Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

  “Mommy turn it Mommy turn it Mommy turn it Mommy…”

  She has reasoned, she has implored, she has ignored, she has worried her eardrums will be actually damaged; and now she says, “Shut the fuck up,” which makes no difference to John, still screaming and starfishing, but Didier yells from the dining room, “Don’t say that to him!”

  “Either come and deal with him yourself,” calls the wife, “or fuck off.”

  Her husband stomps in, lifts the dustcover, sets the needle on the record, unleashes a bouncy guitar.

  John goes quiet, wetly heaving.

  “We are the dinosaurs, marching, marching.

  “We are the dinosaurs. Whaddaya think of that?”

  “The lesson he just learned,” says the wife, “is that if he screams long enough, he’ll get what he wants.”

  “Well, good. It’s a hard world.”

  “We are the dinosaurs, marching, marching.

  “We are the dinosaurs. We make the earth flat!”

  “Could you take him for a walk?” says the wife.

  “It’s raining,” says Didier.

  “His raincoat’s on the banister.”

  “He doesn’t look like he wants to go for a walk.”

  “Please do this one tiny thing,” she says.

  “I really don’t feel like it.”

  “I’m never alone.”

  “Well, me neither. I’m with those trous du cul all day, five days a week.”

  “Didier”—slowly, carefully—“will you please take him out. Bex will be back in an hour, and I’ll make lunch, but until then, I would like to be alone.”

  “I’d like to be alone too,” he says, but heads for the banister. “Come on, Jean-voyage.”

  Herd crumbs into palm.

  Spray table.

  Wipe down table.

  Rinse cups and bowls.

  Put cups and bowls in dishwasher.

  Soak quinoa in bowl of water.

  Rinse and chop red bell peppers.

  Put strips in fridge.

  Rinse quinoa in sieve.

  Put clean, uncooked quinoa in fridge.

  Pour water from quinoa soaking into pot of ficus tree.

  Spray mist onto snake-like arms of Medusa’s head plant.

  Pull clothes out of dryer in basement.

  Fold clothes.

  Stack clothes in hamper.

  Leave hamper at bottom of stairs to second floor.

  Write laundry detergent on list in wallet.

  Plip, plip, plip, says the kitchen tap.

  Nobody on this hill even likes quinoa.

  She pulls the kids’ plastic pumpkins down off the high shelf.

  Over a month since Halloween. She told them the candy ran out.

  In the empty kitchen or the sewing room, she eats sugar nobody knows about.

  She allows herself, now, three coconut crunches. And one almond smushie. And one packet of candy corn.

  This is what you’re missing, Ro! Ramming stale candy stolen from your own children down your throat.

  How can the wife hope that Ro doesn’t get pregnant? Doesn’t publish her book on the ice scientist?

  Plip, plip, plip.

  As if Ro’s not having a kid or a book would make the wife’s life any better.

  As if the wife’s having a job would make Ro’s any worse.

  The rivalry is so shameful she can’t look at it.

  It flickers and hangs.

  It waits.

  So cold in this house.

  She takes off her sweater and pushes it between the back door and the kitchen floor, which is, she notices, sandy with crumbs.

  She goes for the broom but ends up with her phone.

  Saturday morning: her mother will be puttering, cleaning, paging through magazines.

  They see each other, of course, make visits—Thanksgiving is next week—but that’s not the same as having her here, in pinches, on spurs of moments. A hundred miles is too far for an unplanned pinch.

  She is thirty-seven years old and pines for her mother.

  But won’t she be thrilled, thirty years hence, to learn that Bex and John are pining for her?

  She can see John’s little face bigger but still with its translucent emotions, clean feelings surging and waning, her tidal boy. He will always want her.

  Bex has too strong an instinct for self-reliance; she’ll be fine on her own.

  “Hi, Mom,” says the wife. “What’s your weather?”

  “Drizzling. Yours?”

  “Oh, um—just gray.”

