by Leni Zumas
“What do you teach?”
“English. For my sins.” He is big, everything about him big: neck, forearms, shoulders, head, damp shining sprouts of black hair. A dimple when he smiles.
“Sorry, but I forgot your—”
“Bryan Zakile.”
“Of course! My husband says you’re, um, a great teacher.”
“Didier’s a good guy—kids love him.”
“So he’s always telling me,” she says.
He fingers the corner of the newspaper. “I take it you’re not reading the sports?”
“Can’t say I’m a fan.”
“Frivolous shit, I agree. But it keeps men’s lizard cortexes occupied.” The wife watches Bryan Zakile not take his eyes off her. In a lower voice: “So what are you a fan of?”
“Um,” she says. “Various things.”
They go two doors down to Cone Wolf. Over single-scoop chocolates she learns a few facts about Bryan.
He played Division I college soccer and was invited to try out for the U.S. Olympic team, but a knee injury put paid to that.
He has traveled in South America.
He is starting his third year at the high school, where he got the job because the principal is married to his second cousin.
“Mrs. Fivey’s your cousin? How is she—?”
“Talking and moving around. Still in the hospital, but going home soon.”
“Oh, that’s good. Didier said they had to induce a coma?”
“She banged her head hella hard on those stairs. Got swelling on the brain. They couldn’t wake her up until the swelling went down.”
“How did she fall—do you know?”
Bryan shrugs. He licks his spoon, throws it on the counter, crosses his arms. “That was satisfying.”
The wife did not find her teensy little marble of a scoop satisfying. “Delectable,” she says, and blushes. The shop clock says 2:38. “I have to go pick up my daughter.”
“How old?”—the first question he has asked her since the library.
“Six. I also have a three-year-old son.”
“Wow, you’re a busy woman.”
The wife sees how he must see her. Shower-bunned blond hair. Drapey scarf to hide stomach. Black yoga pants. Mom clogs.
Over the course of human evolution, did men learn to be attracted to skinny women because they were not visibly pregnant? Did voluptuousness signal that a body was already ensuring the survival of another man’s genetic material?
When Bex climbs into the booster seat, she’s on a verge. The wife has come to fear this particular after-school look: reddened, scrunched. “Shell is so stupid.”
“What happened?”
“I hate her.”
“Seat belt, please. Did you and Shell fight?”
“I don’t fight, Momplee. It’s against the rules.”
“I mean argue?” The wife turns off the ignition. The cars behind them in the pickup line will just have to go around.
The girl takes a long, shuddering breath. “She said I stole her bag of pennies and I didn’t.”
“What bag of pennies?”
“She had pennies in a bag which she wasn’t supposed to because you can’t bring money to school but she did and she couldn’t find them and said I stole them. And I didn’t!”
“Of course you didn’t.”
She might have.
She is her father’s daughter.
The wife and Didier make fun of Ro’s sperm donors, but what about Didier’s genes, which may have deposited in Bex a puerile interest in drugs and a willingness to embezzle cash from a doughnut shop?
Two sets of instructions battle it out in the girl: well-shaped brown eyes vs. sunken blue-gray ones, orderly teeth vs. huge and crooked, solid SAT scores vs. never took the SAT.
When she got pregnant with Bex, at thirty, the wife felt as though she were sliding under a closing garage door.
Why did “thirty” loom like an expiration date?
She and Didier hadn’t planned it; they weren’t married; they’d been dating for seven months. But the wife felt old. It was August, her last year of law school was about to start, the home pregnancy test made a cross. This is what I want, this!—law school was nothing to this.
“She said I did steal,” says Bex, “and so she isn’t friends with me anymore.”
“Give Shell some time to cool off.”
“But what if she never cools off?”
“I think she will,” says the wife. “Also, we need to talk about your research project! Have you decided on a topic yet?”
A small smile. “It’s narrow to two.”
“Oh, you narrowed it down?” The wife starts the ignition, flips her turn signal. Throat stab: she forgot to get any new books for Bex at the library.
“Wood sprite or ghost pepper, the hottest pepper known to man.”
“Those are good choices, sweetpea.”
“Shell’s mom has ghost pepper from India at their house. They have seventy-three different spices in their spice cabinet.”
“Oh, they don’t have that many.”
“Yes, they do—we counted. How many spices do we have, Momplee?”
“No idea.”
In the rearview, some cow is waving at her to get moving.
The wife will take her sweet time.
If she constructs a solid argument, he’ll be convinced.
But then you’d actually have to go to counseling with him.
Which might work!
Which would be the whole point.
To feel okay again. Even good.
To stop her throat from hurting when Bex asks “Do you and Daddy love each other?”
To stop reading online articles about the maladaptive coping mechanisms of kids from broken homes.
To stop brokenhomebrokenhomebrokenhome from reeling in her head.
To stop staring at the guardrails.
I brought aboard with me a sack of skerpikjøt, which the Canadian sailors were interested to try. They called its taste “harrowing.” I explained that if the lamb is dried during an unusually wet or warm season, it may ferment to the point of decay.
