Red Clocks (11 page)

“Creates a crisis where there is none,” whispers Mom. Then she draws back, cups the daughter’s chin in her fingers. “You’re sure, pigeon?
You’d tell me if something was up?”

“I swear to you, I do not have an eating disorder.”

“Thank Christ.” Tears in her eyes.

The daughter is lucky to have this mother, even if she’s already sixty, even if she makes jokes about pulling a mussel at a seafood disco. A young mom like Ephraim’s might have said “Bulimia? I’ve taught you well!”

For reasons she can’t figure out, the daughter almost
never dreams of her bio father.

She takes an extra-big spoonful of mashed potatoes. Looks at Mom, points to the plate, winks, hates how hard Mom is smiling. She breathes through her mouth when passed the bowl of brussels sprouts, the vegetable whose odor, when cooked, most closely resembles human wind.

The Salem cousins blather and blither. “Well, what do the illegals expect, a red carpet?”
Blahblahblahblah. “And then they refuse to learn English—” Blahblahblahblah. “So then why should I have to take three years of Spanish?” Blahblahblahblahblah. The invaders all look like xeroxes of each other, their beefiness repeating itself, reheating itself. Whereas the daughter is tall, and Dad is short. The daughter is pale, and Mom is sallow.

This clump of cells would have turned out tall,
though maybe not pale. Ephraim tans brown in the summer.

Gravy has dried on the daughter’s sleeve. She hates this shirt anyway. Maybe she’ll give it to Aunt Bernadette, who hates it even more.

Mom and Dad can never know.

What if your bio mother had chosen to terminate?

“Matilda, your turn.”

“Pass,” says the daughter.

Think of all the happy adopted families that wouldn’t exist!

Never, ever
know.

“Oh, you!”

“Don’t be a poop at the party.”

“I can’t think of any jokes,” she says.

“Very funny!”

“What is it with these kids pretending to be so miserable?”

Yasmine said she’d die before telling her parents.

Didier hums “You Are My Sunshine” and trims fat off raw breasts. He worked in kitchens for years, scorns recipes, is good with a knife. A decent restaurant job would pay better than teaching at Central Coast Regional, but he swore off food and bev because he’d miss the kids’ childhoods. The wife sees a calendar of vacant blue evenings, Didier away cooking, children in bed, herself alone
and accountable to no one.

“—the tinfoil?”

“What?”

“Foil, woman!” Didier trots over to snatch it. His mood is merry; he’s happiest when cooking, a dish towel slung over his shoulder. Happiest, yet he rarely cooks.

“What else?” she says.

“I’m good here. Go relax.”

“Really? Okay.” She rubs at a smear of old yogurt on the stovetop. “Should I do a salad?”

“You should sit down.”

She watches
him chop, one hand herding the olives and the other bringing down the knife, fast, accurate. Eyes don’t waver from the olives. Shoulders don’t slump. Happy and confident, yet most of the meals fall to her, the one who “has time.”

“By the way, why is Mattie still here?”

“She’s putting them to bed.”

Didier sets down the knife and looks at her. “We’re paying twelve dollars an hour to keep our
kids at home while we’re at home?”

“Well, I would like, for once, to have dinner with you alone. Without the kids underfoot.”

“Just saying, it’s a luxury, whereas a cleaning service—”

“You mean like living rent-free is a luxury?”

He scrapes the olives off the cutting board into a bowl and lifts his beer bottle. “Is that gonna be held over my head for a
nother
six years?”

“How about, regardless,
it’s saving us a lot of money?”

“That’s like saying ‘Be grateful you live in purgatory, because it’s cheaper than—’”

“Newville is hardly purgatory,” says the wife. The yogurt is stubborn; she licks her finger and rubs again. “I saw this thing on the road. A burnt little animal. I thought some kid had set it on fire. It was trying to get across to the other side.”

“As in the great hereafter?”

“Of the road. It was burnt within an inch of its life, but it was still moving—which felt so, I don’t know, brave?—and I wanted to help it, but it was already dead.”

Her husband slaps the breasts onto a foiled baking sheet. “I’ve never understood that saying, ‘within an inch of its life.’ Like there was some danger right
next
to its life but not quite touching it?”

