The Folded Clock Read online

  Also I did not tell my friends, but to myself I admitted: I was jealous. I was jealous of Dr. Fuhrman, the man who masterminded the diet my husband is following. My husband seems to believe most everything Fuhrman says, and this affronts me because my husband doesn’t believe most everything I say. My husband approaches my claims with a loving but skeptical eye. He doesn’t not question what I say, but occasionally he believes certain ridiculous statements I make because I have probably exhausted him into a place of acceptance. Fuhrman’s claims do not exhaust my husband, even though Fuhrman advocates something called “the Nutritarian Food Pyramid,” which sounds to me acceptable only under circumstances of extreme exhaustion. Also my husband is not as sensitive as I am; he does not understand the title of Fuhrman’s book—Eat to Live—as just so bitchy and rebuking.

  “Because I’m eating to die,” I said to my husband.

  My husband is an alarmingly smart man; he’s a unique thinker to his bones. He is, as a friend once said, a monk or a holy person who might better live in a tower or the desert. He thrives on discipline and solitude. Despite the fact that he has a family and a job and a wife who is always planning parties that he must cook for and attend, he manages to maintain his iconoclastic integrity. Most remarkably he can, without compromising this integrity, happily follow the occasional diet mastermind like Dr. Fuhrman. He has followed a few masterminds since we got married (these are not whimsical switches; he keeps up on the research and responds in kind). While I take pleasure (when I’m trying to reason him out of his health pursuits) in pointing out how, for example, he is able to endorse the belief “fruit is bad, never eat fruit,” and then, after a mastermind shift, “fruit is great, eat as much fruit as you want,” what I’m really expressing is insecurity. He can weather a belief reversal—one based on science, granted—without doubting the soundness of his faith or his mind.

  I, however, am often insecure about what I believe. So, most of the time, is my husband. “Insecure” is maybe not the right word to describe us. We are avid second-guessers because, though we are both professors and thus must act as authorities in certain situations, we find certainty a turnoff. We love to take a conviction we might, for a moment, entertain, and then turn it on its head and make a joke about it. This joking is our form of the Socratic method. Our jokes are interrogations that help us to figure out what we care about, and where our faith, at the moment, lies.

  His unfailing certainty about his diet, thus, made me feel isolated. I was making jokes no one got but me. I was making jokes that weren’t, technically, jokes. They were criticisms driven by the fear that he was abandoning me to interrogate our future uncertainties alone.

  Still, I tried to act supportive. Today I failed. I failed to act my best or at all. As my husband prepared his healthy dinner, and I prepared my moderately healthy one, I had what is best described as a tantrum.

  Afterward I lay on the couch. My husband sat in a distant chair. I tried to explain why, when he was on a diet to manage his pain and secure his longevity—why, when he was trying his best not to more rapidly and miserably die—I was being so totally mean. I talked about how, as a woman, I’d spent literally decades around other women (myself included) who cared too much about food. Who obsessed over what they ate, and adhered to bib-lettuce-and-vinegar-only diets, and who became, over time, unhappy and sexless and dull. After watching for decades what I ate, I finally didn’t give a shit. I’d been freed from the female curse of perpetual self-dissatisfaction and pleasure denial. His caring about what he ate posed a threat to my enlightened, non-caring state.

  I then confessed that I was jealous of Dr. Fuhrman. I further confessed that really I did not give a shit about Dr. Fuhrman; my issues were related to my feeling excluded and subsequently rejected by my husband. He’d found a passion I could not share. He believed and I didn’t. Once we spent an entire summer making and eating elaborate banana splits. Now we prepared side-by-side meals. We parallel cooked and I couldn’t help but extrapolate that soon we would parallel live, and that our vectors would someday permanently cease to cross. It turned out that (contrary to what I’d said to my friends) I was scared of his leaving me, but I worried he would do so by never breaking up with me and never moving out.

  My husband listened. He confessed that he’d been unceasingly aware of my ambient enmity (my secret had not been such a secret, it seems). He understood, now that I’d explained myself, why. I think we are both worried about the perils of parallel living because we share so many parallels. We are so alike that we pursue the same passion and work at the same university and raise the same children and have the same sense of humor. At the dinner parties I force us to throw more often than is probably healthy for either of us, we are often the only two people laughing. No one makes me laugh more than he does. But we both worry, I think, that we are so alike that we might start to take for granted the health of our marriage, as we have, until recently, taken for granted the health of our bodies.

  Today I found a Rolodex in a trash can at JFK. I was about to enter the security check when I remembered the half-full water bottle in my bag. I needed to dispose of it before I held up the security line and became the scourge of Terminal B. I found a tall, space-age trash can. Its smoothly rounded mouth resembled a portal. Before throwing the bottle into it, I looked inside. I saw a Rolodex of family photographs. I was in a hurry and didn’t have time to wonder Why is there a Rolodex in the trash can at JFK? I only knew that the Rolodex made me feel bad to the bone. No matter what I decided to do with the Rolodex (return it to the trash can; keep it), I was in a bind. The statement “The situation demanded something of me” felt extremely applicable. How would I respond to the situation?

