The Folded Clock Read online

  I trailed my husband. I continued our heated dispute to which only I was party. In my head I said to him: Does having two one-quarter Jewish children give me rights to a Jewish connection? Did the failure in the 1970s of Portland, Maine’s WASPiest law firm to hire my father, maybe because he was presumed to be Jewish (“How was your holiday?”) give me rights to that connection? What about the fact that my best friend in graduate school so believed I was Jewish that she mocked me for being a Jewish denier, and would pick up from my desk the old daguerreotypes of my just-off-the-boat-in-nineteen-oh-whatever relatives on my mother’s side, the schnozzy Dabelsteins, and point at them and say, grinningly, and with fake credulity, Not Jewish!, and then point to photos of my dark-haired father and dark-haired brother and exclaim with the same expression and intonation, Not Jewish! The name “Julavits,” as she likes to point out, is doubly Jewish. My name, she says, is basically Jewjew.

  I followed my husband into the dining room. Aptly, the question of defining Jewishness was a primary preoccupation of the Wannsee Conference. The conference minutes are basically dedicated to solving the problem of who counts as Jewish, who only partially counts as Jewish, and who does not count as Jewish at all. Proposals for determining the sub-, and sub-sub-, and sub-sub-sub-“degrees” stretched, under glass, on side-by-side typed sheets of paper, the circumference of the large room. For example:

  (2) TREATMENT OF PERSONS OF MIXED BLOOD OF THE SECOND DEGREE

  Persons of mixed blood of the second degree will be treated fundamentally as persons of German blood, with the exception of the following cases, in which the persons of mixed blood of the second degree will be considered as Jews:

  (a) The person of mixed blood of the second degree was born of a marriage in which both parents are persons of mixed blood.

  (b) The person of mixed blood of the second degree has a racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew.

  (c) The person of mixed blood of the second degree has a particularly bad police and political record that shows that he feels and behaves like a Jew.

  In my head I argued my case to my husband: all of my fully Jewish friends think I’m Jewish! (2c, “behaves like a Jew”). Some of my nearest relatives appear to be Jewish! (2b, “racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew”). The first guy who ever went down on me was Jewish! (Certainly this “deportation”-worthy transgression was covered somewhere in the minutes.)

  Afterward, my husband and I biked to the grocery store. I was feeling excluded, still, and wanted to address that feeling of exclusion by highlighting how totally not Jewish I supposedly was (wasn’t?), and how far apart from one another my husband and I were on this date. I tested; I poked. I remarked on the malevolent stylishness of Hitler, and that I understood how people were (to tragic ends) seduced by his aesthetic bombast and precision. My husband said that Hitler’s aesthetic didn’t appeal to him at all. By this he was saying (I thought) that he was better than those people who found it seductive. That he was better than me, because I claimed to understand how a person, back in the day, might, at their peril, be seduced.

  I cited the many scholarly books written on Nazi style by people who were smart and knowledgeable; on the basically irrefutable intellectual proof that the Nazis were aesthetically intoxicating, to which he said, quite innocently and also correctly, “I just don’t think that anyone would join the Nazis because of the way the party looked.” At which point (we were now in the berry aisle at Kaiser’s, our local supermarket chain) I blew. I said, Of course I wasn’t saying that people joined the party just because they liked the uniforms and the fucking interior decor. I accused him of reducing everything I said to the claims of a simpleton; that he refused to have a conversation with me, or a discussion with me, that he was only interested in staking out his belief territory, and in so doing relegating me to a belief territory that was boneheaded and morally weak (I might have been seduced!). I was trying to talk to him and to emotionally engage with him (by attacking him, but whatever); he, meanwhile, just wanted to tell me who he was, or who he’d have been, in the face of Hitler. He was defining himself apart from everyone, but especially apart from me.

