Jeffrey Robinson to report immediately to the operating room and all the doctors and nurses raise their left eyebrows at each other?” Rose laughs, but is undaunted. “I guess you’re right. Men just don’t care about kids.” Kyla doesn’t remember saying that, but she lets Rose continue. “I mean, I never knew my father. He left my mother when we were kids. I hated him. I saw him once when I was twenty and I couldn’t even look at the bastard.” Kyla has heard this story before, from Rose and from a hundred other adults whose voices receded into childhood tones when they talked about their father’s desertion. Then there were those who talked about the emotional distance of their fathers, as if they were men with hollow bodies. It all made Kyla vaguely defensive, as if she should rush to protect the institution of fatherhood. “That must have been difficult,” Kyla tries to sound sympathetic. “Oh, I survived. What was your father like?” “My father is a nice guy, regular salt of the earth. He was always good to me, still is. Nothing traumatic in our relationship. Kind of boring, actually.” “Well, I always suspected as much. But while we’re trading secrets,” Rose persists despite the downward turn of the Kyla’s full lips. “Why don’t you just tell me the truth. Your children all have the same father, don’t they?” Rose sits back, as pleased as if she thought her bland invocation would be sufficient to convince a pathological liar to make an exception, a guiltless sinner to confess. “What makes you think that?” “They all look so much alike.” “They look like me.” Kyla is exactly right. The four people share the same pale coloring, the same honey streaked curling hair, the same eyes round as blue moons and protruding from the oval angularity of their faces. Their lips are uniformly even and full, their noses aquiline, their fingers long and their hands disproportionately large. “That’s true,” Rose admits, only slightly hiding her disappointment. “Though they must have inherited something from their father—or fathers.” Not if they don’t have any.” Kyla rocks Kyla also knows she is considered slightly inferior because she is not an ‘‘artist. ” Her art of accounting is disparaged, as if it is merely a technical skill. There is no one in this town who shares Kyla’s conviction about the magical nature of numbers. Marina, pressing their faces close together like a nineteenth century painting of mother and child. The day rapidly collapses around Kyla as if Rose’s raw echoes had started a landslide. When Kyla loses interest in her clients’ fiscal tax years, she tries to edit her computer program on nonprofit corporations. Marina’s whining distracts her and she overwrites the program. Three days work is lost. Free Heart School telephones to announce that Donovan has had another accident: “Can you please bring a change of clothes, and are you really sure that he is toilet trained sufficiently to be in the preschool?”Kyla dutifully bustles Marina into the compact blue station wagon to deliver a shirt and pair of overalls for her son, but then decides to take both Donovan and Rachel back home, in the hopes of a quiet, early evening. “ Why don’t you just tell me the truth. Your children all have the same father, don’t they?” Rose sits back, as pleased as if she thought her bland invocation would be sufficient to convince a guiltless sinner to confess. The children have a different agenda. They bicker and demand Kyla’s absolute attention. Marina cries. Rachel pours the dog’s bowl of water over Donovan’s head. Marina spits up. Donovan pulls the training pants from his dresser drawer and puts them in the toilet. Marina screams. All three children want only to cling to Kyla. A sweet supper does not console them. Attempted treats of bowls of ice cream, favorite books, Lego blocks, forbidden pastel chalks, blowing bubbles and coloring books are useless against their ill tempers. The usually enjoyed communal bath only results in six round blue eyes which bulge and stare at Kyla as if she is a traitor to some cause to which she does not know she should belong. It feels a hundred hours past midnight when she outlasts her children’s burst of tyranny and the children are asleep in their own small beds, seeming to listen to each other’s cranky breathing, waiting for the signal to renew the mutiny. It is one of those nights Kyla cries from exhaustion. It is one of those nights when the joy of stretching diagonally across her queen-size bed is not enough; she wants someone to gently move her over as he comes to bed after checking the children. It is one of those nights Kyla doubts the passion of her choices and curses the career that gives her the freedom to implement her schemes. She wishes the phone would ring with a rescue message. The only problem Kyla has tonight, like all such nights, is that she cannot decide who should be the bearer of the message. She only knows that it would be a man and that he would look like her enough to be her twin brother. Only in her fitful sleep does Kyla allow specific men to be contenders for the role of rescuer. She has dreams about pulling a list of three names from her jeans, rejecting each one, then folding the list carefully and slipping it into her tight pocket as she reaches for another custard doughnut. When the phone finally rings with a would be rescue message rather than a client or a request for Kyla to volunteer at the battered women’s shelter, it is weeks later—weeks too late. Things have been running extraordinarily smooth. Donovan hasn’t had an accident in all of March. Rachel has learned to love to read aloud to her brother and sister for hours. Marina is sleeping through the night. Kyla’s accounts are in order and the income tax deadline is