The Folded Clock Page 21

  Today I rowed back from an island. We’d eaten dinner on this island, my friends and family and I. We’d collectively hauled a thousand pounds of food and gear to this island in order to survive three sunny hours on it. Ours was a motley August crowd—locals with roots that extended back many generations, locals who’d escaped from New York twenty years ago, an editor, an all-but-dissertation philosophy professor, a writer, an artist, two men who run silent meditation retreats in Mallorca and Nepal, three men named Ben, a lot of children. The party extended horizontally along the beach.

  The mood was light but also, inevitably, charged. Islands make people competitive, maybe because the subconscious fear of shipwreck and survival permeates even the most casual outing. Who will lead the masses when the weather turns and the food runs out? Who will be sacrificed to feed the starving useful people, the ones who can fish and make fires and sing morale-building sea shanties? I often contemplate my odds of surviving a shipwreck and how to improve them. When I was breast-feeding, I nurtured a lot of shipwreck fantasies. What if I were shipwrecked with my baby and ten adults on an island with a large box of Clark Bars? Wouldn’t it be best if I ate the Clark Bars and breast-fed everyone on the island, because my body would transform the worthless sugar into valuable fat and protein? Wouldn’t that prove to be the wisest survival strategy, and wouldn’t that guarantee I’d never be killed for food?

  I was no longer breast-feeding on this particular island trip; I had to prove my indispensability in other ways. So I swam and swam and swam. I could maybe dive for lobsters; I could maybe go for help—that’s what my eternal swimming said to the people sitting on the beach. I swam while others drank beer, and slowly realized that they, too, would have to swim, swim or maybe be killed. My individual survival was clearly essential to the survival of the group. Was theirs?

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people swim on an island trip before. The water is probably fifty-three degrees out there. Then, near hypothermic, we ate the food we’d brought, and not each other. We watched the sun set, and quelled our panic that we’d have to spend the night, because the boat wouldn’t start, or possibly it would sink. We loaded the scow with bags and people and transferred them to the lobster boat. I decided to row back to the mainland in a dinghy. I rowed with the artist and his squid-loving son. The son fished and caught a sandbar. His father bit the line loose with his teeth. As the moon rose, and the sun definitively set, and we were in darkness, I told them the true story of Boon Island. Boon Island is a long pile of rocks located six miles off the southern coast of Maine. In December 1710 a ship called the Nottingham Galley ran aground on this rock, which measured then and measures now three hundred by seven hundred feet. The fourteen survivors lasted twenty-four days during the winter. They did eat one another in order to pull off this astonishing feat.

  Boon Island, published in 1956, is a thinly fictionalized account of their endeavor written by Kenneth Roberts. Maine children are (or were in the ’80s) assigned to read Boon Island for English class. Should our own personal hardships overwhelm us, well, we should be thankful our feet weren’t turning to translucent sponges in our boots. I guess this was the lesson. Or maybe this is too clichéd an understanding of why we were assigned this book in English class. Buck up, etc. This is so prevalent an attitude in Maine that we didn’t need a formal education to learn it. The takeaway horror of Boon Island was far more existential. Yes, these men were freezing and eating one another, but the cruelest factor of their island internment was this: they could see smoke rising from the house chimneys ashore. As they suffered, they could watch the cheery proof of people warming themselves by fires and cooking food that wasn’t, an hour ago, a friend. That struck me as far worse punishment than simply being shipwrecked on a rock. It seemed an appropriate metaphor for being marooned in Maine as a kid—there was another world out there, you could watch it nightly on TV, but how could you reach it?

  On a windless night, without a current, the row from the island back to shore is an easy one. I was no longer proving my indispensability to the group; I simply wanted to take the slow way to shore under the half-moon, because summer is almost over, and these are the quiet, twilight moments that, if properly collected and preserved, help me survive the New York winter. I start amassing these moments during the final weeks of August. I must salt supplies for storage. They must last me until I can return to this place I angled for years to leave.

  Today my husband and I decided to rearrange our furniture. Our apartment has never looked right to me; probably we should hire an expert to fix it, but I am too proud. I am too convinced that I am secretly a decorating prodigy and to pay for professional help is beneath me. I understand that, with all of the money in the world, and all of the space, a person would require some help to sort through the infinite options available to her. I don’t have such problems. I like what I can afford. I like what fits. Within these narrower choice parameters, I usually choose well.

  In this apartment, however, my talents have been stymied. Five years after moving in I’ve yet to crack the code. The light, as I’ve noted, is an issue. The light comes from the wrong direction. The rooms are oddly shaped, and the walls are full of doors and windows. My husband tries to discuss with me what to do with the apartment—how we might better sit in it and walk through it—but I often grow testy with him when he broaches home improvement topics. I cannot explain why, save to say that my inability to properly inhabit this apartment feels like a personal failing; I am embarrassed that I need his help. When I disagree with where he wants to put a piece of furniture, I tell myself that he has a terrible sense of space (he doesn’t). He cannot eyeball a void, I tell myself, and understand what it is capable of accepting. He’ll suggest we put a bed against a wall that is, to me at least, obviously too short. He’ll insist, gamely, that we try it. I insist it’s pointless to try. I hate that I can’t just say, “Sure, let’s move that bed,” and let the bed be right or wrong. Let the objects in the house fail or succeed to fit in it, not me.

