The Folded Clock (33 page)

Today I went to a Virginia Woolf reading. For some reason this reading was held at a law school. At the front desk
I was asked by an old woman holding a hand-written sign that said
VIRGINIA WOOLF
, as though she was a chauffeur picking up Virginia Woolf at the airport, if I were going to the Virginia Woolf reading. I confirmed. She said, “I
guessed
that about you.” I got offended. Why I didn't know. When I entered the library where the reading was being held I knew. I am of that age now where I am looking for the next age I will be. How will I dress? How will I act? Here were women in their last ages; they wore kimono blouses and ethnic scarves and had buzzed, asymmetrical hair. I felt like I was in a late-80s women's studies class. I'd once admired women who looked like this; what had changed? I said to myself,
They're only dressing for women like themselves
. I often claim that I dress for other women. But this crowd felt more insular and hermetic. There was a formula to belonging.

Since I am older but not yet old, I try not to judge even while, to protect myself, I'm totally judging. So trying not to judge, I surveyed these women and thought:
Maybe when you get older you want to be part of a visually defined group. Maybe it is easier to be recognized and acknowledged as part of a group because to be acknowledged individually becomes harder over time
. I've noticed that I have to look harder at older women in the face to see their faces. I stare and I stare and then suddenly—there they are. I have to look harder at my own face to see myself in it. My face was signifying me so well for a while; now, again, it is failing. When I look in the mirror I literally feel like I'm boring down through a surface that doesn't catch the light, that isn't quickly bouncing back a discernible message. I am starting to fail on the streets to communicate with my face because pedestrians don't have that kind of time. They are in a hurry. Recently I started wearing a bone around my neck. It's a seal vertebra I found on a beach that's for sale;
I hope, if a seal spirit sees fit to deliver unto me a massive windfall, that the beach will someday be mine. The bone makes pedestrians stare, not at me, but at it. This seems a good first step. Who is that woman wearing the bone? Who wears a large bone around her neck? This woman does. Please take the time to look at her.

Today I sat next to an eighty-nine-year-old man at dinner named Mr. Pym. He seems, like Dick Cavett, to have known all of the most interesting human beings of the twentieth century. He was not a name-dropper so much as a man who didn't, by virtue of his lifestyle, know a single unfamous person save his own mother (who was, he thrice repeated in his Georgian accent, “a wonderful woman”; he was haunted, daily, he said, by the unkind words he'd said to her as a boy). When asked by an architect (seated to my other side) if he'd lived his life joyfully or angrily, Mr. Pym replied, “I should have been more angry.” He was too nice, he said, and primarily defined himself as an avoider of conflicts. He was too nice, even, to fire people, he said; “I just wait for them to die.” But then he confessed that he'd considered hiring a murderer from Russia to kill an employee who was making his life hell. “It would only have cost about $3,000,” he said.

For such a conflict-avoiding man, he revealed, through his stories, a fairly consistent aggressive streak. He was, he said, the only person whose advice the writer Mary McCarthy had ever taken. (McCarthy was not a person, apparently, to whom one gave advice.) He'd visited her
house in Maine while doing a photo essay on her town and its buildings. (This was the same town with the white house ordinance where Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Elizabeth Hardwick lived.) McCarthy's house was hidden by a pair of trees. He said to her neighbor, “If I had some overalls and a chain saw, I'd take these trees down myself.” His remark was reported to McCarthy. “He's right,” she apparently said. The trees came down. Later Mr. Pym mentioned going to the theater with the poet Marianne Moore. Over dinner, this man told Moore about his mother's house down south (also, it seemed, his house). He hated this house. He wanted to get rid of his mother's house and move a house from a hundred miles away to the spot her house currently occupied. His own mother would be displaced while this house swapping occurred. He asked Moore what he should do. Live with the terrible house? Or destroy it, make his mother homeless, and truck in, from a distance, the house he desired?

Moore apparently replied, “Mr. Pym, sometimes one must be
ruthless
.”

I'm sure Mr. Pym, this too-nice man, was often ruthless. I think a lot of self-defined nice people are ruthless. I do not consider this a cynical stance. I consider it a realistic understanding of the word “nice.” If a nice person is famous or successful—and plenty are—that person is not so nice that they are above heeding the logic of status improvement. Right now I am reading a nonfiction book in which a certain poet is portrayed (within the normal range of such things) as ambitious and calculating. I was frankly relieved to discover she was ambitious and calculating because, a few months earlier, I'd read her memoir. She'd presented herself as an angel, a guileless art angel. Her passive approach seemed to implicitly criticize people
who had to actually
try
to succeed. She'd just made art alone in her crappy loft. Fame had found her.

