Authors: Leni Zumas
Red Clocks (22 page)
“Great, yours?”
While he’s at the counter, the wife, facing the door, hears him ask the barista if she knows where the word “cappuccino” comes from; and she hears the barista giggle and say, “Um, Italy?” and Bryan say, “Well, for starters.”
When he sits down across from her, she remembers that his face is not beautiful,
despite the dimple. A fair to middling face. But the body that follows—
“Your hair looks awesome,” he says.
“Oh—thanks!”
Slurping milk foam: “Get it cut?”
“Ah, no, actually. So how were your holidays?”
“Good, good. Went to see my folks in La Jolla. Nice to be in civilization again.”
“Do you find this area uncivilized?”
He shrugs. Napkins the foam off his lip.
“Or too remote?”
“How do
you mean?”
“Well, in terms of, I don’t know—”
Bryan smiles. “Do you mean is it hard to meet women?”
“Or whatever. Yes.”
“Not to sound conceited?—but that’s never been a problem of mine.”
“I’m sure it hasn’t.”
He pushes one fist slowly down the length of his thigh. “
Are
you?”
“What?”
“Sure. That it hasn’t.”
A clod of dried mascara falls off the lashes of her right eye, landing on her forearm.
“Look,” says Bryan, “the way I see it, the scarcity model is a bunch of crap. When people are worried about not finding anyone, they pick the first person who comes along.”
She flicks the mascara away. Her mouth is so dry.
“That’s what happened to one of my cousins,” he continues. “Married a total dick because she didn’t think she could do better. And maybe she
couldn’t
have, but, hey, I’d take
lonely over beaten to a paste.”
“Beaten?”
“Like I said, he’s a dick.”
“But that’s—?”
“We all wish she would leave him. They don’t have any kids.”
“Even if they did.”
“Well, maybe. Although children really need both parents at home.”
The wife can see and hear and feel but is no longer thinking.
She wants to feel the thigh sitting two inches from her knee. Feel the fingers resting on the
thigh.
Long, hard fingers.
Long, hard thigh.
“What about you, Susan? Do you find Newville remote?”
“I find it …” She twists her mouth to one side, which Didier used to say was sexy. “Boring.”
“I wonder what we could do to make it less boring.”
“I wonder.”
“I can think of a few things.”
“Can you?” Wet flare in her pit.
“I can.”
“For instance?”
“Well …” Bryan leans forward, elbows on
table, and holds his face in his palms. The wife leans in too, but the angle is awkward with her legs crossed. He stares at her. She stares back. Something is about to happen. He is going to kiss her right here, amid griffins and steam, twelve miles away from the house on the hill. She is going to blow up her life.
“Mini-golf team!” he says, grinning so wide she can see the black fillings in
his teeth.
“What?”
“It’s a thing now, competitive mini golf. There’s a place right off 22. They run teams of four. I’m thinking you, me, Didier, and Xiao. You can actually win decent money.”
As though a giant hand had released its grip, the wife sags in her chair. “I suck at golf,” she says.
“Come now!”
“Get Ro to be on your team.”
“The grammar police?
No gracias.
”
He does not want her.
Why did she think he wanted her?
“Hey,” says Bryan, “let’s share an original sin amen bun. They’re fantastic here.”
Black fillings all over his mouth.
“Why the hell not,” says the wife.
In November of 1875, in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia, pack ice started closing in on
Oreius
. The belts of open water grew farther apart; the leads shrank to black ribbons. Mínervudottír saw that the straighter leads seemed to stay open longer than the wavy, eel-shaped ones: was there something about the irregular margins that sped the knitting of the ice?
She suggested as much to
the captain, who said, “And will you be pointing out the snow fairies too?”
Notices today how large Mr. Fivey’s desk is. He grips its burnished surface with his hands wide apart, as a mogul might. Hanging behind him are the Ivy League diploma and several photos of Mrs. Fivey, which prompt the biographer to say: “I’m glad your wife is doing so much better.”
“That’s nice, Ro. But let’s get down to the marrow. Since the school year began, you have been late
no less than fourteen times.”
