The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 85: August 31

Today I was so relieved to get a migraine. For the past thirty-plus years I’ve gotten migraines regularly; they were part of the weather that happened within and without. I would get a migraine after a manic jag. I would get a migraine before a blizzard. Now I rarely get them. I don’t want to say that I miss being in pain, but I do miss the excuse to not give a shit about all the big and small things I often care too much about and that a migraine eradicates. When I have a migraine I do not grieve the shirt that was put in the dryer by accident and its texture forever ruined; I do not feel undermined by the passive-aggressive person at my workplace; I do not blame myself for failing to be in better touch with my grandmother. My body used to have the good sense to give itself a regular break from my mind. It is no longer so sensible.

I welcomed a migraine today because it permitted me to forget that it is the end of summer and we are about to leave until basically next summer, and I feel guilty for abandoning my house. I turned out the lights and sat in the dim living room. I thought, This is what it’s like in this house for the other nine months of the year. Lightless and empty. I tried to put myself in the house’s position. I tried to feel what the house feels because this house is a people house. I worry, without people, what might become of it. When I was a teenager, my mother, who hated cats, agreed to buy a Maine coon cat because it was a people cat. It was a dog in cat form. I soon left for college, and then so did my brother, and my parents did not come home from work until late. A people cat without people proved a bad combination. Its personality changed. It opened the cupboards and pulled out the food. After months of daily solitude, it stationed itself at the top of the stairs one night and would not let my mother pass. It took angry swipes at her with a claw whenever she approached it. We realized our mistake. We are not people-cat people. We gave it to people who are.

So I worry about this house being alone for most of the year because it is a people house. We bought this house because, after we’d seen it with a snobby real estate agent (who said of it, “it is not an important address”), we’d driven by it again to see if our good hunch held. We slowed as we drove past. Every window was lit; the then-owners were having a party. The house looked like the movie cliché of a house on Thanksgiving or something, aglow with human joy and coziness. Then we almost hit a large animal. I remember it as a stag, though I’ve never since seen a stag, nor do I really know what a stag is. A mythically large deer-type creature, that’s what I remember seeing. It appeared from the darkness on the north side of the house and leapt across the road. I took it as a sign. We should buy this house. (My husband remembers the stag as a moose. I didn’t learn until ten years later that he differently remembered this trenchant — to me — moment in our co-history. Of the two of us, I’m the only one who believes that the sudden appearance of a large animal means we should invest in real estate.)

Despite my migraine, we went to our neighbor’s house for cocktails. Our neighbors serve me margaritas in challenging times. They made me margaritas twenty hours after I’d spent twenty-seven hours in labor. This evening I applied a vise to my temples with my two hands. Every once in a while I’d free a hand to take a drink. A second couple arrived and asked if they smelled like skunk, because their dog had been sprayed that morning. The husband had driven up to the general store at five a.m. to buy de-skunking supplies — baking soda, vinegar, other household items that our store reliably carries (it also reliably carries white bread, celery, rubber gloves, and tonic). The husband said he ran into a lobsterman who, when he learned of the skunking, said, “You know what you want there, you want some of that ladies’ douche.” The husband recounted this with a perfect Maine accent. I was in such pain, and I was fighting the end-of-summer sadness, but I said a small thank-you to the stag, or the moose, or the migraine, or whatever was responsible for my sitting on a stool across the street from our people house, my head in my hands, so that I could be hearing that sentence.