Spirit Level (2 page)

When I wake up, Rocco is gone, the salon is empty, and my cheek is creased from lying on the pillow. One of Verna’s afghans is draped over me. When Verna’s not working in the salon, she’s crocheting the colorful little squares that eventually become afghans. She makes at
least six a year and gives them away to anyone who looks cold or in need of cheering up. Which is just about everybody in Seattle in the winter. Over the years she has tried to teach me how to crochet, but even she had to finally admit that all I was really good at was holding the skein of wool for her while she wound it into a ball.

My mom never learned to crochet either. Or knit or sew. She’s not big on what she calls “the domestic arts,” but she’s been studying Tae Kwon Do since way before I was born. She has a black belt now and teaches classes for girls one night a week. I took classes for a while; I really liked the five tenets—courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control and indomitable spirit—especially after I learned to back them up with a really good elbow strike. That was the only move I mastered before a girl named Bethany Kirk almost broke my arm with a roundhouse kick, and I decided to quit. And yeah, I know you can get injured in any sport (I got a black eye playing basketball once), but with martial arts, you seem to be asking for it. It is kind of cool to know that your mom can beat the crap out of pretty much anyone though. Verna calls her “the titanium fist in the wooly mitten.” And she’s not just referring to physical strength.

I lie under the afghan and think about Byron. How far away he is. How lonely I am. On summer evenings when we were little, our moms would sit at our kitchen table, drinking wine and laughing or maybe crying (it was hard to tell sometimes), talking about whatever
moms talk about. Work, men, kids, books, shoes, where to get the best bagels. Their voices were always in the air, like the scent of the honeysuckle that covered the fence. Mom would spread one of Verna’s afghans on the lawn, and Byron and I would lie side by side in the backyard, waiting for the sun to set and the stars to come out. Usually we fell asleep before moonrise. The summer we were fourteen, he touched my cheek when he thought I was asleep. I swatted his hand away and said,
Do I have a bug on me?

No
, he replied.
No bug
.

A month later, he held my hand as the light faded. I didn’t mind, even though I wondered why he was doing it. The next summer, when his arm grazed mine as he lay down next to me on the afghan, I turned to him and twined my legs with his. I hadn’t planned it, hadn’t noticed that my feelings for him were no longer entirely sisterly. How had I not realized that everything—and nothing—had changed? My lips hovered over his. I could smell the tuna casserole we’d had for dinner. I wished I had remembered to put on lip gloss and a nicer bra. When our mothers came outside later, calling our names, they found us breathless and slightly chafed. They looked at each other, grinned and shrugged. As if it had been their idea all along. The next day, my mom took me to the birth control clinic. While we were waiting to see the doctor, she said,
Good sex is about anticipation, Harry. That and respect,
safety and communication. If you can’t talk about sex, you shouldn’t have it. There’s no rush
.

I nodded and pretended to be enthralled by a year-old
Us Weekly
. When my name was called, I went in by myself while Mom signed some forms. I came out with a box of condoms and a prescription for birth control pills, which I never filled. Yeah, that’s right; we decided to wait. It seems ridiculous now. All that time wasted being “mature,” being “respectful,” being “safe.” I pull the afghan over my head and go back to sleep.

“I’M WORRIED ABOUT
you, Harry,” Verna says.

I stop sweeping and stare at the pile of hair on the cracked linoleum. It’s late Tuesday afternoon. I slept most of yesterday, and I would still be in bed if Mom hadn’t dragged me to Verna’s. I have three jobs this summer. One is helping Verna at the salon, the second is dog walking (not my own dogs—Mom won’t let me have one), and the third is being my mom’s research assistant. I’ve been pretty useless at all but the dog walking so far.

I shrug and push the giant hairball into a corner. The effort makes me feel dizzy, which is ridiculous. It’s a hairball, for god’s sake, not a boulder. Verna is talking again, saying something about pulling myself together. I want to speak, but my mouth feels the way it did when I ate library paste in kindergarten—thick, sticky, slow.

