Red Clocks(22)

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.”