Red Clocks (3 page)

Grew up in a
city born of the terror of the vastness of space
, where the streets lie tight in a grid. The men who built Salem, Oregon, were white Methodist missionaries who followed white fur-trade trappers to the Pacific Northwest, and the missionaries were less excited than the trappers by the wildness foaming in every direction. They laid their town in a valley that had been fished,
harvested, and winter-camped for centuries by the Kalapuya people, who, in the 1850s, were forced onto reservations by the U.S. government. In the stolen valley the whites huddled and crouched, made everything smaller. Downtown Salem is a box of streets Britishly named: Church and Cottage and Market, Summer and Winter and East.

The daughter knew every tidy inch of her city neighborhood. She is
still learning the inches in Newville, where humans are less, nature is more.

She stands in the lantern room of the Gunakadeit Lighthouse, north of town, where she has come after school with the person she hopes to officially call her boyfriend. From here you can see massive cliffs soaring up from the ocean, rust veined, green mossed; giant pines gathering like soldiers along their rim; goblin
trees jutting slant from the rock face. You can see silver-white lather smashing at the cliffs’ ankles. The harbor and its moored boats and the ocean beyond, a shirred blue prairie stretching to the horizon, cut by bars of green. Far from shore: a black fin.

“Boring up here,” says Ephraim.

Look at the black fin!
she wants to say.
The goblin trees!

She says, “Yeah,” and touches his jaw, specked
with new beard. They kiss for a while. She loves it except for the tongue thrusts.

Does the fin belong to a shark? Could it belong to a whale?

She draws back from Ephraim to look at the sea.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Gone.

“Wanna bounce?” he says.

They race down the spiral staircase, boot soles ringing on the stone, and climb into the backseat of his car.

“I think I saw a gray whale. Did you—?”

“Nope,” says Ephraim. “But did you know
blue
whales have the biggest cocks of any animal? Eight to ten feet.”

“The dinosaurs’ were bigger than that.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, my dad’s got this book—” She stops: Ephraim has no father. The daughter’s father, though annoying, loves her more than all the world’s gold. “Anyway,” she says, “here’s one: A skeleton asks another skeleton, ‘Do you want to hear
a joke?’ Second skeleton says, ‘Only if it’s humerus.’”

“Why is that funny?”

“Because—‘humerus’? The arm bone?”

“That’s a little-kid joke.”

Her mom’s favorite pun. It’s not her fault he didn’t know what a humerus was.

“No more
talking
.” He goes to kiss her but she dodges, bites his shoulder through the cotton long sleeve, trying to break the skin but also not to. He gets her underpants down
so fast it feels professional. Her jeans are already flung to some corner of the car, maybe on the steering wheel, maybe under the front seat, his jeans too, his hat.

She reaches for his penis and circles her palm around the head, like she’s polishing.

“Not like that—” Ephraim moves her hand to grip the shaft. Up down up down up down. “Like
that
.”

He spits on his hand and wets his penis, guides
it into her vagina. He shoves back and forth. It feels okay but not great, definitely not as great as they say it should feel, and it doesn’t help that the back of her head keeps slamming against the door handle, but the daughter has also read that it takes some time to get good at sex and to like it, especially for the girl. He has an orgasm with the same jittery moan she found weird at first
but is getting used to, and she is relieved that her head has stopped being slammed against the door handle, so she smiles; and Ephraim smiles too; and she flinches at the sticky milk dribbling out of her.

Between town and home is a long twist of road that hugs the cliffside, climbing and dipping and climbing again.

At the sharpest bend, whose guardrail is measly, the wife’s jaw tenses.

What if she took her hands off the wheel and let them go?

The car would jump along the top branches of the shore pines, tearing a fine green wake; flip once before building speed; fly past the rocks and
into the water and down forever and—

After the bend, she unclenches.

Almost home.

Second time this week she has pictured it.

Soon as the groceries are in, she’ll give herself a few minutes upstairs. It won’t kill them to watch a screen.

Why did she buy the grass-fed beef? Six dollars more per pound.

Second time this week.

They say grass-fed has the best fats.

Which might be entirely common.
Maybe everyone pictures it, maybe not as often as twice a week but—

A little animal is struggling across the road. Dark, about a foot long.

Possum? Porcupine? Trying to cross.

Maybe it’s even healthy to picture it.

Closer: burnt black, scorched to rubber.

Shivering.

Already dead, still trying.

What burned it? Or who?

“You’re making us crash!”—from the backseat.

“We’re not crashing,” says
the wife. Her foot is capable and steadfast. They will never crash with her foot on the brake.

Who burned this animal?

Convulsing, trembling, already so dead. Fur singed off. Skin black rubber.

Who burned you?

Closer: it’s a black plastic bag.

But she can’t unsee the shivering thing, burnt and dead and trying.

At the house: unbuckle, untangle, lift, carry, set down.

Unpack, put away.

Peel string cheese.

Distribute string cheese.

Place Bex and John in front of approved cartoon.

Upstairs, the wife closes the sewing-room door. Sits cross-legged on the bed. Fixes her stare on the scuffed white wall.

They are yipping and pipping, her two. They are rolling and polling and slapping and papping, rompling with little fists and heels on the bald carpet.

They are hers, but she can’t
get inside them.

They can’t get back inside her.

They are hurling their fists—Bex fistier, but John brave.

Why did they name him John? Not a family name and almost as dull as the wife’s own. Bex had said, “I’m going to call the baby Yarnjee.”