  “Sweetpea…?”

  “The sprites are good,” says the wife.

  “Susan, what’s going on?”

  “Bex’s class is doing the Mayflower, and John is obsessed by dinosaur songs.”

  “With you, I meant.”

  “Nothing,” she says.

  “What time do you want us on Thursday?” says her mother. “I’m bringing candied yams. I think they’ll be a hit.”

  Everyone on this hill hates yams.

  “Come as early as you feel like. I love you, Mom.”

  Plip, plip, plip.

  Shell’s perfect mother will drop Bex off in fifteen minutes, and the girl will be full of praise for the fun she has with that family, the plucking of wild berries, the baking of homemade berry pie sweetened only with Grade B maple syrup because refined sugar is toxic.

  Then she’ll want help with her worksheet. Write down the weather for each day of the week. Was it sunny? Was it foggy? Was the ocean cheerful or angry?

  At the rim of sleep, she dreams of how Bryan would fuck her, the big thick plunge of him, the brawny thrusting, he’s a shoving leopard, lord, he does not tire, all that soccer, those extra-long muscles to drive the blood heartward—

  “Meuf.” A pinch in the rib meat.

  “Nnnnnhhhh.”

  Didier’s breath on her neck. “It bugged me what you said today. To John.”

  “Nnnnnhhhh.”

  “Bugged me a lot.”

  “Are you joking?” she whispers. “You say ‘fuck’ in front of them all the time. I say it once?”

  “But I never tell them to shut up. I don’t want you talking to them like that.”

  “Too bad you don’t get to decide,” says the wife.

  The next morning she walks out back, feet bare on the cold, wet grass, past the lavender bushes and the garage and the tire swing. Opens her phone and dials.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Bryan, it’s Susan.” Air, silence. “Didier’s wife?”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course. How are you?”

  “Fine! I, ah, got your number from the school directory and was calling to—say hi.” What?

  “Well, hi there,” says Bryan.

  “Also, I wanted to invite you to Thanksgiving dinner at our place. If you don’t have plans. Ro will be there. She’s sort of an orphan. I mean not technically but—And my parents, which isn’t—I mean—” Cease talking. You must cease talking.

  “That’s really nice,” he says, “but actually I do have plans.”

  “Oh! Well, I thought I’d ask.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Anyway.” She coughs.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “But you and I should have coffee sometime,” she says.

  Air, silence.

  Eventually he says, “I’d like that.”

  anchor

  candle

  drift

  fast

  frazil

  grease

  nilas

  old

  pack

  pancake

  rafted

  young

  THE BIOGRAPHER

  She breaks it to her father quickly, on the drive to school. He doesn’t bother to conceal his displeasure. “Another Christmas by myself?”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I have so little time off, and it takes a whole day to fly—”

  “I never should’ve moved.”

  “You hated Minnesota.�
��

  “Give me a blizzard any day over this humid netherworld.”

  The crease above her pubic bone feels vaguely bloated—or sore—different from period cramps, but the same family of sensation. It’s been almost a week since the insemination; she will take a pregnancy test in eight days. Are these signs of implantation? Has a blastocyst burrowed into the red wall? Does it cling and grow with all its might? Are its chromosomes XX or XY?

  “Am I ever going to see you again?” says her father.

  He won’t fly, on account of his back. He would send her money for a plane ticket if she asked, but he can’t afford it any more than the biographer can. His income is fixed and small. “I may not have cash to leave you,” he likes to say, “but you can sell my coin collection. Worth thousands!”

  “You will, Dad.”

  “I worry, kiddo.”

  “No need! I’m fine.”

  “But who knows,” he says, “how many more trips around the sun I’ve got?”

  The boys in ninth-grade history make spitballs and ask, “Miss, in the olden days, when you were young, did they have spitballs?”

