Red Clocks(75)

Pilots Bride. Gem. Perpetua.

Please let her children not be scarred.

Onward. Czarina. Chinook.

Didier arrives from school, believing their purpose is beer and fried-fish sandwiches. The wife suggests they wait for the after-work crowd to thin. In the little park behind the church, they walk between flower beds thrusting with young stems. Early buds in a warm February. The soil is black and soft from yesterday’s rain.

She is a selfish coward.

“Up for darts tonight?” says Didier. “You had an off night last time, true, but—”

“We need to talk about something.” She stops walking. Say it, Susan.

“Do you have cash for Costello?”

“I think—” Say it.

“Because I have none. We can stop on the way home.”

“I think we should take a break.”

“Huh?”

“From each other.”

He narrows his eyes.

“Like a separation,” she adds.

“Why?”

“Because it’s not”—no breath in her lungs—“good anymore.”

Too frightened to look at his face, she concentrates on the blue leather toes of her clogs.

“Susan, I’m looking for the joke with a microscope.”

She shakes her head.

“We have stuff that could improve, okay, but everyone does. We can work on it.”

“You didn’t want to work on it,” she says.

“You mean the therapy? But that’s—”

“It’s better this way, anyway.”

“Why?” he says softly.

“I’m sorry,” says the wife.

Didier’s face has gone rubbery. Eyes tight in their shadowed sockets. She sees how he will look as an old man.

He takes out his cigarettes.

“If you keep squinting like that,” says the wife, “your eyes might get stuck.”

“And if you keep eating like that, your ass might get stuck. In every door.”

“I’m going to my parents’ tomorrow,” she says. “You can stay in the house, for now.”

“Oh really? I can stay? In that broke-down bourgeois firetrap?”

But he will. That’s the thing. He will judge and dismiss, he will scorn and rage; yet out of sheer laziness, he will stay.

Sucking on his cigarette: “We don’t have to decide now.”

“Didier.”

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow, yeah?” On the last word his voice quavers.

“Nothing will be different tomorrow.”

She has no plan.

For telling the kids, for making a custody schedule, for finding a job.

Her mother said on the phone this morning, “You’ve at least opened your own bank account, I hope?” and the wife had to lie.

The only idea in her sore, stalled brain has been: Tell him.

He stamps out the cigarette on the gravel path. “You know what I won’t miss?”

Me.

“Your shitty cooking.”

“And I won’t miss having three children,” says the wife.

“Fuck you, Susan.”

The wife kneels on the path.

Rent a car. Open a bank account. Bring yourself to care.

She reaches for the black earth.

Her body yearns, inexplicably, to taste it.

Brings a handful to her lips. The minerals sizzle on her tongue, rich with the gists of flower and bone.

“Hell are you doing?” says Didier.

Bright minerals. Powdered feathers. Ancient shells.

“Jesus, stop that!”

She keeps tasting. The soil is bark and needle and flecks of brain, little animal burnt and dead.

Goodbye, shipwrecks.

Goodbye, house.

Goodbye, wife.





Greely’s men shot the rest of the sled dogs. They had kept alive their favorites as long as they could; but there was no food. The starving animals had already eaten their leather harnesses. They killed first the one called King, a rascal and a gentleman. His brothers waiting in the dogloo knew they, too, would be killed. Badger, Scruffles, Cricket, Howler, Odysseus, Samson—a bullet for each. The youngest sailor cried, and by the time they reached his meager beard, the tears were buttons of ice. When the Greely expedition was rescued, in June of 1884, this youngest sailor would be dead of





THE BIOGRAPHER


Knocks cup and cup tips and coffee runs across table onto floor.

When the youngest sailor died, of starvation and exposure, his shipmates probably ate him. She can only speculate. I am inserting the speculum into your vagina; you will feel a slight pressure. After the return to civilization of its six survivors, rumors arose that the Greely expedition had practiced cannibalism. The coffin of one of its dead, a Frederick Kislingbury, was exhumed. The body had no skin on it; the arms and legs were attached by ligaments alone. Greely claimed they had carved up Kislingbury for bait in shrimp and fish traps, not for themselves.

She paper-towels her brown spill.

Susan once told her she shouldn’t be so quick to claim that Mínervudottír’s life was more meaningful for having left the Faroe Islands. “That’s the predictable narrative,” said Susan. “But couldn’t she have had an equally meaningful life if she’d stayed?”