No fewer.
“And absent five times.”
“Four, actually.”
“Tomato, tomahto—it’s become a problem. These kids aren’t going to teach themselves. Instead of learning history they’re memorizing the anti-meth posters in study hall. I’d like to know how you intend to solve this problem.”
“Well,” says the biographer.
“Unless you’d prefer not to teach here at all?”
She
uncrosses and recrosses her legs. “I do want to teach here. Very much. The thing is, I’ve been having some health issues, which—”
“Whatever it is, Ro, it can’t go on. Either take a medical leave, quit, or get to work on time.” His saliva lands on her face.
Has he gotten more dickish because his wife was in a coma? Or because Gin Percival’s trial starts soon? Fivey will have to sit in the courtroom
and hear how his wife allegedly sought an abortion from the witch, though she wasn’t allegedly pregnant in the first place. And how his wife allegedly had an affair with Cotter at the P.O. And how her breasts are allegedly real. Even the biographer, whose finger is not on the pulse, has heard these rumors.
“I won’t be late again,” she says.
“No, you won’t, because I’m giving you an official
warning. One more violation and you’ll need to call your union rep.”
“We don’t have a union.”
“It’s an expression. I don’t mean to be a hard-ass,” he adds. “You’re good at your job, when you’re around.”
Fivey is a bush-league fish in a bush-league pond.
And these kids
are
going to teach themselves.
She’s only here to give them some nudges and clues. She is here to tell them they don’t have
to get married or buy a house or read the list of shipwrecks at the pub every Saturday night.
Ten days until Every Child Needs Two comes true.
She should have asked Mattie sooner.
Plunged faster.
When told, last year, of the biographer’s desire for a child, the meditation teacher suggested that she get a dog.
With a knife she stirs cream into her third cup of coffee. She inherited the family
silverware, which Dad was not interested in carrying to Ambrosia Ridge, but most of the spoons had to be thrown away. The same spoons that had once entered the mouths of the biographer and Archie freighted with ice cream or pudding or soup were later used to heat the heroin and water that was sucked through a shred of cotton into a needle that went into Archie’s skin. The charred spoons were useful
to stumble upon (under beds, in creases of couches) when the biographer needed to confront him with irrefutable, unarguable evidence—though he did, in fact, to her amazement, sometimes argue.
“Ever heard of a dishwasher? They mess up spoons.”
Or “That’s probably been there for two years; it’s not a current event, my friend.”
Archie was a dumb fuck.
And her favorite person of all.
She will
name her kid after him, if she ever has a kid.
Why does she even want one?
How can she tell her students to reject the myth that their happiness depends on having a mate if she believes the same myth about having a child?
Why isn’t she glad, as Eivør Mínervudottír was glad, to be free?
She sips coffee. Drums her heel to the throbbing clank of the kitchen radiator. Opens her notebook. Writes
on a new page:
Reasons I am envious of Susan
. It embarrasses her to write the word “envious,” but a good researcher can’t be stopped by ugly data.
- Convenient/free source of sperm
- Has two
The biographer’s family once looked like the Korsmos—mother father sister brother, a foursquare American family. They had a weedy yard, a house. The biographer doesn’t want a house, but she wants a kid. She
can’t explain why. She can only say
Because I do
.
Which doesn’t seem like a good enough reason for all of this suffering effort.
Maybe she has flat-out been programmed by marketing. Awash in images of mother and child, mama bear and baby bear, she learned, without knowing she was learning it, to desire them.
Maybe there are better things she could be doing with the life she already has.
She
glances down at the pasty insides of her elbows: the tracks are fading. Resemblance to Archie evaporating. Weeks since her last blood draw, since she last laid eyes on Kalbfleisch’s indifferent golden cheeks.
Reasons I
am envious of
hate Susan:
- Convenient/free source of sperm
- Has two
- Doesn’t pay rent
- Told me to distract self at movies
- Has two
- Said you don’t truly become an adult until, etc.
- Has two
A less envious, less hateful person would not be hoping that Mattie Quarles was arrested at the Canadian border.
