The Folded Clock (38 page)

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
.

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.

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
.