Spinster (39 page)

Unfortunately, Martha had different intentions. Not long after these letters she became engaged (to a man), forcing a devastated Charlotte to find a new outlet for her formidable energies—which, of course, she did, more than admirably.

She spearheaded the founding of a women's fitness center in Providence, the Sanitary Gymnasium for Ladies and Children. She painted greeting cards and sold them at a profit. Sometimes, coming home late on a winter night, she would climb atop a boulder in a vacant lot and “exult in the white glittering silence, deeply commiserating [with] all those timid women who never know the wonder and beauty of being alone at night under the stars.”

Around this time, she wrote about her desire not to marry in an unpublished piece called “An Anchor to Windward.” Her
reasons include her love of freedom, her longing for a home of her own, her desire to change the world, and her refusal to be absorbed by “that extended self—a family.” Inside the cover of her 1882 journal she declared “work” her “watchword” for the year, and denounced “love and happiness” with a resounding “NO!”

Ten days later she met a handsome painter, Charles Walter Stetson, who proposed to her before three weeks were out.

This was perhaps the only time in her life that Charlotte diverged from her own compass, and she learned her lesson well. For a full two years she deflected her suitor, but their physical chemistry proved too electric for her to deny. They married on May 2, 1884, jumped into bed, and happily stayed there for quite a while. Ten months later she gave birth to a daughter, Katharine.

Immediately, Charlotte fell into a debilitating depression. She couldn't move or read or think. Eventually, having no idea what else to do, she traveled without Katharine to the home of a friend in Pasadena, California, in the hope that the sun would lift her spirits. It did. So much so that she returned to Rhode Island a healthy woman—only to be immediately felled again. It was this long period of postpartum depression, and her disastrous “rest cure,” that she drew on to write “The Yellow Wall-paper,” a condemnation of sexist medical practices and women's confinement to the domestic sphere.

In 1888, after four years of marriage, she convinced Walter that they needed to officially separate. She was twenty-eight. She'd devoted the last decade to two all-consuming love affairs that, according to Cynthia Davis, “had nearly broken her heart and health.” Her thirties, she resolved, would be different.

The salubrious effects of her decision were immediate. Prior to 1890, the year she turned thirty, she'd published quite a lot (including her first book, an 1888 collection of drawings called
Art Gems for the Home and Fireside
, under the byline Mrs. Charles Walter Stetson). But between 1890 and 1891 she doubled that output
and then some, publishing sixty-seven works of nonfiction, fiction, drama, and poetry.

When “The Yellow Wall-paper” appeared in 1892, it became a sensation and made Charlotte a public figure. The following May, she took stock of her life. She was thirty-three. With any luck she had forty more years left before she died. As she had as a teenager, she made a list of her priorities in her diary and resolved anew to pursue them. In 1894 she finalized her divorce and sent her nine-year-old daughter to live part-time with her father and the woman he was about to marry, Charlotte's own childhood best friend.

When the nation got wind of her decision to leave her family, it erupted in outraged newspaper articles and op-eds. She didn't let it bother her. Instead, she used her celebrity to travel around the country advancing her ideas, a one-woman reform movement with a specific emphasis on “material feminism”—an effort to change sexist cultural standards through redefining the actual architecture of the home.

Her ideas were an expansion on and popularization of the “cooperative housekeeping movement” spearheaded in 1868 when Melusina Fay Peirce published a series of articles in
The Atlantic Monthly
encouraging women to form housekeeping cooperatives and seek reimbursement from the husbands who clearly profited by their labors. Charlotte found this theoretically appealing but practically unworkable, and in her copious writings and lectures advocated for “getting the kitchen out of the house, not more cooks in the kitchen,” as Davis so succinctly puts it.

You don't need to live in a single-family house and drive a four-door sedan—designed to hold two parents and two children—to know how doomed were her efforts. America's allergy to socialism, conviction that bigger is always better, and patriarchal insistence that a woman's identity as mother and nurturer remains bound to the kitchen proved to be intractable. Since 1960
the typical age at which women marry has risen from twenty-one to twenty-seven (and for many of those who pursue higher education that number climbs into their early thirties), family size has shrunk to the lowest it's ever been, and 3.2 million people live alone, but we still inhabit an architectural landscape made for other people, in another time, and which was problematic—for women, at least—even then.

