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

short man’s propensity for wearing cowboy boots. He taught Algebra the way he coached basketball—barking all the time and throwing erasers, reserving himself for the few stars. He began each hour with the hardest problems on the board—inside of fifteen minutes successfully humiliating the peons, goading those who kept up at all, and separating out his A-team for the rest of the hour. His reputation outside of school was for the tequila bottle, and his voice sounded like he’d swallowed a few worms—hoarse and nasal at the same time.
    I could manage the word problems with their variables for X and Y, but without the words the numbers and letters looked like cuneiform or Sanskrit, some language rubbed off of a stone. Zero doesn’t divide into infinity at all but infinity divides into zero endlessly . When Mr. Flotre said things like that I never heard the rest of the hour. I wondered what practices the people of such a language used to ritualize it. What they carved or built to signify it. All my nothing and not being in that room still a part of something and forever. Whatever knowledge I gained he had no part in, and I refused to take the final exam. Never mind the afternoons I cut out with the juvey boys to go condo-hot-tub-hopping, I didn’t consider myself unteachable. Mr. Flotre took me out behind the modular after giving the class problems to work on. Ours was of a different nature.
    â€œYou might pass the exam if you took it.”
    He feared my candor. “But you haven’t taught me anything.”
    â€œI’ve explained the problems over and over.”
    â€œYes, but always the same way.”
    â€œLook, I’m trying to be a nice guy here.”
    â€œNo, you’re not. You don’t want administration to hear why I refused to take the final.”
    He snorted, scoffed before swinging his rear around on his boot heel. “I’m not worried about my standing here, but you ought to be.”
    I didn’t follow him back in, and he left me staring at the whole green playing field in front of me. Standing where? The chain link hood over the pitcher’s mound looked like a net holding me from the sky.
    When my mother called Mr. Flotre, he told her that he was terribly busy. Of course you’re busy , she said, I expect you to be busy . But she was battle weary by then, decided to let me go to junior college and bang out my own consequences.
    I became man-eating to keep my mother at a distance. In a man-slather. So I could say, Look, I get along with all these men. It wasn’t the men. It was you . The summer I turned eighteen, I slept with every man at the motel who’d have me. Ever seen those check-out time questionnaires that come with their own envelope? Tell us how we’re pleasing you . What could she do? Close the motel?
    She used to wait up under the porch light swirling with insects. I could smell the smoke of her cigarettes as I crunched across the drive.
    They won’t make you happy .
    What makes you think you look so happy?
    Maybe you’ll be luckier than me .
    I intend to find out. I’m not the bellhop of love you know, I don’t have to drag your Samsonite up and down stairs for the rest of my life .
    Well, don’t get pregnant. Unless you want to be a suitcase .
    One morning as she was putting away my laundry, she found the crumpled tube of Ortho-Gynol nesting in my underwear. I watched from the bed. She picked it up between her fingers the way you would a dead moth, by its wings. Getting a lot of mileage out of this, I see . Then she dropped it back in and closed the drawer.
    My mother had her little ways of getting even … all the little ways she needed me. Even in high school when I tried having an honest-to-god boyfriend. If she had a compliment for one of them, it also turned out to be a slight. Oh, she took them into her confidence, and they liked her. Nellie. Nothing like their mothers. Thin, rangy, smoking,