The Folded Clock (5 page)

Today we marched in our town's Fourth of July parade. Our float was by far the best—a team of ten (mostly under eight years old) doctors performed a rescue on a sick dolphin, played by a boat builder whom we'd sewn inside a few sheets of sound insulation. The sound insulation had the hand-feel of blubber. It was very realistic to the touch and helped us take our roles seriously. Unfortunately our dolphin became enamored of the crowd and swam very far ahead of our “ambulance,” and did headstands in the middle of the street, and did not appear in need of rescue. Tired of cartwheeling, the dolphin would finally drop to the ground. We'd blow our whistles, run to him with stethoscopes, roll him onto a pair of canvas firewood carriers, and heft him into the back of the ambulance. Then he'd swim off, ready to do cartwheels again. We were the crowd favorite. We were definitely winning first prize in the float contest.

The judge did not agree. The judge awarded us a second place tie. (Our prize—a $20 bill—was handed to us without pomp at the post-parade BBQ.) Who won first place? We asked the judge. First place, he said, went to the farmers market float.

The farmers market float consisted of three old men driving three old tractors.

“I was impressed that they got those old tractors running,” said the judge.

We shared our second place distinction with the Girl Scout float. The Girl Scouts did nothing but ride in a truck until it was parked and the parade was over, at which point they danced atop the flatbed to “Funky Cold Medina.”

We smelled a rat. Two of the judge's daughters were on the Girl Scout float! Coincidence? The farmers market takes place on the judge's front lawn! Coincidence? No and no. We drank beer out of rubber work gloves and bitched about the judge. Oh, the corruption! This judge must be deposed! I spent the rest of the day polling everyone I saw, including the woman who works in the general store about the float situation. She's a native Mainer who doesn't speak much, or at least she doesn't speak much to me. When I arrive each summer, I've decided that the most respectful way to greet her is to fail to greet her at all. But I solicited her opinion on the parade outcome. She seemed to agree that we'd been screwed. “Yeah,” she said. “Who cares about a bunch of tractors?”

I felt vindicated—there is no higher word in our land than that of the woman at the general store—until I remembered: The judge is a controversial figure in our town. Her desire for us to win might more accurately be described as her commitment to never, ever side with the judge. The judge had arrived from a big city with big ideas about how to fix everything that was wrong here, in his opinion. He was going to install a ferry system to bring tourists from the national park that was eleven miles away by boat (sixty by land). He wanted to build low-income housing on his back property. (Not even the low-income people in town liked this idea.) I believe at one point he talked about starting a university here. Then he almost burned his barn down by leaving a bag of live stove ashes on the floor. This gave everyone permission to officially discredit him, and then to ease up on him a bit. Now that he's been proven incompetent, he is tolerated.

Today I started reading a book called
How to Navigate Today. How to Navigate Today
is not a spiritual guide but a book about actual nautical navigation written in the '40s by a woman named Marion Rice Hart. Marion Rice Hart was born in 1891 and was a chemical engineer, a geologist, a research physicist, a miner, a surveyor, a sculptor, a painter, a photographer, a sailboat skipper, an aviator, an author, and a radio operator. According to the preface of
How to Navigate Today
, Rice Hart navigated her day by keeping a low profile. “She has never been a noisy rebel flouting the conventions for women of her generation; she has just quietly done what she felt like doing.”

I am navigating today by drawing the tap handle I found in my dining room wall. What continues to confound me is why I cannot simply own, as in possess in a manner that is satisfying, this tap handle. My inability to enjoyably accomplish this calls into question how I've managed, in the past, to own anything successfully. What does it mean to own this wooden table, this pottery bowl, this random ancestor painting (not my ancestor)? Owning is revealed as a doubly passive business. One just sits around owning these things one already owns. My doubt in my overall owning abilities, however, remains focused on the tap handle. I frequently experience the urge to flailingly, like with my mind or my heart or my body, fuck the thing.

Given the
l'amour fou
diagnosis I received from my artist friend, I clearly require treatment. I have decided, as previously stated, to draw the tap handle each morning
even though I do not draw (unless I'm hanging out with children). I've never seen a still life of spice jars or a sunset or a person and thought,
I want to draw that
. My capturing impulses are not visual. In the past, if I wanted to capture an object, I owned it.