In a sense, Charlotte's ingenuity was realized by big cities, where even though most apartments have kitchens, a multitude of restaurants take the onus off food preparation, and emphasize, if not a communal way of living, then at least a way of life that revolves around public spaces—sidewalks, subways, buses, parks—and deemphasizes the centrality of the domestic sphere.

Once in Newburyport I established a routine. In the mornings I'd wake in my old bedroom on the third floor, walk downstairs to make coffee and oatmeal, and sneak back up to what had been my mother's office, on the second floor, before my father's first client arrived. He and his longtime paralegal are something of an Abbott and Costello; it was comforting to hear their repartee wafting upstairs as I worked. At lunchtime, my father and I would meet in the kitchen to joke around and slice tomatoes for sandwiches or fork sardines onto saltines.

When he knocked off work at six o'clock, I'd force myself to stop, too, and spend the evening making dinner and reading. Once the weather got, and stayed, hot I'd drive across the bridge to Plum Island and down the long, bumpy road that cuts through the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, between golden dunes and bright green salt marshes. At the very southern tip I'd park, walk down to the water, dive in, rush back to my towel—the Atlantic Ocean was reliably freezing—wrap it around myself, and sit for
a while, watching the low, lapping waves collapse into long ruffles of foam. By now the daytime beachgoers had already packed up and headed home for dinner, so it was just me and a few stray fishermen standing sentry over their fishing poles.

On the road between Plum Island and downtown is a big “American four-square” house—a popular style at the turn of the last century—known by locals as the Pink House. It's a pale pink, three steps below bubble gum, just above ballet shoe, on a spot of dry ground by the saltmarsh, with no other houses around. When I was a child, it was a mainstay of my nightmares—the Pink House, a dark stormy sky, and a great horned owl, that solitary night hunter with its sulfurous eyes, perched at the very top, on the widow's walk, scowling.

Somewhere along the way the family that owned it had moved away, and I'd been surprised to see how badly it had fallen into disrepair—paint peeling, a few windows boarded up. I could see straight through its empty rooms to the sky beyond. The place was practically a ruin, as if it really did belong in a nightmare, though now a grown-up version: a mirage, a siren, a foreboding metaphor.

She—and she was a she, obviously, with her demure paint job and gabled widow's walk—was what it looked like, I decided, to cut yourself off entirely from the world, let yourself go, and become your truest, most alone self. A vision of what I could become if I wasn't careful. Or of what I couldn't become if I was too careful. In other words: attraction at its most ambivalent.

But after a few days I couldn't deny that catching sight of those haggard pink shingles gave me the warm glow of happening upon a long-familiar face. Maybe the house was so cheap, I could scrape up enough money to buy it. The Pink House could be Grey Gardens to my “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale. House-rich and cash-poor, I'd wrap cashmere sweaters around my head, wear
my skirts upside down, and putter happily, dusting my cherished knickknacks. What in the city felt like failure had begun to seem more like freedom.

Driving off the island each evening, I'd make sure to give the house one last glance in the rearview mirror, as if nodding good-bye to a neighbor. Back home I'd make a salad, drink a glass or two of wine, and read
Moby-Dick
. I'd never known such unbroken solitude.

In July Karen came up from New York. The night of my birthday we drove out to the beach, and she surprised me with a flower-themed picnic: flower-shaped potatoes on homemade pizza; flower-shaped cucumbers tossed in vinegar; banana cake on a bed of pink roses. How she'd managed to throw this together without my noticing was beyond me.

We reclined on a blanket, our artful Tupperware feast arrayed before us, sharing a bottle of Sancerre. She was going through a down period, too—a relationship had just ended; work was hard to find—and we languished in our shared frustrations. There was never enough time for long, sprawling visits like this in the city. Listening to her describe the challenges of being an artist, I remembered my ancient ambition to be a poet, and I wondered if my extended foray into nonfiction—book criticism, personal essays, author interviews, celebrity profiles, consumer journalism—wasn't merely a way to support myself, but also a crutch, a place to hide. Or was it my fixation on supporting myself that served as a shield?

As we talked, the sun sank into the sea, dragging behind it a radiant red flame, a curtain drawing closed at the end of a play, and the chill that had been creeping across the sand swept up our legs and through our hair. We packed up our feast, turned the
blanket into a cloak for two, and, bound warmly together, walked back to the car, the very last theatergoers, leaving behind an empty, windswept stage.