So now he makes … oh, 200,000 kroner a year in black money.”

“Who can count the coins for the toilet!” my uncle roared.

“And,” Moggens continued, “he is by our standards a millionaire. In the United States, you have movie stars. In Sweden, the King of the Shit House gets rich!”

At this, the men chuckled, except of course my uncle who was rapping his knuckles on the table. I smiled and squeezed Moggens' shoulder, but I had only been half-listening, the rest of my attention on Anders who stood against the wall on the other side of the room.

While Moggens had been telling his story, Anders' mouth had been working, forming words he couldn't get out. I moved to him, leaned over his ambulator and ran my hand across his forehead, pressing down the veins that had risen there. He closed his mouth, and as he smiled his eyelids drooped with the release of the strain.

The men at the table resumed their discussion. I heard the word Electrolux mentioned several times. Anders seemed to be listening, though he stared steadily at me. He curled his fingers and very deliberately made a tunnel of his hand. When he was sure my attention was fixed on it, he dropped his hand to his crotch and made a loud, wet, sucking sound, saying quite clearly and with exaggerated satisfaction: “Electrolux … my first woman.” The moment after he said it, he shook his head as if to deny it, and then he grinned. I laughed so hard with him it made me weak, and I hung on to the other side of his ambulator until I felt my mother's eyes on me.

That night at the dinner table, I chose to sit next to Anders; he was the only person I could supply with words. He would lose words he wanted and become reconnected to others he didn't want.

“I want the tomatoes,” he said. So I passed him the tomatoes. He shook his head. “I want,” he paused, “the tomato.” I took the spoon, believing that he wanted a slice of tomato, and served him. He slumped further into his chair and began again. “I want,” he said, and pointed, I thought, at the fruit basket.

“Ah,” I said, “the fruit.” He was still pointing so I took an apple and a banana from the basket. He took the apple from my hand.

“An apple,” he said slowly, marveling at its shape and the feel of the word on his tongue. Then nodding at me in encouragement, he spoke in Swedish and waited for my response.

So I repeated the words to him, making my best effort at pronunciation. “
Jag har ett apple och en banan
.”

“Jah,” he said with the sharp intake of breath particular to Swedish inflection.

“Jah,” I answered, and in the end we both considered that we had done rather well.

By early evening, the party had moved to the backyard where the children were playing soccer. I saw my mother at the water pump and noticed how pretty she'd become since we'd moved to Sweden. She was wearing one of Kjell's shirts, the tail of it outlining her ample rump rather nicely. Kjell was often patting her there, when she leaned over to peer into the oven or to spit toothpaste into the sink. He wasn't a rump slapper like her last boyfriend, and I didn't think I'd ever wake to find him breathing over my bed. Now we called her last boyfriend “bog breath” and “mouth breather,” when we mentioned him at all.

Krista and Murre were out on the driveway. He'd come back from making a run to the store for sugar, and she'd been clipping flowers. She stood by the car, one arm dangling with the weight of the shears. He hung his arms over the open door and his bad air blew into her wispy hair. From the look on his face, she'd just told him that in all the time they'd known each other, he'd been rubbing her clitoris backwards. She strode off, carrying the flowers, blooms down, in a stranglehold. He slammed the door, eyeing the men in the yard with the bottle between them, wondering how in hell you figure out what is frontwards and backwards of a thing not shaped for travel anyway, bow and stern, yes. Yes, I'm sure he suddenly yearned to be out on his boat, which unlike his wife would signal the first moment of miscalculation. And me, I yearned to be away from all these people—away where my imagination would not have the chance to give meaning to conversations I scarcely understood a word of.

I walked quickly into the forest at the edge of the garden. Birch, aspen, oak, and spruce vied to turn their leaves in the sun, to display their own variant of green, and the forest floor was laced with leaves like interlocking fingers. The sun was slinking behind a veil of cloud. In the sudden damp of the woods, I felt stricken at having left my mother alone back there. But it crossed my mind then too, that it was me that felt alone in the midst of my new family, not her.

I remembered the day before my mother left for Sweden, and I for my grandparents'. We stayed in bed all morning, reading magazines, letting the phone ring, filling out a computer dating application together. I read aloud to her: “If none of the answers following a particular question is the exact answer you wish to give, then mark the answer that comes closest.” The vase of flowers I'd put on her breakfast tray fell over, and when finally she stopped laughing, she told me it was true—that most of her friends had given up on finding the
right
man and picked the man that came closest. The friends that kept looking also kept marrying. I asked her if that was true of her, and she winced, as though I had made a loud noise or pulled the shade up.