The Folded Clock

by Heidi Julavits

  Today I started reading a book called How to Navigate Today. How to Navigate Today is not a spiritual guide but a book about actual nautical navigation written in the ’40s by a woman named Marion Rice Hart. Marion Rice Hart was born in 1891 and was a chemical engineer, a geologist, a research physicist, a miner, a surveyor, a sculptor, a painter, a photographer, a sailboat skipper, an aviator, an author, and a radio operator. According to the preface of How to Navigate Today, Rice Hart navigated her day by keeping a low profile. “She has never been a noisy rebel flouting the conventions for women of her generation; she has just quietly done what she felt like doing.”

  I am navigating today by drawing the tap handle I found in my dining room wall. What continues to confound me is why I cannot simply own, as in possess in a manner that is satisfying, this tap handle. My inability to enjoyably accomplish this calls into question how I’ve managed, in the past, to own anything successfully. What does it mean to own this wooden table, this pottery bowl, this random ancestor painting (not my ancestor)? Owning is revealed as a doubly passive business. One just sits around owning these things one already owns. My doubt in my overall owning abilities, however, remains focused on the tap handle. I frequently experience the urge to flailingly, like with my mind or my heart or my body, fuck the thing.

  Given the l’amour fou diagnosis I received from my artist friend, I clearly require treatment. I have decided, as previously stated, to draw the tap handle each morning even though I do not draw (unless I’m hanging out with children). I’ve never seen a still life of spice jars or a sunset or a person and thought, I want to draw that. My capturing impulses are not visual. In the past, if I wanted to capture an object, I owned it.

  Yet I do not know how to own the tap handle, perhaps because it has been in a state of dis-ownership for so many years. It was found between the wall studs of my house by a guy who demo-ed our dining room. Who knows how a tap handle ended up in a wall. There are plenty of objects in our walls that make sense—the old newspapers added insulation, the old razor blades were too sharp to throw in the trash heaps hidden like Abenaki middens in the back woods—and others that don’t, like the vertebra of a cow. I, too, have been frustrated by objects that you cannot file anywhere in your life, but neither can you throw them away. They drift around a house transiently, in a death row limbo, first on the dining room table, then on a bookshelf. Suddenly there’s a hole in the wall, and an opportunity presents itself. I can get rid of this object while still keeping it. This is what I imagine the person who put the tap handle in the wall thought at the time.

  So I decided that the only way to treat my affliction was to draw the tap handle, because the act of drawing would be frustrating enough to possibly distract me from the inherent frustration of the object. I would draw it every day. (It would become my “everyday object,” like the tumbleweed the Eames hung from their ceiling.) I started work each morning by drawing the tap handle; afterward I would draw, in words, the day. The poet Mary Ruefle wrote, “an ordinary life was an obscure life, if we can extend the meaning of obscure to mean covered up by dailiness, glorious dailiness, shameful dailiness, dailiness that is difficult to figure out, that is not always clear until a long time afterward.” If an object is relegated to dailiness it becomes a part of you. It is ingested by habit. It is stored between the studs of the walls of your self. When I’m autopsied they will find inside—this tap handle, a child too scared to go to matinees, a song I once loved, maybe also a cow bone and some old news. Who knows what else I’ve hidden in there because I could make no sense of it at the time, and found nowhere else to put it.

  Today I sat on the steps to the library and wrote e-mail replies on my computer. I was replying to replies to replies. Where is the question that began all of these replies? Was there ever a question?

  A tourist approached me. She was Japanese. She wore a white business suit; she held an iPhone. A lot of tourists visit this campus. What are they here to see? Often they ask my permission to take pictures of my children playing on the wheelchair ramp, which suggests even they may not know why they’re here. A famous university in theory might sound exciting, but in reality it’s just a bunch of buildings, and often some droopy balloons hanging from an iron banister, and a loose gathering of people that might be a poorly attended Falun Gong liberation protest, or some students playing Assassin.

