In Lydia Davis’s “Lost Things”, from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, a character speaks of several items she has lost—everything from a button to a ring to a dog—then reasons that while the possessions are “lost from [her]…they are also not gone” (275). She insists, in a way, on the existence of things that are no longer with her, suggesting her permanent attachment to these lost objects and beings. She remembers what has been lost and continues to search for what is missing, even if that search involves only trying to imagine that the objects are “not gone” (275) but persisting somewhere in the world.
Davis’s story reminded me of a watch I lost when I was fourteen, a watch my father gave me for Christmas, the first I owned as an adolescent, and the first I really cared for. He visited on Christmas day, sat in our kitchen for an hour, drinking coffee and munching on cookies, before he drove home in his red Rabbit. I stood in the doorway to witness the leave-taking, the bottoms of my socked feet cold on the threshold. The wave good-bye in the doorway was a ritual, no matter what the air was like. I stood there until the car was gone. My mother said, “Shut that door.” Someone left in the snow, but something was staying, and I could feel the new weight and precise hug of it on my wrist.
Although the watch looked gold, nothing on it was gold, and that did not bother me because the watch, whatever its materials, emphasized my wrist, no longer the bony wrist of a child, but the delicate wrist of a girl. All that day and night, I held my arm out to better admire my wrist. I slept with the watch on. The watch was from my father. After the holidays, the first day I wore the watch to school, I made sure my sweater sleeve was pushed up, just a little, just enough for me to be reminded of the watch, and I checked the time discreetly, always with good reason, as someone who did not think a watch was a big deal would. The Monday after the Sunday my friend got her ears pierced at the mall, she wore her hair in two high, tight ponytails, so the silver studs would shine, and kids made fun of her, for showing off. But no one noticed my watch, and I was not made fun of. I wore it as if it had always been mine.
The watch was mine, though, only for a short time. The watch was not the life-long possession I thought it would be. One day after school, I poured a glass of milk, preparing to go downstairs to watch The Young and the Restless, and I saw that my wrist was bare. The clasp must have come loose on the walk home, because when my friend nudged me as we left through the school doors, and asked me to go to her house, I pushed up my coat sleeve and checked the time. Going to her house would mean watching her fight with her sister. Sometimes they threw things- a bottle of nail polish or a brush. They shared a room and a queen-sized bed. She would also play Rat’s “Round and Round” until my brain felt sick. I checked the time because I wanted to tell her I had somewhere to go, but I could not think fast enough. And she knew as well as I did that I never really had to be anywhere. I told her simply that I had to go; I said, “Not feeling well.” She said, “Right.” We parted, and I didn’t doubt, and she probably did not doubt, that we were still friends.
I put my glass of milk in the fridge. In the front landing, I pulled my coat and boots on. I went back out into the winter afternoon to search for my watch, and I felt like I was going in the opposite direction in every way-towards uncomfortable rather than comfortable, towards cold rather than warm, towards school rather than home. I followed the path I walked every day, but with my eyes on the ground. The wind made my neck and ears ache, and the air smelled frozen and lifeless. When I did glance up, the lake in the distance looked cold; if I had fallen into it, I would have died. They would have to drag the lake bottom to find me, and they might never. I zipped my coat up as far as it would go- the coat was a gift from my mother, but a different kind of gift than the watch was. In the hot, bright, crowded store, I picked it out and demanded she get it for me, or, I said, all the kids would go on thinking I was poor. The coat, a soft, army green, made me look perfect in the various gleaming mirrors, but the material was thin, as she warned me. I said I needed it and she pulled out her Visa and the coat was mine. Now, the wind moved through it, the coat that my mother told me wasn’t enough of a coat.
