Free The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family by Kathryn Trueblood Page A

front line receptionist in the warehouse where the sales people showed the different lines to the buyers. The receptionist station was this twelve foot long half arc that faced the elevator bank where I sat with three other women answering phones and filling out requisition orders. Nigel had dressed me all wrong and they didn’t like me. They wore sharply tailored magenta blazers with black skirts or checkered blouses over black skirts, with gathered waists and Victorian flounces to swish behind. Their smiles were brittle sugar as I took off my camel hair coat. Who did I think I was? Dressing like one of Mr. Tobin’s college bound daughters. It wouldn’t have helped to tell them I’d cleaned motel rooms all my life. I wouldn’t have liked them any better if they’d liked me.
    Nigel let me keep all my money. He’s a mechanical engineer, specialty robotics, and he travels to tool and die companies to design swinging arms, automated drill bits, conveyer systems. Everything with an automatic shut off and restart. He said I should go to a real college. He also said he wanted me to go to Europe with him in the spring when he would travel on business. He wanted me to be free to go with him. He also wanted me to be free to go. From the beginning, I was saving against that day. But I didn’t mind that I didn’t like the job. My mother raised me on women’s biographies. I knew that to be an interesting woman, I had to have an education in heartbreak. I had to fail in love to absolve myself for other things, though I don’t know what these other things are yet, only I feel the portent of them like a lead keel, an everyday weight. I was determined that my readiness to leave him, my preparation and my vigilance, would mean not having to leave. Sometimes I got up and went walking in the middle of the night; I wanted him to startle in the dark alone. I wanted him to know how ready I was; how alike we were in that way. I used to think that Nigel wanted to be known … by someone … by me.
    The last time I saw Nigel, he drove out to the motel one more time, and I had him meet me in that same room where we’d made love in the beginning. Except it was morning and the beach light was white as the insides of the curtains that trapped it against the window sill. I remember thinking, this beach light is white as a newborn, as the undersides of your arms where I will go seeking our youth when we are old, and still find it. But Nigel was old already, and I didn’t know it, if being old means to foreclose on possibility.
    Too much regret, not enough time, never enough money, should have, could have, would have.… We were a duet on dissonance. He tocked off losses on his fingers while my voice buoyed up all the things to look forward to. He did not, in this mood, want to look forward at all. He was begging the world not to require anything of him—the way children determine to stay in their rooms forever. He had locked up inside. I dreaded anger even as I felt heat at the roots of my hair. Odd I should remember the day I snuck into his basement while he was at work: geraniums set to winter years ago now yellow on a tin table, the wicker chair with peeled legs, stacks of black drum cases like cake boxes and guitar cases too, leaning like women waiting to dance.
    I don’t know why I thought there would be a grand gesture of reconciliation. I needed him to dream and he was being careful not to dream. The quiet ones in families endure, they make it look easy. They go so far toward secret lives that dreams become a means of hoarding safety. He had come to give me all his reasons why I should go through with an abortion—something he wouldn’t have to do—while I would be left anyway, empty and scarred. It was clear to me then, I would have left him if I had gone through with an abortion. Threatening to be done with me if I didn’t do it wasn’t much leverage.