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

fold of pant fabric with one hand while the other rests at his side, slightly curled. The image arrests me. The fisting and unfisting hands of babies. It’s easy for me to cry, wishing I were the one guarded in the enclosure of my father’s arms. It’s easy for me to idealize him; we have no family history of ambivalence.
    Pictures of a white-muzzled family dog with a beach umbrella clenched between his stubby teeth. Suddenly, I know there’s no one that would look at this album and sob but me. A person might look at my mother’s photo album and wonder the obvious: Where is the father? Who is this other woman? A relative? Of course it’s Angie, my other mother. But whatever they thought, they’d sit back, fold their hands and say: Well the child looks happy enough. She was. She’s digging trenches, dog-paddling to shore, smiling while her mother pushes her around in a wheelbarrow. She’s doing all the things these children are doing. I could glue most of the pictures together in the same book and you’d think it was the same beach. That would be one way to have a family get-together. Maybe there’s something to it. Why his was the sperm that took.
    In this one, they’re building balsa wood gliders at the kitchen table. There are cookies on a platter. The glider decals are collected in a shoe box. My father and his first son are using a nail file to deepen an insert slit. The other boy stands behind my father’s chair rubbing his eye. It’s taking too long for anything to happen. The youngest is holding onto the table ledge, back for another cookie. My father’s face is in profile. Back lit, it looks less harsh, less bullet shaped. Long, like the patient profile of the crescent moon in nursery rhymes. Hey Diddle Diddle. I recognize something in the softening. It’s only love that makes me pretty. My face has the charm of a dark urn by candlelight. I lengthen the flame.
    My father stands in a field of sand and scrub grass flying a model airplane on a string. His youngest son, the one who looks like me, stands knee-high beside him. A series of snapshots take the plane full circle. My father keeps a fierce eye on the plane, even when it flies across the sun. He has stopped trying to make out what his son is saying. He is flying the plane. He has gone to the sky. Upwind, the sound bursts about the boy’s ears; downwind, it fades to a buzz. He is not looking at the plane. He is looking for a way out of the panic circumscribed by noise. The father squints; the boy winces. Upwind, downwind. My ears ring from the picture. Is this too what I missed?
    I search the closets upstairs and find an old playpen, toys in a laundry basket. A string of wooden ducks made of thread spools with wings like little paddles that go round when you pull the string. Six miniature milk bottles that fit into a carrying crate with a handle. A ballasted bird with a convex underside; she’ll jingle but she won’t tip over. I sit on the floor remembering when my hands fit the shapes of these things.
    My pre-school was in a converted brick warehouse. Huge windows began six feet above rows of cubbies and coathooks. I was happy at my projects: gluing macaroni to kleenex boxes, rolling marbles over blobs of paint in a box top, shaping little bears out of cinnamon and applesauce that the teacher later baked. And dreamily I looked up at those windows, where because I couldn’t see their trunks, the branches of the trees seemed to float by on a current of cumulus clouds.
    It must have been around Christmas time. We were cutting chains of angels in construction paper and trying to peel the points of stick-on stars out whole. Our mommies were the chain of angels that wound around our days. Our mommies dropped us off and kissed us goodbye and picked us up and kissed us hello, and our teachers were altogether mommy-like and Jesus in the picture belonged to all the children. I went to hang my