  My husband was totally surprised, as he often is when I explode like this. I tend to give no hint of disturbance until I am massively and performatively disturbed. He was also mortified that this fight should be happening in Kaiser’s, and within earshot of many English-speaking Germans. He said in a low voice, “Please, let’s not fight about Hitler.” (The other day he said to me, “Please, let’s not fight about military time.”)

  I countered that this “fight” had nothing to do with Hitler; that he’d started behaving like an intellectual separatist while we were talking about movies in the Conference house gardens. I told him I had been really insulted when he’d told me what the movie we’d watched many times together was “about.”

  “I know what that movie’s fucking about,” I said.

  As he must do in these situations—What else is there to do save divorce me? I really did pick a fight with him the other day about military time—he approached me calmly. He tried to offer an honest, outsider perspective. He promised that he hadn’t committed any of the crimes I’d pinned on him. He said, quite objectively, “I think you’re just looking for reasons to be offended.”

  He really did not offer this observation accusatorially. He offered it kindly, as an explanatory diagnosis that might provide me some relief. It didn’t give me relief, but it did give me pause. Was I looking to be offended? I knew I was in a terrible mood. A terrible yet officially documented spousal mood. At the admissions desk at the Wannsee Conference house, my husband whispered that he’d been invited to speak at the Wannsee Conference, and I’d missed the joke entirely. My response was: Really? He’d been invited to speak there, too? And I hadn’t been? I wanted to say to him: I’m not looking to be offended. I’m really not looking. It’s just that when I opened my eyes today, offense was all that I could see.

  Today I tried out a new space in the library because my old space, the one with the catwalk, is going to be ruined. Not according to the loud librarians who, in an officious pack, roamed the room and pointed out its flaws. To them, this room will not be ruined; it will be improved. The librarians have tacked a sign to the bulletin board explaining their intentions. “The catalog has not been updated since 1985,” says this sign, “and information in the catalog becomes increasingly inaccurate and obsolete every day.” The card catalog is a threat to truth and relevance! It is a constantly intensifying, present-tense menace! It becomes. It does this every day.

  Now I am in a different catwalk, one threatened only by obsolete books. I have read many of these books; I seem to have landed in the women’s studies nook of the Dewey decimal system. HQ 1236.5–HQ 1665.15 are my coordinates. I was a women’s studies minor in college. I can’t recapture what made me want to study women, but I remember wanting to do so from my very first semester. I tried to convince a friend from my dorm to take a class with me. I was scared to do it alone. “Fuck no,” she said. “I hear women touch each other in those classes.” She was hyperbolic, this friend, tall and mouthy. She’d go on to play rugby, and do heroin, and marry a scruffy mountain genius, and raise chickens in the city.

  I signed up anyway. On the first day of class, everyone already knew everyone. My solitude was conspicuous. Minutes after I sat down, the woman behind me began playing with my hair. She ran her fingers through it. She began to braid it.

  After I recovered from my surprise (and the annoyance that I’d have to admit to my friend, you were right), I found her attention so relaxing. This woman was welcoming me in the way that women welcomed all newcomers into the women’s studies cult. Braiding a newcomer’s hair was a time-honored ritual, I’d probably soon learn, practiced by the Native Americans (for whom our college was founded, in part, to educate) to initiate strange women into their tribes.

  I turned to thank h
er.

  The woman blanched.

  “Oh my God,” the woman said, horrified. “I thought you were Daphne!”

  Her embarrassment yielded to suspicion. What kind of person lets a total stranger braid her hair for five minutes without saying anything? I was so not a feminist! I’d let any old person touch my body! I would endure the invasion in silence! I would probably even enjoy it!

  I don’t think this woman and I ever spoke again during the two years we occupied the same small campus. There’s no recovering from certain shames.

