The Folded Clock (31 page)

Today my husband and I decided to rearrange our furniture. Our apartment has never looked right to me; probably we should hire an expert to fix it, but I am too proud. I am too convinced that I am secretly a decorating prodigy and to pay for professional help is beneath me. I understand that, with all of the money in the world, and all of the space, a person would require some help to sort through the infinite options available to her. I don't have such problems. I like what I can afford. I like what fits. Within these narrower choice parameters, I usually choose well.

In this apartment, however, my talents have been stymied. Five years after moving in I've yet to crack the code. The light, as I've noted, is an issue. The light comes from the wrong direction. The rooms are oddly shaped, and the walls are full of doors and windows. My husband tries to discuss with me what to do with the apartment—how we might better sit in it and walk through it—but I often grow testy with him when he broaches home improvement topics. I cannot explain why, save to say that my inability to properly inhabit this apartment feels like a personal failing; I am embarrassed that I need his help. When I disagree with where he wants to put a piece of furniture, I tell myself that he has a terrible sense of space (he doesn't). He cannot eyeball a void, I tell myself, and understand what it is capable of accepting. He'll suggest we put a bed against a wall that is, to me at least, obviously too short. He'll insist, gamely, that we try it. I insist it's pointless to try. I hate that I can't just say, “Sure, let's move that bed,”
and let the bed be right or wrong. Let the objects in the house fail or succeed to fit in it, not me.

Today I talked with an artist and a poet about luck. The artist (a man) is in his sixties; the poet (a man) is in his twenties. The artist is a cheerful curmudgeon, a man of years; the poet is sweetly irreverent, and still expecting, before he is too much older, his fame day. We started to talk about a book only two of the three of us had read. It soon became clear that the poet, though socially irreverent, was, in his mind and opinions, hard and unforgiving, while the curmudgeon was a man of great compassion. I was speaking in defense of this book, and the poet was speaking against it. He called the book “lucky”—as in, the writer had not been talented or deserving of his success. He'd been fortuitous; he'd stumbled into fame. This assertion made the artist come to the defense of the writer he did not know and the book he'd never read. He spoke sternly to the poet, like a father to his son of whom he is cautiously proud but also a little envious. “That's a cheap shot to call a person lucky,” he said. “Everyone relies on luck to succeed.”

It was lucky that he said this, because I'd been thinking about luck that day. I'd been writing an essay about my son's birth for an anthology of birth stories. My son was born at home, and the midwife didn't show. This isn't exactly what happened; she showed, I sent her away, she went really far away, and by the time we called her back it
was too late. Or almost too late. She arrived with roughly thirty seconds to spare.

Afterward we were told that we were “stupid” and “lucky.” Stupid, I agree. But lucky? We weren't lucky. We were really, really, really lucky. I would never claim not to be lucky. I am so fucking lucky that I am terrified of luck. I am terrified it will abandon me. I'm like the women in the Tuscan town where the
Madonna del Parto
is kept. I'm always lying down in the street to keep my luck from leaving. When I was a kid, in elementary school, I would try to divine the day's luck forecast each morning with a yogurt pot. The pot was sealed with foil; if I could remove the foil without tearing it, the day would be a lucky one. If I tore the foil, the opposite awaited me. I'd walk into the day braced against the hex. I still perform witchy meteorology with yogurt tops. It's a habit I can't shake. When the foil top tears I tell myself,
It means nothing
. I don't believe myself for a second. When things are going badly, I scan my life for the cause. Often that cause can be sourced to an object. A material irritant. Once I bought what turned out to be a very bad luck ring in Morocco. Whenever I wore the ring, my paychecks were lost in the mail. My furnace malfunctioned (there's a softly vengeful name for what happens when your furnace covers everything in your house with oily soot—
puffback
). Beyond-my-control bad luck, in other words. Metaphorical puffbacks happened all over the place. I'd put the ring aside and a few months later try again to wear it. Bad luck returned. It wasn't enough to take the ring off my finger; after I returned it to its box, I had a bad luck hangover that lasted a week.

