Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Maybe this was also true of the Italian ghost. She meant me no harm. Possibly she didn’t even exist. I’d mistaken my exhaustion for a long-dead woman who’d lost her children. To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you.

Today I browsed for skirt suits online. During the summer this qualifies as an unusual event, sort of like not cracking a beer at 3:55 p.m. My studio is located just beyond the winds of our house’s Wi-Fi signal. The occasional gust will blacken my signal delta, and my e-mail will ping into my in-box, but this is rare, an accident of weather. Even at their strongest the signal’s bands are adverse to multitasking. If someone is sending an e-mail, another someone cannot shop for wool jumpers on eBay. A week after arriving, I come to understand the Internet as I understand my well water. You cannot bathe and do laundry. You cannot stream and shop. Resources get taxed beyond the limits of recovery. By sundown, the pumps are sucking air.

Each June, when we arrive in the Internet-challenged wilderness, I adjust to my new deprivation pretty seamlessly, much as I adjust to showering once every five days. The first week in my studio I was miffed that I couldn’t search for the nautical flag alphabet while writing a piece that had nothing to do with nautical flags. I almost needed to know so badly that I unplugged my computer and walked it around to the north side of the porch, and crouched under the Bee Tree (a tree filled with so many bees that it hums like a cavity drill), and Googled nautical flags . I struggled with my desire. How badly did I need to know this? Not that badly, I decided. Within a few minutes, I’d lost the urgency. I remain curious about nautical flags — like, right now, I’m curious again — but it’s been seven weeks since it first occurred to me to be curious, and here I am, still not knowing.

This makes me sad. It worries me. I want to want to know things (or at least those things that don’t involve shark sightings in Maine). I want to want the urgency. I am always wanting urgency. The best part of being pregnant is how urgent your desires become. You need to eat right now . Not thirty seconds from right now. Thirty seconds from now will not do. My husband didn’t immediately understand this. Once I picked a stupid fight with him while I was trying to feed myself. He was talking to me and wanting me to talk back (really! He expected me to talk to him!) while I was trying to push a knife through a loaf of locally crafted spelt bread. My thirty seconds expired. I pitched the spelt loaf at him. I hit his hand. Spelt loaves in these parts are no joke. They weigh as much as cement blocks. I drew blood. I was unapologetic. You do not mess with my need . I am usually so flexible. I am usually so quick to sublimate my desires. Here was a desire my mind could not override. Politeness and conflict avoidance were no longer compelling end goals. I found this fascinating and full of future potential (except that my husband threatened, after I threw the bread at him, to divorce me). My future identity, I momentarily thought, might operate on an entirely different premise. Not How can I be selflessly of service to you, the people of the world? but Fuck you all, this is what I need .

Internet curiosity is an area of my life where my needs can always come first. These needs often come at the expense of other needs (the need to do my work), but I can, and I do, become more and more impetuous and insane as a form of luxurious desire fulfillment. I rewatched Fatal Attraction and thought I must search for Anne Klein ’80s wool overcoats . This type of search usually nets me a random object — a pair of vintage silver knife rests shaped like foxes — regardless, my intense need to search and find, even if I locate something I didn’t know I was looking for, this is a satisfaction in and of itself. This is proof that I am giving myself what I need, when I need it. This is proof that I experience need in the first place.

When I have been off the Internet for a while, however, I forget how to need. I forget how to be urgently curious. Today I took my computer to a friend’s house so I could work while the kids swam. The wireless at this house is abundant. I felt it on my skin, in my hair. I realized I could go online and my bandwidth consumption wouldn’t even register. Theirs was a Korean bathhouse of bandwidth. I opened my browser. And then I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t have a hankering for anything. I thought maybe I might replace some of my grandmother’s Buttercup Spode dinner plates, one of which is unfixably cracked, but my heart wasn’t in the hunt. What about gossip? What about celebrities, what about politics? I skidded through the usual websites, but my clicking was obligatory.

I recalled being a kid and my mom taking me to a plant nursery called Skillins. I hated Skillins. As a child I was gifted at finding objects to desire. To take me to basically any store was to court my begging for items I had no business wanting. It was desire for the sake of desire. The plant nursery, however, confounded my meta-desire mechanism. I tried and I tried, but I could never find a single thing to desire at Skillins, not even in the room with the ceramic frog planters. I didn’t want anything, and because I didn’t want anything, Skillins made me anxious. In Skillins I experienced what it was to desperately want to want something, and to find nothing to want. Even as a kid, this struck me as the worst possible way to feel. I sometimes think this is why I became a writer. Here was a way to regularly exercise my desire. I could desire to do this thing that no one does perfectly, and by doing it and doing it I could learn how to desire more, and better. Here was an activity that would always leave me wanting. When I want something — that to me is not youth exactly, but the opposite of death. That to me is a way to always feel like I am nowhere near the end.

Today we were in the Fourth of July parade again. Probably we wouldn’t have gotten our asses in gear were it not for the vengeful motivator of last year’s loss. Or rather our Second Place Tie distinction that was, yes, so much more insulting than a total failure to be recognized. From the moment we tied for second place — literally minutes after we were bestowed with this dodgy honor, and handed a twenty-dollar bill — we’d enlisted the children in a small-fry smear campaign against the judge. I taught them about village politics and corruption; I taught them how to read between the lines of a local Xeroxed newspaper reported and written by a single home-schooled eleven-year-old boy, in which it was stated that, “the crowd cheered most enthusiastically for the Dolphin Rescue float, involving children in doctor coats rescuing a sick dolphin. First place was awarded to the Farmers Market float.” Could they hear the unspoken allegations of corruption?

The kids dutifully took up the cause. Their whispered accusations apparently made it back to the judge, who (because the job is so politically thorny) tried not to be the judge this year, but no one else would take his place. Again on the morning of the Fourth, riding a mountain bike and wearing an American flag button-down shirt, he corralled the Model Ts and fire trucks and motley acts into line by the Odd Fellows Hall.

Our float this year was Maine-themed, involving tourists and black flies. We got a standing ovation by the general store (or the standing ovation equivalent of already-standing people). After us came another float. A bunch of lobsters in bathing suits boiled tourists in big pots while reading Cooks Illustrated . My friend said, “Shit, that’s really good.” We knew we’d never beat this float, but we didn’t really care. They deserved the win. We wanted the deserving to win! That was the important takeaway for the kids. Let the deserving win even if those people, this year, are not us .