Red Clocks(15)

Speaking of: the biographer gets out the saucepan. While the tea heats, 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.