  The eleventh-graders are enjoying the fruits of someone’s research on archaic terms for “penis.” When Ephraim yells “Bilbo!” the biographer stares him down, but he stares right back. Usually she has no issues with discipline; this outburst makes her feel like a failure.

  Well, she is a failure. She and her uterus fail, fail, fail.

  Ephraim: “Prepuce!”

  The biographer: “That just means foreskin, my friend.”

  Giggles. Haws. You said foreskin.

  The biographer and her ovaries fail, fail, fail.

  “Baldpate friar!”

  But there have been twinges—sharp little aches. Something feels like it’s happening down there. Maybe not fail, finally? Thousands of bodies succeed every day; why not the body of a biographer from Minnesota whose favorite garment is the sweatpant?

  “Nouri,” she says, “you can wait to put on lipstick until after class.”

  “I’m not putting on, I’m refreshing.”

  Nouri Withers loves books about famous murders and writes the best sentences of any child the biographer has taught. Her sentences need to be typed into a search program to make sure they’re not plagiarized.

  “You can refresh later.”

  “But my lips look janky now.”

  “Agreed!” shouts Ephraim, long legged and fidgety, who thinks himself dashing in his vintage trilby hat. A boy who moves through the world unafraid. If he weren’t so fearless and handsome and good at soccer, he might have been forced to grow in more interesting directions. The only thing interesting about Ephraim, as far as the biographer can tell, is his name.

  The biographer decides she will shout too. “Have you ever considered, people, how much time has been stolen from the lives of girls and women due to agonizing over their appearance?”

  A few faces smile, uneasy.

  Even louder: “How many minutes, hours, months, even actual years, of their lives do girls and women waste in agonizing? And how many billions of dollars of corporate profit are made as a result?”

  Nouri, open mouthed, sets down her lipstick. It stands on the desk like a crimson finger.

  “A lot of billions, miss?”

  These kids must think she’s a joke.

  “The institution began,” she tells the tenth-graders, “as a fiscal arrangement in which the father’s household transferred land, money, and livestock to the husband’s household, attached to the body of the daughter-bride. Its economic foundations have in recent centuries become shrouded by—some might even say smothered by—the veil of romantic love.”

  “Are you married, miss?” says Ash.

  “Shut up,” someone says.

  “Nope,” says the biographer.

  “Why not?” says Ash.

  “Shut up!” shouts Mattie.

  Silence crackles. Even the half-asleep kids are suddenly alert.

  Mattie says, more quietly, “Why did they die?”

  From the next desk, Ash rubs her shoulder. “You mean the whales?”

  “The independent researcher said their sonar could’ve broken. High-decibel submarine signals can make whales go deaf.” Mattie cups her lunar cheeks.

  “My dad said it’s the witch’s fault,” says the son of the local navy hero, “because she lured the dead man’s fingers back to Newville and they messed up the water.”

  Shouts and cries: “Yeah, the seaweed poisoned the whales!” “That’s so dumb.” “But there’s been more dead whiting in the nets too—”

  “Hold on, people!” says the biographer. “Maybe your dad was joking?”

  “My Gramma Costello said the same thing,” says Ash, “and the last time she told a joke was 1973.”

  “Also my dad is not dumb,” says the hero’s son.

  The biographer contemplates digressions into marine biology and the history of witch persecution in Kingdom and States United, but she needs to end class five minutes early to get to her clinic appointment. Kalbfleisch is insisting that she come in to discuss the PCOS test results. A two-hour drive to receive what is probably—almost certainly—going to be bad news.

  “There’s a Buddhist temple,” she says, “on a small island in Japan that used to hold requiems for whales killed by whalers. They prayed for the whales’ souls. They also had a tomb for whale fetuses taken from their mothers’ bodies during flensing. They would give a posthumous name to every fetus they buried, and they kept a necrology that listed the mothers’ dates of capture.” She pauses, scanning the room. “Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  “Field trip to Japan!”

  “Did the ones on the beach have any fetuses inside them?”

