The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 73: May 13

Today I talked with an artist and a poet about luck. The artist (a man) is in his sixties; the poet (a man) is in his twenties. The artist is a cheerful curmudgeon, a man of years; the poet is sweetly irreverent, and still expecting, before he is too much older, his fame day. We started to talk about a book only two of the three of us had read. It soon became clear that the poet, though socially irreverent, was, in his mind and opinions, hard and unforgiving, while the curmudgeon was a man of great compassion. I was speaking in defense of this book, and the poet was speaking against it. He called the book “lucky”—as in, the writer had not been talented or deserving of his success. He’d been fortuitous; he’d stumbled into fame. This assertion made the artist come to the defense of the writer he did not know and the book he’d never read. He spoke sternly to the poet, like a father to his son of whom he is cautiously proud but also a little envious. “That’s a cheap shot to call a person lucky,” he said. “Everyone relies on luck to succeed.”

It was lucky that he said this, because I’d been thinking about luck that day. I’d been writing an essay about my son’s birth for an anthology of birth stories. My son was born at home, and the midwife didn’t show. This isn’t exactly what happened; she showed, I sent her away, she went really far away, and by the time we called her back it was too late. Or almost too late. She arrived with roughly thirty seconds to spare.

Afterward we were told that we were “stupid” and “lucky.” Stupid, I agree. But lucky? We weren’t lucky. We were really, really, really lucky. I would never claim not to be lucky. I am so fucking lucky that I am terrified of luck. I am terrified it will abandon me. I’m like the women in the Tuscan town where the Madonna del Parto is kept. I’m always lying down in the street to keep my luck from leaving. When I was a kid, in elementary school, I would try to divine the day’s luck forecast each morning with a yogurt pot. The pot was sealed with foil; if I could remove the foil without tearing it, the day would be a lucky one. If I tore the foil, the opposite awaited me. I’d walk into the day braced against the hex. I still perform witchy meteorology with yogurt tops. It’s a habit I can’t shake. When the foil top tears I tell myself, It means nothing. I don’t believe myself for a second. When things are going badly, I scan my life for the cause. Often that cause can be sourced to an object. A material irritant. Once I bought what turned out to be a very bad luck ring in Morocco. Whenever I wore the ring, my paychecks were lost in the mail. My furnace malfunctioned (there’s a softly vengeful name for what happens when your furnace covers everything in your house with oily soot—puffback). Beyond-my-control bad luck, in other words. Metaphorical puffbacks happened all over the place. I’d put the ring aside and a few months later try again to wear it. Bad luck returned. It wasn’t enough to take the ring off my finger; after I returned it to its box, I had a bad luck hangover that lasted a week.

Finally I took the ring to a psychic. I didn’t tell her why I wanted her to “read” my ring. I wanted to test her cold. She said, “I don’t like this ring for you.” She said it was “associated with an angry man.” I’d always assumed the ring had been cursed by whoever had made it, or possibly by the man who sold it to me. But her description sounded a lot like my ex-boyfriend, the one with whom I’d lived in Morocco. He was angry, I guess; in truth I usually attributed his moods — which were never wrathful or violent — to a case of depression. Regardless, I took the advice she gave me. She told me to wrap the ring in black paper and then again in tin foil. I hid it in the back of my closet. Why don’t I just throw it away? I don’t know why. For the same reason I could not, as a kid, throw away my broken lamp. One thinks a loved object is unique, unique to each human who loves it. But what is really unique is the unloved object. Or rather the unloved object confers uniqueness upon the person who fails time and again to love it and yet who still cannot throw it away.