  Today I talked with an artist and a poet about luck. The artist (a man) is in his sixties; the poet (a man) is in his twenties. The artist is a cheerful curmudgeon, a man of years; the poet is sweetly irreverent, and still expecting, before he is too much older, his fame day. We started to talk about a book only two of the three of us had read. It soon became clear that the poet, though socially irreverent, was, in his mind and opinions, hard and unforgiving, while the curmudgeon was a man of great compassion. I was speaking in defense of this book, and the poet was speaking against it. He called the book “lucky”—as in, the writer had not been talented or deserving of his success. He’d been fortuitous; he’d stumbled into fame. This assertion made the artist come to the defense of the writer he did not know and the book he’d never read. He spoke sternly to the poet, like a father to his son of whom he is cautiously proud but also a little envious. “That’s a cheap shot to call a person lucky,” he said. “Everyone relies on luck to succeed.”

  It was lucky that he said this, because I’d been thinking about luck that day. I’d been writing an essay about my son’s birth for an anthology of birth stories. My son was born at home, and the midwife didn’t show. This isn’t exactly what happened; she showed, I sent her away, she went really far away, and by the time we called her back it was too late. Or almost too late. She arrived with roughly thirty seconds to spare.

  Afterward we were told that we were “stupid” and “lucky.” Stupid, I agree. But lucky? We weren’t lucky. We were really, really, really lucky. I would never claim not to be lucky. I am so fucking lucky that I am terrified of luck. I am terrified it will abandon me. I’m like the women in the Tuscan town where the Madonna del Parto is kept. I’m always lying down in the street to keep my luck from leaving. When I was a kid, in elementary school, I would try to divine the day’s luck forecast each morning with a yogurt pot. The pot was sealed with foil; if I could remove the foil without tearing it, the day would be a lucky one. If I
tore the foil, the opposite awaited me. I’d walk into the day braced against the hex. I still perform witchy meteorology with yogurt tops. It’s a habit I can’t shake. When the foil top tears I tell myself, It means nothing. I don’t believe myself for a second. When things are going badly, I scan my life for the cause. Often that cause can be sourced to an object. A material irritant. Once I bought what turned out to be a very bad luck ring in Morocco. Whenever I wore the ring, my paychecks were lost in the mail. My furnace malfunctioned (there’s a softly vengeful name for what happens when your furnace covers everything in your house with oily soot—puffback). Beyond-my-control bad luck, in other words. Metaphorical puffbacks happened all over the place. I’d put the ring aside and a few months later try again to wear it. Bad luck returned. It wasn’t enough to take the ring off my finger; after I returned it to its box, I had a bad luck hangover that lasted a week.

  Finally I took the ring to a psychic. I didn’t tell her why I wanted her to “read” my ring. I wanted to test her cold. She said, “I don’t like this ring for you.” She said it was “associated with an angry man.” I’d always assumed the ring had been cursed by whoever had made it, or possibly by the man who sold it to me. But her description sounded a lot like my ex-boyfriend, the one with whom I’d lived in Morocco. He was angry, I guess; in truth I usually attributed his moods—which were never wrathful or violent—to a case of depression. Regardless, I took the advice she gave me. She told me to wrap the ring in black paper and then again in tin foil. I hid it in the back of my closet. Why don’t I just throw it away? I don’t know why. For the same reason I could not, as a kid, throw away my broken lamp. One thinks a loved object is unique, unique to each human who loves it. But what is really unique is the unloved object. Or rather the unloved object confers uniqueness upon the person who fails time and again to love it and yet who still cannot throw it away.

  Today I tried to console my son. He’d gone to sleep and thirty minutes later he’d woken up crying. This happens sometimes—my husband and I think he’s down for the night, and then he awakens in a state. I don’t think there’s anything dangerously wrong with him—tonight he said his ear hurt. Last week he said it was his leg. He sobs and he writhes and he’s inconsolable, and we briefly consider calling the doctor, and then we don’t.

  This time I was resentful when he woke up in inexplicable agony because the day had been too long; there had already been too many phases. There was the cleaning phase, during which I organized lightbulbs and tossed modem cords and tried to put away the folded laundry. Then there was the Enforced Outdoor Fun phase, people dragged unhappily around the harbor on a kayak. Then there was the Local Culture phase, involving a trip to a historical society, which more or less looked like the interior of our barn, itself a historical society spanning many more centuries than the one we visited, because ours included deflated beach floaties and broken plastic sleds. Then there was the eating and drinking and socializing phase. Then there was the putting the kids to bed phase, and then the sitting on the couch and watching bad television phase—the phase of which it can sometimes seem all other phases are in service. Everything we do, we do so we can be sitting on this couch watching The Bachelorette.

  And then my son woke up.