  The Japanese woman, I assumed, wanted me to take her picture in front of a statue. I checked the direction of the sun. I considered telling her to pose in front of a smaller library, because I had taken a lot of successful pictures of tourists there.

  Instead the woman asked me, “Do you imagine God as a woman?”

  I took her question seriously. I didn’t want to be dismissive or rude and thus reflect badly on my city or my country. I always feel a keen responsibility to be a good host. Her question better explained, too, why she was on campus. Maybe she thought she’d strike up a more interesting conversation with a stranger she found at a university rather than one she found in, say, Carnegie Deli. What is the place of man in the universe? What determines the fate of the individual? Where, spiritually speaking, is the nearest subway?

  I also considered the possibility that she was part of a conceptual art piece, maybe an “interpreter” hired by the artist Tino Sehgal. Sehgal did a piece recently at the Guggenheim called This Progress in which interpreters—one of them was my friend’s teen son—asked museum visitors questions like “What is progress?” and followed them up the museum’s spiral ramp until another interpreter took over. Maybe Sehgal’s new work was being secretly unfurled over campuses of higher learning. Maybe, in fact, this woman was not an interpreter herself but part of the conceptual art advance team. Maybe I was being interviewed for an interpreter position.

  Now a job was on the line. I love to get jobs. Getting jobs is like winning domestic arguments on a grand scale, and then getting paid for it.

  So. Did I imagine God as a woman? I didn’t. When urged to envision God, or the aura God exudes, I understood that aura as male, maybe because the only people who use the word “God” in a question such as the one I was asked by the Japanese woman tend to be Christian. But I didn’t want to give the Japanese woman this hackneyed answer. I would never be hired.

  Instead I said, “I’m not sure.”

  “According to Scripture,” the Japanese woman said, “God is referred to as both Our Father and Our Mother.”

  “Oh,” I said. Now I was wondering: maybe she was a feminist activist?

  The Japanese woman could see I was confused. I was clearly a novice. I was not the erudite liberal arts student/professor she’d hoped to encounter.

  She regarded me with sympathy.

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked.

  I heard this question as “Do you even know who God is?”

  I was in too deep. I didn’t have answers to her questions. I had too much e-mail to answer to answer her questions. I was no interpreter. I already had a job.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to answer your questions today.”

  Today I biked to a vintage store. I bought

  · a deco rhinestone lipstick case, mirror broken, “as is” price of five dollars

  · a red tin of cookie and sandwich cutters for twelve dollars

  · a painted French serving tray for too much money (or maybe not; the owner of the store made me feel better about the price by saying of the tray, “it’s probably much older than I think”)

  I also bought a garnet and rhinestone necklace. It’s costume, from the ’40s, not valuable, and it matches nothing I own, but what swayed me was the weight of it. I brought it home. I preferred looking at it to wearing it. I kept it spread over the top of my dresser as interior decoration. Then I considered giving it to my mother for her birthday. She was about to turn seventy. My husband and I were throwing her a fancy dinner, and turning our house into a three-star restaurant run by children. But was this enough?
I worried that I needed to give her an object to commemorate her birthday. A dinner party was too ephemeral a gift. She wouldn’t catch accidental sight of it and remember…Me? That she’d turned seventy? Neither of these are things she’s likely to forget.

  Still, the tradition with landmark birthdays is to give a gift that presumes the receiver needs reminding that they remain beloved and alive. I thought I’d give my mother this necklace. But while I never wore it, I found, for whatever reason, that I didn’t want to give it away. I told myself, You didn’t buy it for her, and it’s not a true present if you didn’t buy it with the person in mind. This gift was technically a regift, from me to myself, and from myself to my mother.

