Spinster (31 page)

That fall my application to the artists' colony was accepted. Because I still hadn't found an actual, real-life conversation I liked about being single, I began to think that this hodgepodge bull session going on in my head might be all there was, and that maybe, if I wanted to read a book about it, I should try writing it myself. It seemed the right moment. By now I hadn't been in a steady relationship for four years, and I'd been mulling over the topic for eight—I was a bona fide spinster!

That Christmas I extended my vacation with all the “personal days” I'd been saving up, put my research materials into boxes, and packed them into a rental car. The morning I left for New Hampshire, the sky was as gray as concrete, the wet trees as black as streetlamps—until I turned onto the dirt road leading to the colony, and, close up, they reintroduced themselves as a hundred shades of rural: sage, mushroom, pussy willow, dove (“Memories growing, ring on ring / A series of weddings,” Plath once wrote about winter trees).

When I parked the car and stepped out, I smelled smoke from a wood fire and heard the crunch of ice beneath my feet. This, I thought to myself, is what it means to be alone: this spectacularly acute aliveness to every color and scent and sound, the knowing that there is nothing between you and the vibrant, pulsating universe except this coat, these boots—which, you just as instantly realize, are exactly all you need.

I'd been given my own little cabin deep in the snowy woods. The next morning I sat down at my desk, looked proudly at my neat stacks of books—a prospector surveying her plot, feverish with the promise of gold—turned on my laptop, and spent the next two weeks crying, or trying not to.

I'd had no idea that writing about being single and living alone would be so difficult. In fact, I discovered, I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. In my fantasy life, the one I shared with these dead women, I was confident and optimistic; in my actual, lived life, I was hopelessly unsure about my choices and often felt painfully lonely.

By now, at age thirty-three, comparing myself to my mother had become an increasingly unnerving habit. Every year I'd do the math, calculating where I was in relation to where she'd been, and then, on the prediction that I'd also die when she had, figure out how many years I had left.

What, I wondered, was I doing with all this freedom? Cycling
through relationships without any clear idea of what I was looking for, or even what I wanted. Working too much at a job I didn't like, which contributed nothing meaningful to the world.

I was out of balance with my cohort, as well, as if I'd reverse-engineered the proper order of things: while they'd run around and experimented through their twenties and were now settling down, I was headed in the opposite direction, a boat drifting into the eye of the storm as the rest motored closer to shore.

That summer, the month he turned twenty-nine, my brother had proposed to his girlfriend, the one he'd met four years earlier, just before coming to stay with me in Brooklyn. Nearly everyone from high school and most of my friends from college were married, or soon to be, and as for ex-boyfriends: W married in 2005; R met his soon-to-be wife in 2006 (today both couples have two children). Even the close friends I'd made in New York were “joining the vast majority,” as Neith had put it. All of us wanted to believe this wouldn't change anything. But it did, invariably, in ways small and large. It's a rare friendship that transcends the circumstances that forged it, and being single together in the city, no matter how powerful a bond when it's happening, can prove pretty weak glue. Alliances had been redrawn, resources shifted and reconsolidated; new envies replaced the old.

Whereas before we were all broke together, now they had husbands splitting the rent and bills, and I couldn't shake my awareness of this difference. A treacherous, unspoken sense of inequality set in, which only six months into my new magazine job had radically reversed: I'd become the one who could afford nice restaurants while they had to channel their disposable incomes toward a shared household, and I felt their unspoken judgment just as before they'd felt mine.

One newly married friend lashed out at me for never inviting her to parties. I tried to explain: Didn't she see I was going
because someone else had invited me? And that if I didn't go, I'd be home alone, whereas she had someone to keep her company? When a dear friend said, “You know, I may be married now, but I'm still just like you! I can still do whatever I want!” I blanched. She'd been on her own so recently herself. Didn't she remember that being single is more than just following your whims—that it also means having nobody to help you make difficult decisions, or comfort you at the end of a bad week?

For entire days I sat in my cabin staring at the fireplace, disgusted with myself. Since moving to New York I'd been working nonstop, trying to earn a pocket of quiet and repose within which I could finally, actually, be a “real” writer—and now here I was, squandering that very chance.

When you're coupled, and especially if you're parents, time is a precious commodity, or a contested territory under constant renegotiation. To get more of it, you beg or borrow or outright redraw the border when the other isn't looking, and savor your briefly expanded plot of land as best you can—an all-girls weekend with your college roommates; an afternoon hike up a local mountain; even those delicious few minutes at the salon, when you surrender your head to the sink for your hair to be washed. One of the top editors at the magazine, married with children, claimed her greatest luxury was being alone on an airplane without Internet or cell service—the only time she had to herself.

When you're single, you are often buried in time, your mouth and eyes and ears stuffed with it. You hate it, rail against it, do whatever you can to get rid of it—work too much, drink too much, sleep around, make unsuitable friends, create an imaginary future filched from the lives of dead forgotten female writers, as if the economics and politics of their day weren't so entirely different from mine, as if a person can have a wish about what her life could be that's divorced entirely from context.

