The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family Read Online Free Page B

it doesn’t have much to do with him, does it?”
    â€œHe has his tender side.”
    â€œI know.” I answered without thinking, but she wasn’t watching my face or she would have seen the admission there that she was working scrupulously to avoid—his flirting, his midnight excursion.
    â€œHe understands my ambition.” She sounded more plaintive than defensive. There were sounds in the kitchen of cupboards opening and water running.
    â€œWhat about your passion?” I whispered.
    She shrugged, but it was almost a jerk or a twitch, and she wouldn’t look at me.
    â€œPassion looks to me like unnecessary pain, like self-absorption, like selfishness. I can’t help how I’ve changed. I’m going to make coffee.”
    That morning was the first time I knew I wanted to go home. That I wanted to be away from Monique’s questions as much as she wanted to be away from mine. In the bathroom at her house, soaping my hands with a scallop-shaped pink soap, I wanted to go home. But I wasn’t thinking of the places I drive by now, every afternoon on my run to town: the old sloped houses with power lines looping from roof corner to roof corner and back across the railroad tracks; the trailer parks that look as much like tin cans washed up shoreside as anything else, plastic butterflies in increasing sizes alongside their doors; the 1920’s bungalows converted into motels, teeny weeny novelties to unpack the kids into, 12 coats of paint thickened to their shingles; the downtown converted into a Coney Island of Amusement Park rides and Ye Olde Everything Stores with pull taffy machines and brass sailboats, and the original cannery now a restaurant full of kites. The tourists congregate downtown to buy postcards and T-shirts signifying their trip to a beach they never seem to spend any time on. No, it wasn’t this. With the small pink soap in my hands, I remembered the purple snapdragons that grow in the wild wheat grass of the dunes. They fit on my fingers when I was a child. Thumb and forefinger of both hands. I made their velvet and scarlet skins kiss.

    IV.
    On the bus ride out here, I thought about how it’s possible to set out on a journey in America not to discover oneself and succeed. From on-ramp to off-ramp, from Burger King to Burger King, Motel Six to Super Eight, Arby’s, Bob’s, Wendy’s, Denny’s, every place the same place. Why not be a chain-outlet person? Go home with the first person to mistake me for somebody they know. My father’s already in trouble. I don’t want him to be like anybody else.
    Tomorrow I’ll call him, I say to myself as I sink into sleep. I’ve been at his cottage nearly a week, wrapped head to toe in a gauze of exhaustion. This afternoon lightening and rain. The sky is the color and density of steel wool. The resistance of the air to my body moving through it makes me feel my own shape outlined in sweat. The lawns release fertilizer vapors in the humidity. Fireflies skitter over the dusk-darkened green, up into the black fingered maples. Then it comes, blue heat lightening sheeting across the lake. I stay awake for that.
    The baby skims off my energy like cream. I don’t ask myself where I’ll be to have the baby. I nap. Mid-morning. Mid-afternoon. On the tweedy couch with the Hudson Bay Blanket over me. I don’t ask myself what I would do if anything went wrong. Or maybe I do. Pick up the phone like anyone else, but it goes no further than that. I’ve missed the last train of thought to pull into the station. I can just keep up with feeding myself. My appetite is immortal. A sandwich on a plate looks like a party hors d’oeuvre.
    Last night, I felt a slow tightening above my pubic bone, which drew upwards all the way to my breast bone. I felt muscles I never knew I had, crisscrossing like a basket woven around my baby. I went to the index of my Complete Pregnancy book. Don’t ask