Free Red Clocks by Leni Zumas Page B

prove irresistible.’”
    “Where does black sand come in?” asks the biographer.
    “Euphrosyne and Renzo make love for the first time in a small cove on Long Island.”
    “But wouldn’t it be more interesting and, um, maybe less clichéd if she got engaged to the nephew, then found his
uncle
irresistible?”
    “Lord no! This isn’t
Little Women
. Renzo’s a Brooklyn stallion and his britches are strainedto bursting.”
    Penny is a teacher of English and an inventor, she says, of entertainments. “They’re a hoot,” she answered when the biographer once ventured to ask why she wanted to write soap operas valorizing romantic love as the sole telos of a female life. Penny has written nine of them, all waiting for cover art showing bulge-groined men relieving bulge-chested women of their bodices. Sheintends to be a published author by her seventieth birthday. Three years to make it happen.
    “Okay,” she says, “here’s Detective Sergeant Hathaway. Can’t
buy
cheekbones like that.”
    Inspector Lewis and DS Hathaway trade jokes across a sheeted corpse; enjoy beers at The Lamb & Flag; and chase a murderous puppeteer through a faculty drinks party, leaving a wake of Oxford dons agape.
    Then a largerosy meat bursts onto the screen. “It’s never too early to reserve joy. Call today for your Christmas ham!” Having lost all of its government funding, because the current administration won’t sanction the liberal bias of baking shows and mountaineering documentaries, PBS now airs long blocks of advertising. A spot for control-top hose (“Mom, you look extra beautiful tonight—is it your hair?” “No,my Tummy Tamers!”) makes the biographer’s nose sting.
    “Hey, you’re crying!” says Penny, returning from the kitchen with glasses of limeade.
    “Am not.”
    Penny presses a napkin to the biographer’s cheek.
    “It’s this new elderly-ovary medication,” sobs the biographer.
    “Blow your nose,” says Penny. “Just use the napkin; I can wash it. Do the commercials with children make you—”
    “No.” The biographerblows and wipes, shoves the napkin between her knees. “They make me think about my mom.”
    In‑breath.
    Who would pity her daughter for these solo efforts, this manless life.
    Out-breath.
    But her mother, who went from father’s house to college dorm to husband’s house without a single day lived on her own, never knew the pleasures of solitude.
    “What does your therapist say?” asks Penny.
    “I quitseeing him.”
    “Was that such a smart move?”
    “Poison is a woman’s weapon,” a grim lady tells Lewis and Hathaway. “‘ I love the old way best, the simple way of poison, where we too are strong as men .’”
    “Medea!” shouts the biographer.
    “We should get you on a game show,” says Penny.
    Five thirty a.m., the air cold and gritty with salt. She can’t face the drive to her day-nine egg-check appointmentwithout coffee, even though caffeine is on Hawthorne Reproductive Medicine’s
What to Avoid
handout. Teeth on her mug, she steers up the hill, under towering balsam fir and Sitka spruce, away from her town. Newville gets ninety-eight inches of rain a year. The inland fields are quaggy, hard to farm. Cliff roads dangerous in winter. Storms so bad they sink boats and tear roofs from houses. The biographerlikes these problems because they keep people away—the people who might otherwise move here, that is, not the tourists, who cruise in on dry summer asphalt and don’t give a sea onion about farming.
    A billboard on Highway 22 is a stick drawing of a skirt-wearing person with a balloon for a stomach, accompanied by:
    WON’T STOP ONE,
    WON’T START ONE.
    CANADA UPHOLDS U.S. LAW !
    American intelligenceagencies must have some nice dirt on the Canadian prime minister. Otherwise, why agree to the Pink Wall? The border control can detain any woman or girl they “reasonably” suspect of crossing into Canada for the purpose of ending a pregnancy. Seekers are