Chapter 3
There had always been an intimacy barrier between her and every person her elder, because their interactions had always been transactional.
Elena spent her entire Saturday replaying her and Antonio’s conversation, and all the similar ones that had come before it. She always felt like he had better reasons for wanting to meet their genome donors than she had reasons for being resistant to the idea. On a few occasions, he had managed to get her to imagine things as he did, but never so much as to put her long-held anxieties to rest. What Elena knew to be true was that her genome donor had herself and her infant son cloned and had been collecting money from the HCP ever since. Maybe that wasn’t the sinister sign Elena made it out to be, but it suggested a certain kind of life—a harder kind of life—one in which the woman needed money. And what caused that? Did this woman possess some genetic, self-destructive tendency that Elena had yet to uncover in herself? Or was she a victim of circumstance? It seemed tragic either way.
When Elena woke the next day, Easter Sunday, she had to fight the urge to continue going around and around in her head on the matter. She could feel the knots in her neck and along her scapulas that she had given herself from ruminating. She distracted herself by noting that the weekend marked a series of firsts: her first holiday away from Antonio (he was at Rafi’s), her first Easter celebration, and her first holiday with an organic family. In college, Elena had traveled with friends back to their hometowns a few times, but never over a holiday. It was bittersweet. She was excited to get to experience The Big Holiday Family Gathering—a scene she had seen depicted in shows and movies but had never experienced in person—but she was also slightly sad to be breaking her and Antonio’s holiday tradition. Since leaving The Compound for college, they had gone to a diner or some other equally casual restaurant that was “open 365 days a year!” for every holiday meal. There was something religious about eating greasy food and people watching. For as orphaned as Antonio and Elena often felt since leaving the Compound, she was always surprised by the number of actual orphans in the organic world. There were always people eating alone, hovering over plates of beige food. They were always hunched over, a detail that never escaped her. Elena had noticed immediately upon going to college that organic people had terrible posture. They had terrible posture, terrible vocabularies, and a terrible handle on academic subjects, generally speaking. It wasn’t clear how or why bad posture was so ubiquitous. Slouching made her back hurt. She had tried to slouch and hunch over her desks in college when she realized that her posture made her stand out. Professors and other students commented on it, which prompted her to try and shed it in her initial efforts to blend in. She couldn’t do it. Without meaning to she would soon be sitting or standing comfortably upright, or else she would have given herself a neck ache. This was one battle she finally accepted losing, particularly when her friends who commented on her posture expressed their envy of it.
Elena pulled up to Yasmin’s parent’s house at 11:59am. When she rang the doorbell it was exactly noon. Yasmin opened the door with a cheerful “Happy Easter!” It always felt strange to Elena to echo phrases such as ‘Happy Easter’ or ‘Happy Hannukkah’ since she, herself, was not religious, but she had learned the hard way that responding with ‘thank you’ (or with just a smile) tended to confuse and even offend people. Elena tried to avoid those moments of feeling alien at all costs and so had decided that she would always echo holiday greetings.
Yasmin had asked Elena to come over a few hours before the 4pm dinner to hang out and help her and her mom make food, set the table, and hide eggs for the Easter egg hunt. Elena had learned about the Easter bunny her freshman year of college when she was at a party. On the Friday night before Easter Sunday, a guy walked into a party in a bunny suit and started passing out jello shots that had been molded in colorful little plastic eggs. Elena had inquired about the connection between what she knew to be the defining Christian holiday and the overgrown bunny who hid chicken eggs (??) and candy for little kids to find; she had gotten exactly zero sensical answers.
Yasmin lead Elena into the kitchen. “Hey what’s up? How are you?” Yasmin asked.
“Conflicted.”
Yasmin’s head snapped back. “Conflicted? Did that guy ask you out again and you don’t want to see him?”
“You mean Sean? No, I haven’t heard from him,” said Elena. “He’s been out of town for work and things have kind of petered out.” Yasmin was referring to the guy Elena had met at happy hour a few weeks back. Elena had been excited about him initially, as he was the first guy she’d met ‘in the wild’, so to speak, since leaving college. She had been finding it difficult to start and maintain relationships—of any kind—without the constant opportunities for interaction that come from a group living situation. Even before going to college, that had been all she’d known. “It’s Antonio. He brought up meeting our genome donors again.”
Yasmin had been around when the most recent of these conversations had come up and like a judge, she had gotten to hear both sides. “Ah. Any new arguments from either of you?”
“Not really, although I wish there were because then we wouldn’t be at such an impasse.”
