The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 58: September 6

Today I turned the wrong knob on my stove when I tried to boil water. The burner knobs on my two stoves are reversed. To fire up the front burner in New York, I turn the left knob. To fire up the front burner in Maine, I turn the right one. When I move from the apartment to the house (or the house to the apartment), I spend many days unthinkingly turning the wrong knob and igniting the wrong burner. Like a magician off her game, I throw fire where I didn’t mean to throw it. I have to remind myself: You are not where you just were. Things are different here. I get mad at myself because I hate to waste time, even if it’s only one one-hundredth of a second. I watched the Olympics this summer. One one-hundredth of a second is no joke. One one-hundredth of a second is the difference between gold and last place. I also hate to think about actions that shouldn’t require thinking. I need the mechanics of my life to be effortless. When appliances don’t work, I cannot be my best person. I actually become a bad person. I am not a patient mother when the machines, in addition to the people, require attention. I become like the real estate woman in Maine who showed me the Odd Fellows Hall the other day. The woman, nearing eighty, emerged from her car wielding a butter knife. (The hall has no keys.) She used the knife to jimmy the lock, but the lock wouldn’t spring, and she grew frustrated, and I saw in her what I see in myself when plain things that should work do not — that I have the capacity to turn, with the quickness of a lightning strike, unkind.

But I am also reassured by my failure to turn the correct stove knob in New York. This meant that, though back, I was not yet fully back. Even though I’d already forgotten the calm of the past three months, my muscle memories had yet to be overridden. I am still in that place where real estate agents unlock empty houses with butter knives. My Maine neighbor, an occasional electrician, warned me when he changed our bathroom light from a pull chain to a light switch: “You’ll be reaching for that chain for weeks.” He was right. I was incapable of remembering the chain was no longer there. A year later, I still grope in the dark at the dark.