  “Did you know a ‘tus’ is a male fetus?”

  “We do a requiem,” says Mattie. “But first we need to name them.”

  Good girl. Even when distraught, she pays attention.

  “Okay,” says the biographer, “there are twenty-four of you. Pair off. Each pair names a whale. You have three minutes. Then we’ll reconvene for a recitation and a moment of silence.”

  “But the temple guys named the fetuses, not the grown-ups. You changed the ritual.”

  “So I did, Ash. Get to work.”

  She opens her notebook.

  Things to do with baby:

  1. Take train to Alaska

  2. Burrow in blankets

  3. Gorge on dried mango

  4. Tell stories about the Great Sperm-Whale Stranding

  5. Put toes in waves on year’s shortest day

  Her students christen a Moby-Dick, two Mikes, a Spermy, for God’s sake. But then whales are not exotic to these kids. The coastline near Newville is known as the whale-watching capital of the American West. For decades the local economies have depended on injections from tourists eager to see a breaching, lunging, slapping, spraying, spy-hopping colossus. They pay to watch from the decks of boats and through high-powered spotting scopes from the Gunakadeit Lighthouse; or to swim with guides, in wet suits, in the whales’ feeding grounds.

  The biographer is closing her backpack, thinking ahead to the traffic on 22—she can miss the worst of it if she hurries—when Mattie comes to the desk. “Can I talk to you about something?”

  “Of course. I mean not right now, because I have a doctor’s appointment, but tomorrow?” If she gets out of the parking lot in three minutes, she’ll be on the cliff road in seven.

  “Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”

  “Monday, then.”

  The girl nods, staring at her hands.

  “I know the whales are upsetting,” says the biographer, “but—”

  “It’s not about that.”

  “Have a good weekend, Mattie.” Parka zipped, pack shouldered, she bolts.

  She read about the stranding in the paper but has hardly thought of it since. Barnacly, fat-lidded blocks of beast—they only feel real in her book, when young Eivør
watches them die in the grindadráp.

  “How late is Dr. Kalbfleisch running?” she asks the front-desk nurse. “I’ve been here almost an hour.”

  “He’s a popular guy,” says the nurse.

  “Could you give me a general idea?”

  “It’s the day before a holiday,” she says.

  “And?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Why should that make a difference?”

  The nurse pretends to read something on her computer screen. “I have no way of knowing how much longer the doctor will be. If you need to reschedule, I am happy to help you with that.”

  “Gee, thanks,” says the biographer, and returns to her fawn-colored chair. She touches the bike-lock key on her neck. Her mother rode her bike every morning, shine or rain, until she went to the doctor about shoulder pain and learned she had lung cancer.

  Accusations from the world:

  13. Preferring one’s own company is pathological.

  14. Human beings were designed for companionship.

  15. Why didn’t you try harder to find a mate?

  16. Married people live longer, healthier lives.

  17. Do you think anyone actually believes that you’re happy on your own?

  18. It’s creepy that you relate so much to lighthouse keepers.

  Kalbfleisch wears a necktie of chuckling chipmunks. “Have a seat, Roberta.”

  “That’s your best tie yet,” she says.

  “As you know, I was concerned about the possibility of you having polycystic ovary syndrome. After seeing some evidence of ovarian enlargement and polycystism, we checked your testosterone levels, and I’m afraid the results confirm that you do, in fact, suffer from PCOS.”

  Of course.

  But she will be calm and resilient. She will be a problem solver.

  “Okay, which means?”

  “Which means that some or many of your follicles aren’t maturing properly, and therefore ovulation is significantly compromised. Even when the OPK detects an LH surge, for instance, it’s very possible no egg will appear. Let’s cross our fingers for your current cycle. When do you come back for the pregnancy blood test?”

  “Wednesday,” she says, recruiting her facial muscles into a smile. Problem solver. “And if it’s negative, I’ll use a different donor for the next cycle. Someone with more reported pregnancies than—”