Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Regardless: the noise. The student suggested that maybe I had something wrong with my inner ear. This seemed plausible. I have children who yell and who cause me to yell. Who knew what frequency contusions the invisible chambers of my ear had suffered.

I made an appointment with an ear doctor. Just the act of making the appointment reassured me: something was failing, but that something could be fixed. I should have seen a doctor when I could not understand how anyone found that multi-prize-winning novel remotely good. My inner ear, it must have been my inner ear.

Then I told my husband about the terrible noise, and how I’d made an appointment with the doctor to discover why I’d heard it and my student had not.

“Interesting,” he said. “So there really was a noise?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The noise you heard actually existed?”

“Yes,” I said. “It actually existed.”

“You didn’t just hear it in your head?” he said.

What noise don’t you hear in your head? I wanted to ask. But his question freaked me out. I heard a noise, but had there been a noise ? How many people have to hear a noise before it becomes a noise ?

I promised him: there was a noise . It existed. I really did hear it, and my student really did not.

Today I visited antiques shops. I’d invited my daughter and her friend along as my shopping enablers. They did not fulfill their mandate. I found a poster I liked of a pregnant Girl Scout, circa 1969, smiling beside the slogan: Be prepared. She wore patent leather Mary Janes and kneesocks. She was kind of like Piero della Francesca’s pregnant Madonna . (I just looked up mary how old annunciation . Internet estimates put her between twelve and sixteen years old, meaning she could have been a Girl Scout Cadette or a Girl Scout Senior.) My daughter and her friend counseled me not to buy the poster. I tried to sell them on selling me on buying it. “Why do you like it?” they asked. “Because it’s so funny!” I said. They scrutinized the poster. “Why is it funny?” they asked. I didn’t know why it was funny. Because teenage pregnancy is hilarious? I bought it because I didn’t fully get the joke, and because I wasn’t certain there was meant to be a joke at all. But I liked that the Girl Scout appears to have no idea that she’s pregnant, I liked that “Be prepared” might simply refer to her stylishness and her psychotic smiling gameness, both of which, it seemed to me, were classic Girl Scout traits. And isn’t being prepared to be unprepared the best form of preparedness? If you think you’re ready for anything, you’re probably not ready at all.

Today I read the letters exchanged between a young boy and his mother in 1930. These letters are not published. They are not public domain. These letters were in an old suitcase discovered in the corner of a rental house occupied by my friends. I had no business reading these letters, is what I’m saying. I read them anyway. I read them using the same logic I use in cemeteries, when my children climb on the tombstones or stick their fingers into the engraved dates or delight over the strange names or dismantle the spooky implications of “Lost at Sea.” These people are dead and in many cases forgotten, but now they are receiving some welcome attention . As a dead person, I would very much appreciate a child climbing on my gravestone, so long as they were respectful and interested, and I can promise that my children are exactly these children. If they were terrible children who topple cracked gravestones and yell and cannot be respectful even to the living, I would probably, as a dead person, be frustrated by my inability to discipline them, but I’m assuming the dead have their ways of expressing outrage, especially on their home turf. I could drop a rock on a toe, or trip a small criminal with those wires that hold fake flower arrangements together. Regardless. I feel when I visit a cemetery as I might feel if I were ever to visit a retirement home. These are the forgotten people, and they have stories, and they just want someone to listen to them.

Such was my rationale when I read the letters I found in the suitcase. That I generated a rationale in the first place was because the people in these letters, though I’d met neither of them, did not qualify as complete strangers. They are the relatives of my good friend (it is through his family connection that my other friends are renting the house). The mother in the letters is my friend’s great-grandmother; the son is his grandfather. The suitcase in which the letters were found was already open when I discovered it in the laundry room. The letters were already spilling out of it. They were already free of their envelopes. They were already unfolding. Still, I hesitated. I had heard about the grandfather and the great-grandmother from my friend, because he often uses his family as a medium by which to practice his considerable storytelling gifts. I thought of e-mailing him to ask his permission to read these letters that described, more or less, events he’d already told me about (in his way), but this struck me as a request he’d probably agree to without my needing to ask. What became creepy was me asking in the first place. Asking would cast suspicion over my mostly innocent curiosity.

I did not e-mail him to ask his permission. Obviously I did read the letters. They were heartrending, or maybe I was just in a mood to have my heart heaved up by letters sent to and by a boy who is dead because he would be over one hundred years old now if he were not. The boy had been sent to boarding school and was, I gathered from his mother’s letters to him, miserable. His mother tried to convince him that being sent away from home was the best and most adoring thing she could do, that it would toughen him up and that in general he had to learn to be much tougher because he was not tough and, as a result, he was a bit of a disappointment. She wrote for pages exhorting him to be tougher and tougher and tougher and then she would slip into the third person and write, “Boo still loves his mummy, doesn’t he?”

Later that day I took my son to the cemetery. He is in a phase where he wears no clothing. He is small enough that, in a cemetery, he might be mistaken for a marble cherub sprung to life, i.e., his nakedness seemed less disrespectful than it did a fanciful extension of the graveyard aesthetic. He stood, naked, in front of the grave of the man who had been the little boy whose letters I’d just been reading (He died at age ninety-three) and who’d once been so lonely at boarding school. I took a picture of my naked son in front of the man’s grave to e-mail to his grandson, my friend. I thought he might find it touching, or funny, or I don’t know what. Like the earlier e-mail asking his permission to read his family letters, this, too, I did not send.

Today I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with my daughter and her friend. They are both nearing nine but seem much older. These are my last years to be interesting to them. Knowing this, I try to be so exceedingly interesting that I might hold their attention longer than my natural expiration date allows. I told them, as we walked across the bridge, educational anecdotes about developing from a girl into a woman, featuring me as the protagonist. (This was my more utilitarian attempt at la tendresse Américaine .) After twenty years in this city, it seems that at nearly every Manhattan corner or monument there is an instructive girl-into-woman story I can tell. This bridge is the setting for a number of stories. I told my daughter and her friend about cross-country skiing across this bridge in a blizzard; how I was the only person, aside from a few people in cars, on this bridge. How it was so quiet, and all I could hear was the wind and the metal tips of my poles hitting the walkway under the snow. How the lesson of this story was that even when you’re in your twenties, and adrenaline-crazed, and living in a loft with lots of other adrenaline-crazy striving people, there is something edifying about being cold and alone in the city version of nature.