“I’m okay,” I mumble.

Verna takes the broom away from me and sits me down on the loveseat. “Clearly, you’re not,” she says. “You’re heartsick. I can see that, but you can’t sleep it off. Believe me, after Frank died, I tried. Didn’t help. Every time I woke up, there was a split second when everything was fine—and then it hit me again.”

I nod.

“So you know what I did?”

I shake my head.

“I worked. I kept busy. Real busy. I allowed myself ten minutes of crying a day. Then I went back to work.”

Ten minutes a day? How could that be enough?

“Do you feel better or worse after you cry for hours in your room?” Verna asks.

I think about it and then say, “Worse.”

Verna stands up and brushes some hair off her jeans. “Then there’s your answer.”

“My answer?”

“Life goes on, chickadee. Sooner you accept that, the better.”

“Ten minutes, huh.”

Verna pats my arm and says, “Start with fifteen. No more though.”

I nod and straighten the pile of trashy magazines on the table in front of the loveseat, idly reading the headlines. The Kardashians are up to their usual tricks. I wonder what it would be like to have such a big family. Mom was an only child, and I’m an only child. I don’t have a dad.
So no cousins, no big family reunions. No fighting with a big brother over the last piece of pie or yelling at a little sister for wearing my favorite shirt. I’ve never missed it.

My eyes fill again, but I don’t want to cry in front of Verna, so I pick up another old magazine and read the story Bonnie was talking about on Sunday, the one about the guy with all the kids. Turns out he was a sperm donor who decided to contact as many of his kids as possible. All of a sudden I wonder if I’m one of them, which is ridiculous. Or is it?

I stuff the magazine into my bag.

“Do you need me anymore?” I ask Verna, who is counting the cash in the till and writing down totals with the stub of a pencil, which she licks every now and again.

She looks up at me and smiles. “Run along, honey,” she says. “I’ll close up here. See you tomorrow?”

I nod and give her a peck on the cheek before I head out.

When I get home, Mom is in the glassed-in porch she uses as an office. I stick my head in to say hi, and she gets up from the computer, stretches and says, “What’s up? You’re home early.”

“Not much,” I say. “Verna said she didn’t need me.”

“Lots of work here when you’re ready,” she says. “I’ve missed my assistant.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I’ll get to it soon, I promise. Right now I need a shower.” And a nap. But I don’t say that out loud. Mom doesn’t approve of naps.

She nods and sits back down at her desk. She’s doing research for a book about homeless girls, and I’m her official transcriber. Better than any transcription software, she says, because humans can hear nuance. I listen to the recordings of the interviews she does and type them up for her. She’s a terrible typist. She even has an old T-shirt that says
Never Let Them See You Type
. And yet she suggested I take Keyboarding at school. Not sure what changed (actually, I am sure—I’ve suffered through enough lectures about the three waves of feminism), but it’s a useful skill these days. It’s not like I’m aiming for a career as a secretary or anything. It’s not 1962.

Anyway, the stories I transcribe for my mom are heartbreaking, especially since my mom was one of those girls, although she doesn’t talk about it much. Who knows what would have happened to her if Verna hadn’t taken her in? Now she’s trying to, as she says, “give them a voice.” She pays me fifteen bucks an hour to transcribe, and I had to sign a confidentiality agreement. I don’t ask what good having a voice is if you’re still hungry and cold and you ran away because your stepdad raped you and your mom doesn’t give a shit. If I did ask, Mom would babble about empowerment and connection, about youth shelters and high school equivalency programs, but most of those girls will still be on the street. Not that my mom isn’t sincere
or committed—she is—but there’s only so much she can do. She used to be a frontline youth worker, but she’s a sociologist now, an academic.

The last interview I transcribed was with a fifteen-year-old girl named Angie (not her real name, of course; Mom gives them all fake names) who had been on the street for two years. When she was barely fourteen, she had a baby, who was immediately taken into foster care. Angie is a prostitute, probably an alcoholic but not yet a drug addict. She also has a genius-level
IQ
and a stepbrother at Yale who is the baby’s father. Her family has discarded her like a used tampon. It’s a miracle she isn’t suicidal. I would be.

