Red Clocks(35)

“But I never tell them to shut up. I don’t want you talking to them like that.”

“Too bad you don’t get to decide,” says the wife.

The next morning she walks out back, feet bare on the cold, wet grass, past the lavender bushes and the garage and the tire swing. Opens her phone and dials.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Bryan, it’s Susan.” Air, silence. “Didier’s wife?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. How are you?”

“Fine! I, ah, got your number from the school directory and was calling to—say hi.” What?

“Well, hi there,” says Bryan.

“Also, I wanted to invite you to Thanksgiving dinner at our place. If you don’t have plans. Ro will be there. She’s sort of an orphan. I mean not technically but—And my parents, which isn’t—I mean—” Cease talking. You must cease talking.

“That’s really nice,” he says, “but actually I do have plans.”

“Oh! Well, I thought I’d ask.”

“Mmm.”

“Anyway.” She coughs.

“Yeah,” he says.

“But you and I should have coffee sometime,” she says.

Air, silence.

Eventually he says, “I’d like that.”





anchor

candle

drift

fast

frazil

grease

nilas

old

pack

pancake

rafted

young





THE BIOGRAPHER


She breaks it to her father quickly, on the drive to school. He doesn’t bother to conceal his displeasure. “Another Christmas by myself?”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I have so little time off, and it takes a whole day to fly—”

“I never should’ve moved.”

“You hated Minnesota.”

“Give me a blizzard any day over this humid netherworld.”

The crease above her pubic bone feels vaguely bloated—or sore—different from period cramps, but the same family of sensation. It’s been almost a week since the insemination; she will take a pregnancy test in eight days. Are these signs of implantation? Has a blastocyst burrowed into the red wall? Does it cling and grow with all its might? Are its chromosomes XX or XY?

“Am I ever going to see you again?” says her father.

He won’t fly, on account of his back. He would send her money for a plane ticket if she asked, but he can’t afford it any more than the biographer can. His income is fixed and small. “I may not have cash to leave you,” he likes to say, “but you can sell my coin collection. Worth thousands!”

“You will, Dad.”

“I worry, kiddo.”

“No need! I’m fine.”

“But who knows,” he says, “how many more trips around the sun I’ve got?”

The boys in ninth-grade history make spitballs and ask, “Miss, in the olden days, when you were young, did they have spitballs?”

The eleventh-graders are enjoying the fruits of someone’s research on archaic terms for “penis.” When Ephraim yells “Bilbo!” the biographer stares him down, but he stares right back. Usually she has no issues with discipline; this outburst makes her feel like a failure.

Well, she is a failure. She and her uterus fail, fail, fail.

Ephraim: “Prepuce!”

The biographer: “That just means foreskin, my friend.”

Giggles. Haws. You said foreskin.

The biographer and her ovaries fail, fail, fail.

“Baldpate friar!”

But there have been twinges—sharp little aches. Something feels like it’s happening down there. Maybe not fail, finally? Thousands of bodies succeed every day; why not the body of a biographer from Minnesota whose favorite garment is the sweatpant?

“Nouri,” she says, “you can wait to put on lipstick until after class.”

“I’m not putting on, I’m refreshing.”

Nouri Withers loves books about famous murders and writes the best sentences of any child the biographer has taught. Her sentences need to be typed into a search program to make sure they’re not plagiarized.

“You can refresh later.”

“But my lips look janky now.”

“Agreed!” shouts Ephraim, long legged and fidgety, who thinks himself dashing in his vintage trilby hat. A boy who moves through the world unafraid. If he weren’t so fearless and handsome and good at soccer, he might have been forced to grow in more interesting directions. The only thing interesting about Ephraim, as far as the biographer can tell, is his name.

The biographer decides she will shout too. “Have you ever considered, people, how much time has been stolen from the lives of girls and women due to agonizing over their appearance?”

A few faces smile, uneasy.

Even louder: “How many minutes, hours, months, even actual years, of their lives do girls and women waste in agonizing? And how many billions of dollars of corporate profit are made as a result?”

Nouri, open mouthed, sets down her lipstick. It stands on the desk like a crimson finger.

“A lot of billions, miss?”

These kids must think she’s a joke.