Yet I do not know how to own the tap handle, perhaps because it has been in a state of dis-ownership for so many years. It was found between the wall studs of my house by a guy who demo-ed our dining room. Who knows how a tap handle ended up in a wall. There are plenty of objects in our walls that make sense—the old newspapers added insulation, the old razor blades were too sharp to throw in the trash heaps hidden like Abenaki middens in the back woods—and others that don't, like the vertebra of a cow. I, too, have been frustrated by objects that you cannot file anywhere in your life, but neither can you throw them away. They drift around a house transiently, in a death row limbo, first on the dining room table, then on a bookshelf. Suddenly there's a hole in the wall, and an opportunity presents itself. I can get rid of this object while still keeping it. This is what I imagine the person who put the tap handle in the wall thought at the time.

So I decided that the only way to treat my affliction was to draw the tap handle, because the act of drawing would be frustrating enough to possibly distract me from the inherent frustration of the object. I would draw it every day. (It would become my “everyday object,” like the tumbleweed the Eames hung from their ceiling.) I started work each morning by drawing the tap handle; afterward I would draw, in words, the day. The poet Mary Ruefle wrote, “an ordinary life was an obscure life, if we can extend the meaning of
obscure
to mean covered up by
dailiness, glorious dailiness, shameful dailiness, dailiness that is difficult to figure out, that is not always clear until a long time afterward.” If an object is relegated to dailiness it becomes a part of you. It is ingested by habit. It is stored between the studs of the walls of your self. When I'm autopsied they will find inside—this tap handle, a child too scared to go to matinees, a song I once loved, maybe also a cow bone and some old news. Who knows what else I've hidden in there because I could make no sense of it at the time, and found nowhere else to put it.

Today I sat on the steps to the library and wrote e-mail replies on my computer. I was replying to replies to replies. Where is the question that began all of these replies? Was there
ever
a question?

A tourist approached me. She was Japanese. She wore a white business suit; she held an iPhone. A lot of tourists visit this campus. What are they here to see? Often they ask my permission to take pictures of my children playing on the wheelchair ramp, which suggests even they may not know why they're here. A famous university in theory might sound exciting, but in reality it's just a bunch of buildings, and often some droopy balloons hanging from an iron banister, and a loose gathering of people that might be a poorly attended Falun Gong liberation protest, or some students playing Assassin.

The Japanese woman, I assumed, wanted me to take her picture in front of a statue. I checked the direction of the sun. I considered telling her to pose in front of a
smaller library, because I had taken a lot of successful pictures of tourists there.

Instead the woman asked me, “Do you imagine God as a woman?”

I took her question seriously. I didn't want to be dismissive or rude and thus reflect badly on my city or my country. I always feel a keen responsibility to be a good host. Her question better explained, too, why she was on campus. Maybe she thought she'd strike up a more interesting conversation with a stranger she found at a university rather than one she found in, say, Carnegie Deli. What is the place of man in the universe? What determines the fate of the individual? Where, spiritually speaking, is the nearest subway?

I also considered the possibility that she was part of a conceptual art piece, maybe an “interpreter” hired by the artist Tino Sehgal. Sehgal did a piece recently at the Guggenheim called
This Progress
in which interpreters—one of them was my friend's teen son—asked museum visitors questions like “What is progress?” and followed them up the museum's spiral ramp until another interpreter took over. Maybe Sehgal's new work was being secretly unfurled over campuses of higher learning. Maybe, in fact, this woman was not an interpreter herself but part of the conceptual art advance team. Maybe I was being interviewed for an interpreter position.

Now a job was on the line. I love to get jobs. Getting jobs is like winning domestic arguments on a grand scale, and then getting paid for it.

So. Did I imagine God as a woman? I didn't. When urged to envision God, or the aura God exudes, I understood that aura as male, maybe because the only people who use the word “God” in a question such as the one I
was asked by the Japanese woman tend to be Christian. But I didn't want to give the Japanese woman this hackneyed answer. I would never be hired.

Instead I said, “I'm not sure.”

“According to Scripture,” the Japanese woman said, “God is referred to as both Our Father and Our Mother.”

“Oh,” I said. Now I was wondering: maybe she was a feminist activist?

The Japanese woman could see I was confused. I was clearly a novice. I was not the erudite liberal arts student/professor she'd hoped to encounter.

She regarded me with sympathy.

“Do you
believe
in God?” she asked.

I heard this question as “Do you even know who God
is
?”

I was in too deep. I didn't have answers to her questions. I had too much e-mail to answer to answer her questions. I was no interpreter. I already had a job.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't think I'm going to be able to answer your questions today.”