Red Clocks(28)

“Mrs. Korsmo?” A small voice from the hall.

“Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you,” calls Mattie, “but John scratched Bex’s arm, and she’s pretty upset about it.”

“Did he break the skin?” shouts the wife.

“No, but—”

“Then can you please just deal with it?”

Mattie appears in the doorway, nervous. “Bex says she needs you.”

“Well, she doesn’t. Tell her I’ll be up to check on her later.”

“I’ll go,” says Didier. “Take the chicken out when it buzzes.”

“But we weren’t finished,” says the wife.

He follows Mattie toward the stairs.

The wife shoves the chicken-stained cutting board into the dishwasher. Picks olives off the countertop. Wipes stray salt into her palm.

She washes her hands.

Switches the timer off but keeps the oven on.

Ignites a burner on the gas stovetop to high.

Reaches in with a pot holder for a breast, which she drops onto the burner’s high open flame. It flares and spits and sizzles, the whole breast blue with fire.

Darkening, bubbling.

Charred and rubbery.

Little animal, burnt black.





Her mother’s hand over hers on the knife.

The lamb’s face coming off.

Upon tasting a new batch of skerpikj?t, her mother boasted she could name the very hillside on which the lamb had grazed. No one believed her, but it was wiser, with this mother, to applaud the sensitivity of her tongue.

This mother informed the explorer only two days before the wedding that she was to marry a man she’d never set eyes on, a widowed salmoner aged fifty-two. Eiv?r was old to be unmarried—nineteen.





THE BIOGRAPHER


Good Ship Chinese is full of teachers, thanks to a federal mandate that doubled the number of standardized tests in public schools. Only half the staff are needed to proctor this afternoon’s exams.

The bleached-blond waitress pours their waters and says, “I’ll give you a minute.” A hairy mole clings to her cheek.

Didier reaches to pinch something from the biographer’s collar. “You had oatmeal for breakfast.”

She bats his hand away. He kicks her under the table. In front of Susan she doesn’t touch Didier. Doesn’t want her thinking Does she want my husband? because the biographer doesn’t, and if she did, all the more reason not to arouse suspicion. Susan once told the biographer how the music teacher had flirted her tiny ass off with Didier at the summer picnic, and Bex, drawing at the kitchen table, said, “Did she put her tiny ass back on?” and Susan said, “I wish you’d be seen and not heard for once in your life.” The biographer was pleased to know that Susan could be an unskillful parent.

“How goes your saga,” says Pete, “of the lady adventurer?”

“Almost finished.”

“I have no doubt.” He flaps his placemat vigorously, airing himself. “Everyone needs a good hobby.”

“It’s not a hobby,” she says.

“The hair coming out of that mole,” says Didier, “has got to be three inches long.”

“Of course it’s a hobby,” says Pete. “You do it on weekends or vacations. The act of doing it brings you amusement but no profit or gain.”

“You guys want to order? I can flag down the hair taxi.”

“So if something doesn’t make money,” says the biographer, “it’s automatically relegated to hobby?”

The waitress returns. Her sprouting hair—quite long, quite black—for a moment mesmerizes all of them. The biographer, who bleaches her own upper lip every few weeks, warms with fellow feeling. She and Pete order Golden Lily platters, Didier the Emperor’s Consolation.

Didier leans forward to say, low: “Why don’t she just bleeding yank that thing out, eh?”

There is an egg bracing to burst out of its sac into the wet fallopian warmth. Today the ovulation predictor kit showed no smiley face; she’ll test again tomorrow. Back to Kalbfleisch for sperm, once she gets the smiley face.

“Pour me some more tea, Roanoke?”

She moves the teapot six inches toward him.

“I said pour, woman! Can I get a ride home, by the way? I left Susan the car today.”

“How were you planning on getting home if I didn’t drive you?”

Didier grins, beau-laid. “I knew you’d drive me.”

Bryan Zakile saunters over to their table and bellows, “These three are clearly up to no good! Want to hear my fortune? ‘You will leave a trail of gratitude.’”

“‘In bed,’” adds Didier.

“You said it, not me.”

“Not I,” mutters the biographer.

Bryan flinches. “Thank you, grammar Schutzstaffel.”

She drags her fork through the Golden Lilies. “I’m not the one who teaches English.”

“He don’t really teach English either,” says Didier. “His subject is the beautiful game.”

“If only that knee had held up,” says Pete, “we’d be watching Bryan on telly. Who’d you be playing for? Bar?a? Man United?”