Is John brave, or foolish?—he squirms willingly while his sister punches. The wife doesn’t say
No hitting
because she doesn’t want them to stop, she
wants them to get tired.

She remembers why John: because everyone can spell and say it. John because his father hates correcting butchered English pronunciations of his own name. The errors of clerks. John is sometimes
Jean-voyage;
and Ro calls him Pliny the Younger.

In the past hour, the kids have

Rolled and polled.

Eaten leftover popcorn stirred into lemon yogurt.

Asked the wife if they
could watch more TV.

Been told no.

Slooped and chooped.

Tipped over the standing lamp.

Broken an eyelash.

Asked the wife why her anus is out in space when it should be in her butt.

Slapped and papped.

Asked the wife what’s for dinner.

Been told spaghetti.

Asked the wife what does she think is the best kind of sauce for butt pasta.

The grass-fed beef grows blood in a plastic bag. Does
contact with the plastic cancel out its grass-fedness? She shouldn’t waste expensive meat in spaghetti sauce. Marinate it tonight? There’s a jar of store sauce in the—

“Take your finger out of his nose.”

“But he likes it,” says Bex.

And broccoli. Those par-baked dinner rolls are delicious, but she isn’t going to serve bread with pasta.

Sea-salt-almond chocolate bar stowed in the kitchen drawer,
under the maps, please still be there, please still be there.

“Do you like having your sister’s finger stuck up your nose?”

John smiles, ducks, and nods.

“When the fuck is dinner?”

“What?”

Bex knows her crime; she eyes the wife with a cunning frown. “I mean when the gosh.”

“You said something else. Do you even know what it means?”

“It’s bad,” says Bex.

“Does Mattie ever say that word?”

“Um …”

Which way will her girl’s lie go: protect or incriminate?

“I think maybe yes,” says Bex dolefully.

Bex loves Mattie, who is the good babysitter, much preferred over Mrs. Costello, the mean. The girl when she lies looks a lot like her father. The hard-sunk eyes the wife once found beguiling are not eyes she would wish upon her daughter. Bex’s will have purplish circles before long.

But
who cares what the girl looks like, if she is happy?

The world will care.

“To answer your question, dinner is whenever I want it to be.”

“When will you want it to be?”

“Don’t know,” says the wife. “Maybe we just won’t have dinner tonight.”

Sea-salt-almond. Chocolate. Bar.

Bex frowns again, not cunningly.

The wife kneels on the rug and pulls their bodies against her body, squeezes, nuzzles.
“Oh, sprites, don’t worry, of course we’ll have dinner. I was joking.”

“Sometimes you do such bad jokes.”

“It’s true. I’m sorry. I predict that dinner will happen at six fifteen p.m., Pacific standard time. I predict that it will consist of spaghetti with tomato sauce and broccoli. So what species of sprite are you today?”

John says, “Water.”

Bex says, “Wood.”

Today’s date is marked on the
kitchen calendar with a small black
A
. Which stands for “ask.”

Ask him again.

From the bay window, whose frame flakes with old paint possibly brimming with lead—she keeps forgetting to arrange to have the kids tested—the wife watches her husband trudge up the drive on short legs in jeans that are too tight, too young for him. He has a horror of dad pants and insists on dressing as he did at
nineteen. His messenger bag bangs against one skinny thigh.

“He’s home,” she calls.

The kids race to greet him. This is a moment she used to love to picture, man home from work and children welcoming him, a perfect moment because it has no past or future—does not care where the man came from or what will happen after he is greeted, cares only for the joyful collision, the
Daddy you’re here
.

“Fee fi fo fon,
je sens le sang
of two white middle-class Québécois-American children!” Her sprites scramble all over him. “A’right, a’right, settle down, eh,” but he is contented, with John flung over his shoulder and Bex pulling open the satchel to check for vending-machine snacks. She’s got his salt tooth. Did she get everything from him? What is in her of the wife?

The nose. She escaped Didier’s
nose.

“Hi,
meuf,
” he says, squatting to set John on the floor.

“How was the day?”

“Usual hell. Actually, not usual. Music teacher got laid off.”

Good
.

“Hello, hell!” says Bex.

“We don’t say ‘hell,’” says the wife.

I’m glad she’s gone.

“Daddy—”

“I meant ‘heifer,’” says Didier.

“Kids, I want those blocks off the floor. Somebody could trip. Now! But I thought everyone loved the music teacher.”

“Budget crisis.”

“You mean they’re not replacing her?”

He shrugs.

“So there won’t be any music classes at all?”

“I must pee.”

When he emerges from the bathroom, she is leaning on the banister, listening to Bex boss John into doing all the block gathering.

“We should get a cleaner,” says Didier, for the third time this month. “I just counted the number of pubic hairs on the toilet rim.”

And soap heel crusted to the sink.

Black dust on the baseboards.

Soft yellow hair balls in every corner.

Sea-salt-almond chocolate bar in the drawer.

“We can’t afford one,” she says, “unless we stop using Mrs. Costello, and I’m not giving up those eight hours.” She looks into his blue-gray eyes, level with hers. She has often wished that Didier were taller. Is her wishing the product of socialization
or an evolutionary adaptation from the days when being able to reach more food on a tree was a life‑or‑death advantage?

“Well,” he says, “
somebody
needs to start doing some cleaning. It’s like a bus station in there.”

She won’t be asking him tonight.

She will write the
A
again, on a different day.

“There were twelve, by the way,” he says. “I know you have stuff to do, I’m not saying you don’t,
but could you maybe wash the toilet once in a while? Twelve hairs.”