  But this Daphne person I might have been. I didn’t know Daphne at the time. I would soon find out how totally not-Daphne I was. Daphne was the Gwyneth Paltrow of our school. She was white-blond and grew up on Park Avenue and attended an expensive private girls academy and was a lesbian. Her lesbianism did not appear to be about desire or preference, but probably neither would her heterosexuality be, if she practiced it. She was beautiful without seeming to suffer the needs of a body. She was ascetically thin with an expressionless face that might seem sociopathic or enlightened, depending. She ran feminism on our campus like Tilda Swinton ran her Utopian island community in the film adaptation of The Beach. She was everything I wanted to be in 1986, so I was flattered to be mistaken for her. Now I’m embarrassed that Daphne was the person I most wanted to be mistaken for. Since 1986 my desires have been updated quite regularly—on a daily basis, even. Does this constant updating make me more or less accurate and obsolete? I am not sure.

  Today I was making breakfast when a man floated past my window. I hadn’t slept well. It was all I could do to feed the people in my home. My brother, who is staying with me because he has no electricity in his house and likely won’t for many more days, said, “They’re doing something to your tree.”

  This was very bad news. Since the hurricane took down half our tree last week, the half that remained possibly wasn’t doing well. I’d convinced myself that its health, or people’s perceptions of its health, said more about the perceiver than it did about the tree. The trunk had once forked into two segments pointing north and south. The northern segment was gone; the southern segment, lacking its counterweight, might possibly be listing at a more acute angle to the sidewalk. I’d stood beneath it daily and tried to ascertain whether this listing was real or imagined.

  “I wouldn’t stand under that tree,” an old lady said to me one afternoon.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “It’s going to fall over,” she said. She was optimistically pessimistic, the way old people in New York can be.

  “It just looks like it’s falling over because half of it’s gone,” I said.

  You also look like you’re falling over, I wanted to say to her. You’re lucky people on the sidewalk aren’t assessing your survival chances.

  “It’s always been this way,” I said.

  “Really?” she said. “It always touched this building?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s my building. Those are my windows. It’s always touched my windows.”

  The woman shrugged. She wasn’t going to quibble with the so-called expert. But she wasn’t altering her opinion. This tree was coming down.

  The airborne man started up his chain saw. I abandoned breakfast. I took the elevator downstairs to talk to the tree crew. The worker guarding the sidewalk confirmed: the old lady had been right.

  I returned to the apartment. I didn’t think twice about breaking down in front of my brother; he regularly, when we were kids, witnessed me losing my shit over a misplaced pencil or a lost shoe, objects that solicited my grief more intensely than did the death of our family pets. Still, he hasn’t seen me cry like this in thirty-five or more years. I called my husband (he was in Maine). He professed shock over the tree’s total removal. “That seems unnecessarily brutal,” he said.

  Outside the window, the dismemberment began. They removed the limbs one at a time; they fed each limb into the chipper.

  “Maybe we should all go to a park,” my brother suggested. My brother is a formal fellow. He’s not often outwardly emotional but he is always very empathic.

  Of course we couldn’t go to the park. We owed it to our tree to stay. I took photos of the view out our window that would never again be the view out our window. I documented the stages of disappearance. Its total gone-ness looming, I returned to the sidewalk to ask the crew if they would give us a round of the trunk. “So my children and I can count the rings,” I said. “They’re just so broken up over the loss of our tree.” My children didn’t give a shit about the tree and its rings. But I figured the crew would be more willing to override whatever rules the city had against handing out tree parts to civilians if they believed the solace and education of children were at stake.

  I carried the trunk round upstairs. It was really heavy. My brother and I examined it. “How do you know which marking is a ring?” he said.

  My idiot brother. I swore we’d counted tree rings as kids; we had a dead tree in our backyard that had always been dead, dead and even barkless, and yet we’d hung a swing from it and used it like a regular alive tree until it leaned dangerously and we had to cut it down. We’d counted the rings on the stump, or that’s what I recalled.

