The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 49: April 19

Today I wore a coat I haven’t worn for years. My husband and I were headed downtown on the subway. I said to him, “I wonder what’s in the pockets.” I use my clothing as storage for important and unimportant paper scraps I might paste into a book if I were more organized. The contents of my pockets are like the diary I have, until recently, failed to keep. In pockets I have found movie stubs, plane tickets, to-do lists, e-mail addresses written on grocery receipts, business cards from people I have no memory of meeting, reminders that I used to have far more money in my savings account than I currently do, jotted-down directions (what was at 457 7th Avenue? Who was in Suite 23?). According to my pockets, I’ve been all over this city. I could mark these destinations on a map using pushpins, showing the shape of my travels over the past twenty years. These are my hunting grounds, though I have no memory, now, of what I was hunting.

Sometimes there is money.

So today I said to my husband, “I wonder what’s in the pockets,” thinking I would pull out the usual handful of oblique data points. Instead I found a folded piece of 8½ x 11 paper. I assumed it was the Robert Frost poem I’d read at our friend’s daughter’s bat mitzvah. (I encounter this poem every two years or so. I keep it in a spring coat; I never can remember which one.) I was surprised to unfold the paper and discover our wedding vows.

“It’s our wedding vows,” I said to my husband. We’d been married in our backyard in Maine, and, yes, I recalled, when it had grown colder that afternoon, I’d put on this coat. This was now ten years ago.

I tried to read the vows but found I couldn’t. I felt embarrassed, maybe because we were on the subway and in close proximity to many strangers, but then again we’d gotten married in front of strangers, people we’d literally just met when we’d moved, a month earlier, to Maine. We invited the strangers to our wedding, but I did not — out of shame, because I’d been married before and not successfully — invite my own family. I was trying to make a very small deal of this wedding. I thought I was being so sensitive by failing to include them in this really (I told myself) quite insignificant event. It wasn’t worth the plane fare, I reasoned, plus I figured they’d wish to be spared the shame of witnessing their daughter or sister promise to unfalteringly love yet another man. Then the morning of the ceremony I realized how much this wedding meant to me, and how much I needed my family there, and how insanely thoughtless and stupid it was to think I could get married, especially to this man, without them. I wept on the phone to my mother while the wind blew and the sun shone and the yard was readied for a ceremony that she would, because I’d wished to spare all of our feelings, miss.

In the subway car I handed the vows to my husband. He tried to read them. He also grew uncomfortable. Why was this? We’d been married by an Internet-anointed, ex-fighter-pilot-turned-mussel-farmer; it had been up to us to provide the ceremony’s entire script. So maybe we were made uneasy by what we’d written because we are writers. What writer can look at something he or she wrote ten years ago and not feel that back then he or she knew basically nothing about language or life? Or maybe my husband, like me, experienced a little bit of personal mortification regarding “our affairs.” Though we’re both highly capable and responsible people in other areas (job, family), we’re unable to file our taxes without an extension. We’re unable to keep track of our Social Security cards or birth certificates or car registrations or any of the official documentation one is called upon, with erratic infrequency, to produce. When we recently needed our marriage certificate to prove my spousehood to the Germans, we were so uncertain of its location that we began to doubt we’d ever owned a copy. Then my husband stumbled upon it in a cabinet used to store lightbulbs and chafing dishes. He put it in a more sensible place and immediately forgot where that was.

Another possible explanation for our discomfort: my husband and I, on this day, were going on our first date together in months. We’ve rarely been in the same city for the last year and a half. I recently met him on the street to exchange the kids when I was returning from a trip and he was leaving on one, and the time window was so narrow that we had to rendezvous on a corner, and hug hello and good-bye, and he took his suitcase and got in my cab, and I took my suitcase and wheeled it home with our children. So maybe it was because we were just getting to know each other again after a few trying years of what my husband called “corporation co-management.” It was a bit like having amnesia and being introduced to a total stranger and told, “You’re in love with this person. You’ve been in love with them your whole life!” It’s not that we weren’t in love, but we’d grown shy around each other. I think we were slightly embarrassed by the baldness of the love proclamations we’d written in our vows.

Or maybe it wasn’t the baldness of our love proclamations so much as the inadequacy of them. These words we’d written were sweet and hopeful and well intentioned, but they didn’t come close to capturing the actual future we’d built in the subsequent years. (Also we’d watched too many episodes of The Bachelorette together. I fear we’ve been forever ruined for love language by that show.) The vows made me think of our barn. Our barn is built on top of a pile of rocks. Basically someone just threw some big rocks on the ground a few hundred years ago and built a barn on top of them. People walk into our barn and they can’t believe how quiet and vast it is; it’s got a hand-hewn, holy feeling that a friend once compared to an old Swedish church. When you peer underneath the barn sills you can see the light streaming through from the other side. The whole thing appears to be levitating on these inadequate supports that once functioned as vows for the future. (Here there will someday be a barn.) The engineering is inexplicable; it’s a beautiful mystery. Our barn no longer needs those rocks, if it ever did.