Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

While I’d been scheming for years to get to France, I’d had a miserable time that semester and the weather was only partially to blame. I’d left in America a boyfriend to whom I was more attached than I otherwise might have been because I’d gotten pregnant a few months earlier. When a nineteen-year-old good-college-attending girl gets pregnant, she tells herself she has no option but to undo her mistake. She is pro-choice (she’s driven many hours to attend rallies), but she prefers, because it is easier on her conscience, to think of herself as choiceless. Her life trajectory, such as she understands it, decrees: abortion is the sole outcome of this scenario.

No girl I knew, in other words, had babies, but more than a few had had abortions. I’d attended two abortions before my own. I’d been invited along to do the driving, and hold the hands, and sit afterward in the bars and fetch the drinks. The boyfriends, though informed of our activities, were never present. Abortions are women’s work, I guess.

Regardless, in France I was more fragile than usual. I missed my boyfriend to the point of illness. I talked to him weekly on the phone in the cold French house I inhabited with a man named Girard and a woman named Marie. I lived in a basement room that was doubly cold and also damp. After I hung up with my boyfriend I’d descend to the basement and lie on my bed and feel the weight of the house pressing down. It would be months before I’d see him. I felt so homesick I might have been five years old. I’d halfheartedly tried to find a love substitute in France among the twelve students on my semester abroad program, I discreditably had. But the cutest guy was pretentious and insecure, and the second cutest guy was Austrian and impenetrable. Instead I developed a close relationship with our TA. Halfway through the semester, she let me wear her best sweater basically every day. We’d each been wearing the same small suitcase of clothes for weeks at this point; other people’s clothing was, more than it usually is, a break from ourselves. Our identities had been winnowed to four shirts, two sweaters, a pair of jeans and a skirt and one pair of boots, all of which stunk of nightclub cigarette smoke. The TA’s sweater was nicer (in our opinion) than any other sweater worn by a foreign exchange student in Blois — and maybe in all of France — that winter; we each coveted it. That she’d awarded it to me was the equivalent, if we were still at our American college, of an older boyfriend giving a girl his torn and stained canvas jacket to wear, the one everyone knew, by the unique pattern of destruction, was his. In my mother’s generation, men gave women their school rings, or their varsity jackets, if they were athletes, in order to claim ownership, and women wore them, well, I don’t know why. To prove they were desirable enough to be claimed? When I was in high school, I borrowed and wore my father’s clothing more than I wore my mother’s. At the time I saw my preference for my father’s clothing over my mother’s as a logical extension of a tomboy childhood. But maybe it wasn’t just about that.

During our school holiday, my TA and I traveled together to the South of France and Spain and Mallorca. We were living off of our respective summer job earnings, and to make the earnings last we subsisted on chocolate bars and baguettes and shared a hotel bed. The TA had the same taste in architecture as I did. We chose shabbily romantic places, the evocative atmospheres of which made me miss my boyfriend so much that, when trying to fall asleep each night, I imagined his plane crashing when he eventually flew to France to meet me in May. I stayed awake until three a.m. worrying this hypothetical into existence. Every day I despaired at sundown. In a few hours, I had another appointment with scenes of his demise.

One night when the TA and I were in Nice I awoke to find her sobbing in our bed. She refused to tell me why. I started guessing. I thought maybe if I stumbled upon the trigger for her distress she’d be spared the burden of articulating it. We’d both been reading a Jean Rhys novel called After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie , about a depressed woman who stays home and drinks and grows yet more depressed. I was so emotionally destroyable at the time that I thought it wise to stop reading it. My TA had bravely finished the novel earlier that week; the dysphoric aftereffects were still lingering, perhaps? Also she had a sort-of boyfriend she’d left in the States. Possibly she missed him? Possibly he’d failed to write her or call her enough? I knew the damage that night could do to a boyfriend.

These were not the reasons. Finally she said into her pillow, angrily, “You look so much prettier in my sweater.”

I didn’t know how to respond because I knew, even then: She was lying. She was one of those women who did not compare herself to other women; she just confidently was . Also, we were not competitive over looks or over anything. We both knew: She was more beautiful than I was. She was also smarter, and funnier, and more mischievous and braver and way better at French. She was better at all languages, even nonexistent ones. We often killed time in train stations pretending to be people we weren’t. I’d pretend that I was her mute sister, and that we were from Estonia or Finland or some country with a language no one in France was likely to speak. She’d engage in conversation French men at station cafés, and then “translate” for me what they were saying into “our” language, i.e., her very plausible-sounding gibberish. My passive role was not to laugh, a role that proved not so passive, a role that was arguably the harder of the two. We once tried our ploy with the roles reversed, with her as the mute, me as the chatty sister. But speaking fake languages is as hard as speaking real ones. It required grammatical and sonic improvisational skills I didn’t possess, and this failure proved to us, yet again, that she was my superior. She was my TA in school and in life.

Which was why I knew she was lying. What did she care how I looked in her sweater? Regardless, I didn’t press her. We fell asleep. We awoke to a mild awkwardness that dissipated by breakfast. We never spoke of the incident again. We don’t speak anymore about anything. We had a falling-out ten years ago, when my first husband and I got divorced, and I didn’t tell her before I left him that I was leaving, and I didn’t tell her where I’d be disappearing to for a few months. She left messages that grew increasingly angry. I got angry at her anger. In retaliation, I didn’t call her back. I knew I’d be seeing her at a wedding in a few months. We could resolve our differences wearing formal dresses in an atmosphere padded by mandatory joy. At the last minute, however, she canceled. Not even the bride knew why. Eight years later I ran into a mutual acquaintance on the sidewalk who gave me her e-mail address. I sent her an e-mail. She never wrote back.

Years after the night in Nice, my TA became a lesbian, which was no great surprise to anyone, or it wasn’t a surprise to me.

The friends to whom I tell the Nice story, a story that now concludes with my TA’s and my “break” and her eventual gayness, jump to the obvious interpretation. “She was clearly in love with you,” they say, and I lead them to conclude this. I would never say it myself, but I like to hear it said. I would never say it because I don’t believe it’s true. When I remember what my TA said and the anger with which she said it —You look so much prettier in my sweater —she was angry that the sweater didn’t turn her into the person she still, given her strict family and also, frankly, the times, hoped she’d be — straight like me. She had everything on me but this: I was a straight girl who’d had an abortion and missed her boyfriend. I was a straight girl looking pretty in her sweater.