Red Clocks. Leni Zumas
“It’s a holiday.”
“Not a national holiday. Banks are open and the mail is delivered.”
“You will need,” says Crabby slowly, carefully, “to call the office.”
The biographer cried the first time it failed. She was waiting in line to buy floss, having pledged to improve her dental hygiene now that she was going to be a parent, and her phone rang: one of the nurses, “I’m sorry, sweetie, but your test was negative,” the biographer saying thank you, okay, thank you and hitting END before the tears started. Despite the statistics and Kalbfleisch’s “This doesn’t work for everyone,” the biographer had thought it would be easy. Squirt in millions of sperm from a nineteen-year-old biology major, precisely timed to be there waiting when the egg flies out; sperm and egg collide in the warm tunnel—how could fertilization not happen? Don’t be stupid anymore, she wrote in her notebook, under Immediate action required.
She drives west on Highway 22 into dark hills dense with hemlock, fir, and spruce. Oregon has the best trees in America, soaring and shaggy winged, alpine sinister. Her tree gratitude mutes her doctor resentment. Two hours from his office, her car crests the cliff road and the church steeple juts into view. The rest of town follows, hunched in rucked hills sloping to the water. Smoke coils from the pub chimney. Fishing nets pile on the shore. In Newville you can watch the sea eat the ground, over and over, unstopping. Millions of abyssal thalassic acres. The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do. Today its walls are high, white lather torn, crashing hard at the sea stacks. “Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.
Central Coast Regional H.S. seeks history teacher (U.S./World). Bachelor’s degree required. Location: Newville, Oregon, fishing village on quiet ocean harbor, migrating whales. Ivy League–educated principal is committed to creating dynamic, innovative learning environment.
The biographer applied because of quiet ocean harbor and no mention of teaching experience. Her brief interview consisted of the principal, Mr. Fivey, plot-summarizing his favorite seafaring novels and mentioning twice the name of the college he had gone to. He said she could do the teacher-certification course over two summers. For seven years she has lived in the lee of fog-smoked evergreen mountains, thousand-foot cliffs plunging straight down to the sea. It rains and rains and rains. Log trucks stall traffic on the cliff road, locals catch fish or make things for tourists, the pub hangs a list of old shipwrecks, the tsunami siren is tested monthly, and students learn to say “miss” as if they were servants.
She starts class by following her daily plan, but when she sees chins mashing into fists, she decides to abandon it. Tenth-grade global history, the world in forty weeks, with a foolish textbook she is contractually obliged to use, can’t be stood without detours. These kids, after all, have not been lost yet. Staring up at her, jaws rimmed with baby fat, they are perched on the brink of not giving a shit. They still give a shit, but not, most of them, for long. She instructs them to close their books, which they are happy to do. They watch her with a new stillness. They will be told a story, can be children again, of whom nothing is asked.
“Boadicea was queen of a Celtic tribe called the Iceni in what is now Norfolk, England. The Romans had invaded a while back and were ruling the land. Her husband died and left his fortune to her and their daughters, but the Romans ignored his will, took the fortune, flogged Boadicea, and raped the daughters.”
One kid: “What’s ‘flog’?”
Another: “Beat the frock out of.”
“The Romans had screwed her royally”—somebody laughs softly at this, for which the biographer is grateful—“and in 61 CE she led her people in rebellion. The Iceni fought hard. They forced the Romans all the way back to London. But bear in mind that the Roman soldiers had lots of incentive to win, because if they didn’t, they could expect to be cooked on skewers and/or boiled to death, after seeing their own intestines being pulled out of their bodies.”
“That rules,” says a boy.
“Eventually the Roman forces were too much for the Iceni. Boadicea either poisoned herself to avoid capture or got sick; either way, she died. The win column isn’t the point. The point is …” She stops, aware of twenty-four little gazes.
Into the silence the soft laugher ventures: “Don’t frock with a woman?”
They like this. They like slogans.
“Well,” the biographer says, “sort of. But more than that. We also have to consider—”
The bell.
A burst of scraping and sliding, bodies glad to go. “Bye, miss!” “Have a good day, miss.”
The soft laugher, Mattie Quarles, idles near the biographer’s desk. “So is that where the word ‘bodacious’ comes from?”
“I wish I could say yes,” says the biographer, “but ‘bodacious’ originated in the nineteenth century, I think. Mix of ‘bold’ and ‘audacious.’ Good instinct, though!”
“Thanks, miss.”
“You really don’t need to call me that,” says the biographer for the seven thousandth time.
After school she stops at the Acme, grocery and hardware and drugstore combined. The pharmacist’s assistant is a boy—now a young man—she taught in her first year at Central Coast, and she hates the moment each month when he hands her the white bag with the little orange bottle. I know what this is for, his eyes say. Even if his eyes don’t actually say that, it’s hard to look at him. She brings other items to the counter (unsalted peanuts, Q‑tips) as if somehow to disguise the fertility medication. The biographer can’t recall his name but remembers admiring, in class, seven years ago, his long black lashes—they always looked a little wet.
Waiting on the hard little plastic chair, under elevator music and fluorescent glare, the biographer takes out her notebook. Everything in this notebook must be in list form, and any list is eligible. Items for next food shop. Kalbfleisch’s necktie designs. Countries with most lighthouses per capita.
She starts a new one: Accusations from the world.
1. You’re too old.
2. If you can’t have a child the natural way, you shouldn’t have one at all.
3. Every child needs two parents.
4. Children raised by single mothers are more liable to rape/murder/drug-take/score low on standardized tests.
5. You’re too old.
6. You should’ve thought of this earlier.
7. You’re selfish.
8. You’re doing something unnatural.
9. How is that child going to feel when she finds out her father is an anonymous masturbator?
10. Your body is a grizzled husk.
11. You’re too old, sad spinster!
12. Are you only doing this because you’re lonely?
“Miss? Prescription’s ready.”
“Thank you.” She signs the screen on the counter. “How’s your day been?”
Lashes turns up his palms at the ceiling.
“If it makes you feel any better,” says the biographer, “this medication is going to make me have a foul-smelling vaginal discharge.”
“At least it’s for a good cause.”
She clears her throat.
“That’ll be one hundred fifty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents,” he adds.
“Pardon