The Folded Clock

by Heidi Julavits

  Today we were in the Fourth of July parade again. Probably we wouldn’t have gotten our asses in gear were it not for the vengeful motivator of last year’s loss. Or rather our Second Place Tie distinction that was, yes, so much more insulting than a total failure to be recognized. From the moment we tied for second place—literally minutes after we were bestowed with this dodgy honor, and handed a twenty-dollar bill—we’d enlisted the children in a small-fry smear campaign against the judge. I taught them about village politics and corruption; I taught them how to read between the lines of a local Xeroxed newspaper reported and written by a single home-schooled eleven-year-old boy, in which it was stated that, “the crowd cheered most enthusiastically for the Dolphin Rescue float, involving children in doctor coats rescuing a sick dolphin. First place was awarded to the Farmers Market float.” Could they hear the unspoken allegations of corruption?

  The kids dutifully took up the cause. Their whispered accusations apparently made it back to the judge, who (because the job is so politically thorny) tried not to be the judge this year, but no one else would take his place. Again on the morning of the Fourth, riding a mountain bike and wearing an American flag button-down shirt, he corralled the Model Ts and fire trucks and motley acts into line by the Odd Fellows Hall.

  Our float this year was Maine-themed, involving tourists and black flies. We got a standing ovation by the general store (or the standing ovation equivalent of already-standing people). After us came another float. A bunch of lobsters in bathing suits boiled tourists in big pots while reading Cooks Illustrated. My friend said, “Shit, that’s really good.” We knew we’d never beat this float, but we didn’t really care. They deserved the win. We wanted the deserving to win! That was the important takeaway for the kids. Let the deserving win even if those people, this year, are not us.

  But the deserving didn’t win. We won. We beat the better float. Which was confusing at first, because it was explained to us, when we worried to a stranger about the goodness of the really good float, that we weren’t a float, we were a “walking act,” and so we would be judged in a different category.

  Then we won first prize in the float category.

  A bit of on-the-spot research revealed—the judge gave the “walking act” first prize to the color guard, a crew of octogenarians in uniform, because one of the color guard members suffered a small cardiac event while waiting for the parade to start. When you cheat death, was the judge’s thinking, you deserve a prize.

  I had no issues with this.

  But the poor judge, still bruised by the bad chatter we’d initiated via the kids over the past year, and not wanting to endure another winter of child-fueled rumors about his fraudulence, decided to reclassify us as a float so that we could win, and so that we would leave him the fuck alone. And so we won. And so the other float, the really much better float, didn’t win.

  The children, meanwhile, were jubilant; they felt the cosmos have been righted. I don’t know how to explain that sometimes, in the righting of things, there are occasionally more wrongings. Last year I was all about lessons. This year, I’m all about silence. I don’t even know what the lesson is this year. That unfairness is actually fairness in disguise, or fairness is unfairness in disguise? That the squeaky wheel gets the grease? None of this is news to me. But I want these lessons, for a little bit longer, to remain news to them.

  Today I examined the Rolodex I found at JFK. I flipped it around and around. The photos tumble over themselves like the individual letters and numbers of train departure signs at Penn Station. Blink, blink, blink. The Rolodex is a clock that runs forward and backward. There’s an order but there’s no predetermined point of entry. I can enter at the car accident or the marriage of the daughter or the party in Palm Beach or the marriage of the parents or the club fire or the motel pool or John as a baby or John as an adult or John as a hippie driving to California. I can enter at the midpoint and work my way back around. The Rolodex resets at whatever point I decide—this is where it all begins.

  I might start reading books this way.

  As of yet I have not Googled this Rolodex family. I know their last name. If my last name were more WASPy it might sound like theirs. Maybe they removed their its in the night. Maybe they are Turkish apples and related to me. I haven’t Googled them because I’m enjoying what I don’t know as my means of knowing them. I’m trying not to miss the photos that slipped out of the Rolodex in the trash can, meaning there exist a few captions (on the white paper backgrounds) with no photo to accompany. What image belongs to “Four Generations of Men” or “Front of Inkpot, Apaquogue Rd”? What image belongs to “Home from Belgrade after Op. in June”? I can see the shape of the image—the browned outline of the square it once occupied—but inside the frame it is blank. Maybe I will meditate upon that space, as I am meant to meditate upon the face of the Madonna del Parto should I wish to change my outcome.

  (By the way, I am certain it was John who threw away the Rolodex. John was the sibling who took the Rolodex to the airport and tossed it in the rubbish bin. John, goateed and wearing a poncho on the Pacific Coast Highway. John, a baby in a snowsuit, petting a lamb.)

  I am missing my grandmother right now. The family in the Rolodex spent winters in the same small Florida town as my grandmother, and during the same decades. Since my grandmother knew everyone, I am certain she would have known these Rolodex people. She suffered from accuracy. If she pronounced a person “dreadful,” you could bet they were, and in ways invisible to most eyes.