The ice is a solid floor around our ship. No amount of chopping and sawing and hacking cracks its grip. The rudder hangs useless.
Oreius
is beset.
Follows the officer into a closet room with a brown table, brown chairs, and no windows. Sits down before being asked. The officer stays standing, hands on hips. “Can you tell me the real reason for your visit?”
“Going to see a friend in Vancouver.”
“I said the real reason.”
The door is closed.
Nobody knows she’s here, aside from Ash, and what the hell is Ash going to do?
“That
is the real reason, ma’am.”
“We see a lot of girls like you trying to cross. Problem is, Canada has an official agreement with the United States. We’ve agreed to stop you from breaking
your
country’s laws in
our
country.”
“But I’m not breaking—”
“The nice thing about pregnancy tests? Results in one minute.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am.”
“Section 10.31 of the Canadian Border
Services Agency Regulations states: ‘If an unaccompanied minor registers a positive result on a FIRST RESPONSE Rapid Result Pregnancy Test, and cannot verify a legitimate personal or professional purpose in a Canadian province, she shall be taken into custody and returned to U.S. law enforcement officials.’”
“But I
can
verify my purpose. My friend Delphine?” The daughter opens her satchel and
pulls out the email.
The officer glances at it. “Seriously?” Hands the page back.
The daughter presses her thighs together.
“This is what’s going to happen, Matilda. I’m going to give you a cup, and you’re going to go down the hall to the bathroom and urinate in the cup.”
“You can’t randomly drug-test me. That’s illegal.”
“Nice try.”
The daughter decides to look this woman in the eye. “I
can—I can pay you.”
“For what?”
“For letting me get back on the bus.”
“You mean a
bribe?
”
“No. Just—” Her mouth is quivering. “Ma’am, please?”
“Hey, you know who loves being called ma’am?”
“Who?”
“Nobody.”
“I have a hundred dollars,” says the daughter. She can sleep in the bus station and eat when she’s back in Oregon.
“Keep it, eh?” The officer takes a plastic-wrapped cup from her jacket
pocket and plunks it on the brown table. “Ready to pee, or do you need water?”
“Water,” says the daughter, because it means delay.
Yasmine said she didn’t intend to be anyone’s stereotype. Black teen mother slurping welfare off the backs of hardworking citizens, etc.
And Mrs. Salter was the only woman of color in the Oregon State Legislature. She didn’t intend to jeopardize her mother’s career.
She gave herself a homemade abortion.
Blond Frizzy comes back without any water, followed by a man officer, blue eyed and in charge. He smiles at the daughter. “I’ll take it from here, Alice.”
“I was almost—”
“Why don’t you go on your lunch?”
The subordinate officer does a long blink at the daughter. Wrinkles her mouth. “You betcha.” And leaves.
“How are you today, Miss Quarles?” says the
guy, propping one black boot on a chair. His crotch is at eye level.
She shrugs, too scared to be polite.
“So you’re visiting the True North for pleasure? For fun?”
She nods.
“You know, we may be nice up here, but we still don’t enjoy being lied to.”
“I’m not—”
“Your face is
very
expressive. It betrays a lot.”
Fear pricks up along her arms, across her chest.
“Some folks have unreadable
faces. They’re the tough ones, you know? The ones you second-guess yourself with. Not you, Miss Quarles. But”—he lifts up the propped foot, bangs it down on the floor—“I’m not going to arrest you.”
“You’re not?”
“I’ve got two daughters aboot your age. Let’s say I’ve got a soft spot.”
“That’s—wow. Thank you.”
“You’ll need to go back where you came from, though. Next bus south gets here in three
and a half hours. I will personally ensure that you’re on it. If you don’t already have a return ticket, you can pay the driver.”
Back?
Soft gray hole in her throat.
“Your photo and driver’s license,” says the guy, “will be distributed to every border patrol office in Canada, so don’t even think aboot trying to cross again.”
You can’t tell from looking (scarves, big sweaters), but her stomach
is thicker and harder. Soon it will be too late.
“I want you to learn a lesson from this. Don’t repeat your mistakes. Like I tell my daughters: be the cow they have to buy.”
