Like Clockwork

Not too long ago, one of my girlfriends made herself a picnic on the floor of my room and said through a mouthful of mini chocolate donuts, “If he wants to spend an entire day and night with his stupid friends instead of with me, then I think it serves him right that I locked him out last night.”

This otherwise polite, pristine girl had just unleashed a shower of angry donut crumbs all over my carpet, so I stopped myself from saying, “That was border line Single White Female,” and opted instead for, “But he spent the rest of the week with you.”

“Exactly, he’s only here for a week!”

“But didn’t you tell him that it was okay?”

“Of course I told him it was okay, but I didn’t think he’d actually do it!” She gesticulated wildly with another donut. “He doesn’t care, you know? He obviously doesn’t care.”

This is the guy currently working two jobs in the hopes of saving up enough money to move across the country within the next six months just to be with her; this is the guy who never fails to call her at the same time every night just to hear about the vapid details of her day; this is the guy who responded to every single one of the paranoid text messages she sent on the night in question with patient, minute-by-minute play-by-plays. For all we knew, the poor guy probably hadn’t enjoyed his night out at all, seeing as how he had to spend the duration of it with his thumbs permanently poised over his cell phone keys. But since she was apparently in a state of fructose-induced rage, I decided not to remind her of any of this.

During my moment of baffled silence, she had fixed me with a conspiratorial stare. “It’s like with a dog, you know? Sometimes you just have to lock them out to teach them a lesson. You know what I mean?”

I blinked, terrified for men and dogs everywhere. “Um, not really, chickie.”

For the rest of the night I could offer little else, not only because it was nearing midnight and I had lost all the sympathy and patience I had with this conversation, but also because despite my being one hundred percent woman {hear me roar!}, I have long ago accepted the fact that upon my birth I was somehow miraculously exempted from having the ability to speak and understand “Girl-verse.” It’s a language based entirely on subtext, high on passive-aggression, and used to guarantee the emotional demise of everyone it’s used against. When I’m not trying desperately to perfect it for use in my relentless campaign for world domination, I’ve taken to drowning it out with a little AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and Social Distortion.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m an endless bounty of love and respect for women, and am extremely proud to be one. But why we moronically insist on playing these tedious mind games with unsuspecting men who will only inspire our wrath when we realize that those loveable oafs have no idea there’s a game to begin with, is a question that will continue to perplex me right into little-old-lady-hood. It’s enough to make me wonder why men put up with us all – not to mention strongly reaffirm my preference for them in all intimate and romantic situations.

I was thinking about all of this while rereading Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, a book I hold in such high esteem that I make a point to read it at least once every year. From a purely literary standpoint, the book is brilliant – the prose-style is meticulous and pertinent, the plot both highly-imaginative and timeless, and the characters tinged with an authenticity that even the most talented writers are hard-pressed to produce. But what truly takes the cake is Burgess’s daring – not only does he create his world with the fearlessness of freakin’ Houdini, but he holds his hand out to you Aladdin-on-the-magic-carpet style and asks you to trust him enough to walk through this world with him, promising that you’ll enjoy the hell out of it when you get there. What’s more, he puts trust in his reader, too. And considering that Clockwork literally has its own language {part of that inventiveness and daring I just mentioned}, this move is both charming and admirably reckless.

Not going to lie, I felt exasperated with Burgess when I first read his book, not because he had posed a challenge, but because he had trusted me to rise up to it and right then I just couldn’t deliver. How am I supposed to read something I can’t understand? angsty, annoyed eleven-year-old me whined. But the most groundbreaking thing about Clockwork, the single factor imbedded in it that changed the literary game, is that it draws you in without you knowing, that you’re beginning to know and understand before you’ve even become aware of it. At the same time that Burgess asks you to explore his world, he’s teaching you how to navigate it; and this journey to knowing – the reader’s journey – becomes every bit as much a part of the book’s experience as the plot itself. I love it for its nuance, its complexity, its creativity, yes – but mostly I love it for asking more of me than a passive read. And I come back year after year to experience it again.

This, I like to think, is the same case with women. For all the unnecessary confusion and miscommunication we end up causing {unintentionally or not}, there’s a certain level of accomplishment that comes with finally having breached the secret codes, with finally being in on a joke that we think only we can understand. And I promise you, men, that you’re not the butt of it. Isn’t it, after all, the mysteriousness and Clockwork Orange-ness of us that keeps you coming back? Man, I hope so.

Jayne Wilson writes fiction about the likes of decapitated gnomes, compulsive hoarders, and sardonic old men. She laughs pathetically at her own jokes and is generally an impish mess. She graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2010 with a degree in English-Creative Writing.