Red Clocks(64)

Will he remember to give them their vitamin D?

Tell him.

Downstairs the wife sits at the dining room table with her eyes closed.

“Momplee!”

“Don’t yell, Bex.”

“Then pay attention.”

“What?”

“I said, what will you get Daddy for Valentine’s Day?”

“That’s over a month away.”

“I know but I already know which cards I’m giving to people. The turtle ones, remember, that we saw?”

“Well, I’m not going to get Daddy anything.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a holiday we celebrate.”

“But it’s the day of love.”

“Not for us,” says the wife.

“Do you love Daddy?”

“Of course I do, Bex.”

“Then why don’t you celebrate it?”

“Because it’s silly.”

“Oh.” The girl looks at her interlaced fingers and is thinking of the turtle cards, signed and sealed in small white envelopes, one for each classmate.

“I meant for grown-ups,” adds the wife. “Not for kids—it’s great for kids.”

“Okay,” says Bex, wandering off.

Two days and nights of solitude every week. The house to herself.

But first you need to tell him.

She’ll feel so much better from the solitude that she will teach John to like foods other than buttered spaghetti and chicken nuggets. She’ll bake those barley walnut muffins Bex eats at the Perfects’. She will start cleaning again, keep the rooms scrubbed and dusted, wipe the toilet rims weekly, buy a dehumidifier for the attic, make an appointment to test the kids’ bloodstreams for lead.

Or she won’t be living in this house at all: she will rent an apartment that requires virtually no cleaning.

Maybe the apartment will be in Salem.

After you tell him.

“Daddy’s here!” shrieks Bex, galloping onto the porch.

“Daddy,” sniffles John.

“Fee fi fo fon,” calls Didier.

Children need two parents at home. Every child needs two.

So say the legislators and the commercials and Bryan, the child-free boy whose aim in life is to win money at competitive mini golf.

Jessica Perfect will have a field day. Oh my God, did you hear? The Korsmos are separating. I feel so bad for the kids—they’re the ones who really pay.

The wife’s mother, never a Didier fan, is going to say: I saw this coming a mile away.

She rummages in the kitchen drawer to see how many chocolate bars she has left.

“Momplee?”

Two.

“Yeah?”

“I lost my homework sheet.”

“Look in your room.”

“Incinerate! All homework sheets!” sings Didier.

Last summer at the teachers’ picnic Ro asked her why she’d taken Korsmo, and the wife said, “Because I wanted us all to have the same last name.”

“But why?”

“Because.”

“It’s the twenty-first century.”

“I’m not going to sit here and justify my choices to you,” said the wife.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t need to.”

Ro kept her teeth on the bone. “How come nobody’s allowed to criticize a woman’s decision to give up her name for a man’s name? Just because it’s her choice? I can think of some other bad choices that—”

“Shut up, please,” said the wife, and that was the beginning of the end of her friendship with Ro.

On the kitchen calendar, in Saturday’s square, she writes a T.

Tell him.

She can’t cheat her way out.

She can’t wait her way out, head in the sand.

She has to say it herself.

“Momplee?”

“Jesus, Bex—it must be in your room. Have you checked under the bed?”

“Not about that,” says the girl.

“Then what?” The wife stands holding the ballpoint pen with which she has just written herself a reminder to inform her husband she is leaving him. She wants to ram the pen into her own neck.

“Am I fat?”

“No!”

Voice wobbly: “I weigh eight pounds more than Shell.”

“Oh, sweetpea.” She kneels down on the kitchen floor, gathering Bex into her lap. “You’re exactly the right size for you. Who cares how much Shell weighs? You’re beautiful and perfect just the way you are.”

The wife fails, as a parent, on so many fronts.

“You’re my perfect darling gorgeous girl.”

But she will do this one thing right.





I hate the chewy lard meat called pemmican; and I admit to fearing the attack of a sea bear; and my fingers hurt all the time; but I prefer immurement in these spectral wastes to a seat at the warmest hearth.





THE MENDER


A witch who says no to her lover and no to the law must be suffocated in a cell of the hive. She who says no to her lover and no to the law shall bleed salt from the face. Two eyes of salt in the face of a witch who says no to her lover and no to the law shall be seen by policemen who come to the cabin. Faces of witches who say no do resemble those of owls tied by leashes to stakes. Venefica mellifera, Venefica diabolus. If a town be plagued by a witch who says No, I won’t stop mending and who says No, you can’t hide in my house, and the lover Lola does feel sorrow and shame, and the hard-fisted husband of Lola does discover the betrayal of his wife, and the lover Lola, to save her own life, tells a lie about the witch, the witch’s body shall be lashed to a stake. Her owl teeth shall catch flame first, sparks of blue at the white before the red tongue catches too. A witch’s body when burning does smell of blistered milk; the odor makes onlookers vomit, yet still they look on.