Spinster (10 page)

For two years we lived very happily this way.

And because we were happy, neither of us noticed as I very slowly started to wander off, down the two flights of stairs and past the soft, mowed pelt of front lawn, to the street, which I followed to another, and then another, not paying attention to where I was going, until one day I looked up and saw that I was nowhere near where our life was taking place, but at the edge of some huge unknown expanse, and when I looked behind me, I saw that I had no idea how I'd gotten there, that the path of return had disappeared, and so, like a sly child who doesn't know what's good for her, I stood gaping at the strange, wide openness, wondering what it held, instead of turning around and finding my way back the way I'd come.

It was that drowsy stretch between Christmas and New Year's, when everyone is working, but only barely. R and I had commuted together to work, as we always did; our subway ride had been eerily empty. The building was, too. At the reception desk he turned right and I turned left. I switched on the lights and hung up my parka, still amazed that I finally had my own office: a big desk, a bookshelf, and a burgundy leather armchair illuminated by a floor lamp.

I worked quietly through the morning. Along with conducting author interviews I oversaw the website's poetry section, commissioning essays from poets about their favorite poems and recording their readings. I loved everything about the job—coming up with ideas, assigning projects, the close, careful work of copyediting, which I was still learning how to do. It eased my mind to know that I was acquiring real, practicable skills that I could take with me anywhere in the English-speaking world, as if I were a hairdresser or a mechanic.

At lunch, I settled into the armchair with a peanut-butter sandwich and the latest issue of
The New Yorker
, ostensibly our competition, though I suspected that the glossy upstart (it was founded in 1925) didn't worry much about our fusty selves.

In my mind's eye the magazine springs open of its own accord to an enormous black-and-white portrait. The picture is of…me.

Rather, a woman who resembles a grown-up version of me. The same narrow shoulders, the same Irish features, slightly pointed without being angular. There is glamorously pale skin, the kind that inspires comparisons to alabaster or cream, and then there is my kind, the kind that's merely without color and freckles easily, and I thought maybe this was her skin, too.

In the photograph she is sitting at a desk, in front of a grand fireplace, back straight, collar up, dark hair pulled into a tight, high bun, looking over her shoulder though not directly at the camera.
Her expression reads somewhere between indifference and glower. Amid the low stacks of books on the desk is a vase of long-stemmed roses, an empty glass tumbler, and a slim silver box of cigarettes, one of which she holds between her fingers. The scene radiates an austere, prideful autonomy that I suddenly, desperately wanted to inhabit.

It was like looking into the future and discovering that my unremarkable self had somehow become a person of consequence.

At twenty-six I couldn't have been less like the woman in the picture. For my office wardrobe I scoured the sale racks of Banana Republic and Filene's Basement for the most inexpensive and nondescript pants and collared blouses I could find (collars, for some reason, I deemed nonnegotiable), presuming that if you have no idea how to present yourself, you might as well aim for inconspicuousness.

After absorbing every last inch of the photograph, I turned to the article that ran alongside. Her name was Maeve Brennan. A publisher had just reissued an expanded version of her essay collection,
The Long-Winded Lady
. She was born in Dublin in 1917 and had moved to the United States as a teenager. The portrait was shot in Manhattan in 1948, when she was thirty-one, just before she joined the staff of
The New Yorker
. She'd been married once, very briefly.

“For most of her life Brennan lived alone,” the article explained, “moving restlessly about the city.”

A life like that couldn't have been easy, but at least it was interesting.

The article went on to report that in 1954 she assumed the sobriquet The Long-Winded Lady and published her first essay under that name, launching a column that would run in the magazine intermittently for the next two decades. At the top of each installment the magazine's editors would note, with dry mischievousness,
“We recently received a letter from the long-winded lady. She wrote as follows.”

I looked again at the photograph.

A thrill took hold: the spinster wish made manifest. This is who I wanted to be.

Later that afternoon I made my daily pass by the “free table,” where extra books were tossed for anyone who might want them, and I was surprised to see hers among the offerings. My habit was to linger for a while, killing time, but now I grabbed the book and hurried back to my desk and began, hungrily, to read.

