Red Clocks(43)
The nurse has trouble, as usual, finding a vein. “They’re way buried.”
“The one closer to the elbow usually works better—?”
“First let’s see what we can get over here.”
The biographer’s car crests the cliff and the ocean spreads below. Vast dark luminous perilous sea, floors white with sailors’ bones, tides stronger than any human effort. Sea stacks sleep like tiny mountains in the waves. She loves the sheer fact of how many millions of creatures the water holds—microscopic and gargantuan, alive and long dead.
In eyeshot of such a sea, one can pretend things are fine. Notice only the cares within reach. Coyotes on Lupatia Street. Fund-raising for lighthouse repairs. It’s why the biographer liked this country of pointed firs, at first: how easily here she could forget the hurtling world. She could almost stop seeing the blue lips of her brother, the gray jaw of her mother in the hospital bed.
While the biographer was hiding out in a rainy Arcadia, they closed the women’s health clinics that couldn’t afford mandated renovations.
They prohibited second-trimester abortions.
They required women to wait ten days before the procedure and to complete a lengthy online tutorial on fetal pain thresholds and celebrities whose mothers had planned to abort them.
They started talking about this thing called the Personhood Amendment, which for years had been a fringe idea, a farce.
At her kitchen table she eats a bowl of pineapple chunks.
Sips water.
Waits for the call.
When Congress proposed the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and it was sent to the states for a vote, the biographer wrote emails to her representatives. Marched in protests in Salem and Portland. Donated to Planned Parenthood. But she wasn’t all that worried. It had to be political theater, she thought, a flexing of muscle by the conservative-controlled House and Senate in league with a fetus-loving new president.
Thirty-nine states voted to ratify. A three-quarters majority. The biographer watched the computer screen splashed with this news, thought of the signs at the rallies (KEEP YOUR ROSARIES OFF MY OVARIES! THINK OUTSIDE MY BOX!) and the online petitions, the celebrity op?eds. She couldn’t believe the Personhood Amendment had become real with all these citizens so against it.
Which (the disbelief) was stupid. She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most of the people.
With abortion illegal, said the congressmen, more babies would be available to adopt. It wasn’t hurting anyone, they said, to ban IVF, because the people with faulty uteri and busted sperm could simply adopt all those extra babies.
Which isn’t the way it turned out.
She finishes the pineapple.
Swallows the rest of the water.
Tells her ovaries: For your patience, for your eggs, I thank you.
Tells her uterus: May you be happy.
Her blood: May you be safe.
Her brain: May you be free from suffering.
Her phone rings.
“Hello, Roberta.” Kalbfleisch himself is calling. Usually a nurse does.
“Hello, Doctor.”
Is he calling himself because the news is different this time?
She stands with her back pressed against the refrigerator. Please please please please please please please.
Firs shake and shiver on the hill.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “but your test came back negative.”
“Oh,” she says.
“I know this is disappointing.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“The odds just weren’t, you know, in our favor.” The doctor clears his golden throat. “I’m curious whether—Well, have you—Let me put it this way: do you travel much?”
“Florida sometimes, to see my dad.”
“International travel.”
Take a vacation to console herself?
Screw. You.
Wait.
No.
He’s saying something else.
“So you recommend,” she says haltingly, “in light of my—difficulties, that I should go—somewhere where IVF is legal?”
“I am not recommending that,” he says.
“But you just said—”
“I am not giving you any advice that is against the law and for which I could lose my medical license.”
Has she, without realizing it, been talking to a human being?
“Do you understand me, Roberta?”
“I think so.”
“Okay then.”
“Thank you for—”
“Happy holidays.”
“You too.” She presses END.
Fingers the tea towel draped on the oven handle.
Watches the fir-fledged hill, the deep green waving.
Maybe he genuinely, sincerely believes she has the money for “international travel.”
Get in the shower, she tells herself.
Too sad to take a shower.
She wanted to study sea ice, which begins as a cold crystal soup Harry Rattray, the Scottish tutor, knew nothing about forms a swaying crust strong enough to hold up a puffin thicker than the height of a man can block, trap, gouge, or outright crush a ship too sad
THE DAUGHTER