I can’t face anybody’s misery but my own right now, so I go to my room and try to sleep. Sleep is the one thing I’m still good at. That and crying. But neither sleep nor tears will come. All I can think about is that guy and his five hundred kids. I grab the magazine out of my bag and read it more carefully. A phrase jumps out at me:
accidental incest
. Apparently, two of his kids met and ended up dating. It isn’t clear whether
dating
is a euphemism for
screwing
, but either way, you know those kids are going to have hefty therapy bills and serious trust issues. A psychologist quoted in the article recommends that all donor kids carry around their donor’s number and grill prospective partners before even going out for coffee. That would be one awkward conversation:
I really like you, but I want to make sure we’re not related before I get in your pants.

I’m not even
thinking
about another relationship and the whole idea of accidental incest freaks me out. Maybe I should find out about my half-sibs. How many, where, how old. It’s not like I have anything else to do.

I get up and take a really long shower. Usually Mom yells at me when I shower for too long, but lately she hasn’t banged on the door or pointed out to me that water is a precious resource. I kind of miss it.

I wash and condition my hair. I shave my legs. I can’t even remember the last time I did that, which is gross, since it’s been warm enough to wear shorts and a tank top for a while. The same shorts and tank top. I am down to my last clean bra. Definitely time to do some laundry. Mom hasn’t done my laundry or made my lunches since I was ten. If I went to school in grubby clothes and had to eat crackers for lunch, that was my problem. I learned pretty fast how to measure detergent and make a decent sandwich.

When I get out of the shower, my head feels clearer than it has since Byron left. I’m excited about something for the first time in weeks. Maybe
excited
is stretching it; maybe
curious
is more accurate.

I suddenly feel shy—or more like wary—about telling Mom my plan, although that makes no sense at all. She told me years ago that she was a Single Mother by Choice (yes, it’s a thing) and that I was donor conceived. I’ve known about the Donor Sibling Registry, a service that connects people with their half-siblings and/or donors, since before I could read. She’s encouraged me to check it
out and accepted that I’ve never wanted to. And now that I’m going to, I don’t want her to know. I want this to be my thing, not hers. And it’s not like she has any connection to my half-siblings anyway. She is not the common denominator—my donor is. (We never call him “dad,” because he’s not. Mom says “dad” is a social construct anyway, whatever that means.) All I know is that he was a tall, part-Latino medical student, which I guess accounts for my height, my dark wavy hair and my brown eyes. Mom knows a bit about his medical history, but I’ve never asked her about it. She always refers to him as Dr. GM (short for Genetic Material). When I failed Biology in tenth grade, she said,
Damn. I thought Dr. GM might have passed on some of those science genes
. Then she hired me a tutor.

Do I miss having a father? I’ve thought about that a lot. I know some great dads—I adore Byron’s dad, even though he did drag Byron away to New York. My friend Anna’s two gay dads have never missed one of her dance recitals, even though they’re both big-deal lawyers. Martin has a stay-at-home dad who makes bread and coaches Martin’s soccer team. But Brianna’s dad fell in love with another man and moved to Detroit six years ago. He hasn’t contacted her or paid child support since the day he left. Martha’s dad is in jail for vehicular manslaughter. Gwen’s dad left her mom two years ago and moved to France, where he lives with a woman who’s not much older than Gwen.

So basically it’s a crapshoot. Not having a father doesn’t feel like an absence or even a lack. It’s just a fact.
And really, can you miss what you’ve never known? I don’t think so. Dr. GM could be dead or in jail. Or he could have raised three perfect kids who adore him. He could even have grandchildren. It makes no real difference to me. It’s not him I want to find. And I couldn’t even if I wanted to—you have to be eighteen to contact your donor through the
DSR
. And they have to want to be contacted.