A House of Three
It’s easily decided Dane will father this child, for a multitude of reasons. The strongest being he has the most complete family history.
“One barren branch of a family tree is enough for any kid,” Ethan says.
Nomi whole-heartedly agrees. “I don’t want my child to be hit with a medical bombshell the way I was.”
“Sometimes medical bombshells come direct from family,” Dane says.
“Touché, lover,” she says, hugging him.
“Anyway,” Dane says, “let’s not put all the eggs in my basket. I’m already down one ball and I have no idea if the other one works.”
But it does work. When the urologist’s office calls to say his sperm sample is well within normal limits, Dane first gets light-headed, then teary.
“Are you sure?” he says.
Doctor Zajac laughs. “Positive. Motility’s a touch on the low side, but nothing we can’t work with if need be. Try it the old-fashioned way a few months.”
“I don’t believe it. I really thought it wouldn’t… I didn’t think I…”
“You have a vas deferens and it understands the assignment,” Zajac says. “Gonads gonna nad. Congratulations. Go screw.”
Fathering a child validates Dane, but it dredges up old physical grief, sometimes in bizarre ways.
“Dane, you’re making the curtains ripple with these sighs,” Nomi says. “What’s wrong?”
He leans on the back of the glider rocker, watching Nomi feed their daughter. “It’s dumb.”
“Oh please, you’ve been listening to my dumb neuroses for the past nine months.” Which is true: Instead of morning sickness, Nomi spent the first trimester in her therapist’s office, dealing with all her repressed abandonment issues.
Dane runs his hand through Nomi’s hair and sighs again. “You know, if my old man hadn’t put me under the knife, and with the right hormones, I could’ve breastfed this kid. Maybe. It isn’t out of the realm of possibility. I am just saying.”
Nomi looks up at him, her shadowed eyes full of love and understanding. “I bet you could have. In fact, I know you could.”
The name Saskia means knife. Dane and Nomi pick it out together, wanting to arm her from birth.
Ethan is pleased by both the meaning, and that you can pull a kiss out of Saskia.
It leaves an extra A he doesn’t know what to do with.
Worrisome extra letters can ruin Ethan’s sleep in a way no newborn infant can.
But then the exhausted new mother speaks: “The leftover A is from when my name went from Naomi to Nomi. It’s been waiting patiently all this time for a purpose. Now it’s in Saskia’s name. A kiss A.”
Which is so brilliant that everyone rises from the dinner table and applauds.
Taking no chances, the three parents cram her birth certificate with powerful names: Saskia Helen Mary Ruta Hasen-Strong.
John suggests they drop the other shoe and use Hasen-Strong von Schoenfeld.
It’s too much for the form, but when calling their daughter in to dinner, it’s fun to stand on the back porch and yell, “Saskia Mary Ruta Hasen-Strong von Schoenfeld!”
She’s dynamite because she has Nomi’s best qualities with a solid foundation of love and security under it.
“Saskia is the best thing I ever did,” Dane says.
“If I had Saskia’s confidence,” Nomi says, “I’d hold world domination.”
“She’s so smart,” the genius Ethan says softly. “She’s scary smart.”
Saskia calls Ethan either by name, or by Hasenpfeffer. Sometimes he calls her Saskapfeffer. For Nomi, Saskia uses the Latvian Mammu, which is shortened to Mam. Dane is Dad, which becomes Deddy when Saskia becomes a Rhodes Scholar.
“Is this the grandest deddy of the Danelaw Deddies?” she’ll inquire on phone calls from Oxford. And the Great Dane will answer, “Yes, ’tis I.”
They’re a family. They have their traditions, their rituals, their silly nicknames, their weird words for things. All three parents, but Dane especially, vow always to be honest with this cherished child, but understand honesty must be conveyed in an age-appropriate way.
“Keep it simple,” Nomi says to her partners in the tender years. “Answer only the questions she asks. When she wants to know more, she’ll ask more.”
So the years pass, adoring Saskia, spoon-feeding, answering questions, waiting for the time she makes a quantum leap and realizes something is different at her household.
