Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Then I told them a story about a very stupid thing I did with my first husband. We’d just started dating; we’d been drinking gin. We decided to run home. Literally, to run. Through Tribeca and over the Brooklyn Bridge. This was not exercise; this was not “running” as in marathons. This was the kind of running people did in The Sound of Music , over fields and singing. We were a third of the way across the bridge — to the first stone arch — when my first husband bent down and opened a trapdoor in the middle of the wooden walkway.

It sounded so implausible — a trapdoor? In the bridge? But indeed there was a trapdoor, and for some reason it wasn’t locked. It led to a rung staircase and then a spindly catwalk suspended under the bridge’s roadway. Beneath this catwalk was air and then water. There was nothing to catch us if we fell. The cars drove a few feet over our heads. It was so loud above us, so quiet below. We chased each other. Back and forth, back and forth. The catwalk was metal and responded jerkily to running; it was constructed of welded rungs with a few inches of space between each one. When we ran we could see the far-down water strobing under our feet. Then, as I was being chased, i.e., my first husband was chasing me, I felt a violent vibration behind me. I turned. My first husband had run headfirst into a low-lying girder. He’d been knocked out.

I then told my daughter and her friend, because I’d forgotten this crucial detail, that although the catwalk had a thin metal railing for your hands, by your feet there was nothing; if you were lying on the catwalk, for example, and knocked unconscious, you might tilt right off into the river.

My first husband was tilting.

But I saved him. I saved him so he could go on to be married to me and then divorced from me.

My first husband and I climbed back through the trapdoor. We ran the rest of the way across the bridge. We walked down some steps that led to a deserted underpass. Suddenly, a car pulled up. In this car was one of my first husband’s best friends and his girlfriend. (An ancillary point of interest: this girlfriend would grow up to host a reality TV show that my current husband and daughter and I watch.) They gave us a ride to our apartment. That night, I lay in bed and could not sleep. I was traumatized by what might have been. I might have lost the love of my life to a tragic and stupid accident . He would have been the love of my life had I lost him. I did not, and he was not.

After I told this story to my daughter and her friend, I became embarrassed, not least because they liked this story, and clearly held me in higher regard because of my stupidity and daring, which is of course why I told them the story in the first place. Even once my daughter no longer found me interesting, which would be soon, she couldn’t completely reject me; I’d run under bridges; I’d saved a man from death. To my face she’d scorn me, but to her friends she might proudly tell this story, because she’d heard it before she understood why I was telling it. It would be lodged in her brain before that brain could skeptically wonder, Why on earth is she telling me this inappropriate story?

But what really made me pathetic was that I hadn’t told the whole story. In telling only the dramatic parts, I’d failed to tell the truth; i.e., I’d failed to shape from these events an educational story that little girls getting older and eventually leaving home need to hear. The truth about the skiing story is this: I skied across the Brooklyn Bridge because I was losing the thread. I felt disconnected from the person who once trekked alone through blizzards, the person who was from Maine and didn’t give a shit about parties and fame. The stone used to make the bridge’s arches was quarried in Maine, and taken from a hole in the ground that had since filled up with water and in which I’d once gone swimming. Both of these stories are about my first few years of what would become two decades in a city that didn’t immediately feel like home and still sometimes doesn’t. It so didn’t feel like home that I married a man I knew I should not because his mother lived in a house that, because of its windows and its molding and its old plaster smell, reminded me of Maine; New York so didn’t feel like home that I would often walk across the bridge to lean my forehead against the stone arches and touch the ground from which I’d come. If they could persist here, these stones, and retain their shape, then so could I.

Today I was so relieved to get a migraine. For the past thirty-plus years I’ve gotten migraines regularly; they were part of the weather that happened within and without. I would get a migraine after a manic jag. I would get a migraine before a blizzard. Now I rarely get them. I don’t want to say that I miss being in pain, but I do miss the excuse to not give a shit about all the big and small things I often care too much about and that a migraine eradicates. When I have a migraine I do not grieve the shirt that was put in the dryer by accident and its texture forever ruined; I do not feel undermined by the passive-aggressive person at my workplace; I do not blame myself for failing to be in better touch with my grandmother. My body used to have the good sense to give itself a regular break from my mind. It is no longer so sensible.

I welcomed a migraine today because it permitted me to forget that it is the end of summer and we are about to leave until basically next summer, and I feel guilty for abandoning my house. I turned out the lights and sat in the dim living room. I thought, This is what it’s like in this house for the other nine months of the year . Lightless and empty. I tried to put myself in the house’s position. I tried to feel what the house feels because this house is a people house. I worry, without people, what might become of it. When I was a teenager, my mother, who hated cats, agreed to buy a Maine coon cat because it was a people cat. It was a dog in cat form. I soon left for college, and then so did my brother, and my parents did not come home from work until late. A people cat without people proved a bad combination. Its personality changed. It opened the cupboards and pulled out the food. After months of daily solitude, it stationed itself at the top of the stairs one night and would not let my mother pass. It took angry swipes at her with a claw whenever she approached it. We realized our mistake. We are not people-cat people. We gave it to people who are.

So I worry about this house being alone for most of the year because it is a people house. We bought this house because, after we’d seen it with a snobby real estate agent (who said of it, “it is not an important address”), we’d driven by it again to see if our good hunch held. We slowed as we drove past. Every window was lit; the then-owners were having a party. The house looked like the movie cliché of a house on Thanksgiving or something, aglow with human joy and coziness. Then we almost hit a large animal. I remember it as a stag, though I’ve never since seen a stag, nor do I really know what a stag is. A mythically large deer-type creature, that’s what I remember seeing. It appeared from the darkness on the north side of the house and leapt across the road. I took it as a sign. We should buy this house . (My husband remembers the stag as a moose. I didn’t learn until ten years later that he differently remembered this trenchant — to me — moment in our co-history. Of the two of us, I’m the only one who believes that the sudden appearance of a large animal means we should invest in real estate.)

Despite my migraine, we went to our neighbor’s house for cocktails. Our neighbors serve me margaritas in challenging times. They made me margaritas twenty hours after I’d spent twenty-seven hours in labor. This evening I applied a vise to my temples with my two hands. Every once in a while I’d free a hand to take a drink. A second couple arrived and asked if they smelled like skunk, because their dog had been sprayed that morning. The husband had driven up to the general store at five a.m. to buy de-skunking supplies — baking soda, vinegar, other household items that our store reliably carries (it also reliably carries white bread, celery, rubber gloves, and tonic). The husband said he ran into a lobsterman who, when he learned of the skunking, said, “You know what you want there, you want some of that ladies’ douche.” The husband recounted this with a perfect Maine accent. I was in such pain, and I was fighting the end-of-summer sadness, but I said a small thank-you to the stag, or the moose, or the migraine, or whatever was responsible for my sitting on a stool across the street from our people house, my head in my hands, so that I could be hearing that sentence.