The Folded Clock (30 page)

Today we are in Rome because our children, ostensibly in school in Berlin, have nothing but vacations. The weather has turned dour in Germany, and we cannot stay for so many days inside our little house without people going mad. One can play only so many card games and eat so many wet crackers before the collective familial humor flags. This was our thinking when we bought cheap plane tickets and headed to Rome. Better to be in sunny Rome than to be in wet, cold Berlin. Unfortunately Rome was equally wet and cold. Our sightseeing consisted of running from shelter to shelter.

Now it is night. Our shoes are balanced upside down atop the electric heater. Our socks are dry and hard. The
kids are asleep and my husband and I are in bed watching YouTube videos of gurus. We watched Werner Erhard, founder of est, interviewed on
The Tonight Show
by John Denver. We marveled at how we were able to do this. Here we are in Rome in 2013, and we're watching a video of Werner Erhard and John Denver from 1973! Meanwhile, the TV in our room doesn't get more than two channels. All the news is from today. This seemed so limited, suddenly, such a narrow notion of news.

After John Denver we watched a video of a woman from the Landmark Forum (what I understand to be the corporate offspring of Erhard's est) pitch her wares on a national morning talk show.

She said, “It all comes down to these three questions.”

Then we watched a video of my best friend's guru, the one who was enlightened by the sight of a mouse.

The guru said, “It all comes down to these four questions.”

My friend's guru was soft-spoken and spacey; maybe she was stoned. She stared at her interviewer as though dopily in love or trying to hypnotize him. She wore what might have been robes. The interviewer asked her many more than four questions; she feigned deep thoughtfulness at each and then replied, as though the answer had never before occurred to her,
yes
.

I was shocked. As I've said, this guru had really improved my friend's life. I'd been hoping, when I got around to it and had the time, that I'd let her improve my life, too. But this guru, she had no
game
. She was like a zombie on pain pills. When I someday follow a person, I want to be impressed by their effortless bullshit passing and dribbling and slam-dunking; I want them to be a Harlem Globetrotter of rhetoric and presentation and spin. I
want them, like that world-famous pickpocket (whose YouTube videos we watched in order to learn how to avoid being robbed at the Colosseum), to so deeply understand me, and how I perceive the world, that I can be uniquely distracted, fooled, and fleeced. I would happily pay with my wallet (and my watch and my wedding ring) to be understood as deeply as this pickpocket understands his marks.

I'd hoped this guru would understand me like that pickpocket. But to do this she would have to touch me, fondle me, reach into my front pocket, press her leg against my thigh. Maybe in person she does this. I was not, to be fair, experiencing her
in person
. But in person I could not imagine she would be much different than the human I experienced on my computer screen. We were at an impasse, this guru and I. Maybe I was at an impasse with all gurus. Maybe I was looking to the wrong people for answers and clarity. I turned instead to a guidebook for guidance. A real guidebook. Someone had left it in the common bookshelf of our hotel's dining room. It was called
Getting Along in Italian
. According to
Getting Along in Italian
, one can ably survive a vacation and probably a whole life knowing how to ask and answer a few pages' worth of questions. I narrowed the options down to these essentials:

Today I almost told a woman I barely know that I loved her. This woman is the mother of my son's friend. She and I are also sort of friends. It's hard to make new friends at this stage of life, but she and I are trying. I always want new friends, but I know what it takes to make a good one. It takes years, decades, and back when I was younger I had hours and hours of those days of those years of those decades to dedicate to getting to know a friend. Now I have minutes of hours of days of years of decades. To acquire a new friend under these time restrictions would require three consecutive lives.

To compensate for the time we don't have, this woman and I use the time we do have deeply. We tunnel in. We confess to the hand jobs we gave during our intern years to executives on commuter trains; we confess to coke habits. We talk about anxiety and marital confusion. We know such strange details about each other given the basic details that remain unknown. Are her parents alive? Where did she get married? What is her job?

The commonplace details we do discuss involve child logistics. I will get the boys and bring them here and I will leave them for an hour and then you can pick up yours and bring mine home unless you don't have time to bring mine home in which case my husband can pick mine up and if
you can't pick up yours it's no big deal because my husband can take yours home with us and you can pick yours up whenever and we can even feed yours dinner.

These conversations often become extremely confusing. She thinks out her hypotheticals aloud, and I can't tell what is process and what is proposition. Sometimes I stop listening. Sometimes I hold the phone to my ear and make food with the other, or read e-mail, or fold laundry while she is working through the many permutations of tomorrow. Sometimes, when she starts to say good-bye, I have no idea what we've decided.