They walked into the kitchen where Yasmin’s mom was, waiting to greet Elena. Despite knowing Yasmin since their sophomore year at Berkeley and despite Yasmin’s parents living just an hour north in Marin County, this was the first time Elena was going to be meeting Yasmin’s parents. Yasmin’s mom was standing at the sink with a potato in one hand and a peeler in the other. Without bothering to free her hands, she pulled Elena in for a hug and insisted she call her Luci. Luci was the picture of a cool, suburban grandmother. She wore an apron over an orange sorbet-colored dress and she had long salt and pepper hair that reached nearly to her waist. It seemed impractical that Luci would keep her hair down amidst the cooking chaos, but it quickly became apparent that what initially appeared to be a kitchen in disarray was actually a kitchen with careful order that was merely filled with a ton of food. It also seemed that Luci and Yasmin, despite Yasmin’s insisting that Elena come over early to help cook, did not actually need Elena’s help. The two of them moved through the kitchen and did their various cooking-related tasks as if every move were choreographed, from washing to chopping to deftly reaching around one another for a knife or a peeler or a bowl. Their movements elicited an ever-more-familiar feeling inside Elena of missing something she’d never had. Organic family interactions were the main trigger. She tried to imagine being this close with someone older, a mother or father figure. She couldn’t. There had always been an intimacy barrier between her and every person her elder, because their interactions had always been transactional. Every caretaker she had ever had at The Compound was there doing a job, and not a job in the same way that organic parenting is a job. They were being paid. They were doing a job-job.
“Elena, would you like a glass of wine? Luci and I are already a few glasses in. Right as we were leaving church my aunt made a comment about hoping dessert doesn’t turn out the way it did last year, so Luci came home hot and we started drinking immediately,” laughed Yasmin.
“What happened with dessert last year?” Elena asked.
Yasmin’s mouth pulled into a wide smile and the muscles of her neck exaggeratedly tensed. Her eyes darted sideways toward Luci but she didn’t move her head. Luci answered, “I burnt the pie! Una vez! Una vez en veinte años de hacer la cena de Pascuas! And the thing is, my sister buys cookies for Easter dinner. She doesn’t even cook anything herself!”
Elena understood Yasmin’s expression. Yasmin, rather than diffuse her mother’s indignation, had intentionally poked the bear further. “Those store-bought cookies are really great though…” said Yasmin.
Luci paused. Elena had no idea what to expect from the provocation and looked to Yasmin for some indication of what was about to happen. Then Luci laughed, popping the bubble of tension that had started to engulf the kitchen.
“Ay, I know, they really are. Que molesto,” Luci said begrudgingly. Elena found Luci’s Spanglish endearing. She liked that Luci wore her heritage on her sleeve. Yasmin was half Venezuelan-American. Her dad was white and had grown up in the midwest and her mom had immigrated to the states to go to college. Yasmin had admitted to Elena that while she understood Spanish perfectly she never really spoke it. She would greet her grandparents on her mom’s side in Spanish, eking out some small talk before settling back into English. They would just talk back and forth — her grandparents in Spanish and Yasmin in English — as if they were speaking the same language. When Luci was around, her speech provided a gradient between the two languages, between the two cultures, and between the two generations.
Yasmin handed Elena her glass of wine and then grabbed her by the arm and pulled her over to a clearing of counter near the sink. Elena was put in charge of cutting the newly-peeled potatoes for a dish called ‘scalloped potatoes.’ Yasmin apologized for not having a mandolin for Elena to use, though the apology fell on ignorant ears. Isn’t a mandolin an instrument? Elena made a mental note to look up what a cooking mandolin was when she got home.
Elena took a sip of wine and turned to her cutting board and the pile of potatoes in front of it. She was realizing now that she had underestimated what she had committed herself to and what would be expected of her. She had accepted Yasmin’s invitation to come over early to help cook because helping seemed like a good way to communicate her gratitude for the invitation, and more selfishly, she had been wanting to learn how to cook. She had managed to make a few things here and there following recipes, but each one had missed the mark in some major way. In summary: she didn’t know what she was doing. For the task at hand, Elena thought of the potato dishes she encountered most often to try and give herself leading clues as to how to get started. Aside from mashed potatoes and baked potatoes, potatoes were usually cut into cubes, so Elena started cutting.
As the three of them worked, Yasmin and Luci gave Elena the rundown of the family — who was who and how they were related and what the most recent gossip was. She learned that Luci had two brothers and a sister (the cookie bearer) and that the two brothers each had three kids. Yasmin and her brother fell roughly in the middle of the group of cousins. Yasmin’s single aunt was apparently quite the bombshell for a woman in her late 40s. She would be bringing a man, no doubt, who no one would have ever met before because the men in her life never lasted long. “We give her a hard time for being man eater but honestly we have no idea if she breaks their hearts or if they break hers,” said Yasmin. In any case, Elena was eager to watch the family dynamics play out.
She had gotten about three-fourths of the way through the potatoes when Elena heard Yasmin’s voice behind her. “Ummm…” Elena stopped cutting and turned to Yasmin. “What?”
