Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

  She is glad not to be driving. No decisions to be made at the bend in the road.

  Little animal black and twitching, burnt to death but not quite dead.

  A scrap of tire struggling its way across.

  Little animal, plastic bag.

  But maybe it wasn’t a plastic bag.

  Maybe her first sight was correct.

  Somebody lit it on fire, some bad kid, bad adult. Newville is not lacking in badness—

  but it’s beautiful here and your family’s been coming here for generations and the sea air’s full of negative ions. They boost the mood, remember?

  Bex is chattering again by the time they reach the store.

  Where’s the doll section.

  John’s so lazy.

  Somebody’s mom came to class who’s a dental hygienist and said even the nub of an adult tooth growing in still needs to be brushed.

  “Perfects at two o’clock,” hisses Didier, elbowing the wife’s elbow.

  Not them. Not today.

  “Shell!” squeals Bex. “Oh my God, Shelly!”

  The girls embrace dramatically, as though bumping into each other in the town where they both live were the most amazing surprise.

  Bex: “Your dress is so pretty.”

  Shell: “Thanks. My mom made it.”

  “Hey, friends!” chirps Jessica Perfect. “Good to see you!”

  “You too.” The wife leans in for an air-kiss. “Brought the whole crew, huh?”

  Shell’s tanned, slender siblings stand in a row behind their tanned, slender parents.

  “Yep, it’s one of those days.”

  Those days at the Perfects’ are probably a little different from those days on the hill.

  On top of making dresses, Jessica knits sweaters out of local Shetland wool for all four children.

  Cans jam from the wild berries they pick.

  Home-cooks their wheat-free, dairy-free meals.

  Chicken nuggets and string cheese never cross her threshold.

  Her husband is a nutritionist who once lectured Didier on the importance of soaking nuts overnight.

  “Blake.” Didier nods.

  “How’s it hangin, buddy?”

  “Long and strong,” says her husband, with only a flicker of a smile.

  “Look at this guy! He’s getting so big! How old are you now?” Blake leans down toward John, who squirms in the shopping cart, shoving his face into Didier’s stomach.

  “Three and a half,” says the wife.

  “Wow. Time just passes, doesn’t it?”

  “I know,” says Jessica, “and it’s been forever since we had you over! We need to do that. It’s hard to find a good night with the kids so busy after school. We’ve got soccer, cross-country, violin—gosh, what am I missing?”

  The oldest child says, “My gifted-and-talented class?”

  “That’s right, my love. This one”—she nuzzles the boy’s head—“tested off the charts last year, so he qualifies for an accelerated math and language-arts program. You guys aren’t vegetarian, are you? We’ve been getting the most heavenly beef from our friends down the road. Their cows are grass-fed, no antibiotics whatsoever, just pure happy beef.”

  “You mean happy before they’re slaughtered,” says Didier, “or once they turn into food?”

  She doesn’t bat an eye. “So when you guys come over, I’ll make steaks, and the chard will be ready soon. Gosh, we’ve got acres of it this year. Fortunately the kids love chard.”

  Still raining hard on the way home. Wipers furious.

  “Shooting?” says Didier.

  “Too quick,” says the wife. “What’s a very slow poison?”

  “Hemlock, I think,” he says, taking a hand off the wheel to caress the back of her neck. “No, wait—starvation! Hoist them on their own, like, whatevers.”

  “Petards,” she says.

  “What is a petard, anyway?”

  “Can’t remember. But I vote for starvation.”

  “‘I notice you’ve got some unsoaked nuts on the premises, and I’m a little concerned. Frankly I wouldn’t dream of feeding my children an unsoaked nut.’”

  “What are you guys talking about?” says Bex.

  “A TV show we saw,” says Didier, “called The World’s Smallest Petard. You would like it, Bexy. There’s an episode where every time a person farts, you can actually see the fart—there’s these little brown clouds trailing behind the characters.”

  Bex giggles.

  The wife moves his hand from her neck down to her thigh and closes her eyes, smiling. He squeezes her jeaned flesh.

  She remembers what she loves.

