Red Clocks

by Leni Zumas

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!

Over the course of human evolution, did men learn to be attracted to skinny women because they were not visibly pregnant? Did voluptuousness signal that a body was already ensuring the survival of another man’s genetic material?

Why did “thirty” loom like an expiration date? She and Didier hadn’t planned it; they weren’t married; they’d been dating for seven months. But the wife felt old. It was August, her last year of law school was about to start, the home pregnancy test made a cross. This is what I want, this!—law school was nothing to this.

Babies once were abstractions. They were Maybe I do, but not now. The biographer used to sneer at talk of biological deadlines, believing the topic of baby craziness to be crap for lifestyle magazines. Women who worried about ticking clocks were the same women who traded salmon-loaf recipes and asked their husbands to clean the gutters. She was not and never would be one of them. Then, suddenly, she was one of them. Not the gutters, but the clock.