The Folded Clock (21 page)

Today I went to a barbeque wearing a hospital bracelet. I'd gone to the ER a few days earlier to get antibiotics for a case of strep throat. Normally strep throat does not require a visit to the emergency room, but we are in Maine, and we don't live here full-time, and the doctors here aren't accepting new patients, and my doctor in New York refused to phone in antibiotics without examining me, and so I had to go to the ER.

I'd been to this ER eight years ago. All of my information dated back to that time—my old address, my old insurance, my old doctor in New York. My old doctor's name was on the bracelet they taped around my wrist; on my discharge papers, it was suggested that I follow up with my old doctor once I returned home. Unfortunately, my old doctor was dead. He was killed riding his bike in Manhattan
about six years ago. He was a beloved family physician of the sort that is not bred any longer, and thus his demise was newsworthy, inspiring many articles in the papers. In New York his tragedy had been well documented and long ago accepted. Not so here.

The secretary requested I update my information when I settled my bill. Because of my dead doctor, I nearly didn't. In Maine, computers function as keepers of nostalgically outmoded ideas and things, kind of like historical societies. But I needed to input my new insurance company information, so I updated everything, including the name of my old doctor. Next time I visited the ER, there would be no trace of him.

I kept the ER bracelet on my wrist. Partially I wore it to make myself feel less terrible about erasing him. But I also wore it because of my failure ever to properly thank him for his doctoring while he was alive. He bent over backward to help me, not that I needed his help very much, but when I did, he gave it. I'd repeatedly said to my husband, “I need to write him a note to tell him how wonderful he is.” I never wrote a note. After he was killed, my husband made me feel better about the note I never wrote by saying, “I bet he received so many notes like that.” But what if other people assumed as I did, that all of his patients sent him notes, and thus they did not need to send him one? Maybe he'd never received a single note from anyone.

So at the barbecue many people asked me about the hospital bracelet, including a woman who, after I told her the story of my dead doctor and my subsequent guilt and how I couldn't, because it was the final connection I had to this man, cut the bracelet off yet, she said, “Wow, that was not what I was expecting to hear.” She declared that, due to this bracelet story, she would need to totally rethink
who she'd thought I was. I didn't ask how I'd formerly been categorized, or how I'd be re-categorized based on this updated information.

Recently I read a piece by Julian Barnes about the painter Lucian Freud. Barnes writes,

These two approaches might typify our differences as people, this woman and I. She's episodic, I'm narrative. I see connections everywhere. She's a woman who has lived many fantastic yet disparate and self-canceling lives. She's a rebooter, a category shape-shifter. I entered a track in my twenties and stayed on it and on it. She's my occasional fantasy; I don't know if I'm hers. But I suspect this is why our relationship is strained occasionally. We remind each other of who we aren't. I am herself betrayed. She is myself
betrayed. I don't know for a fact, but I can bet she's told herself, or told her husband, that she's relieved she's not me. I have told my husband that I'm relieved I'm not her. I only sometimes mean it.

Today I met a reclusive writer/editor who lives in our town. I've been hoping to meet him for years. The closest I've come to meeting him is seeing his name written on the
DRY CLEANING READY
list they tape to the cash register of the general store when the shirts come in.

I finally met him not at the general store but at the boatyard. I was wearing a bathing suit and the writer/editor was fully clothed. It seemed inappropriate to be meeting this man in my bathing suit, primarily because this is not a dock where people are often seen wearing bathing suits, and secondarily because this man is ninety-seven years old. Plus my bathing suit is ridiculous on so many design levels; my left breast pops out when I shrug, or when I inhale, or when I put my hand on my hip. For swimming it is completely stupid, but it is a one-piece and thus more sensible than a bikini, and so it is the suit I wear when I swim to the Goodale buoy. Today this is what I intended.

I tried to cover myself with my arms as I shook this man's hand; I told him how excited I was to finally meet him. I asked how much time he spent in Maine (as opposed to New York, where he also lived); he said he'd been here most of the summer. He made reference to the fact that, after the recent passing of his wife, Maine seemed the pleasanter place to be.

