Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

I signed up anyway. On the first day of class, everyone already knew everyone. My solitude was conspicuous. Minutes after I sat down, the woman behind me began playing with my hair. She ran her fingers through it. She began to braid it.

After I recovered from my surprise (and the annoyance that I’d have to admit to my friend, you were right ), I found her attention so relaxing. This woman was welcoming me in the way that women welcomed all newcomers into the women’s studies cult. Braiding a newcomer’s hair was a time-honored ritual, I’d probably soon learn, practiced by the Native Americans (for whom our college was founded, in part, to educate) to initiate strange women into their tribes.

I turned to thank her.

The woman blanched.

“Oh my God,” the woman said, horrified. “I thought you were Daphne!”

Her embarrassment yielded to suspicion. What kind of person lets a total stranger braid her hair for five minutes without saying anything ? I was so not a feminist! I’d let any old person touch my body! I would endure the invasion in silence! I would probably even enjoy it!

I don’t think this woman and I ever spoke again during the two years we occupied the same small campus. There’s no recovering from certain shames.

But this Daphne person I might have been. I didn’t know Daphne at the time. I would soon find out how totally not-Daphne I was. Daphne was the Gwyneth Paltrow of our school. She was white-blond and grew up on Park Avenue and attended an expensive private girls academy and was a lesbian. Her lesbianism did not appear to be about desire or preference, but probably neither would her heterosexuality be, if she practiced it. She was beautiful without seeming to suffer the needs of a body. She was ascetically thin with an expressionless face that might seem sociopathic or enlightened, depending. She ran feminism on our campus like Tilda Swinton ran her Utopian island community in the film adaptation of The Beach . She was everything I wanted to be in 1986, so I was flattered to be mistaken for her. Now I’m embarrassed that Daphne was the person I most wanted to be mistaken for. Since 1986 my desires have been updated quite regularly — on a daily basis, even. Does this constant updating make me more or less accurate and obsolete? I am not sure.

Today I was making breakfast when a man floated past my window. I hadn’t slept well. It was all I could do to feed the people in my home. My brother, who is staying with me because he has no electricity in his house and likely won’t for many more days, said, “They’re doing something to your tree.”

This was very bad news. Since the hurricane took down half our tree last week, the half that remained possibly wasn’t doing well. I’d convinced myself that its health, or people’s perceptions of its health, said more about the perceiver than it did about the tree. The trunk had once forked into two segments pointing north and south. The northern segment was gone; the southern segment, lacking its counterweight, might possibly be listing at a more acute angle to the sidewalk. I’d stood beneath it daily and tried to ascertain whether this listing was real or imagined.

“I wouldn’t stand under that tree,” an old lady said to me one afternoon.

“Why not?” I said.

“It’s going to fall over,” she said. She was optimistically pessimistic, the way old people in New York can be.

“It just looks like it’s falling over because half of it’s gone,” I said.

You also look like you’re falling over , I wanted to say to her. You’re lucky people on the sidewalk aren’t assessing your survival chances .

“It’s always been this way,” I said.

“Really?” she said. “It always touched this building?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s my building. Those are my windows. It’s always touched my windows.”

The woman shrugged. She wasn’t going to quibble with the so-called expert. But she wasn’t altering her opinion. This tree was coming down.

The airborne man started up his chain saw. I abandoned breakfast. I took the elevator downstairs to talk to the tree crew. The worker guarding the sidewalk confirmed: the old lady had been right.

I returned to the apartment. I didn’t think twice about breaking down in front of my brother; he regularly, when we were kids, witnessed me losing my shit over a misplaced pencil or a lost shoe, objects that solicited my grief more intensely than did the death of our family pets. Still, he hasn’t seen me cry like this in thirty-five or more years. I called my husband (he was in Maine). He professed shock over the tree’s total removal. “That seems unnecessarily brutal,” he said.

Outside the window, the dismemberment began. They removed the limbs one at a time; they fed each limb into the chipper.

“Maybe we should all go to a park,” my brother suggested. My brother is a formal fellow. He’s not often outwardly emotional but he is always very empathic.

Of course we couldn’t go to the park. We owed it to our tree to stay. I took photos of the view out our window that would never again be the view out our window. I documented the stages of disappearance. Its total gone-ness looming, I returned to the sidewalk to ask the crew if they would give us a round of the trunk. “So my children and I can count the rings,” I said. “They’re just so broken up over the loss of our tree.” My children didn’t give a shit about the tree and its rings. But I figured the crew would be more willing to override whatever rules the city had against handing out tree parts to civilians if they believed the solace and education of children were at stake.

I carried the trunk round upstairs. It was really heavy. My brother and I examined it. “How do you know which marking is a ring?” he said.

My idiot brother. I swore we’d counted tree rings as kids; we had a dead tree in our backyard that had always been dead, dead and even barkless, and yet we’d hung a swing from it and used it like a regular alive tree until it leaned dangerously and we had to cut it down. We’d counted the rings on the stump, or that’s what I recalled.

He was right. The rings weren’t clearly demarcated. So many activities that I remember being easy and self-evident when I was a kid turn out not to be. I tried to do tombstone rubbings recently. I tried to lift newspaper print with Silly Putty. I tried to make a Christmas ornament out of a burr and cotton balls and toothpicks. All attempts failed; each failure sent me running to the Internet for answers. How had we managed to do tombstone rubbings without a discussion forum determining what kind of paper works best, what kind of charcoal? How had we successfully made pathetic-looking Christmas sheep?

I refused to consult the Internet about tree rings. “When the wood dries,” I said, “we’ll be able to see the rings.”

My brother shoved his laundry into bags. He shoved his kids into coats. He planned to return to his cold house to tough it out for a few more nights. He and I grew up in a cold house; we are used to sleeping in cold houses. Still, he seemed melancholy. He talked about wanting to throw a proper party for his son, whose birthday fell on the second day of the power outage, before they’d relocated to my apartment. Also they had just moved back east from California and didn’t know many people in their new town yet. When his son woke up on his birthday, my brother said, he waited patiently for the festivities to start. There were none. They had no electricity. They had no friends. Finally his son asked, “Where are all the kids?”

My brother, half in his own coat, teared up. I don’t know that I’ve seen him cry for thirty-five years. Perhaps it is due to the rawness of the times that we’re made so sad by missed birthdays and dead trees. There’s an election in a few days and everyone’s on edge. Our city has escaped ruin, but for how much longer can we keep escaping? If another storm doesn’t level it, then a terrorist attack will. The sudden impassibility of the same downtown neighborhood has coupled attacks by humans with weather, past and potential, in our minds. I think we are all thinking: our days here are numbered. The old ladies are walking around making their optimistic pessimistic proclamations. This city’s coming down.