  I am also missing a person I know only from a book. The book has ended. I finished it. Based on this new way of reading, I thought perhaps I could rescue the book, a diary, and its author, from finitude. The diary was written during World War II by a Russian émigré named Maria “Missie” Vassiltchikov. Missie was such a sensible person; she reminded me of my grandmother. She persevered with normal life even when nothing was normal. She remained clear-eyed; she spoke the plain truth. (“I saw that the lorry was loaded with loosely tied sacks. From the one nearest to me a woman’s legs protruded. They still had their shoes on but, I noticed, one heel was missing.”)

  Missie rationed her food and I rationed her. I read one diary entry a day so that Missie and I could hang out for longer. When the diary was over, I was so sad to say good-bye to her. She’d been my compatriot and tour guide throughout the four months I lived in Berlin. But I, too, was leaving. I was returning home. Missie’s diary ended in the manner of a Victorian novel.

  MONDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 1945

  Drove back to Johannisberg via Bad Schwalbach through the beautiful forests of the Taunus. The silence is total there, the sense of quiet and peace pervasive….

  Here my diary ends.

  (About this time, I met my future husband, Peter Harnden.)

  During our last days in Berlin, I’d look up at twilight and see jet trails. Tons and tons of jet trails. They were sky paths pointing to elsewhere. I always notice jet trails when I am about to leave a place. My imminent departure is marked for me overhead. I see jet trails toward the end of each summer when we’re soon to leave Maine; I saw jet trails at the end of my first marriage. Once I saw clouds that looked like jet trails. I’d been in Boston attending a therapy session with my best friend (this was before she switched to the guru). She was trying to forgive me and I was trying to forgive her. My friend told the therapist that I was cheating on my first husband, and the therapist, knowing my less-than-happy marital situation, replied, Good for you. Her approval made me feel so much worse. It was not good for me to lie every day. I was stressed; I’d surprised myself by turning out to be a different person than I’d thought I was. It was measurably not good for me to be having an affair. But apparently she knew something I did not. I left the therapy session and got into my car to drive an hour south to cheat on my first husband with my future husband. Through the windshield I noticed the jet trail clouds leading me south. I had no idea at the time that I would one day marry this man. But I do
remember thinking, I am driving home.

  Today I went to the Grand Central Oyster Bar at midday. I was feeling lost and this bar is like a church. The ceiling is a series of arched brick vaults; at the entrance to the bar is a whispering gallery like the one in St. Paul’s cathedral in London (or so I’ve read; I have never been). I’ve spent many winter days standing in front of this entrance when it is too cold to be outside but you must go somewhere or lose your mind. Because we can get to this underground church by barely touching the outside air, i.e., we can practically take our elevator to the subway beneath our building that, with one change, leads us here, this is where we come. Often on a January afternoon you will find me whispering into one stone corner while my children push their heads into the opposite stone corner and whisper back. We never have much to say to one another except Hello and Can you hear me? But this is mostly what is whispered in churches, too.

  No children accompanied me today. They were in school; it was lunchtime for them. It was whatever time for me. I sat at the bar and ordered a drink and thought that this bar in fact less resembled a church than it did a crypt. I eavesdropped on my neighbors, a pair of businessmen. The one with the British accent said, “It’s brilliant how they’ve put those monitors in the subway that tell you when the next train will arrive,” to which the one with the American accent replied, “What does it matter? The train comes when it comes.”

  After a drink I felt much better. I walked down Park Avenue and decided that I was on a spiritual quest. Since I’d failed to find a guru to follow, maybe I needed a god. I entered a church, an actual church, but I couldn’t seem to get past the gift shop. I considered buying an academic book on spirituality, then I considered buying a pop culture book on spirituality, then I noticed, across the street from the gift shop a restaurant called Le Relais de Venise. I’d never seen this restaurant before, though I’ve lived twenty years in this city. Just the sight of this restaurant made me afraid. It took me back to that semester in France, which was also my first time out of the country. I’d been dreaming, as I’ve said, of going to France for years, in fact I’d pestered my parents (neither of whom had been to Europe) so regularly that my mother, when she put me on the plane, said, with pride and sadness, “I always thought I’d get to Europe before you did.” She didn’t, which was why I felt so terribly that I’d had no fun. I’d found Paris typified by these Le Relais de Venise-type brasseries, the lamps polished to a cornea-stabbing sheen and the red pleather upholstery and the wryly indifferent vibe, like maybe Sartre was the manager. I remember drinking vanilla tea in these brasseries and everything stunk of old tobacco smoke and there was never a sun in the sky, only a horizon-wide tarp that lifted slightly to allow the light in at noon and then lowered again at three p.m., returning the city to gloom. This wasn’t happening now—until suddenly, again, it was. The Relais de Venise, this catalyst of remembered Parisian despair, started to infect New York. I imagined Lexington Avenue as a street in Paris, and this formerly familiar point of geography unpinned itself from the familiar and suddenly I was standing in the middle of a strange city, with no idea what came after this street, where it led, and how it connected to the bridge that connected to the highway that connected to the street where I’d grown up. How much of my daily life in New York, even now, is made possible by the fact that I have, in my head, a clear map to take me back?