“This little animal. It’s
weird. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Where’s the salt?”

“I think it was a possum. It was like it wasn’t accepting death—or didn’t even realize death was near. It
kept going
.”

“There you are, Salty McSalterton.” He dusts the chicken, slides the pan into the oven. “You know what’s so messed up about Ro’s sperm donors?”

The wife closes her eyes. “What?”

“They can totally lie on the application.
All four grandparents died of cirrhosis, but dude claims they’re alive and healthy? Nobody’s checking. I’m surprised that somebody as neurotic as Ro isn’t worried.”

“She’s not neurotic.” But it pleases her to hear him say it.

“You don’t work with her.” He sets the timer. “She’s in full denial mode. Doesn’t realize what a nightmare it’s going to be. By herself? It’s a nightmare even where there’s
two of you.”

“Didier, I want to go to counseling.”

He wipes his hands, hard, on a kitchen towel. “So go.”

“
Couples
counseling.”

“Told you before”—reaching for his beer—“I’m not a therapy person. Sorry.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Means that I don’t respond well to being blamed for things that aren’t my fault.”

Oh God, not his father again.

“I found someone in Salem,” she says, “who’s
highly recommended, and they do late-afternoon appointments—”

“Did you not hear me, Susan?”

“Just because you had an incompetent therapist in Montreal thirty years ago? That’s a
great
reason not to try to save—” She stops. Licks her finger again, scratches at the yogurt on the stove.

“What? Save what?”

“Can you please just
consider
it? One session?”

“Why are people in the States obsessed
with therapy? There’s other ways to solve problems.”

“Such as?”

“Such as hiring a cleaning service.”

“Oh,
okay
.”

“Since you clearly don’t want to do it yourself. Which”—he holds up a palm, nodding—“I
get
. I don’t feel like cleaning either, especially after being at work all day.”

“I’d much rather be at work all day,” she says, wondering, as the words settle in the air, if this is true.

“Then get a job. No one’s stopping you. Or go back to law school.”

“I wish it were that easy.”

“Seems pretty easy to me.” He is paper-toweling translucent pink shreds of raw chicken off the cutting board. “Honestly, Susan? Things aren’t that bad. I mean, yes, some things could be better. But I’m not gonna drive ninety miles to talk about how I should’ve bought you better presents on your birthday.”

Or any presents.

“But what about the kids?” she says. “They sense things—Bex asks—”

“The kids are fine.”

She takes a long breath. “Are you saying they wouldn’t benefit from our relationship improving?”

“It’s kind of interesting that you don’t give a fuck about
my
benefit. That douchebag brainwashed my mom, and she never stopped blaming me. Me, who was basically a child.”

“I know it wasn’t
your fault he left, but—”

“The therapist didn’t even care why I hit him. Said it was ‘immaterial.’ Really, dude?”

“You broke your dad’s nose.”

“Well, he did a lot worse to me. Which is my point. The goal of therapy is to make you feel like dog shit in the name of insight. I’m gonna pay two hundred bucks an hour to feel like dog shit?”

“Mrs. Korsmo?” A small voice from the hall.

“Yes?”

“Sorry
to bother you,” calls Mattie, “but John scratched Bex’s arm, and she’s pretty upset about it.”

“Did he break the skin?” shouts the wife.

“No, but—”

“Then can you please just deal with it?”

Mattie appears in the doorway, nervous. “Bex says she needs you.”

“Well, she doesn’t. Tell her I’ll be up to check on her later.”

“I’ll go,” says Didier. “Take the chicken out when it buzzes.”

“But we
weren’t finished,” says the wife.

He follows Mattie toward the stairs.

The wife shoves the chicken-stained cutting board into the dishwasher. Picks olives off the countertop. Wipes stray salt into her palm.

She washes her hands.

Switches the timer off but keeps the oven on.

Ignites a burner on the gas stovetop to high.

Reaches in with a pot holder for a breast, which she drops onto the burner’s
high open flame. It flares and spits and sizzles, the whole breast blue with fire.

Darkening, bubbling.

Charred and rubbery.

Little animal, burnt black.

