Red Clocks(24)

When you often go to bed without brushing your teeth?

Ab ovo. The twin eggs of Leda, impregnated by Zeus in swan form: one hatched into Helen, who would launch ships. Start from the beginning. Except there is no beginning. Can the biographer remember first thinking, feeling, or deciding she wanted to be someone’s mother? The original moment of longing to let a bulb of lichen grow in her until it came out human? The longing is widely endorsed. Legislators, aunts, and advertisers approve. Which makes the longing, she thinks, a little suspicious.

Babies once were abstractions. They were Maybe I do, but not now. The biographer used to sneer at talk of biological deadlines, believing the topic of baby craziness to be crap for lifestyle magazines. Women who worried about ticking clocks were the same women who traded salmon-loaf recipes and asked their husbands to clean the gutters. She was not and never would be one of them.

Then, suddenly, she was one of them. Not the gutters, but the clock.





The narwhal’s blotchy hide has been likened to the skin of a drowned mariner. Its stomach has five rooms. It can hold its breath under the ice for outrageous lengths. And the male horn, of course—much could be said.





THE MENDER


Would kill to never make another trip to the Acme, yet her needs can’t be met entirely by the forest, orchards, fields, or clients who trade with fish and batteries. For certain essentials she must use green cash. But the store lights hurt the mender’s eyes. And the floors are so hard. And she notices—because even though the teachers at Central Coast Regional called her stupid, she is not stupid—that people stare at her in the Acme. They take their children’s hands.

She is here for ginger, sesame oil, Band-Aids, thread, and a box of black licorice nibs. Passing the butcher counter, she is sickened to see the machine-pressed slices, the loaves of meat. Oils from the tissues of pig and cow and lamb glisten on the air. She has a long walk in front of her, in the rain, and night is coming. She speeds up toward the candy aisle, where her nibs— “I know what you did”—a low snarl, nearly unhearable.

The mender keeps on.

Louder: “Dolores Fivey almost died.”

She keeps on, staring at the end of the aisle, where she will turn right.

Loudest: “She was in the ICU! Do you care? Do you even care?”—voice lifting to the vast fluorescent beds, but the mender won’t look, she won’t grace them with a look.

“Find everything okay today?” says the cashier.

The mender nods, staring down.

“Cool necklace, by the way.”

She always wears her Aristotle’s lanterns to town.

Lola didn’t almost die. It would have been in the newspaper at the library.

Ignore them, says Temple from the freezer. People will believe any old crap.

Her cloak is sopping by the time she reaches home. Wool socks squelch in her sandals. In the goat shed, pouring grain, nuzzled by the snouts of her beautifuls, she tells Temple: “I hate them all.” Runs her hand over the lid of the chest freezer, listening, though she knows Temple won’t come back.

Salem, Massachusetts, 1692: a “witch cake” was baked with rye flour and urine from girls said to have been stricken by spells. This fragrant cake was fed to a dog. When the dog ate it, the witch would suffer—so went the folk wisdom—and her yelps of agony would incriminate her.

“How did they get the girls’ urine?” the young mender wanted to know.

“Unimportant,” said Temple. “The important thing is that people will believe any old crap. Never forget that, okay? Any. Old. Crap.”

The mender misses her aunt every day.

It’s not true that she hates them all, but it makes her feel better to say it.

She doesn’t hate the girl she watches for.

And she doesn’t hate Lola. She misses the compliments—“You have the coolest eyes I ever saw.” The sugar packets and shakers of salt Lola stole from restaurants for the mender. She misses Lola’s finger in her slit, Lola’s plump tits in her mouth.

No visits or notes in over a month. The mender has considered going back to the big sandstone house, when the husband’s at work, to bring her a spray of fawn lily. But Lola might get confused again.

She had come to the cabin for help with a burn. The mender knew she was lying about how she got the burn.

She adds wood to the stove. Eats a cold white stalk of ghost pipe. Steps out of her wet clothes, stands naked by the stove until she is dry.

Who was that yelling in the Acme? What has Lola been telling people?

The last time, Lola wore a green dress, shoulders bare. The scar was knitting well, less puckery, but it would be on her forearm the rest of her life. Into the marked skin the mender rubbed elderflower oil infused with lemon, lavender, and fenugreek.

“That feels so good,” said Lola.

“Okay,” said the mender, wiping her hands on an old washcloth. Packed bottle and washcloth into her rucksack. “See you.”

“But you just got here!”

The mender blinked at the flowered couch, bag of golf clubs, family photos running up the long staircase. Through the cork soles of her sandals she felt the wall?to?wall teeming with carpet-beetle larvae.

“He won’t be back until five. We could …?” Little plucked eyebrow twitched coaxingly. “I haven’t seen you for two whole weeks,” added Lola, coming closer. “I missed you. I have this friend in Santa Fe”—nudging the mender’s toe with her shiny black boot—“who sells handmade pi?on kokopellis. We could go there for a while. He’d never find—”