  Soon it became clear that he could not be distracted from his misery fugue state. He would lie awake in his bed and contort and cry for probably an hour, and I would have to rub his back throughout. I tried not to act aggrieved that my final phase had been interrupted. That I was not on the couch watching man after man say, “I’m starting to fall in love with Desiree.” That I was not parsing with my husband the phrase starting to fall. Isn’t the point of falling that it has no prelude or warning, and certainly does not stretch out over the course of many ninety-minute episodes? That it simply happens? That you are suddenly on the ground, having already dropped from a higher altitude to a lower one? I thought of falling as akin to being tackled by a member of the Boston Women’s Rugby Club (this happened to me; I played rugby in college). Women so skilled you didn’t feel the transition from running to lying on your back. One second you were sprinting toward the try line; the next second you were staring at the sky. You were in love with Desiree!

  These were the important discussions I was missing while my son sobbed and sobbed. Every situation with a child that irks me, I try not to be irked by thinking: How many more irksome moments like this will I have? My son is four and a half. My hours of rubbing his back while he weeps are numbered. I moved my hand from his shoulder blades to his tailbone, and then I swooped it in reverse. Down up, down up; it was like sharpening a knife, or polishing a bowl. I tried to commit the movement to muscle memory. Whenever I am trapped in a situation, I think of how this entrapment might qualify as work. I am so worried about ever wasting time that I cannot let any small amount of it escape without defining for it a use or a purpose or extracting from it a lasting lesson. I tried to think of how this motion might, in the future, come in handy. I thought, If my son dies, I will sit at the shore, and swoop my hand like this back and forth over a smooth rock that has been warmed in the sun and feels humanlike as a way of remembering him. Then I thought this was melodramatic and gruesome. I thought instead: Maybe I’ll write a story in which a character’s son dies, and she could, as a means of coping, go to the shore and do this. Then I thought this was melodramatic and stupid. I thought instead: I must remember to do this when I am seventy. I must remember to find a rock that feels exactly like my son’s four-year-old back. I must remember to close my eyes and imagine that I am me again, a tired mother trying to teach herself how to miss what is not gone.

  Today my husband poisoned himself by accident, or this is what we fear. His was an honest mistake. We do not speak enough German to know what we’re buying at the market; we’ve been trusting our ability to identify objects by sight, i.e., without relying on labels and language. At an overpriced health food market, we saw a large bag of reasonably affordable almonds. We bought them.

  At home, we remarked on the incredibly almondy taste of these almonds. In Germany, everything tastes like an artificially amped-up version of itself. Raspberries taste strongly of raspberry, tomatoes of tomato, Heineken of Heineken, and so on. It made sense that the almonds would taste measurably more like almonds than the almonds we ate in the States. But these almonds were far tinier than almonds usually are; we became curious. What was up with these almonds? We decided to Google the word on the label: aprikosenkerne. The topmost hit was a website introduced by the following text (translated from the original German):

  Disease is not an accident, not even fate, and certainly not evil intention of the love of God. Disease is the result of our own homemade error on mental and physical level. Only if you are willing to correct mistakes by yourself, you are also ready to be healthy again.

  We were willing to correct mistakes! We were ready to be healthy again! We clicked another link that informed us: bitter apricot kernels were what we’d bought. Bitter apricot kernels, we learned from “the official website of vitamin B12” are no plain nut, and maybe not even a food; primarily they are a hotly contested alternative cancer therapy. According to some people, bitter apricot kernels are poisonous. They contain cyanide. Because of this, the recommended daily dosage is one to two nuts. My husband had eaten fourteen.

  I reasoned with him. I am committed to reasoning away his illness and his pain (in the same way that I am committed to reasoning him out of the diet beliefs he maintains for the sake of his health). I can expertly talk him out of experiencing what he believes he experiences and maybe even experiences.

  Fortunately, illness is almost always illogical. I exploit the holes.

  “It says here,” I said, reading from another website, “that while the UK believes consuming anything over two to three bitter apricot kernels means you’ll die of cyanide poisoning, the Hunzas…” Wait. Who were the Hunzas? They sounded like a sci-fi tribe of distant planetary origin whose digestive systems would not rese
mble our own. I did some quick rewriting in my head. “I mean, the people in, like, Afghanistan who harvest these nuts eat dozens and dozens a day.”

  This fact did not assuage either of us.

  “Look at this bag,” I said. I fake almost dropped it. The bag was so heavy! It weighed 500 grams! “If you could eat only two to three nuts a day, this bag would last ten years. Also why would they sell a bag this big without a warning?”

  Together we examined the packaging. There were a lot of words on the label, and, granted, we did not know what any of them meant, but, I reminded him, we knew what warnings looked like. There was nothing visually alarmist about the label at all. There was nothing to indicate that this was a bag of death. There were pictures of blossoms. Which I suppose could be meant in the funereal sense, the death-and-rebirth sense. I recalled a book about nuclear waste buried in a mountain, and how the waste’s deathly potency would outlast the English language. The officials in charge of responsibly protecting the people of the future from the toxic waste did not know how, in the absence of language, to warn these people not to disturb the mountain. They experimented with pictures and symbols. What might constitute a pictorially or symbolically timeless death warning? Maybe blossoms.