Spinster (3 page)

Without a doubt I was forcing myself toward epiphany, come hell or high water, but it worked. The night itself was clear and warm. Watching my family mingle with friends from every stage of my life, some they'd known forever and others they'd never met, I began to sense a shift in my perception, a growing awareness that I was now in possession of not only a future, but also a past. It was almost a physical sensation, as if everything I'd ever thought or done had been embroidered onto the long train of a gown that now trailed behind me wherever I went.

When I looked over my shoulder to inspect this feat of silken wizardry, there they were, my five ghostly awakeners, holding it aloft.

I'd never regarded all five women together before, as a group, and in the weeks following the party I found that I couldn't stop. The oldest was born in 1860, the youngest in 1917. One was from Ireland, but they'd all spent their adult lives in America (at least through young adulthood; one decamped to France in her forties). Though all were writers of various stripes, none had been friends in their lifetimes.

These women had been with me for over a decade, and yet still they were mostly abstractions, spectral beings confined to the invisible sanctum that exists between the reader and the page, as if they weren't once real people who'd walked this same earth,
negotiating their own very different personal and historical circumstances.

Discovering that Edna Millay had actually walked the streets of Newburyport, the only place to which I feel an intense, visceral attachment, as if it's not merely my hometown but a phantom limb, ignited a desire to bring all five of my awakeners back to life, so to speak. Getting to know them,
really
know them—visit their homes; read their letters; smell their perfume—was a task long overdue. I wasn't sure what I'd learn by seeing Edna's house, for example, but given how sensitive I am to my own surroundings, I knew it would somehow deepen my understanding of who she'd been.

I drove the first hour of the trip in silence; the snarl of exits and on-ramps that quarantines New York City from the rest of the state requires militant attention to the GPS. But once I'd hit the highway, I turned on the radio and toggled through the stations, a baggy American songbook.

I'd chanced upon my five awakeners with a similar hopscotch of happenstance and instinct, and until well past New Haven I suffered a variant of commitment phobia, or buyer's remorse, tallying up all those who might have been, musicians and artists and thinkers just as interesting as the ones I'd chosen.

This ad-hoc approach had discounted scores of perfectly acceptable candidates. For instance, Mary McCarthy, many a bookish girl's imaginary avatar, even though one morning I found myself looking in the bathroom mirror thinking a passage from her
Intellectual Memoirs
as if it were my own: “It was getting rather alarming. I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three different men…. I did not
feel
promiscuous. Maybe no one does.”

But crossing from Connecticut into Massachusetts, I remembered that McCarthy a) had been a touch too coolly imperturbable
at the exact moment I needed warmth and b) grew up in Seattle and Minneapolis, two cities I know nothing about.

All four of my native-born women had strong ties to New England.

Besides, I decided, isn't that how falling in love so often works? Some stranger appears out of nowhere and becomes a fixed star in your universe. My susceptibility to the seeming poetry of random chance is both blessing and curse.

By now it was late evening. I took the exit for Newburyport and continued along High Street, a wide boulevard of pretty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses, toward the center of town. As always, the buildings of my youth were exactly where I'd left them. The deceptively dignified-looking Newburyport High School. The tiny, shingled Lynch's Pharmacy, where I was always greeted by name. St. Paul's Church, home of my Montessori kindergarten and later my mother's funeral. The sweet red-brick façade of my grammar school.

Four of my five awakeners were redheads.

Not until I was driving through my blindingly white hometown did I realize that the only characteristics all five women had in common were a highly ambivalent relationship to the institution of marriage, the opportunity to articulate this ambivalence, and whiteness—each of which, arguably, was inextricable from the rest. During the period I was drawn to—primarily, the turn of the last century—vanishingly few women of color were given the privilege to write and publish and, therefore, speak across the decades.

And then thinking ceased and muscle memory took over and I turned left onto our street, pulled into the driveway, and parked the car.

The house was dark; it's not exactly a home anymore. In 1990 it began to empty out—first me, then my grandmother, then my
little brother, and finally our mother. After she died, my father easily could have sold this vestige of his former existence—a three-story “double house” built by two brothers in the early 1800s, it has ye olde New England appeal—and for a long while I braced myself for that eventuality, one I had no control over and desperately didn't want.

So I was relieved if slightly horrified when, instead of unloading it, he quit his small law firm downtown, colonized what had been the dining room, living room, and my late grandmother's bedroom into an office suite, and launched his own private law practice on the first floor. He even hung a plastic
IN/OUT
sign on the front door, beneath the original doorbell that still issues a throaty trill when you twist its brass handle. That was in 2000.