THE BIOGRAPHER
The biographer loves Penny at school, sharing snacks in the teachers’ lounge, but she loves her best on Sunday nights, when they watch Masterpiece mysteries in her little house with its rose-dotted wallpaper and stone fireplace and wool rugs, rain pattering on the oriel windows.
Penny hands her a napkin, a fork, and a plate of shepherd’s pie. “Tap water or limeade?”
“Limeade. But isn’t it time?”
“Oh damn!” Penny hurries to the television. (She is always losing her clicker.) Settles with her own plate next to the biographer, tucks a napkin into the collar of her turquoise sweater. “Let’s see what skills you’ve got for us, Sergeant Hathaway.” The opening credits begin, theme song swelling over shots of Oxford’s dreaming spires, a weak English sun turning Cotswold limestone the color of apricots. Penny intones, “Who will die tonight?”
“You should write mysteries instead of bra rippers,” says the biographer.
“But I prefer the beating heart. Did I tell you I’m going to a romance writers’ convention? They have agents you can pitch to.”
“How much do they charge you for that privilege?”
“Well, they charge plenty. And why shouldn’t they? The agents are being flown all the way from New York.”
“Can I read your pitch?”
“Honey, I have it memorized. ‘Rapture on Black Sand opens at the end of World War I. Euphrosyne Farrell is a young Irish nurse so gutted by her sweetheart’s death at the Somme that she emigrates to New York City. After becoming engaged to a middle-aged widower, she finds herself drawn to Renzo, the widower’s nephew, whose magnetic Neapolitan eyes prove irresistible.’”
“Where does black sand come in?” asks the biographer.
“Euphrosyne and Renzo make love for the first time in a small cove on Long Island.”
“But wouldn’t it be more interesting and, um, maybe less clichéd if she got engaged to the nephew, then found his uncle irresistible?”
“Lord no! This isn’t Little Women. Renzo’s a Brooklyn stallion and his britches are strained to bursting.”
Penny is a teacher of English and an inventor, she says, of entertainments. “They’re a hoot,” she answered when the biographer once ventured to ask why she wanted to write soap operas valorizing romantic love as the sole telos of a female life. Penny has written nine of them, all waiting for cover art showing bulge-groined men relieving bulge-chested women of their bodices. She intends to be a published author by her seventieth birthday. Three years to make it happen.
“Okay,” she says, “here’s Detective Sergeant Hathaway. Can’t buy cheekbones like that.”
Inspector Lewis and DS Hathaway trade jokes across a sheeted corpse; enjoy beers at The Lamb & Flag; and chase a murderous puppeteer through a faculty drinks party, leaving a wake of Oxford dons agape.
Then a large rosy meat bursts onto the screen. “It’s never too early to reserve joy. Call today for your Christmas ham!” Having lost all of its government funding, because the current administration won’t sanction the liberal bias of baking shows and mountaineering documentaries, PBS now airs long blocks of advertising. A spot for control-top hose (“Mom, you look extra beautiful tonight—is it your hair?” “No, my Tummy Tamers!”) makes the biographer’s nose sting.
“Hey, you’re crying!” says Penny, returning from the kitchen with glasses of limeade.
“Am not.”
Penny presses a napkin to the biographer’s cheek.
“It’s this new elderly-ovary medication,” sobs the biographer.
“Blow your nose,” says Penny. “Just use the napkin; I can wash it. Do the commercials with children make you—”
“No.” The biographer blows and wipes, shoves the napkin between her knees. “They make me think about my mom.”
In-breath.
Who would pity her daughter for these solo efforts, this manless life.
Out-breath.
But her mother, who went from father’s house to college dorm to husband’s house without a single day lived on her own, never knew the pleasures of solitude.
“What does your therapist say?” asks Penny.
“I quit seeing him.”
“Was that such a smart move?”
“Poison is a woman’s weapon,” a grim lady tells Lewis and Hathaway. “‘I love the old way best, the simple way of poison, where we too are strong as men.’”
“Medea!” shouts the biographer.
“We should get you on a game show,” says Penny.
Five thirty a.m., the air cold and gritty with salt. She can’t face the drive to her day-nine egg-check appointment without coffee, even though caffeine is on Hawthorne Reproductive Medicine’s What to Avoid handout. Teeth on her mug, she steers up the hill, under towering balsam fir and Sitka spruce, away from her town. Newville gets ninety-eight inches of rain a year. The inland fields are quaggy, hard to farm. Cliff roads dangerous in winter. Storms so bad they sink boats and tear roofs from houses. The biographer likes these problems because they keep people away—the people who might otherwise move here, that is, not the tourists, who cruise in on dry summer asphalt and don’t give a sea onion about farming.
A billboard on Highway 22 is a stick drawing of a skirt-wearing person with a balloon for a stomach, accompanied by:
WON’T STOP ONE,
WON’T START ONE.
CANADA UPHOLDS U.S. LAW!
American intelligence agencies must have some nice dirt on the Canadian prime minister. Otherwise, why agree to the Pink Wall? The border control can detain any woman or girl they “reasonably” suspect of crossing into Canada for the purpose of ending a pregnancy. Seekers are returned (by police escort) to their state of residence, where the district attorney can prosecute them for attempting a termination. Healthcare providers in Canada are also barred from offering in vitro fertilization to U.S. citizens.
