Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

So I talked to this woman at Wharton’s house. She told me about the smart life choices she’d made, which made me realize that she wasn’t inherently serene, she was purposefully and strategically so, meaning somehow serenity wasn’t an oxymoronic pursuit like it was with me, because I just get so stressed out when I’m trying to fit yoga into my day. We exchanged numbers so that we could go out to dinner the following night with the other Wharton celebrants. We decided to drive to the restaurant together. I picked her up. It felt like a first date. After dinner, after we’d had some drinks, and as I was driving her back to her hotel, we did the friend version of parking. We kept the car running, and we sat in the dark and we talked. I confessed to her that I remembered the first time I’d seen her, or I thought I had. I didn’t want this to sound creepy; I wanted it to sound complimentary. I remember the first time I ever saw you! But maybe I don’t remember seeing you — maybe I just imagined it! Maybe I have a fantasy about the first time I ever saw you! I was growing creepier by the contingency. But when I mentioned the name of the restaurant, she stared at me differently. She said she remembered that night, and she also remembered seeing me. We had seen each other! Maybe she was having a false memory inspired by my false memory, who knows.

She obviously worried that her remembering me also sounded a little creepy — why would a semi-famous person remember a waitress? — so she explained her memory by saying, “You’re just so distinctive looking.” Which no one has ever said to me before, certainly not all of those people who claim that I look like their cousin.

Regardless, I started to think about women who look at women and not because they want to sleep with them. Some women some other women like to look at. My first husband used to say, sort of jokingly, that women deem other women beautiful only when those women aren’t really. He believed that women are sometimes so competitive that they can’t admit that the beautiful women are beautiful; they can only call beautiful the not-really-beautiful ones. But I don’t agree. The women I find beautiful are so beautiful that I never forget the first time I saw them. I wait for years to see them again.

Today I heard an ambulance siren. In New York, sirens are no cause for alarm, but in Maine they are cause. If you hear an ambulance siren, the odds are fairly high you’ll know the person for whom the ambulance has been called. One morning a few summers ago, the town was crazy with sirens. Because we live close to the town center, we received texts from friends who live on the periphery. What the hell is going on? I drove to the post office to investigate. The postmistress told me that a kid had been hit by a car. “She’s the daughter of a family that’s visiting some summer people,” she said.

I suspected from her description: the girl was my friend’s niece. I drove to my friend’s house. My friend and her children stood on the stoop watching the emergency workers pack up their stretchers and machines. The trauma was elsewhere now; here was just the trauma’s queasy hangover. Everyone was too stunned to say much. The girl who’d been hit was unconscious. The man who’d hit her was very old, but the fault wasn’t his; the girl had run across the street from behind a parked delivery van. The old man, in shock, had, on the spot, suffered a heart attack.

For two days the girl remained unconscious. Then she woke up and was fine. The old man who had the heart attack was also fine. As a result of this near tragedy, our town decided to hire a sheriff to lurk in the church parking lot and hand out speeding tickets (even though the old man, when he hit the girl, had been driving ten miles under the limit). One of the most vocal supporters of the sheriff got two speeding tickets in one day. My husband also got a speeding ticket. Now when the sheriff’s in town, people text us to let us know he’s been spotted, and to warn us not to speed. Sometimes when I’m driving toward the church, a local will flash his lights at me, alerting me that the sheriff’s ahead. This incident has brought our town closer, but in a perverse way. We agreed to hire a good guy to keep our children safe from speeding cars. Now we’ve joined forces against the good guy to keep ourselves safe from speeding tickets.

Still, when I hear a siren, or when anyone in this town hears a siren, the kneejerk fear is, Somebody’s kid got hit .

Today when I heard the siren, I’d just sent my kid and her friend on bikes to the store. They’re seven and eight, but the road is busy, and the trucks drive recklessly. So I didn’t think, Somebody’s kid got hit , I thought, Maybe my kid or her friend got hit . I wondered if I should stop working and drive to the store to check on them. But I have so little time to work these days. A few hours at most. Chances are the siren was for somebody else. But what if it wasn’t? What if, in order to guarantee fifteen more minutes of work time, I forfeited the chance to hold my daughter’s head in my lap for the last three minutes of her life?

Instead of getting into the car to check on my daughter and her friend, I “checked” on them by devising a hypothetical scenario to test my preparedness for what might be awaiting me. If there were an accident, and if I were forced to choose one child to survive, would I pick my daughter or her friend?

I chalkboarded the problem thoroughly. This friend, a boy, is the only child of one of my friends; to take my friend’s one child from her would mean she’d suffer far more than I would, in theory, since I have two children. I’d still be a mother; she’d be the widow equivalent of a mother. This is what the Israelis I know would recommend if consulted. If I used my theoretical lifeline to call an Israeli. You must sacrifice your child, they would say, because you have another one. The transplanted Israelis I know in New York are calmly practical when describing the reasons Israelis have so many kids. Chances are one or more of these kids will be killed while serving in the army, or by terrorist attack. Wise, thus, according to these Israelis, to have a lot of them.

I once ran the Israeli theory past a comedian I know who, when not being funny, can be usefully thoughtful. I was, at the time, interviewing everyone I knew about whether or not to try to have a second kid. The comedian sided with the Israelis. He claimed he had two children because, “if you lose one child, what remains is still a family.”

But hadn’t he seen Ordinary People ? I countered. (Two brothers, one played by Timothy Hutton, are stranded on an overturned boat during a storm; the non-Timothy Hutton brother drowns.) The family would still be a family after one kid dies, true, but the remaining members would be fucked beyond any pretense of future normalcy. The parents would come to hate and blame each other like Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore came to hate and blame each other. The surviving sibling would try to kill himself like Timothy Hutton did, or, best-case scenario, claw his way back to semi-functional lugubriousness with the help of a therapist like Judd Hirsch.

Which was my long way of rationalizing: when weighing whether to sacrifice my daughter or her friend to this probably nonexistent car accident, the fact of a sibling did not, in my mind, disqualify my daughter from the survival trials. In fact, the reason my friend’s son was at our house was because my friend was at the hospital for a prenatal appointment. Assuming all went well, she’d be giving birth to another kid in four months. Meaning, wouldn’t it be traumatic to fewer people if my daughter lived? Because if my daughter died, her younger brother would end up like the Timothy Hutton character, while my friend’s unborn baby wouldn’t know what he or she was missing if his or her brother died. He or she would be burdened by the ghost of this dead brother, true, and that probably wouldn’t make for the lightest of childhoods, but the dead brother would be romanticized as the best brother ever, and he or she would mourn the brother’s loss unconditionally, whereas if the brother survived, he or she would probably find regular reasons to hate him. Some siblings are thick as thieves through adulthood, but how many really? The percentage is low.