  Situations have demanded something of me before. Once, in my twenties, when I was studying in France, I was with a group of Americans approached by a con artist looking for money. The con artist, an American who was clearly not a student or a tourist, beseeched us, his fellow countrymen, for help. His wallet had been stolen! Also his father had died! He needed money to catch a train to his plane, which left from Paris tomorrow, and which he had to make so that he could attend his father’s funeral! Thank God I have found some Americans! He repeatedly said. We all knew the guy was conning us—he wore leather shoes in an era when Americans wore nothing but big white sneakers—but none of us wanted to be the first to call bullshit to his face. The situation demanded a choice. Who did we want to appear to be? To give him money was to appear stupid in front of our friends. To not give him money was to appear heartless. Most people, publicly at least, choose looking stupid over appearing heartless. Or most of the people I know would choose to look stupid.

  The Rolodex, like the fake American tourist, was a lose-lose situation that nonetheless demanded a choice. No one was around to publicly shame me, but I am perfectly able to shame myself. And worse—around myself it is not a matter of appearing to be stupid or heartless; instead I confirm to myself that I am definitively one or the other.

  To keep the Rolodex was to be stupid; to discard it was heartless.

  I kept it.

  In the security line, I worried. Wasn’t I a version of the gullible traveler who acts as an unwitting mule of illegality, i.e., the person who transports, as a kindness, a kilo of heroin hidden in a knitting bag for an innocent-seeming granny? If asked, how would I answer the question, Did a stranger give you anything to carry?

  The situation gave me a Rolodex. The situation demanded of me that I carry it.

  Maybe there was an explosive in the Rolodex. Maybe a suicide bomber suffered a crisis of faith or nerve at the security line and ditched the bomb and went back to Queens. Maybe the photos were acid tabs or coated with cocaine that, following a crafty extraction process, would yield enough to net me a life sentence in an Italian jail. (I was headed to Italy to go to the artist colony.) What if, while going through customs in Rome, a dog smelled the drugs on my Rolodex?

  It was already becoming my Rolodex.

  I m
ade it through security. If the Rolodex contained a bomb, it was a good bomb. Maybe, instead of cocaine, the photos were coated with a bioweapon designed to release at cruising altitude. I called my parents to say good-bye. (I hoped it wasn’t good-bye.) I told them about the Rolodex. My dad said, “Someone in those photos must have really pissed someone off.” I’d also considered this possibility; the cursedness I’d sensed originated from anger or hate directed at a person in the Rolodex photos. Somebody needed to release himself from these bad feelings. He’d thrown the photos away, betting on the psychic exorcism of a landfill burial.

  I’d screwed up the process. I’d kept live what should have been dead. Many of the photos had captions. Whoever chose the moments to be memorialized in the Rolodex was obsessed by accidents. There was a photo of a violently shredded white picket fence with the caption “Accident, 1965.” There were photos of trees upended in various hurricanes. There was a photo of the Maidstone Club after a fire destroyed the cafeteria. There was a photo of a road hugging a cliff. The caption read, “Dubrovnik, 1971: Accident going down this coast (to Greece),” after which appeared a photo of a man in a hospital bed (“Belgrade—Yugoslavia”) reading James Michener’s The Drifters.

  I countered my dad’s theory with what was—bombs and drugs and anger aside—the likeliest theory. Many of the photos were taken in nearby Long Island. Probably the owner of the Rolodex had recently died. The children—from the photos, I guessed them to be in their sixties by now—had flown in from wherever they lived to clean out the family museum, long docented by the lone surviving parent. Nobody wanted the Rolodex, but nobody could justify throwing it away. One sibling insisted to another sibling, “You take the Rolodex!” The situation demanded that the sibling not refuse. The sibling who took the Rolodex—it was heavy, and an awkward size, and the photos, in my bag at least, kept sliding out of their plastic jackets—had probably been struggling to find his or her ID to go through security, and the fucking Rolodex was in the way, and it had started to come apart, and in a fit of annoyance the sibling dumped it. He or she had been praying all along for a good excuse to get rid of the Rolodex, just like I’d been praying for an excuse to divorce my ex-husband years ago and was so relieved when he provided me one by spending our savings on the sly. He misbehaved in a way that would hold up in a court of public opinion. It would also hold up in my court of private opinion. I would not appear heartless to the court or to myself by divorcing him. The Rolodex had likewise misbehaved. The sibling was so relieved when it obstructed his basic ability to properly identify himself, find his ticket, and board a plane. He was so relieved to discover it was broken. In all good conscience, the sibling had probably thought to himself: Finally I am justified in ditching this thing.

