Red Clocks(7)

Today’s date is marked on the kitchen calendar with a small black A. Which stands for “ask.”

Ask him again.

From the bay window, whose frame flakes with old paint possibly brimming with lead—she keeps forgetting to arrange to have the kids tested—the wife watches her husband trudge up the drive on short legs in jeans that are too tight, too young for him. He has a horror of dad pants and insists on dressing as he did at nineteen. His messenger bag bangs against one skinny thigh.

“He’s home,” she calls.

The kids race to greet him. This is a moment she used to love to picture, man home from work and children welcoming him, a perfect moment because it has no past or future—does not care where the man came from or what will happen after he is greeted, cares only for the joyful collision, the Daddy you’re here.

“Fee fi fo fon, je sens le sang of two white middle-class Québécois-American children!” Her sprites scramble all over him. “A’right, a’right, settle down, eh,” but he is contented, with John flung over his shoulder and Bex pulling open the satchel to check for vending-machine snacks. She’s got his salt tooth. Did she get everything from him? What is in her of the wife?

The nose. She escaped Didier’s nose.

“Hi, meuf,” he says, squatting to set John on the floor.

“How was the day?”

“Usual hell. Actually, not usual. Music teacher got laid off.”

Good.

“Hello, hell!” says Bex.

“We don’t say ‘hell,’” says the wife.

I’m glad she’s gone.

“Daddy—”

“I meant ‘heifer,’” says Didier.

“Kids, I want those blocks off the floor. Somebody could trip. Now! But I thought everyone loved the music teacher.”

“Budget crisis.”

“You mean they’re not replacing her?”

He shrugs.

“So there won’t be any music classes at all?”

“I must pee.”

When he emerges from the bathroom, she is leaning on the banister, listening to Bex boss John into doing all the block gathering.

“We should get a cleaner,” says Didier, for the third time this month. “I just counted the number of pubic hairs on the toilet rim.”

And soap heel crusted to the sink.

Black dust on the baseboards.

Soft yellow hair balls in every corner.

Sea-salt-almond chocolate bar in the drawer.

“We can’t afford one,” she says, “unless we stop using Mrs. Costello, and I’m not giving up those eight hours.” She looks into his blue-gray eyes, level with hers. She has often wished that Didier were taller. Is her wishing the product of socialization or an evolutionary adaptation from the days when being able to reach more food on a tree was a life?or?death advantage?

“Well,” he says, “somebody needs to start doing some cleaning. It’s like a bus station in there.”

She won’t be asking him tonight.

She will write the A again, on a different day.

“There were twelve, by the way,” he says. “I know you have stuff to do, I’m not saying you don’t, but could you maybe wash the toilet once in a while? Twelve hairs.”





Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.





THE BIOGRAPHER


Can’t see the ocean from her apartment, but she can hear it. Most days between five and six thirty a.m. she sits in the kitchen listening to the waves and working on her study of Eiv?r Mínervudottír, a nineteenth-century polar hydrologist whose trailblazing research on pack ice was published under a male acquaintance’s name. There is no book on Mínervudottír, only passing mentions in other books. The biographer has a mass of notes by now, an outline, some paragraphs. A skein draft—more holes than words. On the kitchen wall she’s taped a photo of the shelf in the Salem bookstore where her book will live. The photo reminds her that she is going to finish it.

She opens Mínervudottír’s journal, translated from the Danish. I admit to fearing the attack of a sea bear; and my fingers hurt all the time. A woman long dead coming to life. But today, staring at the journal, the biographer can’t think. Her brain is soapy and throbbing from the new ovary medicine.

She sits in her car, radio on, throat shivering with hints of vomit, until she’s late enough for school not to care that her eye–foot–brake reaction time is slowed by the Ovutran. The roads have guardrails. Her forehead pulses hard. She sees a black lace throw itself across the windshield, and blinks it away.

Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.) She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for. This man thought women who miscarried should pay for funerals for the fetal tissue and thought a lab technician who accidentally dropped an embryo during in vitro transfer was guilty of manslaughter. She had heard there was glee on the lawns of her father’s Orlando retirement village. Marching in the streets of Portland. In Newville: brackish calm.