The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 42: January 3

Today I tried out a new space in the library because my old space, the one with the catwalk, is going to be ruined. Not according to the loud librarians who, in an officious pack, roamed the room and pointed out its flaws. To them, this room will not be ruined; it will be improved. The librarians have tacked a sign to the bulletin board explaining their intentions. “The catalog has not been updated since 1985,” says this sign, “and information in the catalog becomes increasingly inaccurate and obsolete every day.” The card catalog is a threat to truth and relevance! It is a constantly intensifying, present-tense menace! It becomes. It does this every day.

Now I am in a different catwalk, one threatened only by obsolete books. I have read many of these books; I seem to have landed in the women’s studies nook of the Dewey decimal system. HQ 1236.5–HQ 1665.15 are my coordinates. I was a women’s studies minor in college. I can’t recapture what made me want to study women, but I remember wanting to do so from my very first semester. I tried to convince a friend from my dorm to take a class with me. I was scared to do it alone. “Fuck no,” she said. “I hear women touch each other in those classes.” She was hyperbolic, this friend, tall and mouthy. She’d go on to play rugby, and do heroin, and marry a scruffy mountain genius, and raise chickens in the city.

I signed up anyway. On the first day of class, everyone already knew everyone. My solitude was conspicuous. Minutes after I sat down, the woman behind me began playing with my hair. She ran her fingers through it. She began to braid it.

After I recovered from my surprise (and the annoyance that I’d have to admit to my friend, you were right), I found her attention so relaxing. This woman was welcoming me in the way that women welcomed all newcomers into the women’s studies cult. Braiding a newcomer’s hair was a time-honored ritual, I’d probably soon learn, practiced by the Native Americans (for whom our college was founded, in part, to educate) to initiate strange women into their tribes.

I turned to thank her.

The woman blanched.

“Oh my God,” the woman said, horrified. “I thought you were Daphne!”

Her embarrassment yielded to suspicion. What kind of person lets a total stranger braid her hair for five minutes without saying anything? I was so not a feminist! I’d let any old person touch my body! I would endure the invasion in silence! I would probably even enjoy it!

I don’t think this woman and I ever spoke again during the two years we occupied the same small campus. There’s no recovering from certain shames.

But this Daphne person I might have been. I didn’t know Daphne at the time. I would soon find out how totally not-Daphne I was. Daphne was the Gwyneth Paltrow of our school. She was white-blond and grew up on Park Avenue and attended an expensive private girls academy and was a lesbian. Her lesbianism did not appear to be about desire or preference, but probably neither would her heterosexuality be, if she practiced it. She was beautiful without seeming to suffer the needs of a body. She was ascetically thin with an expressionless face that might seem sociopathic or enlightened, depending. She ran feminism on our campus like Tilda Swinton ran her Utopian island community in the film adaptation of The Beach. She was everything I wanted to be in 1986, so I was flattered to be mistaken for her. Now I’m embarrassed that Daphne was the person I most wanted to be mistaken for. Since 1986 my desires have been updated quite regularly — on a daily basis, even. Does this constant updating make me more or less accurate and obsolete? I am not sure.