At sleepovers, I deconstructed entire linen closets. I would sneak into the hallway, a child prowler working by nightlight, and seek out the towels, fabric-softener-fresh mounds of richly hued terrycloth, thick and plentiful. At home our towels were hodgepodge and pale, thin and stained. Inexpertly folded. We put them in haphazard stacks, shoved them in the bathroom cabinet or never even bothered to put them away, passed the spinach souffle over them at the dinner table. I observed the technique of those in the folding-know, took the stacks apart, unfolded and folded until it became second nature. The trick was to fold the towels evenly in thirds lengthwise, then fold the result in half and in half again. It was the kind of skill one learned at a mother’s side, like ironing or playing poker or throwing chaotic birthday parties.

Because folding is the metaphor, see? For domestic knowledge and stability. For normalcy. When you don't feel normal and want to fit in, you observe and try to copy. Everything is a clue to the right way to behave. Nobody needs to know that you are an impostor.

Last night my small book group met to discuss Michael Ondaatje's novel Divisadero. It's a flawed book, or at the very least a book that requires both careful reading and a lack of attachment to resolution. I was the only one who really enjoyed it. Yes, the characters are damaged and abandoned, solitary types with hidden motivations. But they are my people, sketched out in Ondaatje's poetic language. I can't be the only one who knows how to fill in the blanks.

What I can't get from careful observation, from cracking open other peoples' linen closets, I get from books. Stories show me the possibilities in life. Sometimes I know the characters, fellow strangers in a strange land. There is solace in the world of quiet ones, solitary bookish people trapped in the amber of personality and circumstance. Freedom is possible. Maybe it is as simple as self-acceptance and if there is hope for them, there is hope for me. Or maybe there is no hope and I should just get on with it.

“All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refused to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” -- Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 136.

Without stories, I would be a series of events waiting for an author, searching for a unifying theme. Without memory, the raw material of story, I am nothing. But a strange thing can happen when we start to tell our stories, to mix memory with narrative: the stories can change. We can change. Our past can drop away, defanged.

I am here to gather the pieces and make them into something new, a narrative, a mutable monologue: this is who I am. If I'm lucky what I write will spark something in you.

Maybe it's time for another story.

Image: Me, Wilmington, DE, circa 1976?
More on the villanelle.

Tags: Michael Ondaatje, towel folding, Divisadero (Novel), imposters, fitting in, autodidacticism