  He was right. The rings weren’t clearly demarcated. So many activities that I remember being easy and self-evident when I was a kid turn out not to be. I tried to do tombstone rubbings recently. I tried to lift newspaper print with Silly Putty. I tried to make a Christmas ornament out of a burr and cotton balls and toothpicks. All attempts failed; each failure sent me running to the Internet for answers. How had we managed to do tombstone rubbings without a discussion forum determining what kind of paper works best, what kind of charcoal? How had we successfully made pathetic-looking Christmas sheep?

  I refused to consult the Internet about tree rings. “When the wood dries,” I said, “we’ll be able to see the rings.”

  My brother shoved his laundry into bags. He shoved his kids into coats. He planned to return to his cold house to tough it out for a few more nights. He and I grew up in a cold house; we are used to sleeping in cold houses. Still, he seemed melancholy. He talked about wanting to throw a proper party for his son, whose birthday fell on the second day of the power outage, before they’d relocated to my apartment. Also they had just moved back east from California and didn’t know many people in their new town yet. When his son woke up on his birthday, my brother said, he waited patiently for the festivities to start. There were none. They had no electricity. They had no friends. Finally his son asked, “Where are all the kids?”

  My brother, half in his own coat, teared up. I don’t know that I’ve seen him cry for thirty-five years. Perhaps it is due to the rawness of the times that we’re made so sad by missed birthdays and dead trees. There’s an election in a few days and everyone’s on edge. Our city has escaped ruin, but for how much longer can we keep escaping? If another storm doesn’t level it, then a terrorist attack will. The sudden impassibility of the same downtown neighborhood has coupled attacks by humans with weather, past and potential, in our minds. I think we are all thinking: our days here are numbered. The old ladies are walking around making their optimistic pessimistic proclamations. This city’s coming down.

  Today I trespassed at twilight. Twilight is the ideal time for pretending you live somewhere you don’t. The sky guard is changing, security is relaxed, and everyone’s just had a cocktail. In the gloaming, there is slippage. In this particular gloaming, I pretended to live in a Maine summer colony that’s in my town. Maine has many summer colonies, most of them built at the turn of the last century, most of which resemble adult camps. Each house has a decrepit porch with hard wooden chairs in which relaxation is meant to occur. The words that spring to mind when I look at these cottages are “backgammon” and “wife-swapping” and “gin.” Families have been swapping wives over backgammon and gin for generations. They are heritage families, I suppose. I know some of these heritage families. Heritage families ten
d to fray, and fight, and go spectacularly broke. They fail to fix rotting sills or replace window screens. This adds to the charming unattainability of such properties. You cannot purchase a century of hostility and neglect; you cannot purchase houses in which first editions of 1984 and old family letters are left unprotected, even when the houses are rented to strangers, as many are, in order to fund the most urgent repairs and the paying of taxes. To care so little for history raises the value immeasurably.

  My friends are renting one of these houses; ergo we’d established a trespassing foothold. Just before the moon rose, we decided to walk to a nearby cottage we’d heard was for sale. My friends called it the Boston Marriage cottage because it was once owned by two women of independent means. We walked down the dirt lane carrying wineglasses so that we could pass as well as trespass. Open container strolls marked us as natives. We wondered about the origin of the term “Boston marriage.” Even though we had iPhones in our pockets, we preferred to hazard guesses. It would not be passing of us to Google a term we’d presumably used so many times without knowing what it meant that we no longer harbored any curiosity about its origin.

  The Boston Marriage cottage was located on Mandalay Lane. Mandalay! Colonialism was so predictable. Manderley, the name of the house in du Maurier’s Rebecca, seemed the shrewder and more literary fit, with its haunting of the new generation by the old, also its themes of passing and identity concealment. We were all the second Mrs. de Winter that night.

  There was no “For Sale” shingle in front of the Boston Marriage cottage, which made us wonder if it had been sold, or if it had never been for sale in the first place. My friend, who hails from a multigenerational family of landowners in a historic area outside of Philadelphia, assured us that a sign would be gauche, or an indication of financial vulnerability. Their neighbors in the colony would gossip condemningly. Who would bother selling such a worthless thing? Only the desperately desperate.