She finally brings it up on a winter evening when she’s ten.
The family is gathered at the long kitchen table, cozily occupied with projects.
Ethan is drawing. Dane is cutting out paper snowflakes for the windows.
Saskia’s working on a puzzle. Nomi is sorting her seeds.
Important conversations always happen around this table and, Dane notices, they go particularly well when everyone has a bit of distraction in their hands.
“So Mam, you and Dad are my parents, right?”
“That’s right,” Nomi answers. And no more.
“I mean, like, you made me. Your egg, his sperm.”
“Correct.”
Only answer the question asked, Dane thinks.
“But you’re married to Ethan.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t sleep in the same bed.”
“Sometimes we do.”
“But not all the time. Usually you and Dad sleep in the big bed.”
“That’s right, we do.”
“Why?”
“Because I stay up too late and when I do go to sleep, I fart all night,” Ethan says. “Nobody wants to sleep with me. Not even the dog.”
“But I don’t get it,” Saskia says. “Mammu, you and Dad kiss and hug and act all mushy, and you sleep in the same bed, but you’re not married.
Ethan’s your husband but…” She trails off, more confused, realizing her mother and Ethan occasionally get kind of mushy.
And sometimes sleep together. The gears are turning in her scary smart head, but math just ain’t mathing.
“You probably notice,” Dane says, brows furrowed around a tricky angle he’s trying to cut, “that most of your friends have just two adults in their house. Which is how it usually is in families.”
“But families can look all kinds of ways,” Ethan says. “You know kids who have two mothers and two fathers.”
“And kids whose parents divorced and then got married again to other people. So they have stepmothers or stepfathers.”
“I know that,” Saskia says patiently. “But none of them have parents and a step-parent in the same house. Nobody I know has three parents, and I’ve never read any books where there’s three.”
Nomi looks up. Her face glows with love and pride, knowing her daughter measures the world by what she can find in books.
“Ethan and I are married,” Nomi says, “because I got really sick and getting married helped me get the care I needed.” She put her hand on Dane’s arm. “I’m not married to Dad because it’s against the law to be married to more than one person.”
Saskia looks at Dane. “You mean, you and Mam were never married?”
“No.”
“If I hadn’t gotten sick,” Nomi says, “I wouldn’t have gotten married. To either Dad or Ethan.”
“Is that allowed?”
“It’s against the law to be married to more than one person,” Ethan says, “but there’s no law saying unmarried people can’t be parents.”
“It’s traditional,” Dane says. “It’s usually what happens. But not always.”
“Any two people who love each other can become parents. They don’t have to get married,” Nomi says.
“But wait,” Saskia says. “You said if you didn’t get sick, you wouldn’t have married Ethan.”
“Ethan carries our health insurance through his work. I was able to get the best kind of care if I was his legal wife.”
Saskia looks between Nomi and Ethan. “So you’re not in love?”
For a microsecond, Dane questions every choice he’s made. Wondering in despair what he’s done. What they’ve all done.
Your mission is peace, the voice of John Schoenfeld reminds him. Only you can write the laws that keep your peace.
He shakes off the doubt and reaches across and sideways to take the hands of his life mates.
“We,” Dane says to his daughter, “are in love.”
“We’ve always been in love,” Nomi says, squeezing Dane’s fingers hard.
“It’s not the way in every house,” Ethan says.
“But it’s the way in this house. Look…” He gets up and peruses the kitchen wall where hang a dozen depictions of the Three Hares.
In pen and ink, watercolor, acrylic, collage.
He takes one down and brings it back to the table.
“You know how I’m obsessed with this motif. ”
“Sure.”
“What’s so interesting about it?”
“It’s an optical illusion. It looks like each hare has two ears, but really they share three.”
“Right now, tonight, knowing what you know about me, Mam and Dane, do you see it any differently?”
Saskia looks at the motif a long time. She looks at each adult, then back down. She slowly turns the picture frame to make the hares chase each other.
Then she smiles.