Unveiling these terms at a press conference last year, the Canadian prime minister said: “Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.”
Kalbfleisch calls her ultrasound “encouraging.” The biographer has five follicles measuring twelve and thirteen, plus a gaggle of smallers. “You’ll be ready for insemination right on schedule, I suspect. Day fourteen. Which is…” He leans back, waits for the nurse to open the calendar and count off the squares with her finger. “Wednesday. Do we have at least a couple of vials here?” As usual, he doesn’t look at her, even when asking a direct question.
Four, in fact, are sitting in the clinic’s frozen storage, tiny bottles of ejaculate from the scrota of a college sophomore majoring in biology (3811) and a rock-climbing enthusiast who described his sister as “extremely beautiful” (9072). She also owns some semen from 5546, the personal trainer who baked a cake for sperm-bank staff; but his remaining vials are still at the bank in Los Angeles.
“Start the OPKs tomorrow or the next day,” says Kalbfleisch. “Fingers crossed.” He rubs foaming sanitizer into his hands.
“By the way.” She sits up on the exam table, covers her crotch with a paper sheet. “Do you think I might have polycystic ovary syndrome?”
Kalbfleisch stops mid-rub. A golden frown. “Why do you ask?”
“A friend told me about it. I don’t have all of the symptoms, but—”
“Roberta, were you looking online?” He sighs. “You can diagnose yourself with anything and everything online. First of all, the majority of women with PCOS are overweight, and you are not.”
“Okay, so you don’t—”
“Although.” He is looking at her, but not in the eye. More in the mouth. “You do have excessive facial hair. And, come to think of it, excessive body hair. Which is a symptom.”
Come to think of it? “But, um, how does that account for genetics? Certain ethnic groups are naturally hairier. My mom’s grandmothers both had mustaches.”
“I can’t speak to that,” says Kalbfleisch. “I’m not an anthropologist. I do know that hirsutism is a sign of PCOS.”
Wouldn’t that be human biology, in which all physicians are trained, and not anthropology?
“When you come in on—” He glances at the nurse.
“Wednesday,” she says.
“—I’ll take a closer look at your ovaries, and we’ll include a testosterone check with your bloodwork.”
“If I have PCOS, what does that mean?”
“That the odds of your conceiving via intrauterine insemination are exceedingly low.”
To justify being late to work, sometimes as often as twice a week, she scatters crumbs of mortal illness. Principal Fivey is annoyed—has broached the subject of unpaid leave. But he hasn’t been around much since his wife went into the hospital.
Taking fresh blue books from the supply closet, the biographer asks the office manager how Mrs. Fivey is doing.
“Poor thing’s still in very critical condition.”
Is “critical” an adjective that can take an intensifying premodifier? “What happened, exactly?”
“Took a nasty tumble down the stairs.”
“What stairs?”—picturing the Exorcist steps, the biographer’s favorite ten minutes of a family trip to Washington, DC.
“At home, I think? We’re circulating a card.”
Mrs. Fivey always looks good in her Christmas costumes. Garish, true, but good. Also: why garish? Probably only because the biographer grew up in suburban Minnesota. A saying of her mother’s was “Don’t take your clothes off before they do.” The muddy grammar always bothered the biographer. Should she not take her clothes off before the men removed their own clothes? Or should she keep her clothes on until the men took them off for her?
“Here’s the card,” says the man
ager. “And can you write something personal? Most people have only been signing their names.”
“I don’t—”
“Sheesh, I’ll tell you what to say: ‘Heartfelt hopes for a speedy recovery.’ Is that so hard?”
“Hard? No. But my hopes are not heartfelt.”
The two long jowls on the manager’s face shake a little, as though in a breeze. “You don’t want her to get better?”
“I do in my mind. Not in my heart.”
In her mind she wants Mrs. Fivey to walk out of the hospital. In her heart she wants her brother to be alive again. In a place that is neither mind nor heart, or both at once, she wants an ashy line down the center of a round belly; she wants nausea. Susan’s marks of motherhood: spider veins at the knee backs, loose stomach skin, lowered breasts. Affronts to vanity worn as badges of the ultimate accomplishment.
But why does she want them, really? Because Susan has them? Because the Salem bookstore manager has them? Because she always vaguely assumed she would have them herself? Or does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilized, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve. It doesn’t matter to the ancient throb if she does good works in this short life—if she publishes, for instance, a magnificent book on Eivør Mínervudottír that would give people pleasure and knowledge. The throb simply wants another human machine that can, in turn, make another.
Sperm, in Faroese: sáđ.
Three donors walk into a bar.
“What can I get you?” says the bartender.
Donor 5546, dumb and cocky and hot, says: “Whiskey.”
Donor 3811, looking up the weather on his phone, says: “Hold on.”
Donor 9072, who notices the bartender has his own glass going, says: “Whatever you’re drinking.”
Bartender points to 5546 and says: “You’re a little too hot.”
And to 3811: “You’re a little too cold.”
And to 9072: “But you’re just right.”