  I concluded: I definitely should not give her the necklace. And yet I still couldn’t firmly commit. I changed my mind daily. I thought, She’s turning seventy—does she really want an old necklace? Wouldn’t she prefer something more fun and modern? If I give her this necklace, won’t I offend her by implying that she’s no longer young enough to wear fun and modern jewelry? I thought, I’m a vintage-wearing person, but she is not a vintage-wearing person. Maybe the objects of dead people freak her out. I thought, If I like it, she probably won’t like it, because we don’t have the exact same taste in jewelry. I have given her jewelry in the past that I’ve never seen her wear (and that I would wear), and she’s given me jewelry in the past that she would wear (but that I never would). By this logic, I should not give her the necklace. Except that I didn’t ever wear the necklace. This suggested that she would like it and thus I should give her the necklace.

  I did not give her the necklace.

  The night of her birthday dinner, I dressed up. Because I was still uncertain about my decision to keep the necklace, I wore it. I thought to myself, If she doesn’t comment on my necklace, it means she doesn’t like it, and I made the right choice. But I often compliment people on items of clothing they’re wearing because those items look great on them, not because I think they would look great on me. I compliment a woman on her ring when I can sense that she is proud of or excited to be wearing it. I want her to know that her positive feelings about herself are effectively communicated to me through the object transmitter she’s put on her body.

  If my mother complimented me on my necklace, it could mean that she herself desired to wear it, or it could mean that she appreciated how I wore it. If she said nothing, of course, this would mean unequivocally—she did not like it, not on me, not on her.

  We met for cocktails on the front porch as the child staff readied our table. My mother said, almost immediately, “What a pretty necklace!” I tried to divine how she meant this comment. It was pretty on me? It might have been pretty on her? I demurred. “It’s just some cheap thing I found at a vintage store.” It was cheap. But I was trying to make it sound less desirable to her, and also to reassure myself—I hadn’t been cheap when I’d failed to give it to her.

  Today I realized it was July 19. This hasn’t been the case in pretty much forever. For years I’ve gone days without knowing the date. I exist in relation to dates I’ve missed. Suddenly I am forty. Suddenly I was forty a long time ago.

  The same is true with minutes. The first occasion I had to notice minutes was when I worked briefly as a hostess in a restaurant. The owner was Lebanese; he spoke French and rode a motorcycle and told me that my outfits weren’t sexy enough for me to capably say, “Your table is ready.” I hated working there for many reasons, but mostly I hated my time responsibilities—I could never lose myself in the work; I could never look at my watch and be amazed that three hours had passed. Quickly passing time stressed me out, because if time passed too quickly then people wouldn’t have time to order dessert and time to pay their checks, and come time there would be no tables for the 8:45 reservations. I obsessively monitored the clock leading up to each seating—7:25, 7:26, 7:27, 7:29, 7:30. I never didn’t know what time it was, not for one single minute did I not know. This made the shift crawl by. One night lasted a week. I quit after two days. A few years later I heard that the owner was killed on his motorcycle.

  Once, however, I remember knowing what time it was for every minute, and yet this made time feel uncatchable, like a fistful of twenties the wind blew out of my hand. (This happened to me once. My first three years in New York, I lived on an avenue lined with factories and through which the wind tunneled at high speeds. This was also the only time in my life I had fistfuls of twenties because I worked, after quitting my hostess job, as a waitress paid with tips.) I’d met up with a friend in L.A. She lives in London, and at that point we’d e-mailed each other many times a day for a year, but we’d only seen each other twice, for about three days each. Nonetheless, we’d fallen into an intense friendship. We were so intense in L.A. that people mistook us for lovers. We drove to the desert for the weekend, and stayed at a very small spa hotel where all the rooms faced inward toward a thermal pool, and the high desert wind, though hot, blew through our rooms and made air-conditioning seem silly, or at least unhealthy, so we left all of the windows open. The wind was so strong it blew the water glasses off the table. It blew open our books and sped-read the pages. A marine from the local base, on leave with his wife, stayed in the room opposite ours. He liked me because I am blond and marine-friendly. He did not take to my friend, who is darkly elfin, androgynous, and wicked. We decided to mess with him. I had a very good time flashing my wedding ring and talking about my husband while rubbing my friend’s shoulders suggestively. Soon he started avoiding me. When I got into the thermal pool, he got out of it. The wind continued to blow. It blew through the days. It blew through the nights. Suddenly it was time to drive my friend back to the airport, and put her on a plane, and then probably I would not see her again for six months or even a year. On the way to the airport, she pushed to stop at a museum to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock. The Clock—some call it an art installation—is also a twenty-four-hour-long movie that’s a fully functional (and visual) timepiece. Every minute of a twenty-four-hour day is accounted for by a preexisting film clip, in which a clock or a watch appears (often during a dramatic moment, or what feels like a dramatic moment, in whatever film is being sampled—there is something breathless-making about time), showing the appropriate minute (1:22, then 1:23, then 1:25, and so on).