“It’s you three.”
“That’s right,” Ethan says. “And you know what this is?” His index finger comes down on the triangle made by the three ears. In this particular piece, it’s a nighttime sky filled with stars. “This magic space right here?”
Saskia bites her bottom lip a second, then smiles wider. “Me?”
Ethan’s finger comes off the glass and points at her. “You.”
All four of them inhale and exhale together. A little cozy accomplishment pulls a chair up to the table, pleased. The adults gently turn their heads back to their respective puttering, leaving the girl to ponder all the things in her heart.
If she wants more information, she’ll ask, Dane thinks. If she’s gathered enough, let her be.
“So you’re all together,” she says after a while.
“Yes,” they answer.
“Some people don’t understand this,” Nomi adds.
“Or they don’t approve. They think love only works in twos.
That people are meant to live, love and parent in pairs.
Most of the time, people will mind their own business and keep their opinions to themselves.
But what did I tell you the other day about life—you know, when Wendy Santorelli was giving you grief? ”
“You’re always gonna run into jerks.”
“Yep. You can fight the jerks, or you can give them nothing to work with. In other words, what happens in this house is nobody’s business but ours.
If you want to keep telling people that Dad and I used to be married, but we divorced and now I’m married to Ethan, and Dad lives here because we’ve all stayed friends, that’s perfectly fine with us.
” She glanced around the table. “Am I right, guys?”
Ethan raises a hand. “Stepfather representing.”
Dane raises one too. “Ex-husband reporting for duty.”
“But it’s kind of a lie,” Saskia says.
Anxiety uncoils in Dane’s chest, for this is what keeps him up at night.
His daughter having to weave a web of dishonest stories to keep her peace.
Under the table, Ethan’s foot presses against Dane’s calf.
On top of the table, Nomi’s hand strokes his forearm as she says, “You do not have to lie. You can choose which parts of the story to tell and which parts to keep private. You can choose whom you trust with what.”
“The truth is easiest,” Dane says, pleased that his voice sounds so normal over the thump of his heart. “But it might end with people asking nosy questions or jerks making unkind remarks.”
Saskia nods in big up and down arcs, her mouth pursed a little.
“So what’s the story you want us all to tell?” Nomi says, in her best family meeting tone. “We can’t have four different stories. There has to be one, and you need to help us decide.”
“I think,” Saskia says slowly, addressing Nomi, “I’ll just keep saying what I always have. You and Dad were together once but not anymore. You’re married to Ethan now. But you’re still friends with Dad. You’re all really good friends and we live in the same house.”
“Which part of that isn’t true?”
“The part where you and Dad aren’t together anymore?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re all together.”
The heart of the house thumps now, as they all answer truthfully: “Yes.”
“Together, like…romantic.”
“Yes.”
“You all have sex together?”
“Not together,” Nomi says.
“One at a time,” Dane says.
“And me rarely,” Ethan says, surprising everyone. “This is very personal, but I actually don’t like sex much. Which is my private business that I only trust to a few special people.”
“Okay,” Saskia says.
“I love Nomi and Dane passionately, but it’s a different passion. An emotional passion. They’re my best friends in the world.”
“Oh,” Saskia says slowly. “I didn’t know you could be married but not have sex.”
Nomi smooths her daughter’s hair. “There are a million different ways to be married. A million ways to be romantic. A million ways to be friends.”
“A million ways to be a family,” Dane says.
“Maybe not a million,” Ethan mumbles.
“Fine. There are four hundred and seventy-two ways to do things,” Dane says. “Happy? The point is, Sask, you can decide who gets to know which is your way.”
“However,” Nomi says, raising a hand. “A favor? Tell us before you confide to others? Call a meeting so we can discuss. We need to know who knows, so we’re not surprised when we find out they know. Is that fair?”
“That’s fair,” Saskia says. Her brows knit for another minute, and then she goes back to her puzzle. The three adults stare at her, then glance at each other. Ethan winks. Dane touches his forehead. Nomi mouths, I love you.
Then they let it be.