The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 3: July 29

Today I was reading The Men’s Club by a California writer, now dead, named Leonard Michaels. (When I told a friend in the grocery store parking lot that I was reading Michaels, she said, “Talk about dead men in Berkeley we don’t like!” I can’t remember who the other dead man in Berkeley was we didn’t like.) Leonard writes, “Everybody has a doppelganger. You may sometimes catch a glimpse of him in the mirror, or in a storefront window. He is the one you fear, the other you.” For decades I never saw anything but my doppelganger when I looked in the mirror. In the house where I grew up, a huge mirror hung at the bottom of our staircase, where there was also a small landing. This landing functioned as a stage from which I would audition for my future role as a person. I kept waiting for the girl in the mirror to look like me. She never did. Starting in my late thirties, however, I no longer felt the same disconnect when I looked in a mirror. That’s your face! I would think. I mean, my face! This face was leaner and sharper, and suggested that when I was an old woman I’d resemble a kindly witch. At around this same time, men stopped checking me out on the street. This was fine by me, but it also made me confused. I was so beautiful now. Was I the only person who thought so?

I wanted to ask one of my real-life doppelgangers what she thought about how we looked. Apparently there are many I could ask. I am always meeting people who say, “You look exactly like my cousin!” This has happened frequently enough that I’ve decided I am a generic type. I am everywhere. This explains why strangers are always asking me for directions. During the school year, when I live in New York, I am asked for directions almost every day. I’ve witnessed so many lost people in New York scan the pedestrian horizon and settle on me. They looked relieved. There. There is a familiar face. I’ve been lost in cities where I don’t live, and even then I’m asked for directions. I say, “I don’t live here. I’m lost too!” These pedestrians think I’m lying. They turn from me, disappointed. How small and ungenerous I am, pretending I’m a tourist in my own city, pretending not to speak German or Croatian, just to avoid helping them out.

The other possibility: I am trusted by strangers because I am a teacher. I was informed by the psychic I saw for research purposes, You are a teacher. (She also told me that my three-year-old son would grow up to run a bed-and-breakfast.) In fact I am a teacher, but I think she meant it metaphorically. I am a person who guides other people. I share and impart knowledge. I can tell people where the nearest subway is located. I did not take the psychic seriously until I was stricken by a weird illness this past spring. When my friend advised me to see my affliction as an opportunity to become a new person, I decided that I’d give up writing fiction and become a different kind of teacher. A life teacher. I’d give directions to the nearest life subway. I’d say things like, “There is nowhere to be, only everywhere to go.” I’d become a guru. I honestly had a moment when I thought, This is why I got sick, because the world needs me.

Then I got better.

Once I met one of my doppelgangers. She was not some abstracted cousin; she was the good friend of one of my good friends. We spent a weekend together celebrating our mutual friend’s wedding engagement. Looking at her was like looking in the mirror when I was a kid—Is that really me? She thought I was her. She said, “It’s so weird! We really do look so much alike!” I wasn’t seeing it beyond the hair and eye color. It’s true that we emitted a similar vibe; at the onset, we presented as energy twins. But she is never self-deprecating (I am always self-deprecating), and always confident (I am confident, but not outwardly). As the weekend progressed, we looked less and less alike to me, then not alike at all. Which didn’t mean I didn’t like her. I really liked her. I politely agreed with her pronouncements that we resembled one another. I know, it’s so weird! It seemed impossible to deny our similarity without inadvertently insulting her (You? God no, I look nothing like you) or sounding bizarrely defensive, like a woman who has only recently come to resemble herself.