The Folded Clock (35 page)

Today I visited antiques shops. I'd invited my daughter and her friend along as my shopping enablers. They did not fulfill their mandate. I found a poster I liked of a pregnant Girl Scout, circa 1969, smiling beside the slogan: Be prepared. She wore patent leather Mary Janes and kneesocks. She was kind of like Piero della Francesca's pregnant
Madonna
. (I just looked up
mary how old annunciation
. Internet estimates put her between twelve and sixteen years old, meaning she could have been a Girl Scout Cadette or a Girl Scout Senior.) My daughter and her friend counseled me not to buy the poster. I tried to sell them on selling me on buying it. “Why do you like it?” they asked. “Because it's so funny!” I said. They scrutinized the poster. “Why is it funny?” they asked. I didn't know why it was funny. Because teenage pregnancy is hilarious? I bought it because I didn't fully get the joke, and because I wasn't certain there was meant to be a joke at all. But I liked that the Girl Scout appears to have no idea that she's pregnant, I liked that “Be prepared” might simply refer to her stylishness and her psychotic smiling gameness, both of which, it seemed to me, were classic Girl Scout traits. And isn't being prepared to be unprepared the best form of preparedness? If you think you're ready for anything, you're probably not ready at all.

Today I read the letters exchanged between a young boy and his mother in 1930. These letters are not published. They are not public domain. These letters were in an old suitcase discovered in the corner of a rental house occupied by my friends. I had no business reading these letters, is what I'm saying. I read them anyway. I read them using the same logic I use in cemeteries, when my children climb on the tombstones or stick their fingers into the engraved dates or delight over the strange names or dismantle the spooky implications of “Lost at Sea.”
These people are dead and in many cases forgotten, but now they are receiving some welcome attention
. As a dead person, I would very much appreciate a child climbing on my gravestone, so long as they were respectful and interested, and I can promise that my children are exactly these children. If they were terrible children who topple cracked gravestones and yell and cannot be respectful even to the living, I would probably, as a dead person, be frustrated by my inability to discipline them, but I'm assuming the dead have their ways of expressing outrage, especially on their home turf. I could drop a rock on a toe, or trip a small criminal with those wires that hold fake flower arrangements together. Regardless. I feel when I visit a cemetery as I might feel if I were ever to visit a retirement home. These are the forgotten people, and they have stories, and they just want someone to listen to them.

Such was my rationale when I read the letters I found in the suitcase. That I generated a rationale in the first place was because the people in these letters, though I'd
met neither of them, did not qualify as complete strangers. They are the relatives of my good friend (it is through his family connection that my other friends are renting the house). The mother in the letters is my friend's great-grandmother; the son is his grandfather. The suitcase in which the letters were found was already open when I discovered it in the laundry room. The letters were already spilling out of it. They were already free of their envelopes. They were already unfolding. Still, I hesitated. I had heard about the grandfather and the great-grandmother from my friend, because he often uses his family as a medium by which to practice his considerable storytelling gifts. I thought of e-mailing him to ask his permission to read these letters that described, more or less, events he'd already told me about (in his way), but this struck me as a request he'd probably agree to without my needing to ask. What became creepy was me asking in the first place. Asking would cast suspicion over my mostly innocent curiosity.

I did not e-mail him to ask his permission. Obviously I did read the letters. They were heartrending, or maybe I was just in a mood to have my heart heaved up by letters sent to and by a boy who is dead because he would be over one hundred years old now if he were not. The boy had been sent to boarding school and was, I gathered from his mother's letters to him, miserable. His mother tried to convince him that being sent away from home was the best and most adoring thing she could do, that it would toughen him up and that in general he had to learn to be much tougher because he was not tough and, as a result, he was a bit of a disappointment. She wrote for pages exhorting him to be tougher and tougher and tougher and then she would slip into the third person and write, “Boo still loves his mummy, doesn't he?”

Later that day I took my son to the cemetery. He is in a phase where he wears no clothing. He is small enough that, in a cemetery, he might be mistaken for a marble cherub sprung to life, i.e., his nakedness seemed less disrespectful than it did a fanciful extension of the graveyard aesthetic. He stood, naked, in front of the grave of the man who had been the little boy whose letters I'd just been reading (He died at age ninety-three) and who'd once been so lonely at boarding school. I took a picture of my naked son in front of the man's grave to e-mail to his grandson, my friend. I thought he might find it touching, or funny, or I don't know what. Like the earlier e-mail asking his permission to read his family letters, this, too, I did not send.

