Red Clocks (17 page)

Also possible: she spent her whole life (apart from or including the eighteen-month marriage) without sex. Out of necessity. Out of choice.

But how many people have sailed to the Arctic Circle, slept in tents bolted to ice floes, watched a man’s skin peel off from eating the toxic liver of a polar bear?

In the clinic waiting
room, under the vexing tinkle of the adult-contemporary station, the biographer does a pump of hand sanitizer. The news murmurs on a wall-mounted flat-screen and a few faces watch it and nobody talks.

“What are you in for today?”

She looks up: a blond-pigtailed woman is smiling from the chair opposite. “A pregnancy test.”

“Wow! So this could be it!”

“Unlikely,” says the biographer. But, yes,
in fact, it could be. If this cycle works, the eleventh-hour victory will be a story to tell the baby.
You showed up just in time.
She notes that the woman wears a simple band, no rocky engagement ring. “What about you?”

“Day nine check,” says the woman. “This is my second cycle. My hubby says we should adopt, but I—I don’t know. It’s—” Eyes fill, shimmer.

The word “hubby” cancels out the lack
of a diamond.

“At least you
can
adopt,” says the biographer, louder than she meant to.

The woman nods, unperturbed. Maybe she’s never heard of Every Child Needs Two; or forgot about it promptly after hearing it, because the law did not apply to her.

Compare and despair.

The biographer unbuttons her sleeve, hoists it, makes a fist. Nurse Crabby swabs the bruised skin. Archie was proud of his
track marks and would neglect on purpose to wear long sleeves.

The nurse has trouble, as usual, finding a vein. “They’re way buried.”

“The one closer to the elbow usually works better—?”

“First let’s see what we can get over here.”

The biographer’s car crests the cliff and the ocean spreads below. Vast dark luminous perilous sea, floors white with sailors’ bones, tides stronger than any human
effort. Sea stacks sleep like tiny mountains in the waves. She loves the sheer fact of how many millions of creatures the water holds—microscopic and gargantuan, alive and long dead.

In eyeshot of such a sea, one can pretend things are fine. Notice only the cares within reach. Coyotes on Lupatia Street. Fund-raising for lighthouse repairs. It’s why the biographer liked this country of pointed
firs, at first: how easily here she could forget the hurtling world. She could almost stop seeing the blue lips of her brother, the gray jaw of her mother in the hospital bed.

While the biographer was hiding out in a rainy Arcadia, they closed the women’s health clinics that couldn’t afford mandated renovations.

They prohibited second-trimester abortions.

They required women to wait ten days
before the procedure and to complete a lengthy online tutorial on fetal pain thresholds and celebrities whose mothers had planned to abort them.

They started talking about this thing called the Personhood Amendment, which for years had been a fringe idea, a farce.

At her kitchen table she eats a bowl of pineapple chunks.

Sips water.

Waits for the call.

When Congress proposed the Twenty-Eighth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and it was sent to the states for a vote, the biographer wrote emails to her representatives. Marched in protests in Salem and Portland. Donated to Planned Parenthood. But she wasn’t all that worried. It had to be political theater, she thought, a flexing of muscle by the conservative-controlled House and Senate in league with a fetus-loving new president.

Thirty-nine states voted to ratify. A three-quarters majority. The biographer watched the computer screen splashed with this news, thought of the signs at the rallies (
KEEP YOUR ROSARIES OFF MY OVARIES! THINK OUTSIDE MY BOX!
) and the online petitions, the celebrity op‑eds. She couldn’t believe the Personhood Amendment had become real with all these citizens so against it.

Which (the disbelief)
was stupid. She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most of the people.

With abortion illegal, said the congressmen, more babies would be available to adopt. It wasn’t hurting anyone, they said, to ban IVF, because the people with faulty uteri and busted sperm could simply adopt all those extra babies.

Which isn’t the way it turned out.

She finishes the pineapple.

Swallows the rest of the water.

Tells her ovaries:
For your patience, for your eggs, I thank you.

Tells her uterus:
May you be happy.

Her blood:
May you be safe.

Her brain:
May you be free from suffering.

Her phone rings.

“Hello, Roberta.” Kalbfleisch himself is calling. Usually a nurse does.

“Hello, Doctor.”

Is he calling
himself because the news is different this time?

She stands with her back pressed against the refrigerator. Please please please please please please please.

Firs shake and shiver on the hill.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “but your test came back negative.”

“Oh,” she says.

“I know this is disappointing.”

“Yeah,” she says.

“The odds just weren’t, you know, in our favor.” The doctor clears his golden
throat. “I’m curious whether—Well, have you—Let me put it this way: do you travel much?”

“Florida sometimes, to see my dad.”

“International travel.”

Take a vacation to console herself?

Screw. You.

Wait.

No.

He’s saying something else.

“So you recommend,” she says haltingly, “in light of my—
difficulties,
that I should go—somewhere where IVF is legal?”

“I am
not
recommending that,” he says.

“But you just said—”

“I am not giving you any advice that is against the law and for which I could lose my medical license.”

Has she, without realizing it, been talking to a human being?

“Do you understand me, Roberta?”

“I think so.”

“Okay then.”

“Thank you for—”

“Happy holidays.”

“You too.” She presses
END
.

Fingers the tea towel draped on the oven handle.

Watches the fir-fledged hill,
the deep green waving.

Maybe he genuinely, sincerely believes she has the money for “international travel.”

Get in the shower,
she tells herself.

Too sad to take a shower.