  Not the fart jokes, but the sweetness. The solidarity against the Perfects of this world.

  She will ask him tomorrow.

  In the car-window fog she draws an A.

  It was bad, yes, the last time he refused. She promised herself she wouldn’t ask again.

  But the kids adore him.

  And he really is sweet sometimes.

  I got the name of a person in Salem, she will say, who’s supposed to be fantastic, not that expensive, does late appointments. We can get Mattie to sit—

  And she has seen herself driving off the cliff road with the kids in the car.

  When the polar explorer turned six, she was shown the best way to hold the knife and how to make a slice across the lamb’s throat—just one, they don’t feel it, do it hard, watch your brother. But when she had the knife, and her mother was squatting beside her with the little wriggler, she didn’t want to. Eivør was ordered twice to cut it and twice she said “Nei, Mamma.”

  Her mother put a hand over hers and drew the knife under the lamb’s face; its face fell off; Eivør fell with it, screaming; and her mother hoisted the animal above a washtub to bleed.

  Eivør was beaten on her thighs with a leather strap used for hanging slit lambs in the drying shed. And she ate no ræst kjøt that Christmas or skerpikjøt that spring, apart from the occasional secret bite her brother Gunni saved in his shoe.

  THE BIOGRAPHER

  Doesn’t know for a fact that Gunni saved pieces of fermented lamb in his shoe when Eivør wasn’t allowed to have any, but she writes it in her book, because her own brother used to hide cookies in his napkin when their mother told the biographer she didn’t need more dessert unless she wanted to get chubby. Archie would leave the cookies in his drawer for her to retrieve. Each time she opened the drawer and saw the grease-darkened napkin tucked among socks, a flame of happiness lit in her throat.

  She wrote the first sentences of Mínervudottír: A Life ten years ago, when she was working at a café in Minneapolis and trying to help Archie get clean. When she wasn’t driving him to meetings or outpatient appointments, she was dropping leafy greens into smoothies he didn’t drink. She was checking his pupils for pinnedness, his drawers for needles, her own wallet for missing cash. Sometimes he would ask to read the manuscript. He liked the part where the polar explorer watches men drive whales to their deaths in a shallow cove.

  As a hater of tradition, Archie would have applauded her solo pregnancy efforts. Would have tried to get his friends to supply sperm for free. (One dose of semen from Athena Cryobank costs eight hundred dollars.)

  She has not told her father about the efforts.

  She closes her computer and sets Mínervudottír’s journal on a pile of books about nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions. Rolls her head toward one shoulder, then the other. Is a stiff neck another sign of polycystic ovary syndrome? She has researched PCOS online, a little, as much as she can stand. The pregnancy statistics aren’t good.

  But Gin Percival might not know what she’s talking about. She didn’t even graduate from high school, according to Penny, who was already teaching at Central Coast when Gin dropped out. The visit to her did not go badly, or particularly well. She liked Gin Percival fine. She came away with a bag of gruesome tea.

  Speaking of: the biographer gets out the saucepan. While the tea hea
ts, she braces for the flavor of a human mouth unbrushed for many moons and debates whether to change for dinner. It’s only Didier and Susan and the kids; but these sweatpants, truth be told, have not been washed in a while.

  Her white mug is streaked tan inside. Are her teeth this stained? Probably almost. Years of frequent coffee. Long hiatuses from dentistry. Could poor mouth hygiene be a cause of PCOS? Inflammation leaking from the gums into the bloodstream, a slow poison, her hormones dizzy and ineffectual?

  If she does have PCOS, maybe Gin Percival can give her another concoction—to lower her testosterone levels, repair her blood. Her cells will jump to work, plumping and fluffing and densing, her FSH numbers will drop into the single digits, Nurse Crabby will call with her bloodwork results and say, “Wow! Just, wow!” and even Fleischy will give a golden nod of amazement. They’ll shoot in the sperm of the rock climber or the personal trainer or the biology student or Kalbfleisch himself, and the biographer, at last, will conceive.

