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

me why they can get away with that title. It makes me shudder now to think of any pregnancy less than complete. I feel like my body is a giant cargo plane revving its engines on the runway. I am terrified the signal from the tower will be given too soon. I try not to but I think about my mother, like this, by herself and pregnant with me. And how do you feel after the hours and years of rocking and singing lullabies in that tone that teaches about desires never met, never satisfied. When you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses . And dressing the little body day after day and paint sets and play dough and cotton ball bunnies and Christmas ornaments made of two pound dough babies tilting your tree. If I called her, we could talk about the baby: a whole new safe subject. What a relief that would be to her. I don’t know how anyone finds anything in that book in the middle of the night. Rehearsal contractions .… Braxton Hicks . Was he the guy who discovered them like the first man on the moon? As far as I’m concerned the entire index could come under the heading “Fears.” I don’t like flipping around in that book. It keeps falling open to those gruesome photographs. Women getting double chins trying to look down there so hard and grimacing to see themselves distended in lurid color—cracked red and wrinkled black—about to shred like wet tissue paper while the caption reads: “The baby’s skin is still crinkled up like a rose petal before it has opened,” when you can see its skin has the texture of an old turkey wattle.
    I found a family photo album under a bunch of paperback mystery novels and crossword puzzle workbooks. It’s incomplete, original intent abandoned. Pictures of the cottage from all four sides, east, west, north, and south. Then there’s one with the three boys and their mother standing on the kitchen steps, but it’s from too far away: four small white people squinting, standing in a line and decreasing in height like dry goods jars lined up on a counter: flour, sugar, coffee, tea. I’m glad my father is not in this one, the family shot. He’s outside looking through a lens, like me. Then there are pictures of every room, all empty. The kitchen wallpaper is the same as it is now, yellow and white gingham. The bathroom is still pink. From the outside, the place doesn’t look any different either. Maybe my father’s wife had grand plans to remodel. “Before” pictures but no “after.”
    The boys are sitting around a large mixing bowl on the floor. The eldest has secured the bowl with his feet. The toddler is curling his toes as he sucks frosting from his fingers. The youngest is tracing over the glitter whorls in the linoleum with one chocolate coated finger. My mother has pictures of me like this, straddling a bowl with frosting on my face.
    I have to admit I don’t like the pictures with my father’s wife in them, but I make myself look. She’s sitting on the beach in a one piece suit, broad-striped as a beach chair, and she’s wearing a straw hat with a brim that curls up ridiculously. But I’m not being unkind. I can see by her smile that she’s terribly self-conscious, even about having her picture taken, and that her self-consciousness is her charm. She’s so modestly genuine, she could never be stylish, not for a minute, and she knows it. A pained admission to the camera’s eye. The baby in her lap looks toward the water, unaware of her embarrassment.
    There are endless pictures of the boys on the beach, digging dog-style, dripping sand castles into spires and turrets, scampering in and out of the little doorway. Then there’s one of my father at twilight, sitting on a log with his arms around the shoulders of the son who looks like me, the baby newly on his feet. The baby stands with his heels together, his stout legs bowed from locking his knees. He’s clutching a