The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 38: July 27

Today my husband and I watched the finale of The Bachelorette, Season Eight. The bachelorette, Emily, is a bright yellow blonde with fake boobs and a polite, little-girl demeanor. She has a daughter by her former fiancé, a racecar driver who died in a plane crash. (Her story, and maybe it checks out, and maybe it doesn’t, and I don’t care either way, is that she discovered she was pregnant a week after her fiancé was killed.)

We’ve known Emily, my husband and I, for two full seasons. We first met her on The Bachelor, Season Fifteen; she competed with seventeen other girls for the heart of Brad, such as it was. Even though she was chilly, and unforthcoming, and appeared to be one of those pretty women who’d never once had to make an effort in bed, and thus hadn’t, she won Brad’s heart. She took it home, she found it small and defective. Wisely, Emily ditched it.

Though she frequently demurred that the constant tabloid attention wasn’t for her, she returned to TV a year later as the star of her own show.

Initially, we were disappointed in The Franchise’s choice. Emily was pretty and likable, but she wasn’t smart enough to be interesting or dim enough to be an accidental genius. We feared that she would sit around in a sparkly dress and let men fawn over her, even the asshole-ish and the ill-intentioned. This would be the dramatic highlight, we figured, her failing to understand that some men, just because they liked her, aren’t good people.

But Emily surprised us. She proved to be a much tarter apple. She had wit and sharp retorts, she gave men shit as a way of flirting with them (and some men were so thick they neither understood that she was giving them shit nor that she was flirting with them), and she totally knew who the scumbags were.

Tonight, on the final episode of her season, Emily had to choose between Jef, a boyish entrepreneur whose family owned a gazillion-acre ranch in Utah, and Arie, a handsome racecar driver. The obvious choice was Arie because Emily wanted to fuck Arie, and historically the bachelors and the bachelorettes choose to marry the people they most wanted to fuck, even if that person is despicable.

Emily, meanwhile, had zero chemistry with Jef — they bird-pecked when they kissed; they had nothing to say to each other — but she wanted to want Jef. Her desire marked her either as a climber and a gold digger, or as an ambitious woman who privileges over sex and love not money per se (though Jef was certainly rich, and also a Mormon whose mysterious socioeconomic situation — the big house, the many children and women—The Bachelorette found it wise to represent in general yet in its specifics ignore), but exposure to new experiences. Arie’s career as a racecar driver meant he’d be traveling much of the time; in effect, she’d still be a single mother. Also, as noted, her dead fiancé, the father of her daughter, was a racecar driver. While dating him, she’d hosted her own cable show about car racing. I imagined her thinking about Arie and the future he offered her: done that. She wanted to try something new. Emily is a beautiful enough and smart enough woman who can have any man she chooses, and also, via these men, any life she chooses. She chose a life over a man. She chose Jef. (Cue my grad school friend, women expect a world.) Wasn’t this so ambitious of her? Wasn’t this savvy and self-knowing?

Recently I went hiking with a woman whose daughter is friends with my daughter. This woman is beautiful but haplessly so. She cannot dress herself; she has no clue about hair. She told me about an old woman, a famous heiress, that she’d worked for when she was in her twenties. The old heiress advised her to use her looks to get ahead while she still had them. She told her there was no shame in doing this, and that she, the heiress, was bored by women who thought they should handicap their best assets on the principle that doing so would be unfair, or that the spoils they achieved would be less valuable.

My friend said, “I had no idea how to do what she was talking about. I had no idea how to use my looks to get anywhere.” This might sound insincere; it isn’t. She really doesn’t know how. Funnily, her daughter, who is eight, already knows how to use her looks as the heiress recommended her mother do. The mother could take lessons from her eight-year-old daughter. So who can say where this knowledge comes from?

I have the knowledge, but to what degree I put this knowledge to use is debatable (i.e., I have a debate about it with myself). My parents like to tell of the time I came home from high school and announced that I wanted to dye my blonde hair black so that people would take my mind, my brilliant teenaged mind, more seriously. My desire was hollow. Or rather my desire was other than it seemed. I desired to be a teenaged girl who could destroy her most compelling teen asset. But I was never her.