  And yet. An innocence is lost when the path becomes too clear. I still remember the first time I ever came to New York. I’d wanted so long to escape from Maine and finally, for the length of an April vacation, I did. I rode into town on a Greyhound bus, alone. I was eleven. The bus pierced the outmost rim of the city, it seemed, an hour before we reached Port Authority. By the time we unloaded at the gate, I felt I’d been wound downward into the gears of a sooty clock. I would never find my way out. I felt spooked and happy at the thought of being so lost. Now I am never lost in New York. Whatever mastery I feel is instantly undone by the suspicion that I have ruined my capacity for awe.

  Speaking of awe. A few days ago—I am spinning time now (it is ten months later than “today”)—I was in Rome with my family for the children’s school vacation. I had not been to Rome in twenty-five and a half years. The last and only time I’d been to Rome had been in the spring of 1988, after my semester in France. I’d been reunited with the boyfriend whom I’d imagined dying every night before I fell asleep. It was spring, and we’d lain on a grassy hill near the Piazza del Popolo, and watched dogs chasing one another, and we felt the thrilling expansiveness, or at least I did, of our futures.

  This was my expansive future. I was in it. My boyfriend was not. My children by a different man, though soaked and cold, were uncomplaining as we walked past this same grassy hill. Our family, though we ought to have been cursing the wet skies, was happy. I should have felt mastery over the weather and also the many fates and also over myself, but instead I felt nothing. I experienced, as I passed that same slope, not a single trace of that girl. She was no longer—because it was cold and wet and almost three decades later—lying in the grass. I wanted to show myself and say to her, “This will be you someday!” She might have been relieved to know—it all worked out. But we could not connect. It felt like losing a child. Not to death but to adulthood. I suppose this is more or less what happened to her. She lost herself to me.

  Speaking of lost. I seem to have lost “today.” Now it is six months earlier than it was when I started this entry. I am in Maine, and it is a year since I began this book, and I am trying to finish it. I have just spent the weekend with my parents. I am convinced that it is impossible to temporarily visit people with whom you used to permanently live. We cannot tap back into the old ease of cohabitation. We try and we try, and I don’t want to call these attempts futile, because for every million misses there exists a single success. I had a success five days ago. I rowed to an island with my father and my son. My son ignored us—he set mussel shells afloat and then sunk them with a raining hell-fire of pebbles. My father and I, meanwhile, admired the rocks balanced atop other rocks. In Maine, on islands, rock manipulation is a form of tagging. We were here. The rock manipulation feats of our predecessors were daunting, almost spooky. They were supernatural acts of object levitation. A tall, thin rock balanced on its narrowest point, like a saltshaker on a pile of salt. I thought we could never practice this variety of beach sorcery, but we tried and we did. We were either extremely skilled or what we were attempting was not, despite appearances, very hard. Regardless, the activity consumed us. My father and I, we walked along the shoreline and searched for rocks. We tried to find the right combination of hollow here and jag there. Though we’d never before performed such precarious and optically illusory balancing acts, the activity felt familiar to us both. I had spent many summer days as a kid trying to lose myself to fun on islands. My father had spent many summer days—and winter days, and fall and spring days—trying to lose himself to fun with me. We were at the mall. We were spinning tops. We were drilling downward. The disappearance of the invisible but present object—time—is how we fall back into love with people we never, according to language at least, stopped loving. E. B. White once wrote, “The whole problem is to establish communication with one’s self.” Sometimes the self I return to loving belongs to me.

  But to return to “today.” The today when I was in Manhattan. I walked back to the church gift shop. I almost bought the academic book on spirituality, but then I realized I would never read it, and that I would feel bad both for wasting money and for failing to pursue what others pursue so passionately and with such discipline. I stood on the subway platform and wondered, when would I become a regularly, rather than erratically, spiritual person? Probably never. One cannot orchestrate an aperture. One cannot plan a feeling. One can plan for other things, however. One can plan for trains.

  The best I could manage, on this day, was to plan to plan for the unplannable. I had to have faith that someday I’d be doing rock tricks on beaches wit
h my father and my son. I did not know at that time that I’d be doing this in exactly 166 days. Such math was not available to me on that platform and likely never will be available, but who can say anymore what we’ll someday easily know. Instead of reading the spirituality book I didn’t buy, I watched the countdown on the monitor. Like the British guy in the Oyster Bar, I found this improvement brilliant. I had no uncertainties about time this time. I knew exactly when my train was coming.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Heidi Julavits is the author of four critically acclaimed novels (The Vanishers, The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Mineral Palace) and coeditor, with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Short Stories, among other places. She’s a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan, where she teaches at Columbia University. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine.