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

straight at the camera and smiling, as if to say, “This is the first frame of forever.” I don’t know what it’s like to lose love, only that most of my friends’ parents lost it anyway, and that’s not an observation my mother ever factors into her loss total.
    I didn’t do well my last year of high school, which effectively cut me out of the scholarship scene and all my mom’s hopes. What a relief to be cut loose. Jackie’s brother was hyperkinetic and had bottles full of ritalin. We ate most of his prescription that year. God knows how he got by. I had to recite the elements chart in chemistry, fill in the blanks. Mrs Wallia was Pakistani and her bindi became the red center of my whirlpool. Strontium, barium, uranium, red dot .
    I could see the names in my head but they looked like pieces of clothing in a washer, a centrifuge that spun around the red dot on her forehead. Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, red dot. Try again, concentrate Jessica . She asked me if I felt well, placed her pretty hand on my forehead. If she’d placed it on my chest, she would have heard my heart skipping like a scratched record.
    My English teacher, Mrs. Sundquist, devised tests for the kinds of cocktail parties she had to endure, the official functions. Match the quotes to the correct authors . Quoting snippets to display erudition while eating hors d’oeuvres was obviously important to her. Not a damn for what I thought of geese as rapists, immortals descending, Zeus and Danaë. Wasn’t I the product of an immortal lust? I daydreamed constantly. Mrs. Sundquist would turn from the board in her dark gabardine skirt, hand prints of chalk on her hips. I imagined my mother, bent over and kicking, unable to refuse an immortal. Her hubris had earmarked her for such a lesson in humility. Oh I was vicious, and full of longing too, sometimes a sorrowing Persephone returned to her mother from the underworld.
    What of the hubris I inherited? I tore up Mrs. Sundquist’s final exam. It was satisfying to hear that slow ripping in the silence, to do it slowly so that it destroyed each student’s concentration; the girls dared not look up, only glanced at me sideways. “Sheez,” one boy said, shaking his head. Gina Giannini passed me a note: “Jesus loves you anyway.” I slipped one back to her: “I am the miracle of immaculate conception.” By then the whole room had paused, and Mrs. Sundquist was glaring at me with the obvious question, so I told her that what she’d seen and heard was in fact what I’d done. Torn up the exam. “Jessica, Are you going crazy?” For once, it was not a question in patronizing tones while she withheld the answer, not rhetorical either. All heads snapped up. “Yes, Mrs. Sundquist.”
    â€œThen you may be excused.”
    I smoked a cigarette under the cement stairwell and cursed that brick Taj Mahal with its textbooks full of prick-less statues. Chipped off . It became a code expression between Jackie and me. I see myself, standing in my school issue wool kilt, a bit tilted back—the spine of a child, the breasts of a woman. Every man dreams of saddle shoes . I dreamed of myself that way … saddle shoes over my head, bucking for a brooding storm. My mother would later fight it out with the principal’s office, earning no points with them for saying they couldn’t keep up with my restless intelligence. The class spends three months covering one novel with those bloody mimeographed discussion sheets while my daughter is reading three novels a week. How does Mrs. Sundquist expect to keep her interest?
    I admit I made a practice of being intractable. It seemed important. I thought the world was ending. I warded off most everybody with my bad case of weltshmerz. I prided myself on knowing what the word meant.
    Mr. Flotre was one of those unfortunate men with the affliction of having a fanny, set off the more by the