Red Clocks(42)

Or at Central Coast Regional, where someone with a BA and no experience can teach history, and someone with a glorified-community-college degree and no experience can teach French.

She could stop being Didier’s wife.

In therapy the kids will blame her for their broken childhoods and the maladaptive coping mechanisms that have ruined their adulthoods.

Their therapists will say, Do you think you can ever forgive her?





First a mangler in the shipyard laundry, then a maid in the house of the shipyard director. Brewed tea for the butler and cook, learned English, overheard the lessons given to the director’s oldest son. Jars of creatures to pin and dissect. A volcano built of papier-maché. Maritime navigation demonstrated with an astrolabe.

The polar explorer asked to sit in the schoolroom with them.

The young tutor agreed and wanted nothing in return.

The young tutor agreed but wanted half her monthly pay in return.

The young tutor agreed but wanted sex in return.

The young tutor, Harry Rattray, agreed if she promised to walk with him on Sundays through the purple crocus in Aberdeen’s newly opened Victoria Park.





THE BIOGRAPHER


Drives for two hours to give the clinic her blood. They will measure its HCG levels and call with the results. She did not test at home beforehand, as she typically does. She wants to make everything about this last-ever pregnancy test different, so that its result can be different too.

If this cycle fails, she isn’t having a biological child.

To adopt from China, your body-mass index must be under 35, your annual household income over eighty thousand. Dollars.

To adopt from Russia, your annual household income must be at least a hundred thousand. Dollars.

To adopt from the United States—as of January 15—you must be married.

Are you married, miss?

When her first caseworker at the adoption agency said “You do realize, I hope, that a child is not a replacement for a romantic partner?” the biographer almost walked out of the interview. She did not walk out, because she wanted to get onto their wait-list. That night she threw a potted cactus against her refrigerator.

The last time she had sex was almost two years ago, with Jupiter from meditation group. “Your cunt smells yummy,” he said, extending the first syllable of “yummy” into a ghastly warble. Wiped semen from the dark swirls of his belly hair and said, “You sure you’re not getting attached?”

“Scout’s honor,” said the biographer.

“Not that attachment is always a bad thing,” said Jupiter, “but I don’t really see us having that. I think we connect well sexually and intellectually, but not emotionally or spiritually.”

“I’m getting a Klondike bar,” said the biographer, rolling off the bed. “Want one?”

“Unless you’re secretly using me for this.” He held up five glistening fingers. “Are you having a Torschlusspanik moment?”

“I do not speak German.”

“‘Gate-closing panic.’ The fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages. Like when women worry about getting too old to—”

“Do you want a Klondike bar or not?”

“Not,” said Jupiter, and she could feel him wondering, now that he thought about it, if it might be true. Afraid of withering on her own vine, had she decided to steal his vegan cum?

She bit hard into the frozen chocolate, which sparkled along her tooth nerves, and he said: “Those things are so bad for you.”

Though she mentions no sex in her notebooks, it’s possible that Eiv?r Mínervudottír slept with lots of men. Lots of women. Who can say what she got up to with the other maids in Aberdeen, or with her shipmates on ocean voyages?

Also possible: she spent her whole life (apart from or including the eighteen-month marriage) without sex. Out of necessity. Out of choice.

But how many people have sailed to the Arctic Circle, slept in tents bolted to ice floes, watched a man’s skin peel off from eating the toxic liver of a polar bear?

In the clinic waiting room, under the vexing tinkle of the adult-contemporary station, the biographer does a pump of hand sanitizer. The news murmurs on a wall-mounted flat-screen and a few faces watch it and nobody talks.

“What are you in for today?”

She looks up: a blond-pigtailed woman is smiling from the chair opposite. “A pregnancy test.”

“Wow! So this could be it!”

“Unlikely,” says the biographer. But, yes, in fact, it could be. If this cycle works, the eleventh-hour victory will be a story to tell the baby. You showed up just in time. She notes that the woman wears a simple band, no rocky engagement ring. “What about you?”

“Day nine check,” says the woman. “This is my second cycle. My hubby says we should adopt, but I—I don’t know. It’s—” Eyes fill, shimmer.

The word “hubby” cancels out the lack of a diamond.

“At least you can adopt,” says the biographer, louder than she meant to.

The woman nods, unperturbed. Maybe she’s never heard of Every Child Needs Two; or forgot about it promptly after hearing it, because the law did not apply to her.

Compare and despair.

The biographer unbuttons her sleeve, hoists it, makes a fist. Nurse Crabby swabs the bruised skin. Archie was proud of his track marks and would neglect on purpose to wear long sleeves.