The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 84: April 21

Today I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with my daughter and her friend. They are both nearing nine but seem much older. These are my last years to be interesting to them. Knowing this, I try to be so exceedingly interesting that I might hold their attention longer than my natural expiration date allows. I told them, as we walked across the bridge, educational anecdotes about developing from a girl into a woman, featuring me as the protagonist. (This was my more utilitarian attempt at la tendresse Américaine.) After twenty years in this city, it seems that at nearly every Manhattan corner or monument there is an instructive girl-into-woman story I can tell. This bridge is the setting for a number of stories. I told my daughter and her friend about cross-country skiing across this bridge in a blizzard; how I was the only person, aside from a few people in cars, on this bridge. How it was so quiet, and all I could hear was the wind and the metal tips of my poles hitting the walkway under the snow. How the lesson of this story was that even when you’re in your twenties, and adrenaline-crazed, and living in a loft with lots of other adrenaline-crazy striving people, there is something edifying about being cold and alone in the city version of nature.

Then I told them a story about a very stupid thing I did with my first husband. We’d just started dating; we’d been drinking gin. We decided to run home. Literally, to run. Through Tribeca and over the Brooklyn Bridge. This was not exercise; this was not “running” as in marathons. This was the kind of running people did in The Sound of Music, over fields and singing. We were a third of the way across the bridge — to the first stone arch — when my first husband bent down and opened a trapdoor in the middle of the wooden walkway.

It sounded so implausible — a trapdoor? In the bridge? But indeed there was a trapdoor, and for some reason it wasn’t locked. It led to a rung staircase and then a spindly catwalk suspended under the bridge’s roadway. Beneath this catwalk was air and then water. There was nothing to catch us if we fell. The cars drove a few feet over our heads. It was so loud above us, so quiet below. We chased each other. Back and forth, back and forth. The catwalk was metal and responded jerkily to running; it was constructed of welded rungs with a few inches of space between each one. When we ran we could see the far-down water strobing under our feet. Then, as I was being chased, i.e., my first husband was chasing me, I felt a violent vibration behind me. I turned. My first husband had run headfirst into a low-lying girder. He’d been knocked out.

I then told my daughter and her friend, because I’d forgotten this crucial detail, that although the catwalk had a thin metal railing for your hands, by your feet there was nothing; if you were lying on the catwalk, for example, and knocked unconscious, you might tilt right off into the river.

My first husband was tilting.

But I saved him. I saved him so he could go on to be married to me and then divorced from me.

My first husband and I climbed back through the trapdoor. We ran the rest of the way across the bridge. We walked down some steps that led to a deserted underpass. Suddenly, a car pulled up. In this car was one of my first husband’s best friends and his girlfriend. (An ancillary point of interest: this girlfriend would grow up to host a reality TV show that my current husband and daughter and I watch.) They gave us a ride to our apartment. That night, I lay in bed and could not sleep. I was traumatized by what might have been. I might have lost the love of my life to a tragic and stupid accident. He would have been the love of my life had I lost him. I did not, and he was not.

After I told this story to my daughter and her friend, I became embarrassed, not least because they liked this story, and clearly held me in higher regard because of my stupidity and daring, which is of course why I told them the story in the first place. Even once my daughter no longer found me interesting, which would be soon, she couldn’t completely reject me; I’d run under bridges; I’d saved a man from death. To my face she’d scorn me, but to her friends she might proudly tell this story, because she’d heard it before she understood why I was telling it. It would be lodged in her brain before that brain could skeptically wonder, Why on earth is she telling me this inappropriate story?

But what really made me pathetic was that I hadn’t told the whole story. In telling only the dramatic parts, I’d failed to tell the truth; i.e., I’d failed to shape from these events an educational story that little girls getting older and eventually leaving home need to hear. The truth about the skiing story is this: I skied across the Brooklyn Bridge because I was losing the thread. I felt disconnected from the person who once trekked alone through blizzards, the person who was from Maine and didn’t give a shit about parties and fame. The stone used to make the bridge’s arches was quarried in Maine, and taken from a hole in the ground that had since filled up with water and in which I’d once gone swimming. Both of these stories are about my first few years of what would become two decades in a city that didn’t immediately feel like home and still sometimes doesn’t. It so didn’t feel like home that I married a man I knew I should not because his mother lived in a house that, because of its windows and its molding and its old plaster smell, reminded me of Maine; New York so didn’t feel like home that I would often walk across the bridge to lean my forehead against the stone arches and touch the ground from which I’d come. If they could persist here, these stones, and retain their shape, then so could I.