Red Clocks. Leni Zumas
“All the more reason to avoid single motherhood,” says Didier.
Is she ashamed?
“So only couples in massive debt”—she raises her voice—“should have kids?”
“No, I just mean you have no idea how hard it’s going to be.”
“Actually I do,” she says.
“You very much don’t. Look, I’m the product of a single mother.”
“Exactly.”
“What?”
“You turned out fine,” says the biographer.
“You’re human evidence,” adds Pete.
“Wait’ll it’s four a.m.,” says Didier, “and the kid’s puking and shitting and screaming and you can’t decide if you should take him to the emergency room and there’s no one to help you decide.”
“Why would I need someone to help me decide?”
“Okay, what about when the kid has a guitar performance in assembly and you can’t be there because of work and everyone laughs at him for crying?”
The biographer does the tiny violin.
Didier pats his shirt pocket. “Hell are my smokes? Pete, do you—?”
“I got you, brah.” They head out together.
She thinks to start clearing the table—this would be a good thing to do, a courteous and helpful thing—but stays in her chair.
Susan, in the doorway: “They’re finally down.” Her narrow face, edged by blond waves, pulses with anger. At her kids for not settling faster? At her husband for doing nothing? She goes to hover behind a chair, surveying the mess of the table. Even angry she is shining, every piece of dining-room light caught and smeared across her cheeks.
The males clomp back in, smelling of smoke and cold, Didier laughing, “Which is what I told the ninth-graders!”
“Classic,” says Pete.
Susan reaches for plates. The biographer gets up and hefts the roast pan.
“Thanks,” says Susan, to the pan.
“I’ll wash.”
“No, it’s fine. Can you get the strawberries out of the fridge? And the cream.”
The biographer rinses, pats, and de‑tops.
“I bought those specially for you,” says Susan.
“In case I need some folic acid?”
“Are you—?”
“Another insemination next week.”
“Well, distract yourself if you can. Go to the movies.”
“The movies,” repeats the biographer. Susan has a knack for commiserating with suffering she hasn’t suffered. Which doesn’t feel like compassion or empathy, but why not? Here is a friend trying to connect over a trouble. But the effort itself is insulting, the biographer decides. The first time Susan got pregnant, it wasn’t planned. The second time (she told the biographer) they’d only just started trying again; she must be one of those Fertile Myrtles; she’d expected it to take longer, but lo and behold. If she told Susan about seeing the witch, Susan would act supportive and serious, then laugh about it behind the biographer’s back. With Didier. Oh, poor Ro—first she’s buying sperm online, now she’s tramping into the forest to consult a homeless woman. Oh, poor Ro—why does she keep trying? She has no idea how hard it’s going to be.
On her teacher’s salary she will die holding notices from credit-card agencies, whereas Susan and Didier, who also live on a teacher’s salary, are debt-free, as far as she knows, and pay no rent. Bex and John no doubt have trust funds set up by Susan’s parents, fattening and fattening.
“The comparing mind is a despairing mind,” says the meditation teacher.
Well, the biographer will figure out how to send her baby who does not exist yet to college. If the baby chooses to go to college, that is. She won’t push the baby. The biographer herself liked college, but who’s to say what the baby will like? Might decide to be a fisherperson and stay right here on the coast and eat dinner with the biographer every night, not out of obligation but out of wanting to. They will linger at the table and tell each other how the day went. The biographer won’t be teaching by that point, only writing, having published Mínervudottír: A Life to critical acclaim and now working on a comprehensive history of female Arctic explorers; and the baby, tired from hours on the fishing boat but still paying attention, will ask the biographer intelligent questions about menstruating at eighty degrees below zero.
As a girl, I loved (but why?) to watch the grindadráp. It was a death dance. I couldn’t stop looking. To smell the bonfires lit on the cliffs, calling men to the hunt. To see the boats herd the pod into the cove, the whales thrashing faster as they panic. Men and boys wade into the water with knives to cut their spinal cords. They touch the whale’s eye to make sure it is dead. And the water foams up red.
Malky’s been gone three days. Long for him—she doesn’t like it. The sun is dropping. Killers in the woods. Malky is a killer himself but no match for coyotes and foxes and red-tailed hawks. Every creature, prey to someone. The girl rides away from school in the car of a boy in an old-fashioned hat. (Does he believe the hat looks good?) Hat boy walks hips first, boom swagger swagger, pirate-like.
Not that the mender can warn her. She has been keeping away from town for fear the girl will catch her watching.
She wipes down the sink, the oak countertop. Tidies the seed drawer. Sets clean jars by a basket of eyeless onions.
Boom swagger boom.
A pirate slept off his dreadful deeds at a tavern on Cape Cod. He met the local beauty, not yet sixteen. Maria Hallett fell hard for this bandit. Then Black Sam Bellamy sailed away. She was packed with child. Child died the same night born—hid in a barn, choked on a piece of straw.
Or so went the story. Little did they know. The farmer’s wife who raised the child told no one but her diary.
Goody Hallett was imprisoned. Or banned from the village. Became a recluse. Lived in a shack by a poverty grass. Waited on the cliffs for Black Sam Bellamy in her best red shoes. Rode the backs of whales, tied lanterns to their flukes, lured ships to crash on the shoals. Got a reputation: witch.
Black Sam was the Robin Hood of pirates. They rob the poor under the cover of law, he said, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. In 1717, after some Caribbean plundering, Captain Bellamy rode back up the Atlantic with his gang of buccaneers. Their stolen ship, Whydah, sailed into the worst nor’easter in Cape Cod history. Ship went to pieces. Dead pirates all over the beach. Black Sam’s body was never recovered.
In 1984 the remains of Whydah were found off the coast of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. That same year Temple Percival bought a foreclosed tackle shop in Newville, Oregon, and arranged on the shelves some spooky trinkets and called it Goody Hallett’s.
Now Temple’s fingernails live in a jar on the cabin shelf. Lashes in a glassine packet. Head hair and pubic hair in separate paper cartons—both almost gone. The rest of her body in the chest freezer behind the feed trough in the goat shed.
Scratching on the doorstep. Malky slinks in without greeting or apology. She tries to sound stern: “Don’t ever stay out that long again, fuckermo.” He purrs tetchily, demanding supper. She gets a plate of salmon from the mini fridge. It is happiness to see his pink tongue lapping. Merry, merry