Today we were having one of these phone conversations. She talked, I emptied the dishwasher; she kept talking, I boiled water. Then she said good-bye. I started to say, “Bye, I love you.” The words were half out of my mouth before I stopped them. I hung up, panicked. What would have happened if I hadn't caught myself? So many rules would have been violated. You cannot tell a person you love them too early. You shouldn't tell a person you don't love that you do. More shamefully she'd surmise, after the awkwardness, that I'd stopped listening to her, and that I'd entered that rote response zone, and I'd told her I loved her because I thought she was my husband. She'd know that I don't always listen to my husband when we're on the phone together, and that when I say “I love you,” it sometimes means I am too distracted by our home life to listen to him right now, because he's out of town and I am not, and I am doing the work that he is not here to do (and which he does for me when I am not here to do it), and so I am really so busy that I don't have time to hear about his day. I just want to say, “I love you,” which I do mean, I do love him, but I need him to be quieter so I can keep our house
and family in order. I sometimes say, “I love you,” not to open up an emotional vein but to cauterize it, keep it full of blood.

Today I rowed back from an island. We'd eaten dinner on this island, my friends and family and I. We'd collectively hauled a thousand pounds of food and gear to this island in order to survive three sunny hours on it. Ours was a motley August crowd—locals with roots that extended back many generations, locals who'd escaped from New York twenty years ago, an editor, an all-but-dissertation philosophy professor, a writer, an artist, two men who run silent meditation retreats in Mallorca and Nepal, three men named Ben, a lot of children. The party extended horizontally along the beach.

The mood was light but also, inevitably, charged. Islands make people competitive, maybe because the subconscious fear of shipwreck and survival permeates even the most casual outing. Who will lead the masses when the weather turns and the food runs out? Who will be sacrificed to feed the starving useful people, the ones who can fish and make fires and sing morale-building sea shanties? I often contemplate my odds of surviving a shipwreck and how to improve them. When I was breast-feeding, I nurtured a lot of shipwreck fantasies. What if I were shipwrecked with my baby and ten adults on an island with a large box of Clark Bars? Wouldn't it be best if I ate the Clark Bars and breast-fed everyone on the island, because my body would transform the worthless sugar into valuable fat and protein? Wouldn't
that prove to be the wisest survival strategy, and wouldn't that guarantee I'd never be killed for food?

I was no longer breast-feeding on this particular island trip; I had to prove my indispensability in other ways. So I swam and swam and swam. I could maybe dive for lobsters; I could maybe go for help—that's what my eternal swimming said to the people sitting on the beach. I swam while others drank beer, and slowly realized that they, too, would have to swim, swim or maybe be killed. My individual survival was
clearly
essential to the survival of the group. Was theirs?

I don't think I've ever seen so many people swim on an island trip before. The water is probably fifty-three degrees out there. Then, near hypothermic, we ate the food we'd brought, and not each other. We watched the sun set, and quelled our panic that we'd have to spend the night, because the boat wouldn't start, or possibly it would sink. We loaded the scow with bags and people and transferred them to the lobster boat. I decided to row back to the mainland in a dinghy. I rowed with the artist and his squid-loving son. The son fished and caught a sandbar. His father bit the line loose with his teeth. As the moon rose, and the sun definitively set, and we were in darkness, I told them the true story of Boon Island. Boon Island is a long pile of rocks located six miles off the southern coast of Maine. In December 1710 a ship called the
Nottingham Galley
ran aground on this rock, which measured then and measures now three hundred by seven hundred feet. The fourteen survivors lasted twenty-four days
during the winter
. They did eat one another in order to pull off this astonishing feat.

Boon Island
, published in 1956, is a thinly fictionalized account of their endeavor written by Kenneth Roberts. Maine children are (or were in the '80s) assigned to read
Boon Island
for English class. Should our own personal hardships overwhelm us, well, we should be thankful our feet weren't turning to translucent sponges in our boots. I guess this was the lesson. Or maybe this is too clichéd an understanding of why we were assigned this book in English class. Buck up, etc. This is so prevalent an attitude in Maine that we didn't need a formal education to learn it. The takeaway horror of
Boon Island
was far more existential. Yes, these men were freezing and eating one another, but the cruelest factor of their island internment was this: they could see smoke rising from the house chimneys ashore. As they suffered, they could watch the cheery proof of people warming themselves by fires and cooking food that wasn't, an hour ago, a friend. That struck me as far worse punishment than simply being shipwrecked on a rock. It seemed an appropriate metaphor for being marooned in Maine as a kid—there was another world out there, you could watch it nightly on TV, but how could you reach it?

On a windless night, without a current, the row from the island back to shore is an easy one. I was no longer proving my indispensability to the group; I simply wanted to take the slow way to shore under the half-moon, because summer is almost over, and these are the quiet, twilight moments that, if properly collected and preserved, help me survive the New York winter. I start amassing these moments during the final weeks of August. I must salt supplies for storage. They must last me until I can return to this place I angled for years to leave.