  Today we went to a party where the food was very tiny. It is officially halfway through the summer and we are feeling out of scale. We’ve been drinking too much beer and eating too many jumbo bags of chips. Our shorts don’t fit. So my friend threw a miniature food party. We cooked tiny meatballs. Another guest made tiny BLT sandwiches. Problematically, the drinks were not tiny, and soon we were all really drunk. I talked all night to two women I really like but whom I don’t often encounter, even on our small peninsula. One is a doctor who lives in an electricity-free cabin and who is always spectacularly attired. Whenever I see her in the store buying batteries, she looks as though she’s just finished a clubbing jag in Marrakech. The other woman is the great-granddaughter of a famous stage actress. She, like me, lives in New York during the year. Despite our geographic synchronicities, we are not close. I think we have mutually agreed—we are just too busy right now to make a good friend from whom we cannot seasonally escape.

  The doctor was coming off a hard year. She’d been incessantly sick and stressed. She works so much that she never sees her children. She said she was considering a career change because she wanted to be a more present mother, and also less of a basket case. “My kids are all fucked up,” she said.

  I entered this conversation at the midpoint. Without the proper context, I probably misunderstood the famous stage actress’s great-granddaughter’s response. She said of children, “You really have to just live their lives if you want to be a part of them.” She could do this. She does not have a full-time job. (I arguably also don’t have a full-time job; I do have four or five half-time ones.)

  My first impulse was to express in my totally polite and agreeable way, Fuck off. I said, “You’re totally right about that,” but any mildly perceptive person would hear that I was really saying, Fuck off fuck off fuck off.

  But then I realized—my fuck off was a trained reaction. I am quick to rage when I think a person is implying that another person cannot be a decent mother if she has a consuming career. Because, in fact, I found that I agreed with the famous stage actress’s great-granddaughter. I’d recently come to the same conclusion. In the interests of my family, I’d been so unambitious recently. I’d barely written at all these past few weeks. For my family’s sake, I told myself, I’d lost my fire; I just wanted to lie around with my kids if they were home, and if they weren’t home I wanted to lie around and read essays written by a poet I’d met last month who I’d found too terrifying in person to befriend, but in print we could just hang out, she and I in my studio, and “chat” about, for example, theme.

  Whether or not I was being a better parent because of my ambition failure, I can’t say. But I really couldn’t disagree with the famous stage actress’s great-granddaughter’s point about living your children’s lives if you want to have any idea of what’s happening in them. Until very recently, I felt that I didn’t know anything about my children’s lives; this spring, my lack of knowledge started to alarm me. I regularly called my husband (when he was out of town, or I was out of town), and left him panicked messages. In hotel rooms, far from the family I no longer seemed to know, my anxiety was even worse. Our family—i.e., our children—became, at a distance, a handful of vaguely familiar people who happened to live in our house. Suddenly the people in our house were lazy and ill-mannered. The people in our house grew holes in their teeth. The people in our house owned no viable pants.

  The people in our house were my fault. Our fault, but really, my fault. I’m not being a martyr. I’m speaking realistically, in a manner reflecting the consensus reality of the situation. No men at this party were standing around talking about quitting their jobs so they could be a part of—sorry, live—their children’s lives. No men listening to these men were thinking defensively to themselves, Fuck off, or, after a moment’s reflection, You’re so right, actually. No men would be writing about these conversations tonight in their diaries. My husband would absolutely write about these issues in his diary tonight if he kept one. He worries about and buys all of our children’s clothing—the pants, the underwear, the sneakers, the socks. But to the greater world, these pantsless children reflect more poorly on me than they do on him. Women are responsible for the people in the family having pants.

  Later, in bed, my husband and I shared party notes. He told me that he’d been speaking to a man, and that this man spoke critically of another couple’s child, and that it was clear the man blamed the mother for her child’s bad behavior, not the father. The mother traveled for her work. So did the father travel for his work, but this did not seem germane to the matter of the child’s failure to be pleasing. I want to say that this man’s opinion arises because he’s from a different generation, but it’s more complicated than just age. He has a very smart wife who, after having children, did not have a full-time job; he also has two smart and well-educated daughters who, after having children, did not have full-time jobs. His opinion supports the decisions made by his wife and his daughters. Sometimes I don’t think any of us really believes anything we say; we are just defending our kind.

  Today I went drinking with a former student who asked me, “Are you proud of your hands?”

  I thought what a good question this was. As a professor, I am alw
ays struggling to ask good questions. How can a question be an invitation, not a test? Questions with answers make people scared. If you’re an up-rounder, 100 percent of possible responses to questions with answers are incorrect. The odds totally favor wrongness. Good questions can initiate a surprising wend toward an answer that is neither right nor wrong, but can be judged as strong or weak or honest or dishonest on the basis of the steps that brought the answerer there. It is a built thing. Sometimes what it builds is bullshit, but the bullshit can be so well-constructed that it has integrity, a pattern integrity. This can be worth admiring.

  I admitted I was proud of my hands, though this hasn’t always been the case. I used to hate my hands. Their fingers are short, the nails bitten. When anxious, I unthinkingly chew holes in my hands. Often I do this when I’m teaching or on a stage. I’ve been on a stage and chewed a bloody hole where once there was a cuticle, and have had to scramble to find a piece of paper with which to blot the flow. Occasionally, while teaching or on stage, I’ve had to suck on my finger to keep the blood from going everywhere.