Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Afterward we were told that we were “stupid” and “lucky.” Stupid, I agree. But lucky? We weren’t lucky. We were really, really, really lucky. I would never claim not to be lucky. I am so fucking lucky that I am terrified of luck. I am terrified it will abandon me. I’m like the women in the Tuscan town where the Madonna del Parto is kept. I’m always lying down in the street to keep my luck from leaving. When I was a kid, in elementary school, I would try to divine the day’s luck forecast each morning with a yogurt pot. The pot was sealed with foil; if I could remove the foil without tearing it, the day would be a lucky one. If I tore the foil, the opposite awaited me. I’d walk into the day braced against the hex. I still perform witchy meteorology with yogurt tops. It’s a habit I can’t shake. When the foil top tears I tell myself, It means nothing . I don’t believe myself for a second. When things are going badly, I scan my life for the cause. Often that cause can be sourced to an object. A material irritant. Once I bought what turned out to be a very bad luck ring in Morocco. Whenever I wore the ring, my paychecks were lost in the mail. My furnace malfunctioned (there’s a softly vengeful name for what happens when your furnace covers everything in your house with oily soot— puffback ). Beyond-my-control bad luck, in other words. Metaphorical puffbacks happened all over the place. I’d put the ring aside and a few months later try again to wear it. Bad luck returned. It wasn’t enough to take the ring off my finger; after I returned it to its box, I had a bad luck hangover that lasted a week.

Finally I took the ring to a psychic. I didn’t tell her why I wanted her to “read” my ring. I wanted to test her cold. She said, “I don’t like this ring for you.” She said it was “associated with an angry man.” I’d always assumed the ring had been cursed by whoever had made it, or possibly by the man who sold it to me. But her description sounded a lot like my ex-boyfriend, the one with whom I’d lived in Morocco. He was angry, I guess; in truth I usually attributed his moods — which were never wrathful or violent — to a case of depression. Regardless, I took the advice she gave me. She told me to wrap the ring in black paper and then again in tin foil. I hid it in the back of my closet. Why don’t I just throw it away? I don’t know why. For the same reason I could not, as a kid, throw away my broken lamp. One thinks a loved object is unique, unique to each human who loves it. But what is really unique is the unloved object. Or rather the unloved object confers uniqueness upon the person who fails time and again to love it and yet who still cannot throw it away.

Today I tried to console my son. He’d gone to sleep and thirty minutes later he’d woken up crying. This happens sometimes — my husband and I think he’s down for the night, and then he awakens in a state. I don’t think there’s anything dangerously wrong with him — tonight he said his ear hurt. Last week he said it was his leg. He sobs and he writhes and he’s inconsolable, and we briefly consider calling the doctor, and then we don’t.

This time I was resentful when he woke up in inexplicable agony because the day had been too long; there had already been too many phases. There was the cleaning phase, during which I organized lightbulbs and tossed modem cords and tried to put away the folded laundry. Then there was the Enforced Outdoor Fun phase, people dragged unhappily around the harbor on a kayak. Then there was the Local Culture phase, involving a trip to a historical society, which more or less looked like the interior of our barn, itself a historical society spanning many more centuries than the one we visited, because ours included deflated beach floaties and broken plastic sleds. Then there was the eating and drinking and socializing phase. Then there was the putting the kids to bed phase, and then the sitting on the couch and watching bad television phase — the phase of which it can sometimes seem all other phases are in service. Everything we do, we do so we can be sitting on this couch watching The Bachelorette .

And then my son woke up.

Soon it became clear that he could not be distracted from his misery fugue state. He would lie awake in his bed and contort and cry for probably an hour, and I would have to rub his back throughout. I tried not to act aggrieved that my final phase had been interrupted. That I was not on the couch watching man after man say, “I’m starting to fall in love with Desiree.” That I was not parsing with my husband the phrase starting to fall . Isn’t the point of falling that it has no prelude or warning, and certainly does not stretch out over the course of many ninety-minute episodes? That it simply happens ? That you are suddenly on the ground, having already dropped from a higher altitude to a lower one? I thought of falling as akin to being tackled by a member of the Boston Women’s Rugby Club (this happened to me; I played rugby in college). Women so skilled you didn’t feel the transition from running to lying on your back. One second you were sprinting toward the try line; the next second you were staring at the sky. You were in love with Desiree!

These were the important discussions I was missing while my son sobbed and sobbed. Every situation with a child that irks me, I try not to be irked by thinking: How many more irksome moments like this will I have? My son is four and a half. My hours of rubbing his back while he weeps are numbered. I moved my hand from his shoulder blades to his tailbone, and then I swooped it in reverse. Down up, down up; it was like sharpening a knife, or polishing a bowl. I tried to commit the movement to muscle memory. Whenever I am trapped in a situation, I think of how this entrapment might qualify as work. I am so worried about ever wasting time that I cannot let any small amount of it escape without defining for it a use or a purpose or extracting from it a lasting lesson. I tried to think of how this motion might, in the future, come in handy. I thought, If my son dies, I will sit at the shore, and swoop my hand like this back and forth over a smooth rock that has been warmed in the sun and feels humanlike as a way of remembering him. Then I thought this was melodramatic and gruesome. I thought instead: Maybe I’ll write a story in which a character’s son dies, and she could, as a means of coping, go to the shore and do this . Then I thought this was melodramatic and stupid. I thought instead: I must remember to do this when I am seventy. I must remember to find a rock that feels exactly like my son’s four-year-old back. I must remember to close my eyes and imagine that I am me again, a tired mother trying to teach herself how to miss what is not gone.

Today my husband poisoned himself by accident, or this is what we fear. His was an honest mistake. We do not speak enough German to know what we’re buying at the market; we’ve been trusting our ability to identify objects by sight, i.e., without relying on labels and language. At an overpriced health food market, we saw a large bag of reasonably affordable almonds. We bought them.

At home, we remarked on the incredibly almondy taste of these almonds. In Germany, everything tastes like an artificially amped-up version of itself. Raspberries taste strongly of raspberry, tomatoes of tomato, Heineken of Heineken, and so on. It made sense that the almonds would taste measurably more like almonds than the almonds we ate in the States. But these almonds were far tinier than almonds usually are; we became curious. What was up with these almonds? We decided to Google the word on the label: aprikosenkerne . The topmost hit was a website introduced by the following text (translated from the original German):