Coincidentally, three children and I had visited his wife's grave earlier that day. We'd gone to the cemetery to bring flowers to a number of people: E. B. White and Katharine White; also the “youngest person in the cemetery” (given the youngest members tragically warranted little more than an
INFANT
tombstone, this superlative status proved impossible to determine); and the grave of the bootlegger whose name I stole to give to my daughter. I'd specifically shown the kids the writer/editor's wife's grave, because, since last summer, it was new. He had a matching grave beside hers. It was also new. I suggested his wife might qualify as the “youngest” in the cemetery (in that she was the newest member) and was probably deserving of flowers. She got some. Then the kids noticed that the writer/editor's grave did not have a death date on it yet. I explained that this was because he was still alive. I explained that people sometimes buy and erect their tombstones before they die. This confused them. The existence of a tombstone for a not-yet-dead person wasn't the source of their bewilderment. What bewildered them was the etiquette involved. They had put flowers on his wife's grave. Should they put flowers on his grave too, even though he was not yet in it?

A brief discussion ensued. “It's rude to put flowers on the grave of a person who's not dead,” declared one kid authoritatively, putting the matter to rest.

I wanted to tell the writer/editor about our earlier visit to his wife's and his future grave, but I wasn't sure the story would come off as I wanted it to. Because I was wearing a bathing suit, I wasn't confident in my ability to walk the line between respectful and inappropriate. Would it make him happy to know that a few strange children had, just two hours earlier, put flowers on his wife's grave? Would
he find it cheering or depressing to know that he had not met the requirements for flowers? I'd heard that he'd been bereft since his wife had died. That it was “a matter of time” before he joined her. I told him that we'd put flowers on his wife's grave, but didn't tell him that he had not yet qualified. Sometimes, I figured, people don't need reminding that they are still alive.

Today we tried to socioeconomically identify the people whose house my friend is renting for the week. My friend is an artist, England-born, contrarian. He paints representations of historically seismic thought shifts. His ability to contextualize data, and divine from it a visual map, is applied, in his off hours, to his immediate surroundings. He decided that the family from which he was renting his house was anti-intellectual, conservative, and Francophobic. The books in the house, he said, supported his theory, which he delivered as though it were the third law of thermodynamics (one of his favorite laws). I defended the family, knowing them not at all; bookshelves of summerhouses are filled with dishy nonsense, I said. They indicate how a person understands time that is meant to be wasted.

He fetched from the shelves a novel that appears in many houses around here because the novel is about this town, and the writer wrote about real people and changed their names, and so everyone bought the novel to see if and how they'd been portrayed. He read the first sentence aloud. “All places where the French settled early have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow,
like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive.”

This proved everything and nothing, and led to a conversation about
la tendresse
, which the artist refused to define, save to say, “If you don't know about
la tendresse
, you'll understand nothing about nineteenth-century French literature.” Another friend explained
la tendresse
as the sexual education of French daughters by French mothers. Education of actual sexual techniques? we asked. Or just wiles? What class of French women inculcated their daughters via
la tendresse
? And what did this say about the man we knew who'd married and then divorced a millionaire and built a boat named
Tendress
?

This discussion, such as it was, dovetailed with a
tendresse
-related conversation I'd had two nights previous. In August, in Maine, it can sometimes seem that everyone everywhere is having the same conversation between the hours of five and eight p.m. The summer bleeds into an extended talking twilight. I was discussing with two women how best to raise a girl so that she won't become anorexic and won't approach sex guiltily, because many of us had mothers who came of age during an era when to have casual sex with a guy was thereby to inspire his disrespect, and to subsequently be seen as a woman of low morals, i.e., unmarriageable and worthy only of fucking. I admitted to telling my eight-year-old daughter, who has a great body but is no waif, that she shouldn't wish to be really skinny, because in my experience (I told her) once you start dating, you'll get a lot of action if you've got meat on your bones. I didn't say “if you look fuckable,” but that's what I meant. I was insecure about my non-waify body when I was a teenager, but I had a boyfriend who guaranteed me that my body was “fuckable,” and this seemed a
decent runner-up distinction if I couldn't look like a model. I then emphasized to my daughter that her self-worth should have nothing to do with what other people thought (thereby contradicting myself); that she had to believe her body to be fuckable, i.e., if only she wanted to fuck it, that would be ideal, and that would make other people, girls or boys or whatever, want to fuck it more. Again I communicated all of this using none of these words. I admitted to my friends that maybe it was totally screwed up to mention this stuff to my daughter, and that I basically really didn't know how to talk about it at all. But now this conversation with my daughter could be viewed, more nobly, as my attempt at
la tendresse Américaine
. Set a good example. Want to fuck yourself so that others want to fuck you too.