“Shoot. That’s not how you cut potatoes for scalloped potatoes. I should have clarified…”
Horrified, Elena looked down at what then seemed like an ocean of potatoes, all cut wrong. Heat began blossoming across her neck and cheeks. Luci stopped tying knots of dough and without missing a beat said,
Elena tried to choke down her mortification, determined at least to execute this new version of her task quickly. Luci seemed to have picked up on her need for guidance, and when Elena was finished with the potatoes Luci pulled her over to the adjacent counter and started teaching her how to make rolls. She taught Elena to pull a small ball of dough off of the large ball sitting in a bowl, to roll it into a long-ish tube, and then to tie it into a knot with the ends tucked in. Elena’s hands felt clumsy at first and her first knot was lumpy and uneven, but Luci insisted that it was fine and nudged Elena to make another. The two of them proceeded to make knot after knot, and the whole time Luci chattered on about about dough. She talked about dough for rolls and bread, dough for cookies, and dough for pie crusts, making sure that Elena knew just how finicky a good pie crust could be. Elena let the information wash over her as she gradually became more and more adept at making the dough knots.
Before she knew it, all the dough had been knotted and they were finishing the rolls by brushing melted butter over the tops of the rolls before putting them in the oven to bake. It was only when they had finished the rolls and Elena looked up did she realize that she had, somehow, lost track of time.
Pretty soon Yasmin’s extended family started to arrive. The sounds from the kitchen were drowned out by the sounds of greetings and of kids being shooed away from the egg hunt areas. Elena was introduced to family members in a steady stream as they arrived and passed through the kitchen and dining room. Elena and Yasmin set the large dining table and before she knew it, Elena found herself seated among all of Yasmin’s relatives with food spread from one end of the table to the other. There was a prayer, which was concluded with 30 people making crosses across their torsos. It was often these sorts of religious rituals that still made Elena feel alien. While she and her peers at The Compound had studied world religions, they had not been not brought up in one and there was an intimacy with the world of religion that she lacked. In spite of herself, Elena wondered if her genome donor was religious and if, had she been there, she would also be crossing her torso as she said ‘amen’.
As people started dishing up, one of Yasmin’s aunts, whom Elena had met briefly while setting the table, spoke to Elena. “Elena, where is your family? Aren’t they missing you today?” she asked.
The question was well-intended. This aunt, Aunt Mim, was merely trying to make small talk by asking where Elena was from, and in doing so interjected her own feelings about a family member being absent for such an important day. Elena had noticed that this was common in older generations. The good thing was that in the five years since leaving The Compound, she had become skilled at fielding such questions without actually giving any concrete details about her childhood. She answered truthfully, only really lying by omission or by exploiting common ambiguity in people’s questions. “Oh, I grew up upstate, outside of Redding. I have a brother but he got an invitation to one of his friend’s Easter celebrations as well. We live together and we spend so much time together that it’s actually nice to get a break from him,” Elena joked.
Aunt Mim chuckled politely. This was a satisfactory answer, and as Elena had hoped Aunt Mim had fallen for her diversions to draw the topic of family away from parents and toward where she grew up and her “brother.” On the occasions that Elena and Antonio had been asked about their parents, they had successfully navigated these conversations by describing one or two of their caretakers. For continuity, Elena had settled on telling people that her mother was a therapist and her father was a medical doctor. She had made the mistake once of saying that her mother was a genetics researcher and the conversation had gotten dangerously close to the topic of clones. Afterward Elena swore that off as one of her go-to back stories. But she didn’t have to worry today. Aunt Mim concluded the conversation after the single back-and-forth by saying, “Well, we’re so happy you could join us.”
As Elena sat there at the table full of people, trying to absorb all the many conversations at once, she momentarily felt nostalgia for the Compound. The mild chaos of a table full of food being passed around reminded her of the holiday meals at the Compound. They were the only meals that were served at the tables and didn’t require everyone to go through cafeteria lines with trays, picking out nutritionist-approved meals. The contrast between the holiday meals at the Compound and the ones that Elena and Antonio had had since leaving was always a topic of conversation as they sat alone together in their holiday diner booths. They missed those holiday meals and all the characters that played parts in their upbringing. They missed a lot of things. It had been easy to find reasons to be angry at the researchers and other caretakers, to criticize everything they did and cast the Institute in its entirety as a villain after they were told they were clones. They had all felt betrayed. The only adults any of them had ever known had all been a part of the same monumental conspiracy. How could they not see their caretakers in a different, more negative light? Still, the Compound was their home and the caretakers, for all their flaws, had always tried and succeeded to make holidays special. Elena softened, inwardly; t he caretakers, having come from the outside world and having experience with large family gatherings, had recreated this exact experience that Elena was having with Yasmin’s family. It occurred to her that maybe she hadn’t been as deprived of organic experiences as she and the other clones believed themselves to be. The only issue now was in finding ways to recreate these experiences herself. She and Antonio and all the graduated clones were welcome to attend holiday meals at the Compound, but without their other cohort-mates it would never be the same. The saying ‘you can’t go home’ was especially true for a clone.