  It’s got to be mostly hokum, of course. Tree bark and frog’s spit and spells. Mash up a few berries and seeds and call it a solution.

  But what if it works? Thousands of years in the making, fine-tuned by women in the dark creases of history, helping each other.

  And at this point, what else can she do?

  You could stop trying so hard.

  You could love your life as it is.

  The Korsmos’ place, horror-movie handsome on its hill, would make the biographer jealous if she were a house wanter, which she is not, as houses make her think of being stuck neck-deep in a mortgage; but she admires its lead-glazed panes and the ocellated trim work vining its porch. It was built by Susan’s great-grandfather as a summer place. In winter they duct-tape the windows and stuff sweaters under the doors.

  Didier smokes on the porch steps, yellow hair poking like hay from under his beanie. He is sunk-eyed and snaggletoothed yet manages somehow—the biographer can’t figure out how—to be fetching. Beau-laid. He raises one beautiful-ugly palm in greeting.

  “ROOOOOO!” yells Bex, running at the biographer across the lawn.

  “Pipe the fuck down,” says her father. He squashes the cigarette on his bootheel, tosses it into a large brown bush, and ambles over to lift the girl into the air. “Bexy, remember that ‘fuck’ goes in the special box. You hungry, Robitussin? Also, we invited Pete.”

  “I’m elated. What’s the special box?”

  “The box of words we never say to Mommy,” says Bex.

  “Or even near Mommy.” Didier sets the girl down, and she scurries back toward the house. “I see you didn’t bring anything, which is awesome.”

  “What?”

  “My wife adheres to the twentieth-century belief that civilized people arrive with small gifts or contributions to an invited meal. And once again this proves her wrong because you’re civilized but, as usual, you brought zilch.”

  The biographer foresees the wince, the disapproval filed away. Susan keeps track to the grave.

  Pliny the Younger stomps behind while Bex gives the biographer yet another tour of her room. She is very proud of her room. The purple walls are thick with fairies, leopards, alphabets, and Pinocchio noses. When her brother dares to move a rabbit from the bed, Bex slaps his hand; he yowls; the biographer says, “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.”

  “It was only a soft hit,” says the girl. “See, I have one shelf for the monster and one shelf for the fish. Here’s a squirrel mummy.”

  The biographer peers. “Is that a real squirrel?”

  “Yeah, but it died. Which is, like, when…” Bex sighs, twists her hands together, and looks up at the biographer. “What is death?”

  “Oh, you know,” says the biographer.

  Blond-brown, endearing, demanding, sometimes quite irritating—how eerily they resemble Susan and Didier. It’s much more than the coloring: they are shaped like their parents, Bex with Didier’s shadowy eye sockets, John with Susan’s elfin chin—small faces imprinted by two traceable lineages. They are the products of desire: sexual, yes, but more importantly (in the age of contraception, at least) they come from the desire to recur. Give me the chance to repeat myself. Give me a life lived again, and bigger. Give me a self to take care of, and better. Again, please, again! We’re wired, it’s said, to want repeating. To want seed and soil, egg and shell, or so it’s said. Give me a bucket and give me a bell. Give me a cow with her udders a-swell. Give me the calf—long eyes, long tongue—who clamps the teat and sucks.

  Downstairs she trips on a plastic truck and slams elbow first into a side table. The floor is choked with toys. She kicks a blue train against the wall.

  “They live in squalor,” says Pete Xiao.

  “I may have sprained my elbow.”

  “That aside, how are you?” Pete came to Central Coast Regional two years ago, to teach math, and announced he’d only be here for one year because he wasn’t built for a hinterland. This year, too, is meant to be his last; and next year will undoubtedly be his last.

  “Swell,” she says. Swollen. The Ovutran bloats.

  They gather in the dining room, which Susan’s forebears rigged up in style: fat oak ceiling beams, hand-carved wall panels, built-in credenza. The little black roast is sliced and served. Munchings and slurpings.

  “This year’s parents,” says Pete, “are even more racist than last year’s. One guy goes, ‘I’m glad my child is finally studying math with someone of your persuasion.’”