While they take their quiz, Ro/Miss is doing a weird thing with her fingers on the sides of her face. Rubbing in a sort of violent way. Her eyes are closed. Bad headache? The daughter doesn’t agree with Dad that Ro/Miss is a radical leftist; she’s just smart. A smart spinster. If the daughter were to say that word in front of Ro/Miss, she’d get a sermon:
What does the word “spinster”
do that “bachelor” doesn’t do? Why do they carry different associations? These are language acts, people!

The witch is a spinster too. She is bold and cold and wouldn’t be agitated by the Nouri Witherses of this world. In the daughter’s shoes, instead of fretting over some little melancholy jelly Ephraim prefers, Gin Percival would either quit caring or take revenge. Devise a potion that made
Nouri’s fingertips numb for the rest of her life, so that if she went blind in old age, she couldn’t read braille.

Except she can’t make potions in jail.

“Everyone finished?” goes Ro/Miss. “If not, too bad.”

She hurt the principal’s wife, according to the newspaper.

“Ash, stop writing.
Now
. Give me that paper.”

Except she didn’t seem like a person who would hurt anyone.

Do they provide tampons
in jail? Gin Percival might not have brought any with her. And what if they give her the wrong size? A Slender when she needs a Super Plus?

Yasmine coached the daughter on the phone when she lost a tampon inside herself. Explained how to find the muscles that would expel it. “Pretend you’re stopping yourself from peeing.”

She is come from walking on the bottom of the sea. There the tiny eyeless and the footless walked with she. Ran with she the finned and flattened, sailed with she the lungless; swayed with she the fantom grasses, lantern fishes, wolf eels. To the north bathed viperfish, who did not even see she; to the south flew goblin sharks, who did not even eat she. Toed a wolf eel, thumbed a skate,
fingered the sucker of a cockeyed squid.

And back again, on waking, to the concrete bed.

Like the cell of any hive.

“Here’s your tray,” says the day guard, who has six fingers on her off hand. Hyperdactylia is a sign of the visionary. “And you got a letter.”

On white paper, in pencil:

So polite, Cotter. “I’m going to put it in now, okay?” he said, the first time they had sex. Polite till the cows come home. In, and in, and in. Her scabbard hurt after.

She had been curious to try. They did it five times, on four different days, on a blanket on the floor of Cotter’s parents’ basement, until she decided she didn’t want to do it anymore.

Cotter was sad but still walked her home from school, and they didn’t talk much, sometimes not at all. Her scabbard stopped hurting. They listened to the
scroof
and
bap
of their shoes on the sidewalk. The tsunami siren went off so loud the mender fell to her knees—“Will we drown?” She hated to swim, was frightened of sharks. “No, it’s just a test,” he said, and crouched to hug her.

Cotter was
not her future husband, even though, back then, he sort of wanted to be. Scottish virgins used to douse charred peat with cow piss and hang it in their doorways, and whatever color the piss-moss was, next morning, would equal the color of their future husbands’ hair.

Has Mattie Matilda solved her problem by now? Or is the little fish still inside?

“The letter says chocolate,” she tells the guard.

“You’re not allowed to have the chocolate.”

“But it was sent to me.”

“You’re in jail, Stretch. Nothing here is yours.”

“At least tell me what
kind
it was?” she yells at the guard’s back.

The other guards are eating the chocolate, she knows. Smearing it all over their faces.

They took away her Aristotle’s lanterns too. Her neckcloth.

“If we go to trial, it will help if you look as mainstream
as you can,” said the lawyer. “Studies have shown that juries are influenced by grooming and attire.”

Her grooming won’t change one inch of itself. She won’t let him bring her any department-store clothes. Her aunt yells from the freezer:
Show those fuckshits how Percivals do!
The mender has been refusing the instant mashed potato and pork nuggets; she eats her own nails and the brickling skin
around them. The lawyer has promised to bring better food. He said, “I’ll have you out by Christmas.”

Christmas, her favorite criminal. Stockings are hanged, trees chopped, geese shot, children threatened with coal.

Christmas is next week.

Medical malpractice: who’ll believe forest weirdo over school principal? Naturally that prick became a principal—plenty of little ones to boss around. Wasn’t
enough for him to boss Lola. “You divorce me at your age, you’ll never get another man, it’s just numbers, babe, you’re at the wrong end of the numbers,” she told the mender he’d said.

They think the mender harmed her grievously. Think she waved her broom at the moon and saved her own menstrual blood in a cat skull and dipped a live toad in the blood and tore off one of the toad’s legs and stuffed
it into Lola’s butthole.

Nobody knows why the dead man’s fingers—poisonous to ships’ hulls and oysters and fishermen’s paychecks—have come back to Newville. Nobody knows, so they’ve decided that it’s the mender’s fault. She hexed the seaweed. Called it to shore with her special weed-hexing whistle. And her reason? What reason, bitches?

Some things are true; some are not.

That Lola fell down
the stairs, hard.

That she fell down so hard her brain swelled up.

That she fell down because she drank a “potion.”

That the “potion” she drank before falling down was directly responsible for the falling down.

That the providing of the “potion” counts as medical malpractice.

That the newspaper headline says
POTION COMMOTION
.

That the oil she gave Lola was for calming her scar.

That the
oil was topical, not meant to be swallowed.

That, even if swallowed, elderflower, lemon, lavender, and fenugreek don’t make people fall down.

That nobody will believe forest weirdo over school principal.

“Percival!”—a guard through the screen box. “Get dressed. Your lawyer’s here.”

The lawyer wears a suit, like last time. As if to make himself more real. As if, in a suit, he will appear forceful
and real and not the plump weird trembler he is. Among humans, the mender prefers the weird and the trembling, so she likes him.

From his briefcase he produces two boxes of licorice nibs. “As requested.”

The mender breaks one open. Crams her mouth thick with the black taste, holds the box out to him.