Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

I’d screwed up the process. I’d kept live what should have been dead. Many of the photos had captions. Whoever chose the moments to be memorialized in the Rolodex was obsessed by accidents. There was a photo of a violently shredded white picket fence with the caption “Accident, 1965.” There were photos of trees upended in various hurricanes. There was a photo of the Maidstone Club after a fire destroyed the cafeteria. There was a photo of a road hugging a cliff. The caption read, “Dubrovnik, 1971: Accident going down this coast (to Greece),” after which appeared a photo of a man in a hospital bed (“Belgrade — Yugoslavia”) reading James Michener’s The Drifters .

I countered my dad’s theory with what was — bombs and drugs and anger aside — the likeliest theory. Many of the photos were taken in nearby Long Island. Probably the owner of the Rolodex had recently died. The children — from the photos, I guessed them to be in their sixties by now — had flown in from wherever they lived to clean out the family museum, long docented by the lone surviving parent. Nobody wanted the Rolodex, but nobody could justify throwing it away. One sibling insisted to another sibling, “You take the Rolodex!” The situation demanded that the sibling not refuse. The sibling who took the Rolodex — it was heavy, and an awkward size, and the photos, in my bag at least, kept sliding out of their plastic jackets — had probably been struggling to find his or her ID to go through security, and the fucking Rolodex was in the way, and it had started to come apart, and in a fit of annoyance the sibling dumped it. He or she had been praying all along for a good excuse to get rid of the Rolodex, just like I’d been praying for an excuse to divorce my ex-husband years ago and was so relieved when he provided me one by spending our savings on the sly. He misbehaved in a way that would hold up in a court of public opinion. It would also hold up in my court of private opinion. I would not appear heartless to the court or to myself by divorcing him. The Rolodex had likewise misbehaved. The sibling was so relieved when it obstructed his basic ability to properly identify himself, find his ticket, and board a plane. He was so relieved to discover it was broken. In all good conscience, the sibling had probably thought to himself: Finally I am justified in ditching this thing .

Today we went to a party where the food was very tiny. It is officially halfway through the summer and we are feeling out of scale. We’ve been drinking too much beer and eating too many jumbo bags of chips. Our shorts don’t fit. So my friend threw a miniature food party. We cooked tiny meatballs. Another guest made tiny BLT sandwiches. Problematically, the drinks were not tiny, and soon we were all really drunk. I talked all night to two women I really like but whom I don’t often encounter, even on our small peninsula. One is a doctor who lives in an electricity-free cabin and who is always spectacularly attired. Whenever I see her in the store buying batteries, she looks as though she’s just finished a clubbing jag in Marrakech. The other woman is the great-granddaughter of a famous stage actress. She, like me, lives in New York during the year. Despite our geographic synchronicities, we are not close. I think we have mutually agreed — we are just too busy right now to make a good friend from whom we cannot seasonally escape.

The doctor was coming off a hard year. She’d been incessantly sick and stressed. She works so much that she never sees her children. She said she was considering a career change because she wanted to be a more present mother, and also less of a basket case. “My kids are all fucked up,” she said.

I entered this conversation at the midpoint. Without the proper context, I probably misunderstood the famous stage actress’s great-granddaughter’s response. She said of children, “You really have to just live their lives if you want to be a part of them.” She could do this. She does not have a full-time job. (I arguably also don’t have a full-time job; I do have four or five half-time ones.)

My first impulse was to express in my totally polite and agreeable way, Fuck off . I said, “You’re totally right about that,” but any mildly perceptive person would hear that I was really saying, Fuck off fuck off fuck off .

But then I realized — my fuck off was a trained reaction. I am quick to rage when I think a person is implying that another person cannot be a decent mother if she has a consuming career. Because, in fact, I found that I agreed with the famous stage actress’s great-granddaughter. I’d recently come to the same conclusion. In the interests of my family, I’d been so unambitious recently. I’d barely written at all these past few weeks. For my family’s sake, I told myself, I’d lost my fire; I just wanted to lie around with my kids if they were home, and if they weren’t home I wanted to lie around and read essays written by a poet I’d met last month who I’d found too terrifying in person to befriend, but in print we could just hang out, she and I in my studio, and “chat” about, for example, theme.

Whether or not I was being a better parent because of my ambition failure, I can’t say. But I really couldn’t disagree with the famous stage actress’s great-granddaughter’s point about living your children’s lives if you want to have any idea of what’s happening in them. Until very recently, I felt that I didn’t know anything about my children’s lives; this spring, my lack of knowledge started to alarm me. I regularly called my husband (when he was out of town, or I was out of town), and left him panicked messages. In hotel rooms, far from the family I no longer seemed to know, my anxiety was even worse. Our family — i.e., our children — became, at a distance, a handful of vaguely familiar people who happened to live in our house. Suddenly the people in our house were lazy and ill-mannered. The people in our house grew holes in their teeth. The people in our house owned no viable pants.

The people in our house were my fault. Our fault, but really, my fault. I’m not being a martyr. I’m speaking realistically, in a manner reflecting the consensus reality of the situation. No men at this party were standing around talking about quitting their jobs so they could be a part of — sorry, live —their children’s lives. No men listening to these men were thinking defensively to themselves, Fuck off , or, after a moment’s reflection, You’re so right, actually . No men would be writing about these conversations tonight in their diaries. My husband would absolutely write about these issues in his diary tonight if he kept one. He worries about and buys all of our children’s clothing — the pants, the underwear, the sneakers, the socks. But to the greater world, these pantsless children reflect more poorly on me than they do on him. Women are responsible for the people in the family having pants.

Later, in bed, my husband and I shared party notes. He told me that he’d been speaking to a man, and that this man spoke critically of another couple’s child, and that it was clear the man blamed the mother for her child’s bad behavior, not the father. The mother traveled for her work. So did the father travel for his work, but this did not seem germane to the matter of the child’s failure to be pleasing. I want to say that this man’s opinion arises because he’s from a different generation, but it’s more complicated than just age. He has a very smart wife who, after having children, did not have a full-time job; he also has two smart and well-educated daughters who, after having children, did not have full-time jobs. His opinion supports the decisions made by his wife and his daughters. Sometimes I don’t think any of us really believes anything we say; we are just defending our kind.