Raising Dawn

From this memory there is no respite. It spools within my head like a timeworn family movie trotted out every year, in which the children are always children, always happy, cavorting around a lawn sprinkler in July, perhaps, or wearing coned hats and blowing out birthday candles. My sister Patty and I are lounging on the soft white carpet in her and Doug’s living room, eating buttered popcorn on the floor, which is astounding by itself because she doesn’t normally allow eating in her living room. Dawn calls her the original Idy-Tidy. Patty and I are laughing together, giggling like freshmen comparing the junior boys we think are hot. I am forty-one years old, trying to pick out a sperm donor for the child I am determined to have all by myself. As if this would be simpler than finding a compatible real father who would marry me. Abe had left me by then, or I him, and I am achingly lonely. I think a child who is at least half me will be the perfect life companion. Doug is upstairs, putting Sandra and Ian to bed, as far away from us as he can get. He has spawned his two children in the ordinary manner, and he doesn’t even want to know about my alternative. Both Patty and I know better than to ask him to be the sperm donor. The memory is loud with laughter, an occasional scream of delight. It won’t shut up in my head. “Oh, you can’t have this one.” Patty laughs so hard she has to hold her sides. “Why not?” “Because I want him. Listen: ‘Six feet tall, 180 pounds, blue eyes, blonde hair, Protestant, Northern European ancestry, 24 years old, first year medical student, state tennis champion in high school.’ ” Patty’s tastes run to the conventional. Yet, he is on my list of five finalists, and I want her to vet them all. “‘Not available in the five Bay Area counties.’ Why not?” “They don’t want too many half brothers and sisters mingling and committing incest in high school. Fortunately, we’re out of range.” We are in her home in Roseville, a suburb east of Sacramento, where this guy’s relatives would fit in well. I live a bit further up Highway 80, in Nevada City, where quirky is common. “You can’t do this one either,” Patty continues. She has come to the 38-year-old African-American musician, a drummer who teaches high school, my stealth favorite. I lean toward opposites, even in sperm. “Why create problems for a child, especially when you’re already going to be a single mother?” She echoes my own private concern, though I don’t admit it to her. I want her reactions. She is the sane and solid one, I the one who is “takin’ the long way around.” Patty gave me that Dixie Chicks album, saying that song reminded her of me. I think she has always been fascinated by my wayward life, which gives her all the details but none of the problems of living it. “I know which one you should choose,” Patty pronounces when she comes to the bottom page. “The one with red hair.” I read her mind. As sisters, we often did. She nods, happy I had come to the same decision. “He’s nothing like any of your old boyfriends.” “None of them would be suitable parent material.” She nods. No one in our family has ever had red hair, and Patty and I were always drawn to these pale English types we’d only seen in movies, with horn-rimmed eyeglass frames, argyle sweaters, books under the arm, sky-blue eyes, and flaming red hair. This donor (number Y6478) is six-foot-three, weighs187 pounds, with blue eyes and Welsh ancestry (like many of the early miners in Nevada City), Protestant, 42 years old (I like that he is one year older than I), a history professor who plays flute and reads poetry as his avocations. That’s as much as I ever learned about Dawn’s father. I’m starting to think I know even less about Patty, or myself for that matter. Patty had it all put together, I thought, a husband who loves her and two healthy children. Though I could never lead her conventional life, I admire her practicality. She’d been practical about getting a husband, and I never was, never would be. My time with Abe, my last boyfriend, is the perfect example. Abe and I met when he came to a little book party that Harmony Books gave for me when I published Cleo and the Leopard. Parents had brought their children, and the back part of the store had more little people’s chairs than ones for adults. It was a dank February evening, with mist sulking low over the roads, and the children’s jackets smelled like wet puppies. He hadn’t known there was a book party until he got there; he was just in town to stock up on some new reading. He stood in line where I was signing books, fingering his full brown beard, as curly as a spaniel’s ear. It softened his narrow face. When I asked to whom I should sign it, he just asked me to sign my name, and add my phone number at the bottom. I glanced up at him, but his dark eyes just looked thoughtful, not flirtatious, and I assumed he wanted the phone number in case he wanted to buy more books. I did notice he had no children with him. He called me the next day and asked if he could cook me a good dinner, at his house. He did mention he lived in Washington, one of many old gold mining towns in this part of the Sierra foothills. It lay at the bottom of a deep gorge, next to the South Fork of the Yuba River. To get there, I’d have to drive six miles down a steep, winding road that terrified me in any wet weather and I refused to drive at all in the winter except on a dry warm day. If you slipped on ice on that road, your car would probably take off in a spectacular arc like a dying firework and drop right to the bottom of that cold canyon. Even to get to the turnoff to his town, I had to drive half an hour on a woodsy, winding road that sometimes closed in the winter before the snowplows could get in. On a perfect day, it took forty-five minutes to drive those twenty miles. I told him I’d meet him for dinner somewhere in Nevada City. After grumbling a little bit about how you can’t get a good meal in Nevada City (which isn’t true), he agreed to meet me for dinner at the Corner House Café. It was my first clue as to how little he liked leaving the canyon. People should pay more attention to the first issue they have to negotiate with another person; it could save a lot of time and trouble. In the beginning I was sort of enchanted by where he lived. The town itself had most of its original buildings, all six of them – a hotel with a false front and saloon at the bottom, a general store, a stone jail with metal doors, the remains of a lumber mill, and two clapboard houses. No school. Abe lived in a trailer outside the town, just enough above the river that his home wouldn’t flood in the spring. The Yuba never froze; its burbling in late summer changed only to shushing in the high months of winter. He had built a detached screen porch, where we slept on hot summer nights, and sometimes we saw deer or coyotes just outside. Sex with Abe was untamed, ragged and surprising. After the baby arguments began, it went extinct, or nearly so. And then we began to argue about whether he’d drive to my house or I to his. His trailer sat among fifteen or twenty others and a few shambling houses, set far enough apart from each other to give almost total privacy. Some of the trailer owners – Abe was one of them – had active mining claims on the river, though I never saw anyone actually working his mine. In the summer, we followed winding trails from where he lived to the most secluded, idyllic swimming holes on the river. We took camp chairs and books and perched on huge boulders overlooking the river, where we’d read for hours. Sometimes he fished, and we grilled trout on an open fire. He was an incredibly good cook, even with the tiny amenities of his trailer kitchen. He grew most of his own vegetables and stir-fried them in a huge wok. Summers were easier than winters.