Once again, there I was—in her pages and not just her face. Not the me who rode the subway to work with R each morning or made dinner with him at night. It was the me beneath all that, the solitary self I hadn't been able to access or articulate ever since—well, ever. I'd written one or two poems that got within shouting distance of that self, and certainly I'd felt her power when competing in a race. Mostly, though, it was an amorphous form of consciousness, sensed but never spoken. Reading Brennan's words, this inner self flickered to the surface.

You know how a text message can impart an uncanny sense of intimacy merely by arriving at the most mundane moment—while you're shopping for new sneakers or waiting for a friend in a restaurant? This is how Maeve's essays reached me, though in reverse: dispatches from one woman's private experiences of public places. By recording her observations from that shoe store, or restaurant table, she disclosed the significance of seemingly fleeting experiences, the way a poem can, but with a clarity and accessibility that struck me as far more useful and, therefore, generous. The poetry of everyday life, you could say, but in essay form.

To write a sentence, then a paragraph, then another, and to have someone else read those lines and immediately understand what I meant to express—I wanted to try to do that.

That year, 1998, was the height of the memoir boom, evidence of which streamed through the office on a daily basis, some of it compelling, much of it horrible. But even at its very best, when a woman was able to present herself with honesty and intelligence, her experience was inextricably bound to the people around her, as if her story didn't exist apart from theirs. It was different for men; they knew how to present themselves as singular agents, even heroes.

Maeve was the first woman I'd ever read who wrote about herself not in relation to someone else—whether lover, husband, parent, child. She simply walked around New York City alone, watching. Her point of view was as clear and contained as an ice cube.

Walking through Washington Square Park, she watches a couple on a bench fighting, just before dawn. From a hotel room many floors up, she watches an old woman dropping a letter out the window, one page at a time. On the A train, a man offers her his seat; she politely refuses and then spends the rest of the ride anxiously regretting her refusal—here, of course, she is watching herself.

That last one was my favorite. I'd always been daunted by New York City, cloaking my provinciality in smug disinterest, as if the small towns of my close acquaintance were world enough. Brennan's short scene on the subway was a chink in the great wall of my resistance, and when I peered through I saw that New York wasn't merely the dense, brutal megalith I'd feared, but also an unpredictable, infinite chain of human interactions, each a tiny drama that flared into being as quickly as it disappeared.

A longing to leave Boston welled up in me like a flood.

I wish I could say I brought the book home and read the whole thing in one night, without getting up even for a drink of water, and the next day bought a bus ticket to Penn Station. The truth is, it took a while.

Often after work R and I went running. Once, we saw a woman jogging along with her toddler in one of those rugged, all-terrain strollers—the embodiment of modern motherhood, multitasking exercise and child care, Mrs. Having It All. R smiled and pointed “Look, there's you someday.” My stomach lurched. There was no way I was going to become that woman, but I didn't know how to say it.

What I wanted was too ridiculous to voice. What I wanted was to be Maeve Brennan—a woman I knew so little about that she wasn't even an actual person to me, but a disembodied mood. It would be several years before her biography was published, fleshing out the bones I rattled in my pockets, and it took me nearly another decade after that to find and have dinner with one of the last people she'd known. For now all I had were her books, which for the time being were more than enough to keep stoking my imagination.

Because my way of coupling was to merge completely, whenever I felt the need to be separate, if only for a day, I got nervous and suppressed it. While with R, I developed a new habit of simply slipping this uncomfortable desire into the citadel of Maeve's all-seeing, almost oracular tone, which created a mental space that felt safely contained and powerful all at once, practically glamorous. That The Long-Winded Lady is herself a fiction, in the way all writing about the self ultimately is, increased rather than diminished her appeal. Stepping into her point of view showed me how to look at the world around me more closely, and—crucially—to forget myself. From this vantage, the most ordinary interactions—conferring with the pharmacist, ignoring the old man barking obscenities from his lawn chair on the
street corner, sharing a knowing look with the woman making my cappuccino—shone with significance and drama. I could almost pretend that I was a writer, too.

Quite a few of her essays featured her eating alone at a diner in lower Manhattan called the University Restaurant, and so I began to imagine myself.