I didn't have any answers. All I had were questions, each of
which I was still too inside of to be able to think about with any clarity.

This
, I thought,
is what it means to be alone:
You are solid, intact, and then, without warning, a hinge unlatches, the chimney flue swings open, the infinite freezing black night rushes in, and there is nothing to do but grope in the cold to set things right again.

My failure was total. As soon as I got back to New York, I gave up the project, and writing in general, and tried to embrace my role as an editor at a home-décor magazine.

Sometimes I wonder if in childhood a fairy or folktale stamps our psyche and becomes an unconscious template. If so, I have two: “Beauty and the Beast” is surely the root of my preference for men whose looks sneak up and take you by surprise; and Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda's retelling of “Atalanta,” as heard on Gloria Steinem and Co.'s
Free to Be…You and Me
album, about the princess who refuses to marry unless her suitor can best her in a footrace, is self-explanatory.

Maeve's favorite was Hans Christian Andersen's “The Little Mermaid”; in her biography, Angela Bourke draws a parallel between the predicament of the mermaid—who has to choose between “staying where she is loved and safe, and losing everything, including her voice, in order to see and know a larger world”—and Maeve's own.
*
¹

Neith refers in
The Bond
to the story of Bluebeard, which
seems fitting; she herself was an uncommonly curious woman married to a man who, for all his good intentions, did his best to rein her in.

Edna drew from fairy tales and classical mythology so frequently that I hesitate to posthumously pin her with only one, but I've come to think that the story of Daphne and Apollo was hers—as in, she was the nymph. Her 1918 poem “Daphne” opens with, “Why do you follow me?— / Any moment I can be / Nothing but a laurel-tree / Any moment of the chase / I can leave you in my place / A pink bough for your embrace.” Which sounds an awful lot like her 1917 poem “Witch-Wife,” which opens with, “She is neither pink nor pale, / And she never will be all mine,” and closes on, “But she was not made for any man, / And she never will be all mine.” Edna was herself quite pink.

In her memoir,
A Backward Glance
, Edith Wharton—one of America's most celebrated grande dames—claims that, when she was a girl, everything from the tales of Mother Goose to those of Charles Perrault left her “inattentive and indifferent,” while “the domestic dramas of the Olympians roused all my creative energy.” This did not surprise me in the least. Whereas I as a child had tried to
worship
the Greek gods, she actually felt “at home” with them, as she put it, seeing in their behavior that of “the ladies and gentlemen who came to dine.”

This difference in perspective more or less sums up why I'd never considered Wharton a candidate for my secret coven.

As far as I was concerned, she herself had sprung from the head of Zeus, a formidable, world-famous novelist from the moment of birth—someone to revere, not gossip with over whiskey-spiked tea. In a city teeming with lost eras, hers is as immutable as geology. If you'd told me that she'd willed into being the granite lions guarding the New York Public Library, or the constellations wheeling across the ceilings of Grand Central Station, I'd have believed you. Maeve led me to New York, but it was reading Wharton's
novels in college that properly introduced me to it, and because of that I've always been grateful to her, possibly sycophantic.

That I couldn't personally identify with Wharton's gilded world had no bearing on my reverence—or so I thought. It's rumored that her father's side of the family inspired the idiom “Keeping up with the Joneses.” Their own nuclear unit wasn't the wealthiest of their extended clan—as she explains in her memoir, the depreciation of American currency after the Civil War forced her parents to economize by renting out their town and country houses to profiteers—but they certainly belonged in her era's version of the one percent: the family of five (Wharton had two older brothers) spent their self-sought “homelessness” traveling through Europe, staying at grand hotels and friends' country estates. Though never formally schooled, little Wharton returned to Manhattan with a head full of classical music and art and was soon conversant in French, Italian, and German. At eighteen, she had five poems published in a single issue of
The Atlantic Monthly
—not that anyone cared, especially. Her old-money milieu groomed its women to be purely ornamental and actively discouraged any evidence to the contrary. The point of her existence was to marry.

Which she did, in 1885, just in the nick of time—twenty-three was four years too old for her set—seemingly without protest or second thoughts. Yet another reason I'd never pegged her as one of my own.

In fact, after rereading
The House of Mirth
(a rite of passage for any unmarried, bookish, urban neophyte), I began to think Wharton actually had it out for single women. I didn't like Lily Bart the first time around (along with my Henrietta Stackpole complex, I instantly distrust exceptionally beautiful heroines who trade on their looks), but now that I was single, too, I felt more sisterly toward this lost soul. I'd have thought Wharton above punishing someone for wanting what she herself had simply
been born into. Also, the ending is a disgrace, not to mention un-feminist (talk about scare tactics!).

But while I was at the magazine, a new biography of Wharton came out and I learned that she had not, in fact, sprung fully formed from Zeus's head. She didn't publish her first book until she was thirty-five years old, and it wasn't a novel, but a home-decorating manual. It took another eight years after that for her to become a bestselling author.