I turned up Breezy street, and I kept my eyes on the sidewalk because if my watch was not buried in a drift, I refused to overlook it. I slowed my step, but the watch was not anywhere on the sidewalk I had walked along just a few minutes ago; it did not appear near anyone’s fence line, beneath the mailbox, near the bus stop; the fake gold did not glimmer near any curb. I arrived at the gate to the school yard, and I stood still. The yard of our school was probably the widest and longest of all the yards of all the schools in our town. They made us run the perimeter in gym. But my watch might have been there, waiting. I would see it, pick it up, and close it in my hand, and slip my hand into my pocket. I would hold it tight. I entered the school yard, and I walked the path I thought I might have taken. There was only snow, though, and all the footprints in it. And I was the only one in the field. It was always strange to be near the school when the teachers were gone. I couldn’t imagine their other lives. Without them there supervising, I felt eerily alone, like I could have been anywhere, a place no one knew about, and would never know about. I walked to the other side of the yard, across the pavement to the door I’d unwisely emerged from after school- unwisely because I had no idea what was about to happen. I was going to lose my watch, it was going to slip from my wrist, and I wasn’t going to know the loss was happening when it was. I was not going to be able to stop it.
There was no snow by the doors because the area was sheltered by an overhanging roof. We stood here on rainy days, trying to duck from the worms that boys still pelted at us, the boys who loved us one minute and hated us the next. Now, my companions were a soggy, yellow and black package of matches, a red mitten with a frayed, open thumb, and dead yet lovely leaves left from the autumn. I leaned against the brick wall, and I stared ahead. There was the school yard before me, the houses beyond, and the sky that would, I knew, almost suddenly be dark. That was winter. That was always winter- almost suddenly cold, almost suddenly terrible, and never over, until it almost was. My face was cold, and I put a gloved hand on either icy cheek. My mother would be home soon, and she would say, coming into the kitchen, “All I ever ask is that you peel the potatoes.” It was all she asked, but I disliked the chore as much as she did. Still, I tensed, imagining her voice -- didn’t I know how hard she worked? Was peeling a few potatoes so bloody hard? Didn’t I appreciate all she did? Not peeling the potatoes was like letting our sky fall- the sky that belonged to my mother and me, the one that was always about to fall, to crush us, defeat us. The guilt I felt over not peeling the potatoes, making her long day an even longer one, would have the exact, endless weight of that sky.
I started back across the field, keeping my eyes out, trying to see better than I had. The snow seemed to fold into itself and to fold away from itself. The sky shadowed it oddly, and the more I looked, the more I wanted to find it, the blurrier everything became. The wind was freezing my eyes, even my mouth, and the day wasn’t day anymore. I probably wasn’t going to find the watch, and that would mean that it was lost.
I walked down Breezy Street again. I passed some younger kids who were in snowsuits and carrying sleds. They would be on their way to the ravine, where there was a steep hill that ended in frozen marsh. Darkness was okay when you were sledding, but not when you were searching for something lost, something stubbornly gone. At the end of the street lay the bay—solid, bluish, white ice, and perfect for skating on. When I was seven or eight, my friend and I tried to skate across it to the nuclear power plant. We always said, not trying to be original, but truthful, that the plant looked just like an elephant. It always seemed possible to reach it, but the closer we got to the beast, the farther away the power plant grew; it was an optical illusion I fell for over and over. I could not see how something could get farther away, the closer you got to it. There had to be a way to trick things, rather than to have things tricking you. Then months and years passed, and we grew up, and I no longer cared about the nuclear plant- the farther away the better.
I slid my hands in my pockets. I was almost home, almost at the turn, and my wrist was bare; really, my wrist was more than bare; it was forlorn. I had been beautifully adorned, and so adorned, I had changed, or I thought I changed, or that life had changed. But I did not now need to pay anymore attention to my wrist. The watch that was given was no longer mine, and if I didn’t forget it, it would own me, the one who loved it. I wasn’t cold anymore. I wasn’t hot or cold or warm, I was simply walking home, feeling nothing. The watch was gone, and I was done looking for it in the snow.
I really like this.
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