Today I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with my daughter and her friend. They are both nearing nine but seem much older. These are my last years to be interesting to them. Knowing this, I try to be so exceedingly interesting that I might hold their attention longer than my natural expiration date allows. I told them, as we walked across the bridge, educational anecdotes about developing from a girl into a woman, featuring me as the protagonist. (This was my more utilitarian attempt at
la tendresse Américaine
.) After twenty years in this city, it seems that at nearly every Manhattan corner or monument there is an instructive girl-into-woman story I can tell. This bridge is the setting for a number of stories. I told my daughter and her friend about cross-country skiing across this bridge in a blizzard; how I was the only person, aside from a few people in cars,
on this bridge. How it was so quiet, and all I could hear was the wind and the metal tips of my poles hitting the walkway under the snow. How the lesson of this story was that even when you're in your twenties, and adrenaline-crazed, and living in a loft with lots of other adrenaline-crazy striving people, there is something edifying about being cold and alone in the city version of nature.

Then I told them a story about a very stupid thing I did with my first husband. We'd just started dating; we'd been drinking gin. We decided to run home. Literally, to run. Through Tribeca and over the Brooklyn Bridge. This was not exercise; this was not “running” as in marathons. This was the kind of running people did in
The Sound of Music
, over fields and singing. We were a third of the way across the bridge—to the first stone arch—when my first husband bent down and opened a trapdoor in the middle of the wooden walkway.

It sounded so implausible—a trapdoor? In the bridge? But indeed there was a trapdoor, and for some reason it wasn't locked. It led to a rung staircase and then a spindly catwalk suspended under the bridge's roadway. Beneath this catwalk was air and then water. There was nothing to catch us if we fell. The cars drove a few feet over our heads. It was so loud above us, so quiet below. We chased each other. Back and forth, back and forth. The catwalk was metal and responded jerkily to running; it was constructed of welded rungs with a few inches of space between each one. When we ran we could see the far-down water strobing under our feet. Then, as I was being chased, i.e., my first husband was chasing me, I felt a violent vibration behind me. I turned. My first husband had run headfirst into a low-lying girder. He'd been knocked out.

I then told my daughter and her friend, because I'd
forgotten this crucial detail, that although the catwalk had a thin metal railing for your hands, by your feet there was nothing; if you were lying on the catwalk, for example, and knocked unconscious, you might tilt right off into the river.

My first husband was tilting.

But I saved him. I saved him so he could go on to be married to me and then divorced from me.

My first husband and I climbed back through the trapdoor. We ran the rest of the way across the bridge. We walked down some steps that led to a deserted underpass. Suddenly, a car pulled up. In this car was one of my first husband's best friends and his girlfriend. (An ancillary point of interest: this girlfriend would grow up to host a reality TV show that my current husband and daughter and I watch.) They gave us a ride to our apartment. That night, I lay in bed and could not sleep. I was traumatized by what might have been.
I might have lost the love of my life to a tragic and stupid accident
. He would have been the love of my life had I lost him. I did not, and he was not.

After I told this story to my daughter and her friend, I became embarrassed, not least because they liked this story, and clearly held me in higher regard because of my stupidity and daring, which is of course why I told them the story in the first place. Even once my daughter no longer found me interesting, which would be soon, she couldn't completely reject me; I'd run under bridges; I'd saved a man from death. To my face she'd scorn me, but to her friends she might proudly tell this story, because she'd heard it before she understood why I was telling it. It would be lodged in her brain before that brain could skeptically wonder,
Why on earth is she telling me this inappropriate story?

But what really made me pathetic was that I hadn't
told the whole story. In telling only the dramatic parts, I'd failed to tell the truth; i.e., I'd failed to shape from these events an educational story that little girls getting older and eventually leaving home need to hear. The truth about the skiing story is this: I skied across the Brooklyn Bridge because I was losing the thread. I felt disconnected from the person who once trekked alone through blizzards, the person who was from Maine and didn't give a shit about parties and fame. The stone used to make the bridge's arches was quarried in Maine, and taken from a hole in the ground that had since filled up with water and in which I'd once gone swimming. Both of these stories are about my first few years of what would become two decades in a city that didn't immediately feel like home and still sometimes doesn't. It so didn't feel like home that I married a man I knew I should not because his mother lived in a house that, because of its windows and its molding and its old plaster smell, reminded me of Maine; New York so didn't feel like home that I would often walk across the bridge to lean my forehead against the stone arches and touch the ground from which I'd come. If they could persist here, these stones, and retain their shape, then so could I.