approaching gracefully. Kyla is spending less time with Rose, and more time with Evelyn, a new and more considerate friend. Besides, it is early spring and the weather is heavenly. It is the season which makes the populations of the northern sections of the country plunder their address books for acquaintances in the subtropics who wouldn’t mind a visitor or two. All of Kyla’s children were born in winter. Douglas is on the other end of Kyla’s long distance line and he wants to visit. He and Kyla have been friends for a long time. They met each other in college, years before Douglas went north to Mackinac Island at the strait between the icy lakes Michigan and Huron and Kyla came south to a narrow strip of land off the “Gold Coast” of Florida. Yet there are certain old lovers one should never trust; lovers who left living scabs rather than mending wounds. She is trying to remember her vow never to see Douglas again. And Kyla is suspicious because he is now married. Douglas has a charm that penetrates while it implies that he needs to talk to Kyla about family problems only she will understand. The wary Kyla tosses her hair generously, and somewhat flir- \ tatiously, and tells him she’ll pick him up at the airport next Tuesday. She puts her better judgment to sleep like a naughty child. That child gets restless once Douglas is actually in her presence. Her real children seqm to overwhelm him at first with thek busy corporeality, but by the time the troupd arrives at the stucco house facing west,Douglas is easy with the kids and they all seem to like him. He loves children, telling, Kyla this fact over and over on the ride bpm the airport, as if it is not obvious, as if it contains some deeper message. Kyla is Carefully registering her perceptions to see if he gives any one child extra attention. Kyla shows Douglas to the guest room, its demure twin beds outfitted with pink and sea green striped sheets that look fresh as the first squeeze from a new tube of toothpaste. He laughs and strokes her head. Once she had called him oenmel, an ancient Greek beverage made of wine and honey, something that is both strong and sweet. She was studying philosophy then, fascinated with the ancient Greeks and their myriad theories about the perfect number. He was studying French literature and used to read her Flaubert in his faltering rendition of the original. Now he sells hand-hammered silver to tourists on a summer resort island that allows no cars. He married a former fashion model. Now Kyla delves into columns of numbers, making sure each is accurate, if not perfect. She is an unwed mother three times. The small ironies of life are not wasted on either of them. It takes him two days to tell her he is disturbed because his wife Lenore is sterile. He tells her this after her own three children are safely asleep and it is just two adults sitting on the back step listening for the distant sound of sloshing salt water. It seems Lenore knew she could not conceive, but did not tell Douglas because she thought he wouldn’t marry her. Douglas is weeping. “Deception,” he says, “always makes me this way.” > > w yla, I want to know. I need * * B^^ to know.” BF^ “Come on. We’ve got to A Wget going. Your plane leaves at near midnight.” “I can’t leave until you tell me.” “Evelyn’s already on her way over to stay with the kids.” “Kyla, don’t be so cruel. I’ve got to know, is Donovan my child?” “Ssh. The children are sleeping. And I told you, he’s not. Now don’t be ridiculous.” “It’s not ridiculous. We were lovers the last time I came down. He looks enough like me to be mine, doesn’t he?” “Look, let me tell you in plain English. I got my period after we fucked the last time. You aren’t Donovan’s father. You aren’t Rachel’s or Marina’s father either.” Kyla notices that she has lapsed into the harsh tones of her childhood neighborhood; tones her father never used; tones which meant that the speaker was either lying through her teeth or telling a horrible truth. “This is serious. Very serious. Because if Donovan isn’t my child, I’m going to have to divorce Lenore. I mean, I’ve always wanted children. I’ve always thought I’d have at least one child somewhere in the world. I don’t want to hurt Lenore, but I’ve got no choice.” “I don’t understand. If you suddenly found out you were a father by some woman other than Lenore, you’d stay with Lenore?” Kyla is stifling her soft laugh, reminded of soap operas. She almost regrets that she can’t trust Rose, the two of them could relish this story over a glass of wine. But then it would be all over town. “My kid could visit Lenore and me on the island in the summer. I could teach him to swim and we could bike around the town. It would be great.” Douglas has a notion he might be convincing Kyla of something. “What does Lenore think of your great plan to save your marriage.” “Well, she doesn’t know about any of this. But she'd get used to it. She’d have to.” On the drive to the airport, Kyla falls into herself. She tried to disguise her inner silence with witty conversation and the recalling of shared anecdotes. She tries to erase the strange exchange with Douglas back at the house with memories of college and stories about the scenery. Despite her efforts, Douglas launches into a disjointed tirade about fatherhood, in which the words “natural” and “unnatural” dominate. He is talking about fruits and seeds and immortality while Kyla is trying to direct his attention to mango trees, to a cultivated avocado, to the remnants of an orange grove dissected by the bypass from the highway. Suddenly Douglas is talking about his own father, who he calls Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988 15
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