Red Clocks(67)

Bex smiles.

“How are they good for you?” says Shell.

This wallpaper is horrendous. Dark purple flowers on a brown ground. It shouldn’t be the first thing her girl sees every morning.

“When you breathe them in, they create more white blood cells in your body, which keep you from getting sick. Dust is extremely nutritious.”

By dinnertime her husband hasn’t appeared, so she serves the kids their casserole, slides the dish back into a two-hundred-degree oven, hustles Shell out to Blake Perfect’s car, gives Bex and John a bath, tries to recall when Didier last gave them a bath. While she’s reading about the little fur family (Warm as toast, smaller than most) the front door slams and voices thud in the hall.

“Will Daddy come say good night?”

“I don’t know. That’s up to him.”

“Well, can you tell him to?”

Downstairs she sees he has managed to find the casserole, which is piled, all of it, onto his and Pete’s plates. “This is hella good,” says Pete by way of greeting, slurping a forkful.

“Yeah it is,” says Didier. “Did you use more salsa than usual?”

“So there’s none left? I didn’t have any.”

“I figured you ate with the kids.”

“I waited for you.”

Didier looks down at his plate. “Want the rest of mine?”

“I’ll make a sandwich.”

She slathers cream cheese on whole wheat, adds cucumber slices and salt. A virtuous sandwich. A sandwich that might need to be supplemented, later on, by soft-batch chocolate-chip cookies.

Soft-batch—scenic overlook—Bryan Zakile—

Something nips at the edge of her mind.

She looks over at the ficus, which, though brittle, is still alive (didn’t she water it yesterday?), and the Medusa’s head plant, always chancy in winter, snaky green arms quick to rot without enough sun.

Something Bryan told her.

“I’m literally stunned,” Pete is saying, probably about a school matter the wife can’t be part of.

“I thought you hated it,” she says, “when people say ‘literally.’”

Shark-eyed glare. “I was referring to people’s misuse and overuse of the term. In this case, I am literally stunned.”

“By what?”

“The news of my colleague acquiring a literary agent for her flaming piece of hogswaddle.”

The wife’s face aches. “Ro got an agent?” She will sell the story of the polar explorer, be paid, be reviewed, maybe even become— “No, Penny Dreadful.”

“Good for her,” says the relieved, disgusting wife.

“And bad for literature,” says Pete.

Something is chewing now on her brain. Some hook, some link, two things she is meant to connect.

Bryan—the cookies—the Medusa’s head—

“I need to go smoke.”

“Sorry if I’m boring you, Didier,” says Pete, “but I happen to think it’s important to critique the hegemony of commercial publishing. Otherwise, they’ve got us where they want us.”

“Who?”

“The corporate tastemakers. The romance–industrial complex. Dance, puppet, dance!”

“Go tell the kids good night,” says the wife.

“I will, right after—”

“By the time you finish that, they’ll be asleep.”

Didier throws the unlit cigarette on the counter and heads for the stairs.

In the bathroom she pees, wipes, stands, but does not pull up her underwear. She gazes past her sucked?in stomach at the shaggy hillock. How many individual hairs are on this mound? More than a hundred, or less? She pinches one and yanks it out. It hurts a little. She pulls another. Hurts. And a third. A fourth, a fifth. The wife lifts the seat and lays the hairs, one by one, on the toilet rim.

What is nipping at her mind?

Something about Bryan.

Going after him was a coward’s move.

She needs to figure out how she got to be such a coward.

But it’s more than Bryan.

But what?

She looks at the kitchen calendar, where T has been written and crossed out, written and crossed out, written and crossed out.

Stands at the sink, scrubbing the casserole dish.

Didier and Pete come back in from their cigarettes.

“Want a beer, Peetle-juice?”

Little animal burnt black, trying to cross. Rubber and shivering.

“Can you believe she’s never heard of them?”

“Dude, the sum total of Ro’s musical knowledge would fit into Bryan Zakile’s jockstrap.”

Rubber and shivering.

“Do they make those in extra-small?”

Strapped jock. Jock of Bryan. Balls. Family jewels. Father. Mother. Cousin. Cousin— “He actually uses a kids’ size.”

They don’t have any kids, so why not leave?

Cousin beaten to a paste.

Oh no.

The wife drops the casserole dish. It clatters at the bottom of the sink.

Where is her phone—where is—“Where’s my phone?” Furiously shaking water off her hands.

“Right here on the table,” says Didier. “Jesus.”

She snatches it up and hurries into the dark dining room, dialing.