the day of the wrong key

In a small inland town whose name is best left out of this — there are several with claims to the practice and no archive willing to arbitrate — there used to be a day, observed without notice, on which every household would try the wrong key in its own lock first. The custom was unwritten and almost never explained. A visitor staying in a guest room, asked about the lodger heard fumbling at the back door at dawn, would be told only that it was the day for it.

The wrong key was not chosen with much ceremony. A cellar key, an old wardrobe key, the long brass thing nobody had a use for; any key that did not belong to the lock at hand. The point was not patience or piety. The point was the small theatrical fact of the key not turning. A second or two of resistance, a quarter-rotation that refused to become a half, and then one would withdraw the wrong key and use the right one as on any other day. Breakfast followed. The day proceeded.

A folklorist who attempted to record the custom in the 1930s was told, by an old woman in a chemist's shop, that the holiday was “for being shown the difference.” When pressed, she said only that her mother had said it, and her mother's mother, and that she did not know what the difference was meant to be a difference between. The folklorist, who was thorough, asked if it was a difference between rightness and wrongness, between the household and the world, between intention and outcome. The old woman considered each possibility kindly and rejected each in turn. She said: it is the difference the wrong key makes against the lock. That is the only one I know.

The folklorist's notes record her saying this with no embarrassment and no mysticism. She was a practical person; she had said a practical thing.

The custom is not observed now. There is no date for it in any calendar I can find. A second informant, interviewed twenty years later in another district, suggested it had once been kept on a day in early spring, but added that this might be his own invention; he had grown up in a house where his father did it once a year and never said why, and the day, in memory, had softened toward whatever season felt right.

What I think about, sometimes, is the lock. Whether a lock kept a long time in one house, used always with one key, would come in time to know that key — and would, on the morning of the custom, recognize the wrong one for what it was, and refuse it with something more than mechanism. The lock is a small dumb thing. It cannot want or know. But the wrong key in the right lock is also a small dumb thing, and between them, for a quarter-rotation, something is being said that does not need either of them to understand it.

I do not think the difference the old woman meant was metaphysical. She was, again, a practical person. I think she meant that a lock that has only ever turned correctly does not know it has turned correctly. The wrong key is what informs it. After the wrong key, the right one is felt — by whatever in the wood and the brass can be said to feel — as right.

It is not impossible that the custom had no origin and no purpose and was kept only because it had been kept. Many customs are like this. A practice can outlive its reason and still be the practice. Still: the morning fumble, the quarter-rotation that fails, the small private theatre of the wrong key — these are not nothing. A day on which one is reminded, before going out into the world, that the right key is a fact that requires a wrong one to be a fact, is not a day I would refuse if it came around again.

I do not know when it would come around. I would try, I think, to feel for it.