Red Clocks. Leni Zumas
make a slice across the lamb’s throat—just one, they don’t feel it, do it hard, watch your brother. But when she had the knife, and her mother was squatting beside her with the little wriggler, she didn’t want to. Eivør was ordered twice to cut it and twice she said “Nei, Mamma.”
Her mother put a hand over hers and drew the knife under the lamb’s face; its face fell off; Eivør fell with it, screaming; and her mother hoisted the animal above a washtub to bleed.
Eivør was beaten on her thighs with a leather strap used for hanging slit lambs in the drying shed. And she ate no ræst kjøt that Christmas or skerpikjøt that spring, apart from the occasional secret bite her brother Gunni saved in his shoe.
Doesn’t know for a fact that Gunni saved pieces of fermented lamb in his shoe when Eivør wasn’t allowed to have any, but she writes it in her book, because her own brother used to hide cookies in his napkin when their mother told the biographer she didn’t need more dessert unless she wanted to get chubby. Archie would leave the cookies in his drawer for her to retrieve. Each time she opened the drawer and saw the grease-darkened napkin tucked among socks, a flame of happiness lit in her throat.
She wrote the first sentences of Mínervudottír: A Life ten years ago, when she was working at a café in Minneapolis and trying to help Archie get clean. When she wasn’t driving him to meetings or outpatient appointments, she was dropping leafy greens into smoothies he didn’t drink. She was checking his pupils for pinnedness, his drawers for needles, her own wallet for missing cash. Sometimes he would ask to read the manuscript. He liked the part where the polar explorer watches men drive whales to their deaths in a shallow cove.
As a hater of tradition, Archie would have applauded her solo pregnancy efforts. Would have tried to get his friends to supply sperm for free. (One dose of semen from Athena Cryobank costs eight hundred dollars.)
She has not told her father about the efforts.
She closes her computer and sets Mínervudottír’s journal on a pile of books about nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions. Rolls her head toward one shoulder, then the other. Is a stiff neck another sign of polycystic ovary syndrome? She has researched PCOS online, a little, as much as she can stand. The pregnancy statistics aren’t good.
But Gin Percival might not know what she’s talking about. She didn’t even graduate from high school, according to Penny, who was already teaching at Central Coast when Gin dropped out. The visit to her did not go badly, or particularly well. She liked Gin Percival fine. She came away with a bag of gruesome tea.
Speaking of: the biographer gets out the saucepan. While the tea heats, she braces for the flavor of a human mouth unbrushed for many moons and debates whether to change for dinner. It’s only Didier and Susan and the kids; but these sweatpants, truth be told, have not been washed in a while.
Her white mug is streaked tan inside. Are her teeth this stained? Probably almost. Years of frequent coffee. Long hiatuses from dentistry. Could poor mouth hygiene be a cause of PCOS? Inflammation leaking from the gums into the bloodstream, a slow poison, her hormones dizzy and ineffectual?
If she does have PCOS, maybe Gin Percival can give her another concoction—to lower her testosterone levels, repair her blood. Her cells will jump to work, plumping and fluffing and densing, her FSH numbers will drop into the single digits, Nurse Crabby will call with her bloodwork results and say, “Wow! Just, wow!” and even Fleischy will give a golden nod of amazement. They’ll shoot in the sperm of the rock climber or the personal trainer or the biology student or Kalbfleisch himself, and the biographer, at last, will conceive.
It’s got to be mostly hokum, of course. Tree bark and frog’s spit and spells. Mash up a few berries and seeds and call it a solution.
But what if it works? Thousands of years in the making, fine-tuned by women in the dark creases of history, helping each other.
And at this point, what else can she do?
You could stop trying so hard.
You could love your life as it is.
The Korsmos’ place, horror-movie handsome on its hill, would make the biographer jealous if she were a house wanter, which she is not, as houses make her think of being stuck neck-deep in a mortgage; but she admires its lead-glazed panes and the ocellated trim work vining its porch. It was built by Susan’s great-grandfather as a summer place. In winter they duct-tape the windows and stuff sweaters under the doors.
Didier smokes on the porch steps, yellow hair poking like hay from under his beanie. He is sunk-eyed and snaggletoothed yet manages somehow—the biographer can’t figure out how—to be fetching. Beau-laid. He raises one beautiful-ugly palm in greeting.
“ROOOOOO!” yells Bex, running at the biographer across the lawn.
“Pipe the fuck down,” says her father. He squashes the cigarette on his bootheel, tosses it into a large brown bush, and ambles over to lift the girl into the air. “Bexy, remember that ‘fuck’ goes in the special box. You hungry, Robitussin? Also, we invited Pete.”
“I’m elated. What’s the special box?”
“The box of words we never say to Mommy,” says Bex.
“Or even near Mommy.” Didier sets the girl down, and she scurries back toward the house. “I see you didn’t bring anything, which is awesome.”
“What?”
“My wife adheres to the twentieth-century belief that civilized people arrive with small gifts or contributions to an invited meal. And once again this proves her wrong because you’re civilized but, as usual, you brought zilch.”
The biographer foresees the wince, the disapproval filed away. Susan keeps track to the grave.
Pliny the Younger stomps behind while Bex gives the biographer yet another tour of her room. She is very proud of her room. The purple walls are thick with fairies, leopards, alphabets, and Pinocchio noses. When her brother dares to move a rabbit from the bed, Bex slaps his hand; he yowls; the biographer says, “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.”
“It was only a soft hit,” says the girl. “See, I have one shelf for the monster and one shelf for the fish. Here’s a squirrel mummy.”
The biographer peers. “Is that a real squirrel?”
“Yeah, but it died. Which is, like, when …” Bex sighs, twists her hands together, and looks up at the biographer. “What is death?”
“Oh, you know,” says the biographer.
Blond-brown, endearing, demanding, sometimes quite irritating—how eerily they resemble Susan and Didier. It’s much more than the coloring: they are shaped like their parents, Bex with Didier’s shadowy eye sockets, John with Susan’s elfin chin—small faces imprinted by two traceable lineages. They are the products of desire: sexual, yes, but more importantly (in the age of contraception, at least) they come from the desire to recur. Give me the chance to repeat myself. Give me a life lived again, and bigger. Give me a self to take care of, and better. Again, please, again! We’re wired, it’s said, to want repeating. To want seed and soil, egg and shell, or so it’s said. Give me a bucket and give me a bell. Give me a cow with her udders a‑swell. Give me the calf—long eyes, long tongue—who clamps the teat and sucks.
Downstairs she trips on a plastic truck and slams elbow first into a side table. The floor is choked with toys. She kicks a blue train against the wall.
“They live in squalor,” says Pete Xiao.
“I may have sprained my elbow.”
“That aside, how are you?” Pete came to Central Coast Regional two years ago, to teach