  I drove speedily—we didn’t have much time to see The Clock, and the more quickly I drove, the more time we’d have at the museum, but also the more quickly, it seemed, I’d be dropping my friend on the LAX curb. We arrived at the museum, parked, ran inside, discovered a terribly long ticket line, somehow located another not-so-terribly-long line, found a spot on a couch in the dark screening room, and watched. We’d decided beforehand that we had to leave at 3:45 for her to catch her flight. We passed our dwindling time together watching a visual representation of our dwindling time together. It confused my desire mechanism, and maybe rightly, because my desire mechanism was pretty confused. The movie made me so excited to see how the next minute (3:29, 3:30, 3:31) would be portrayed (what film clip would it be? Would I recognize it?), but I didn’t want the time to pass because then we’d have to leave, and then I’d have to say good-bye, and then I wouldn’t see my friend again for what felt like an eternity if measured by the time standards we encountered on that couch. Time crawled. Time flew. We broke our vow and stayed until 3:58.

  Today I ordered ten toy stethoscopes from a party supply company. I did this over the phone. Toy stethoscopes did not seem to be the sort of items that, if you ordered them online, would come. I often order things online that fail to come. I ordered a birth tub once. It disappeared in Tennessee. I tracked it like an air traffic controller does a plane that vanishes over the Bermuda Triangle, a series of regular blips that suddenly, like a heartbeat, stop. This was a very large item, not the sort of thing one could easily lose. Nor, though expensive, did it seem to be massively desired yet under-available. There is not a black market infrastructure built around birth tubs. Yet no one could account for the
birth tub’s whereabouts. My birth tub had dematerialized in transit.

  This happens to me quite a lot, as I’ve said. Sometimes I’ll place an order online and make my husband click the CONFIRM PURCHASE button, because he is confident and believes in ways that I don’t, whereas the online commerce universe can sense my faithlessness. When I order things online, I am expressing my desire for an item I have never touched or experienced as a 3-D object, and to trust in the process requires the suspension of something I cannot fully suspend, even though I understand perfectly how online commerce works. As the object travels from the warehouse to me, it gains matter. Presumably it gains matter. But because I am faithless, my objects do not.

  So I wanted to talk to an actual person about the stethoscopes. Conversations with strangers are so touching and intimate these days. Maybe it’s simply that any conversation with a stranger, since such conversations are more and more rare, represents something you almost didn’t do. I almost didn’t call you about toy stethoscopes. Every item I’ve ever bought online represents a conversation with a stranger I didn’t have. It’s only when the system fails that you talk to people. Or exchange heated e-mails. I once bought some boots online that didn’t fit, and I tried to return them, but I no longer had the original box. Because I no longer had the original box, I could not return the boots. I engaged in a lengthy e-mail discussion about this box. The box was worthless—it cost maybe two dollars at most—while the boots cost five hundred dollars. I had never before spent close to this amount of money on any article of clothing; this made me panic, and then become deranged. I wrote the online seller many deranged e-mails. Why should the boots become worthless because of a two-dollar box?