Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

PRAWNING

Best done in a boat. However can wade out from northwest side of bridge. Must have a good light and it must be on a moon free night. There are 2 prawn nets in shed. The prawns swim out on the outgoing tide — i.e., I think best just after the tide turns — check this at Tackle World .

We share evidence. We exchange phone photos of our outfits. She sent me pictures of her wedding dress, which she’d borrowed from the ’80s singer Sade. We explained ourselves to each other. Our histories. When did we lose our virginity, and to whom? Why did my first husband and I divorce? What happened to the guy she married in the Sade dress, through whom she got her UK passport?

Our e-mails have proven to be an important archival exercise because I’m starting to forget important life events. The reason I’m forgetting is because it’s been a while since I’ve articulated my life history to anyone. The depth and range of the intel I was meant to provide to my London friend — this I hadn’t done since I’d met my second husband. It was fun to do it again but it was also hard. Especially over e-mail, or especially in writing, and especially when you are a writer. It was hard to tell the truth, is what I’m saying. I tried to tell it, but I was aware of how each sentence had a million conditional offshoots. Like if you were to diagram a sentence for meaning, rather than grammar, that’s what each sentence might have resembled. I was trying to be charismatic, and in doing so I probably didn’t tell the truthiest truths. I never made stuff up. But I did strive to be entertaining. Such embellishments do not constitute lies. They constitute your personality. But your personality can seem like a store front for lie vending if what you’ve said threatens to find a wider audience.

I once arranged to meet a friend at a bar. He was supposed to interview me for a magazine — we were meant to have a “conversation” between writers — but our endeavor was doomed from the start. The bar I chose turned out to be much louder and scarier than I’d recalled. It opened at eight a.m. By four-thirty p.m. the clientele were drawing shivs over the jukebox queue. We ordered drinks and tried to make the best of it, but his tape recorder wouldn’t turn on. Instead we used my phone to record our conversation. We talked about books and writing for about five minutes before sliding into the sloppy, erratic rhythm of our surroundings. We talked about the things you talk about when you’re drinking bad vodka. We remarked, with some amazement, that neither of us found any of our young students attractive, and never had. Weren’t professors supposed to want to sleep with their students? What was wrong with us? We discussed one disastrous man’s disastrous love life. We discussed alcoholics we knew. When we were leaving, I realized I’d forgotten to shut off my phone after the brief books discussion concluded, and that our entire conversation had been recorded. Meanwhile, the file was due to one of the magazine’s interns the next day for transcription. I panicked. Probably this intern wouldn’t do anything with the file, but who knew? He or she could forward it to someone, and soon we’d be reading on the Internet damning shit about people attributed to us. Nothing I said on that recording differed from what I believed; I stood by all of it. But the way I’d articulated certain truths — there was falseness involved. There was a persona involved, one that I used with this friend, and that I used with other friends, too, but I did not use it with everyone. My friend and I considered pretending that the recording had failed, that there was no interview, sorry. Then, at home, I figured out how to split the file. It necessitated erasing the parts I supposedly no longer wanted. Suddenly, however, I was loath to lose them. It reminded me of the newspaper sections I never care to read until I am kneeling by the woodstove, balling them up to start a fire.

Today I am not going to a yard sale. I have not been to a yard sale all summer, even though I am fanatical about yard sales. I am also very gifted when it comes to yard sales. I can case the tables of junk and instantly locate the four items that don’t immediately appear interesting — a pitcher, a raincoat, a jigger — but are. Seconds are all I require. It’s like what happens when I go to an art colony and I sweep the dining hall and identify the attraction threats. My body responds to people and objects erotically, and within a micro-span of time. When my friend, who suffered from strange food allergies, visited a holistic healer, she was asked to bring samples of the food she normally ate. The healer would pick up her jar of peanut butter, or her bag of jasmine rice, and hold it against my friend’s body, and pronounce, “The body likes this,” or “The body doesn’t like this.”

My body works this way.

But this summer I have sworn off yard sales. I see the handwritten placards—9AM — NO EARLY BIRDS — nailed to the electrical poles. I feel the rise in my pulse like a libido spike, and I say to myself: No . I am going to have a healing summer, one absent unnecessary stresses. Yard sales are stressful. I feel like the character with the superpowers who, after she uses these powers to stop a villain, collapses in a heap.

Also, yard sales are sites of potential confrontation. One year there was a yard sale at a house that was always perfectly painted and the lawn perfectly mown, but no one ever lived there, not even during the hottest weeks of August. Then a sign announced there would be a yard sale at this house and I knew: it would be a good one.

I was right. It was one of the best yard sales I’ve ever been to; the competition, as it can be in Maine, was intense. I had to double my usual speed of identification, because stuff was disappearing fast. I found an iron bed within two minutes of arriving. It could have come from an infirmary, or a Victorian orphanage. It was narrow and long, custom-sized for a serpent. The odd proportions and level of disrepair (not terrible) announced to me: this is the item you must stand next to, and thereby risk losing all other good items.

I stood next to the bed and tried to flag the person with the sales tickets. Meanwhile, a woman I know approached me. “Are you getting that bed?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Oh,” she said. “My husband was supposed to get here early to buy it.” She explained that there had been a preview of the sale, and that they’d gone, and they’d agreed to buy the bed for their small son.

I am usually the first person to cede to another — the more advantageous place in the checkout line, the last scone — I do this because I enjoy making other people happy. I enjoy the friendly exchanges that result from this kind of giving. But sometimes I give away things I want for myself. I do this because I hate social awkwardness and then afterward I hate myself for being such a coward.

This time, however, and maybe it was because we were at a yard sale, and because the rules of yard sales are understood and respected by everyone in Maine —I got here first, piss off —I did not budge. I said, “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sorry that I wasn’t giving her the bed. I was sorry that she wasn’t married to a man who better understood the rules.

The story of this bed has become legion among our friends. Or rather, my “cutthroat” behavior has become legion. I put “cutthroat” in quotes because my friends are not criticizing me. They enjoy teasing me about my refusal to give away the bed. It was so out of character, my failure to cede the bed to a couple who would use it year-round rather than just during the summer, a couple who probably makes a fraction of the money my husband and I make. All these factors rendered the story even more delicious for my friends to tell and retell.