Good Ship Chinese is full of teachers, thanks to a federal mandate that doubled the number of standardized tests in public schools. Only half the staff are needed to proctor this afternoon’s exams.

The bleached-blond waitress pours their waters and says, “I’ll give you a minute.” A hairy mole clings to her cheek.

Didier reaches to pinch something from the biographer’s collar.
“You had oatmeal for breakfast.”

She bats his hand away. He kicks her under the table. In front of Susan she doesn’t touch Didier. Doesn’t want her thinking
Does she want my husband?
because the biographer doesn’t, and if she did, all the more reason not to arouse suspicion. Susan once told the biographer how the music teacher had flirted her tiny ass off with Didier at the summer picnic, and
Bex, drawing at the kitchen table, said, “Did she put her tiny ass back on?” and Susan said, “I wish you’d be seen and not heard for once in your life.” The biographer was pleased to know that Susan could be an unskillful parent.

“How goes your saga,” says Pete, “of the lady adventurer?”

“Almost finished.”

“I have no doubt.” He flaps his placemat vigorously, airing himself. “Everyone needs
a good hobby.”

“It’s not a hobby,” she says.

“The hair coming out of that mole,” says Didier, “has got to be three inches long.”

“Of course it’s a hobby,” says Pete. “You do it on weekends or vacations. The act of doing it brings you amusement but no profit or gain.”

“You guys want to order? I can flag down the hair taxi.”

“So if something doesn’t make money,” says the biographer, “it’s automatically
relegated to hobby?”

The waitress returns. Her sprouting hair—quite long, quite black—for a moment mesmerizes all of them. The biographer, who bleaches her own upper lip every few weeks, warms with fellow feeling. She and Pete order Golden Lily platters, Didier the Emperor’s Consolation.

Didier leans forward to say, low: “Why don’t she just bleeding yank that thing out, eh?”

There is an egg
bracing to burst out of its sac into the wet fallopian warmth. Today the ovulation predictor kit showed no smiley face; she’ll test again tomorrow. Back to Kalbfleisch for sperm, once she gets the smiley face.

“Pour me some more tea, Roanoke?”

She moves the teapot six inches toward him.

“I said
pour,
woman! Can I get a ride home, by the way? I left Susan the car today.”

“How were you planning
on getting home if I didn’t drive you?”

Didier grins,
beau-laid
. “I knew you’d drive me.”

Bryan Zakile saunters over to their table and bellows, “
These
three are clearly up to no good! Want to hear my fortune? ‘You will leave a trail of gratitude.’”

“‘In bed,’” adds Didier.

“You said it, not me.”

“Not I,” mutters the biographer.

Bryan flinches. “Thank you, grammar Schutzstaffel.”

She drags
her fork through the Golden Lilies. “I’m not the one who teaches English.”

“He don’t really teach English either,” says Didier. “His subject is the beautiful game.”

“If only that knee had held up,” says Pete, “we’d be watching Bryan on telly. Who’d you be playing for? Barça? Man United?”

“Hilarious, Peter, but I was All-Conference for three years at Maryland.”

“That is tre
mend
ously impressive.”

The biographer smiles at Pete. Surprised, he smiles back.

Sometimes he reminds her of her brother.

She can’t use the ovulation predictor test when she wakes up, because first morning urine isn’t optimal for detecting the surge of luteinizing hormone that augurs the egg’s release. She has to wait four hours to let enough urine accumulate in her bladder, and in these four hours she can’t drink
too many fluids, lest she dilute the urine and skew the results. Instead of coffee, she toasts a frozen waffle and gnaws it unbuttered at the kitchen table. She stares at the bookstore photograph. The shelf where her book will go.

Between first and second periods, in a stall of the staff bathroom, the biographer inserts a fresh pee-catching tab into the plastic wand of the ovulation predictor
kit and squats over the toilet. The instructions say you don’t need to absorb the whole stream, only five seconds’ worth, which is good because the opening spray goes wide of the stick. She has to keep moving the stick around under herself to find it. Count to five. Rest the stick on some toilet paper on the metal tampon receptacle, angled just so, to allow the caught pee to wend its way through
the stick into whatever mechanism tests it for luteinizing hormone. Which takes a minute or longer.