All of the food was wonderful. Elena was proud, too, of her contributions to the rolls and the mashed potatoes. Though she had gotten off to a rocky start with the potatoes, the end product was delicious. When dinner ended, Elena jumped up to help clear the table and help with dishes. She had had dishwashing rotations for chores at The Compound so unlike with cooking, Elena felt confident in her ability to contribute there. The Easter egg hunt got underway in the other room and squeals from the little kids could be heard every time one of them found an egg.
As Elena was drying the last of the dishes, Luci appeared beside her. She held up a plate of cake. “Here. I got you the best piece. You’ve been such a help,” she said. Luci waited for Elena to dry off her hands and then handed her the plate. She patted Elena on the shoulder and instructed her to go sit down and enjoy her cake with Yasmin. “Also, Yasmin needs to hear you praise this cake,” she said. “And make sure you say it loud enough for my sister to hear.” Elena went and sat down at the mostly-empty dining room table next to Yasmin. Most of Yasmin’s family had congregated in the living room to watch the egg hunt and had stayed there when it finished. Yasmin slumped back into her chair in exaggerated exhaustion. “Man, today was a long day! It was so nice having you here to help with everything. So how was it? Did my family scare you away?”
“No! I had a great time,” said Elena. “Everyone was really nice.”
“Good. They can be a lot sometimes. Did you see my niece wrestle my nephew to the ground over an egg?”
“No, but I wish I had,” Elena admitted.
“The girl is vicious. Anyway, I want to hear more about the genome donor thing with Antonio,” Yasmin said.
Elena had been worried that they weren’t going to have a chance to talk and was relieved when Yasmin brought up the subject of genome donors. She needed someone to talk to that wasn’t Antonio. She gave a recap of everything that was said between her and him from the other night, which was easy having replayed it so many times in her head.
Yasmin’s eyebrows arched toward her hairline. “Sooo…where does that leave you?”
“That’s what I’m trying to decide. I’m still bothered by the idea of my genome donor. I believe in the mission of the HCP and everything, but I resent someone creating us for money. And second to that, who is she even supposed to be to me? Is she supposed to be like a mom or an aunt or an older sister or…?”
Yasmin worked to swallow a large bite of cake. “Well to your first point, you have no idea why your genome donor enrolled in the HCP. They get money, but maybe that wasn’t the main motivator. Or maybe it was, but maybe not in a greedy way.”
This was one of Antonio’s points, but coming from Yasmin it sounded much more plausible.
“And to your second point, if there’s no model for your relationship, then you can’t do it wrong. You get to define what that relationship is for yourself and not worry if it’s hitting or missing some kind of mark.”
This was why Elena was friends with Yasmin. Yasmin was able to get her to think about things in ways that other people couldn’t. When Elena had expressed her anxieties about the unknown relationship expectations with her genome donor with other people, they either brushed off her concerns (“No! It will be great, you shouldn’t worry!”) or made them worse (“Yeah, that would be weird, I would be nervous too.”). Neither response ever helped. But Yasmin’s did. It took the pressure off, and if anything, it made her realize that it was Antonio who had more to worry about with his genome donor relationship.
On her drive home, Elena started to feel a shift. Maybe it was Yasmin’s sage way of framing things, or maybe it was the entire day of being with Yasmin’s family. Rather than feel like an outsider, she had been welcomed, absorbed even, into Yasmin’s family throughout the day. She was let in on bits of family gossip (“Can you tell that Lydia got botox?”); she was asked to help with this or that (“Will you grab the seltzer from the garage?”) or, just as frequently, simply told to do something, without the usual fanfare that came with interacting with someone new (“Go help Mikey, he has marshmallow in his hair.”) One of the aunts had brushed flour off her shoulder and another had offered her lip gloss when she was reapplying; and of course there was Luci, who had taught her how to make rolls and saved her the best piece of cake. The interactions were similar to the ones Elena had with her peers at the Compound, except that the interactions today occurred not only with people her own age but with little kids and older adults as well. It dawned on her that she had just gotten to experience the kind of family dynamics she and all the other clones had dreamed about growing up. Her ego was going to be bruised to admit it, but she was starting to understand Antonio’s desire to meet their genome donors. The possibility of getting to be a part of an organic family like Yasmin’s was compelling. She doubted that she would ever be as excited about the whole thing Antonio was, but for the first time, she actually felt hopeful about the idea.