Red Clocks(73)
“This is Delphine and her mom,” announces L.
“I’m Dr. V.,” says a small, beautiful woman in a green medical smock. “I’m gonna take care of you, okay?” She looks South Asian and sounds like the ladies from Queens who live at Dad’s retirement village. “Let’s get started with your vitals.”
“Have you done many of these before?” asks the biographer.
Dr. V. wipes back a strand of silver-black hair. “Thousands.” Wraps a blood-pressure cuff around Mattie’s biceps. “I worked at Planned Parenthood for almost twenty years. Until the day they shut it down.”
Mattie says, “You can go now, um, Mom.”
Their providers are skilled. They do not charge a shit ton.
She wants Mattie to be happy. To be safe. To be free from suffering.
Also: she can’t stand her.
She hates her for getting to experience the twenty-one weeks of pregnancy she’ll never get to experience herself.
There are millions of things the biographer will never do that she doesn’t pity herself for missing. (Climbing a mountain, cracking a code, attending her own wedding.) So why this thing?
She came prepared to wait, brought a stack of tests to grade, but faced with the prospect of all day in this room of wicker couches and zebra pillows, hot bean smell blowing in from the kitchen, the biographer feels itchy. She wanders into a front hallway, where posters and pamphlets describe the other services offered by the Polyphonte Collective. Sliding-scale mental-health counseling. Sliding-scale legal services for women who are unhoused, undocumented, battered, addicted. Free childcare during court appearances. Cop watching at protests. This house must be their headquarters. It was the first address, in fact, that was a decoy.
The largest poster says:
REPEAL THE 28TH AMENDMENT!
SIT IN / RISE UP FOR REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
FEATURED SPEAKERS:
REP. ERICA SALTER (D?PORTLAND)
& DOCTORS FROM WOMEN ON WAVES
MAY 1, OREGON STATE CAPITOL
Up through the gummy darkness in her chest, through the self-pity and resentment, poke thin stalks of gratitude. The Polyphontes aren’t just shaking their heads.
She starts to read blue books, pen in hand. The events that led up to the American Revolutionary War included. What about events on the second floor? Is Mattie scared? Three main causes of the war were. Should the biographer go and check? The colonists really hated taxes—and still do!
From the coffee table she picks up a graphic novel about women in the Cretan resistance during World War II. Dark-eyed schoolgirls and crones in cartridge belts lug packs of ammunition up craggy mountainsides. They shoot at German parachutists as they land. They don’t just sit there watching.
The biographer falls asleep with her face in a zebra pillow.
Dr. V. shakes her awake. “Time to go, Mom.”
“Who?”
“Delphine’s fine. All went well. You can be on your way.”
The future baby, the kid?to?be, her own—
It was never yours.
“L. will drive you back to your car. The sooner you’re gone, the safer everyone is. Let’s see—she’ll be loopy for a bit, from the painkillers. Bleeding is expected, including clots. She can take ibuprofen for cramps. No alcohol, tampons, or sex for at least a week. She’s Rh?positive, luckily, and won’t need an immune globulin shot. She should be doing a course of antibiotics, but the Collective can’t afford them and we certainly can’t write scripts—so keep an eye out, okay? Any fever above a hundred, take her straight to the ER. Is this your bag?” Dr. V. passes the biographer her backpack and gestures to the door. “They’re waiting.”
In the kitchen Mattie sits bundled in her peacoat, drinking a glass of water. She looks sleepy and bleary and younger. Seeing the biographer, she grins wide. “Well,” she says, her relief unmistakable, “that happened.”
L. can’t drop them off fast enough. The midnight street makes chirring sounds. Are they being surveilled from a parked car?
“You hungry?” The biographer helps Mattie negotiate the seat belt.
“Nix nought nein.”
It comes to her: Polyphonte was one of Artemis’s virgin followers. Punished by Aphrodite for—something.
No cars follow them out.
The police probably don’t even know the Collective exists.
Unless she’s being stupid. Naively ascribing common decency to people in power, as she did before the Personhood Amendment showed all of its teeth.
Aphrodite made Polyphonte fall in love with a bear.
WE NEED COP WATCHERS ON MAY 1ST, said a flyer in the front hall. PLEASE VOLUNTEER!
Don’t be stupid anymore, she once wrote in her notebook, under Immediate action required.
By the time they get to Newville, it will be almost three a.m.
After giving birth to twin bear sons, Polyphonte was turned into an owl.
Is this even the right road?
“Miss?” comes a drowsy little voice.
“Yeah?” She thought this road was taking them to the highway access ramp, but it just keeps going, ramplessly.
“I’m sorry but I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Can you hold it for a little while?” The biographer strains to read a sign, faint in the dark. Could there be one goddamn streetlight in this city?