But fame hadn't. Fame doesn't. Recently a writer I know expressed irritation with another quite famous writer's claim that she'd just been a mother, and she'd just sat at her kitchen table writing stories while her kids napped, and that she had no ambition at all. “That's bullshit,” this irritated writer said. “So an editor decided to randomly phone this housewife and ask her for some stories?”

I'm messily conflating ambition and not-niceness here. To some, to me, I guess, there's a connection. To be ambitious—to exert one's self-interested desires beyond the scope of one's own head—could be seen as impolite. As not nice. I have always been nice; I have been told by others how nice I am. The one person who does not think I'm nice is me. This is because I am ambitious and competitive, and so I must be not nice to someone in order for my otherwise niceness to feel authentic. I am not nice to myself by believing I must pay more than others, and sometimes for others. When I go out to lunch with a person, I must always pay the entire check; splitting isn't allowed, and I will never permit another person to pay for me. I sometimes think my sense that I must pay comes from growing up in Maine. The five purely beautiful summer days per year are mortgaged hard against months and months of mud and ice and damp. The Maine weather instills in one's psyche a seasonal rhythm of payment. Of the cost of joy coming due.

Today I sought advice from the therapist at my daughter's school. My daughter and I are victims of a co-produced play that begins and middles and ends with screaming, tears, accusations of heartlessness and disaffection, faked injuries, faked heartbreak that hides real heartbreak. There's an oxymoronic quality to the unremitting pitch of our relationship; it's a screeching flat line. Finally I could no longer take this relationship. I am not saying that I am not the crazy person here. I am saying I am the adult. I can throw up my hands and claim powerlessness. As the adult, this powerlessness has serious power.

So I contacted the Feelings Doctor. The Feelings Doctor works at my daughter's school. We made an appointment, just the doctor and me. Before our meeting, I mapped out what I planned to say to her. I wanted to be efficient. I wanted to provide an accurate history, but mostly I wanted to get down to business. Establishing background exhausts me. I don't tend to do it. I start talking and the listener can fill in the blanks as he or she chooses. My husband calls me No Context Woman. “ ‘The journey is the goal' is not the goal” is my motto. The goal is the goal. Let's start with the end.

To this end, I had a probably bad idea: I could send the Feelings Doctor an essay I'd written about my daughter and our traumatic history together. I thought the Feelings Doctor might get a very good sense, an arguably more thoughtful and comprehensive sense, of this history by reading an essay.

But then I realized how insane this might make me
appear to be. A mother contacts a Feelings Doctor to speak about her troubled relationship with her small daughter. Instead she sends the doctor her own writing, turning the therapy session into an opportunity for the therapist to respond to her artistic representation of the problem, rather than the problem itself. How could I appear as anything other than a narcissist, or a writer greedy for more readers, or a mother so self-involved that she pretends to care about her daughter when, in fact, she's using the appointment as a sneaky means of gaining an intimate tête-à-tête about her own work with a stranger?

I decided against sending the Feelings Doctor my essay; I regret now that I didn't. I arrived early for the appointment, and good thing, too. I busted the Feelings Doctor lacing up her escape sneakers; she'd forgotten we were supposed to meet. (I seem to have this effect on therapists.) She asked me some questions and didn't really listen to the answers. She said, “Children these days have so much attention paid to them that they can't handle a moment of neglect.” I corrected her; in fact, our situation was slightly more complicated. To state it uncomplicatedly, and thus probably inaccurately, I resented my daughter's need of me and thus punished her by neglecting her.

Then the Feelings Doctor told me everything I already knew about my daughter, everything I'd already written about her. I wished I'd given the Feelings Doctor my essay. Not because we would have wasted less time. Not because we would have reached a solution faster. I think I understand, for the time being, at least, that therapy is unable to tell me anything new about myself or my loved ones. But therapy could tell me many interesting things about a stranger. About a person I hope I'm not. It could tell me something about a woman, for example, who makes
an appointment with her daughter's therapist as an excuse to talk about her writing. What might a therapist be able to tell me about
that
woman? I wanted to know more about her.