Finally I took the ring to a psychic. I didn't tell her why I wanted her to “read” my ring. I wanted to test her cold.
She said, “I don't like this ring for you.” She said it was “associated with an angry man.” I'd always assumed the ring had been cursed by whoever had made it, or possibly by the man who sold it to me. But her description sounded a lot like my ex-boyfriend, the one with whom I'd lived in Morocco. He was angry, I guess; in truth I usually attributed his moods—which were never wrathful or violent—to a case of depression. Regardless, I took the advice she gave me. She told me to wrap the ring in black paper and then again in tin foil. I hid it in the back of my closet. Why don't I just throw it away? I don't know why. For the same reason I could not, as a kid, throw away my broken lamp. One thinks a loved object is unique, unique to each human who loves it. But what is really unique is the unloved object. Or rather the unloved object confers uniqueness upon the person who fails time and again to love it and yet who still cannot throw it away.

Today I tried to console my son. He'd gone to sleep and thirty minutes later he'd woken up crying. This happens sometimes—my husband and I think he's down for the night, and then he awakens in a state. I don't think there's anything dangerously wrong with him—tonight he said his ear hurt. Last week he said it was his leg. He sobs and he writhes and he's inconsolable, and we briefly consider calling the doctor, and then we don't.

This time I was resentful when he woke up in inexplicable agony because the day had been too long; there had already been too many phases. There was the cleaning
phase, during which I organized lightbulbs and tossed modem cords and tried to put away the folded laundry. Then there was the Enforced Outdoor Fun phase, people dragged unhappily around the harbor on a kayak. Then there was the Local Culture phase, involving a trip to a historical society, which more or less looked like the interior of our barn, itself a historical society spanning many more centuries than the one we visited, because ours included deflated beach floaties and broken plastic sleds. Then there was the eating and drinking and socializing phase. Then there was the putting the kids to bed phase, and then the sitting on the couch and watching bad television phase—the phase of which it can sometimes seem all other phases are in service. Everything we do, we do so we can be sitting on this couch watching
The Bachelorette
.

And then my son woke up.

Soon it became clear that he could not be distracted from his misery fugue state. He would lie awake in his bed and contort and cry for probably an hour, and I would have to rub his back throughout. I tried not to act aggrieved that my final phase had been interrupted. That I was not on the couch watching man after man say, “I'm starting to fall in love with Desiree.” That I was not parsing with my husband the phrase
starting to fall
. Isn't the point of falling that it has no prelude or warning, and certainly does not stretch out over the course of many ninety-minute episodes? That it simply
happens
? That you are suddenly on the ground, having already dropped from a higher altitude to a lower one? I thought of
falling
as akin to being tackled by a member of the Boston Women's Rugby Club (this happened to me; I played rugby in college). Women so skilled you didn't feel the transition from running to lying on your back. One second you were sprinting toward the try line;
the next second you were staring at the sky. You were in love with Desiree!

These were the important discussions I was missing while my son sobbed and sobbed. Every situation with a child that irks me, I try not to be irked by thinking: How many more irksome moments like this will I have? My son is four and a half. My hours of rubbing his back while he weeps are numbered. I moved my hand from his shoulder blades to his tailbone, and then I swooped it in reverse. Down up, down up; it was like sharpening a knife, or polishing a bowl. I tried to commit the movement to muscle memory. Whenever I am trapped in a situation, I think of how this entrapment might qualify as work. I am so worried about ever wasting time that I cannot let any small amount of it escape without defining for it a use or a purpose or extracting from it a lasting lesson. I tried to think of how this motion might, in the future, come in handy. I thought, If my son dies, I will sit at the shore, and swoop my hand like this back and forth over a smooth rock that has been warmed in the sun and feels humanlike as a way of remembering him. Then I thought this was melodramatic and gruesome. I thought instead:
Maybe I'll write a story in which a character's son dies, and she could, as a means of coping, go to the shore and do this
. Then I thought this was melodramatic and stupid. I thought instead: I must remember to do this when I am seventy. I must remember to find a rock that feels exactly like my son's four-year-old back. I must remember to close my eyes and imagine that I am me again, a tired mother trying to teach herself how to miss what is not gone.