  “Calm your yard, Pete-moss,” says Didier.

  “I have a yard?”

  “It’s in your pants, nestled like a teeny mouse.”

  “How very white of you to change the subject away from model-minority stereotypes.”

  “Hey, Roosevelt, are you using only white sperm donors out of racism?”

  “Didier, God,” says Susan.

  “White is the state color of Oregon,” says Pete.

  “The kid is already going to feel weird about his paternity situation,” says the biographer, “and I don’t want to add to the confusion.”

  “Once you have that kid, you won’t be able to take a dump by yourself. And you’ll become even less cool than you are now. As they say, ‘Heroin never hurt my music collection, but parenthood sure has!’”

  “No one says that,” says Susan, reaching for another roll.

  “I once did a research paper,” says Didier, “on the history of words for penis, and ‘yard’ was a preferred term until a couple of centuries ago.”

  “Was that considered a research topic at your wattle-and-daub college?” says Pete.

  “Not wattle and daub,” says Susan, “so much as frosted glass block and drive-through window.”

  “What’s wattle and daub?” says Bex.

  Didier scratches his neck. “Even if it had been a community college, which it was not, so what? I mean, literally, meuf, why would it matter?”

  Pete shouts, “Why does everyone say ‘literally’ so much these days?”

  “‘When I lay with my bouncing Nell,’” recites Didier, “‘I gave her an inch, but she took an Ell: But… it was damnable hard, When I gave her an inch, she’d want more than a Yard.’ Ell meant the minge, by the way.”

  “Yet he can’t remember the name of the kids’ pediatrician,” says Susan.

  Didier gives his wife a long look, rises from the table, heads for the kitchen.

  He returns with a butter dish.

  “We don’t need butter,” says Susan. “Why did you get out the butter?”

  “Because,” he says, “I want to put some butter on my potatoes. They happen to be a little dry.”

  “Daddy,” says Bex, “your face just looked like a butt.” Giggles. “Don’t be a buttinski, you buttinski!”

  “Use your NPR voice, chouchou,” says Didier.

  “I hate NPR!”

  “What Daddy means is you need to speak more quietly, or you’re leaving the table.”

  Bex whispers something to her b
rother, then counts to three. “AAAAAAHHHHHH!” they roar.

  “That’s it,” snaps Susan. “You’re done. Leave the table.”

  “But John’s not done! If you don’t feed us it’s, um, it’s child abuse.”

  “Where did you hear that term?”

  “Jesus,” says Didier, “she prolly got it from TV. Relax.”

  Susan closes her eyes. For a few seconds, nothing moves. Then her eyes open and her voice comes out placid: “Let’s go, sprites, time for bath. Say good night!”

  Pete and Didier keep opening beers and ignoring the biographer. Their conversation topics include European soccer, artisanal whiskey, famous drug overdoses, and a multiplayer video game whose name sounds like “They Mask Us.” Then Didier, suddenly remembering her, says: “Instead of driving a million miles to Salem, why don’t you just go to the witch? I saw her the other day, waiting outside the school. At least I think it was her, although she looks less witchy than most of the girls at Central Coast.”

  “She’s not a witch. She’s—” Tall, pale, heavy browed. Eyes wide and pond-green. Black cloth pinned around her neck. “Unusual.”

  “Still,” says Didier, “worth a try?”

  “Nah. She’d give me a bowl of tree bark. And I’m already in massive debt.” The biographer isn’t sure why she’s lying. She’s not ashamed of her visit to Gin Percival.

  “All the more reason to avoid single motherhood,” says Didier.

  Is she ashamed?

  “So only couples in massive debt”—she raises her voice—“should have kids?”

  “No, I just mean you have no idea how hard it’s going to be.”

  “Actually I do,” she says.

  “You very much don’t. Look, I’m the product of a single mother.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What?”

  “You turned out fine,” says the biographer.

  “You’re human evidence,” adds Pete.

  “Wait’ll it’s four a.m.,” says Didier, “and the kid’s puking and shitting and screaming and you can’t decide if you should take him to the emergency room and there’s no one to help you decide.”