Nighttime in that house always seems to fall grayish, never pitch-black; I know every last inch so completely, I can see the wallpaper and furniture even when I can't. Upstairs, when I switched on the little peach-colored lamp with its dented shade, my bedroom blinked awake: small white space with a low, sloped ceiling; makeshift valance of torn lace at the window (tacked there circa high school); messy stacks of books and old journals; wide, old floorboards dulled with dust—not much of a room.

But when I set my suitcase on the floor and started to undress, my ears adjusted to that seductive hush unique to libraries and childhood bedrooms—a busy, almost trance-inducing silence, a noiseless hum, as if all those abandoned books and journals buzzed on an alternate frequency straining to be tapped—until slowly the hush itself became real.

I've come to think that, much as neglect in infancy scars the eventual adult, so our first experiences of pleasurable solitude teach us how to be content by ourselves and shape the conditions in which we seek it. For me it was being alone up in that bedroom, reading or lazing about, one ear forever tuned to the orchestra of
family life. As I slipped beneath the sheets, that lost din echoed in all its comforting familiarity. By the time I turned off the lamp, it seemed incomprehensible that anything of consequence had ever existed beyond this tiny pinnacle.

To set sail on the black unknown of sleep in a room that's been “mine” nearly my entire life is one of the greatest luxuries I know. As Edna Millay once put it about an island she loved: “There, thought unbraids itself, and the mind becomes single.”

When I set out for Edna's house the next morning, it was almost noon, the streets empty and hot; a small town at midday is nearly as quiet as at night, everyone shut indoors at their jobs.

The distance between my childhood home and the one Edna lived in is barely a ten-minute walk, so before I knew it, there it stood: classic federalist, white with green shutters, three stories, flat roof. The way it's set flush to the sidewalk, without even a strip of front yard, gives it a looming quality, like someone who stands too close when he talks.

I walked across the street to get a better view. I used to be embarrassed to gawk at the homes of the famous; it seemed like watching the movie version of a novel without ever reading the book. But now I know that a house is a book, just not the kind we're accustomed to reading.

This one told a story of borrowed finery. Edna's mother, Cora Buzzell, was born in Belfast, Maine, in 1863, met and married Henry Millay in 1889, and quickly bore three daughters—after which the couple's differences (she was responsible and industrious, he was not) grew too obvious to ignore. By 1901, when she was thirty-eight, Cora had deemed him more trouble than he was worth, and she brought her brood to Newburyport, where her own siblings lived. Edna, the oldest daughter, was eight. Of the several
houses they bounced among in town, this is the only one that remains. It was the nicest Edna had ever known, or would again until she was an adult.

Ah
, I thought to myself,
this is the purpose of my trip
.

Newburyport was founded in the 1600s where the Merrimack River empties into the Atlantic Ocean, and prospered as a clipper shipbuilding center in the 1850s; that original boom-time class system is writ into the architecture. At the top is High Street, the main thoroughfare, a parade of grand, cupola-topped mansions erected by wealthy ship captains. Between that and the river is the crowded middle—these are the streets I'd walked from my house to hers—a latticework of small and large clapboard houses built by rope-makers and blacksmiths, merchants and distillers. The lowest class—longshoremen and stevedores—was sequestered along the waterfront in a rat-infested village of seamy boardinghouses (since razed and developed as parkland).

I knew from my reading that as adults Edna and I had little in common, but as children we were very similar, highly sensitive to what we did and did not like, imaginative though not dreamy, as that adjective often implies—more like bossy, in the best sense of the word. If I learned how class works by walking the streets of this town, then she did, as well. Her house, like mine, is just off that main thoroughfare, attractive without being showy, a house to be proud of—and grandeur proximate.

The longer I looked at Edna's old house, the more I saw: the template for the one she'd go on to buy in 1924, and the distance she would traverse as a person; that house, also, would be a federalist, also white with green shutters, though on seven hundred acres in New York State, near the Massachusetts border. The resemblance was striking, right down to the delicate, semicircular fanlight window capping the front door.

After a while I stopped gawking and turned back. Making my way along the ancient brick sidewalks, buckled by tree roots
and warped by cold snaps, I wondered what my childhood home might reveal about me to a stranger. It never ceases to astonish me how readily we presume to know ourselves, when in fact we know so little.