Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

But the deserving didn’t win. We won. We beat the better float. Which was confusing at first, because it was explained to us, when we worried to a stranger about the goodness of the really good float, that we weren’t a float, we were a “walking act,” and so we would be judged in a different category.

Then we won first prize in the float category.

A bit of on-the-spot research revealed — the judge gave the “walking act” first prize to the color guard, a crew of octogenarians in uniform, because one of the color guard members suffered a small cardiac event while waiting for the parade to start. When you cheat death, was the judge’s thinking, you deserve a prize.

I had no issues with this.

But the poor judge, still bruised by the bad chatter we’d initiated via the kids over the past year, and not wanting to endure another winter of child-fueled rumors about his fraudulence, decided to reclassify us as a float so that we could win, and so that we would leave him the fuck alone. And so we won. And so the other float, the really much better float, didn’t win.

The children, meanwhile, were jubilant; they felt the cosmos have been righted. I don’t know how to explain that sometimes, in the righting of things, there are occasionally more wrongings. Last year I was all about lessons. This year, I’m all about silence. I don’t even know what the lesson is this year. That unfairness is actually fairness in disguise, or fairness is unfairness in disguise? That the squeaky wheel gets the grease? None of this is news to me. But I want these lessons, for a little bit longer, to remain news to them.

Today I examined the Rolodex I found at JFK. I flipped it around and around. The photos tumble over themselves like the individual letters and numbers of train departure signs at Penn Station. Blink, blink, blink. The Rolodex is a clock that runs forward and backward. There’s an order but there’s no predetermined point of entry. I can enter at the car accident or the marriage of the daughter or the party in Palm Beach or the marriage of the parents or the club fire or the motel pool or John as a baby or John as an adult or John as a hippie driving to California. I can enter at the midpoint and work my way back around. The Rolodex resets at whatever point I decide — this is where it all begins.

I might start reading books this way.

As of yet I have not Googled this Rolodex family. I know their last name. If my last name were more WASPy it might sound like theirs. Maybe they removed their its in the night. Maybe they are Turkish apples and related to me. I haven’t Googled them because I’m enjoying what I don’t know as my means of knowing them. I’m trying not to miss the photos that slipped out of the Rolodex in the trash can, meaning there exist a few captions (on the white paper backgrounds) with no photo to accompany. What image belongs to “Four Generations of Men” or “Front of Inkpot, Apaquogue Rd”? What image belongs to “Home from Belgrade after Op. in June”? I can see the shape of the image — the browned outline of the square it once occupied — but inside the frame it is blank. Maybe I will meditate upon that space, as I am meant to meditate upon the face of the Madonna del Parto should I wish to change my outcome.

(By the way, I am certain it was John who threw away the Rolodex. John was the sibling who took the Rolodex to the airport and tossed it in the rubbish bin. John, goateed and wearing a poncho on the Pacific Coast Highway. John, a baby in a snowsuit, petting a lamb.)

I am missing my grandmother right now. The family in the Rolodex spent winters in the same small Florida town as my grandmother, and during the same decades. Since my grandmother knew everyone, I am certain she would have known these Rolodex people. She suffered from accuracy. If she pronounced a person “dreadful,” you could bet they were, and in ways invisible to most eyes.

I am also missing a person I know only from a book. The book has ended. I finished it. Based on this new way of reading, I thought perhaps I could rescue the book, a diary, and its author, from finitude. The diary was written during World War II by a Russian émigré named Maria “Missie” Vassiltchikov. Missie was such a sensible person; she reminded me of my grandmother. She persevered with normal life even when nothing was normal. She remained clear-eyed; she spoke the plain truth. (“I saw that the lorry was loaded with loosely tied sacks. From the one nearest to me a woman’s legs protruded. They still had their shoes on but, I noticed, one heel was missing.”)

Missie rationed her food and I rationed her. I read one diary entry a day so that Missie and I could hang out for longer. When the diary was over, I was so sad to say good-bye to her. She’d been my compatriot and tour guide throughout the four months I lived in Berlin. But I, too, was leaving. I was returning home. Missie’s diary ended in the manner of a Victorian novel.

MONDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 1945

Drove back to Johannisberg via Bad Schwalbach through the beautiful forests of the Taunus. The silence is total there, the sense of quiet and peace pervasive….

Here my diary ends .

(About this time, I met my future husband, Peter Harnden.)

During our last days in Berlin, I’d look up at twilight and see jet trails. Tons and tons of jet trails. They were sky paths pointing to elsewhere. I always notice jet trails when I am about to leave a place. My imminent departure is marked for me overhead. I see jet trails toward the end of each summer when we’re soon to leave Maine; I saw jet trails at the end of my first marriage. Once I saw clouds that looked like jet trails. I’d been in Boston attending a therapy session with my best friend (this was before she switched to the guru). She was trying to forgive me and I was trying to forgive her. My friend told the therapist that I was cheating on my first husband, and the therapist, knowing my less-than-happy marital situation, replied, Good for you . Her approval made me feel so much worse. It was not good for me to lie every day. I was stressed; I’d surprised myself by turning out to be a different person than I’d thought I was. It was measurably not good for me to be having an affair. But apparently she knew something I did not. I left the therapy session and got into my car to drive an hour south to cheat on my first husband with my future husband. Through the windshield I noticed the jet trail clouds leading me south. I had no idea at the time that I would one day marry this man. But I do remember thinking, I am driving home .

Today I went to the Grand Central Oyster Bar at midday. I was feeling lost and this bar is like a church. The ceiling is a series of arched brick vaults; at the entrance to the bar is a whispering gallery like the one in St. Paul’s cathedral in London (or so I’ve read; I have never been). I’ve spent many winter days standing in front of this entrance when it is too cold to be outside but you must go somewhere or lose your mind. Because we can get to this underground church by barely touching the outside air, i.e., we can practically take our elevator to the subway beneath our building that, with one change, leads us here, this is where we come. Often on a January afternoon you will find me whispering into one stone corner while my children push their heads into the opposite stone corner and whisper back. We never have much to say to one another except Hello and Can you hear me? But this is mostly what is whispered in churches, too.

No children accompanied me today. They were in school; it was lunchtime for them. It was whatever time for me. I sat at the bar and ordered a drink and thought that this bar in fact less resembled a church than it did a crypt. I eavesdropped on my neighbors, a pair of businessmen. The one with the British accent said, “It’s brilliant how they’ve put those monitors in the subway that tell you when the next train will arrive,” to which the one with the American accent replied, “What does it matter? The train comes when it comes.”