Spinster (37 page)

A woman once told me that in the late 1930s, when her grandmother turned eighteen, her father, a lawyer, had turned to her and said, “Darling, in the eyes of the law you are now a spinster.”

For argument's sake, let's agree that today eighteen—voting age in the United States, when most people finish high school, and when consent is incontestably legal in all states—is the age when a girl becomes a “single woman.” In that case, my mother was single for six of her fifty-two years, and Edith for twenty-nine.

For my mother, being single was primarily a fantasy, one so powerful that well into her marriage she chose to explore it in her only completed work of fiction (that I know of). For Edith, it was a long-term reality that, perhaps, began as a fantasy.

Edith was seventy-two when her memoir came out in 1934. I'd been particularly struck by a short passage about her never-married aunt, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones. Edith remembered her as “a ramrod-backed old lady compounded of steel and granite,” who, as a consumptive child, had been locked in her bedroom one October and not set free “till the following June, when she emerged in perfect health, to live till seventy” (in fact, she died when she was sixty-six).

In her early forties, Aunt Elizabeth bought eighty acres in the Hudson Valley and commissioned the building of a twenty-three-room, brick Norman Romanesque mansion on a bluff overlooking the river. After dubbing it a “dour specimen of Hudson River Gothic,” Edith claims that “from the first” she was “obscurely conscious of a queer resemblance between the granitic exterior of Aunt Elizabeth and her grimly comfortable home, between her battlemented caps and the turrets of Rhinecliff.”

I seized this observation and used it to support my pet theory that Edith didn't like single women.

By now I had for ammunition not only the preening, wretched Lily Bart, but also the knowledge that, though only a decade older than Neith, Edith was deaf to the politics of suffragists and New Women. I grew rather adamant about it, trying to convince people that the only reason Edith was famous and Neith obscure was because Edith wrote about the moneyed elite, and we never, ever tire of reading about rich people, no matter that hers lived more than a century ago.

I trust by now that you're wise to my reversals of opinion.

When I went back to Edith's books and looked at them again through the lens of my grudge, I saw that I'd been completely wrong. She wrote frequently about unmarried women—
I
was the one who'd been blinded by all the silk gowns and opera gloves.

Lily Bart's descent into a boardinghouse wasn't a punishment; among other reasons, it was how Edith engineered the story to include, front and center, the lives of single women who hadn't been born into privilege. Sure, where Lily is bold and glittering, Gerty Farish is meek and mousy, but it's Gerty who has a secure sense of self and manages to live alone with great grace and virtue. The poor, innocent spinsters Ann Eliza and Evelina of
Bunner Sisters
; Kate Clephane, who abandons her husband and infant daughter in
The Mother's Recompense
; Charlotte Lovell, the unmarried mother in
The Old Maid
—all of them are not only crucial to Edith's critique of the conspicuous consumption she grew up with, but also allow her to explore the lives of single women in the city.

Edith died before her Aunt Elizabeth's mansion became a metaphor for every lonely old spinster: by the 1950s, it was an abandoned ruin, and it remains one to this day.

At this point I'd been “single” in the strictest definition of the word for seventeen years, nine of which I'd spent being single and also fantasizing about being single, simultaneously.

At first this realization greatly depressed me. I'd been running in place.

But then I went back and counted the number of single female characters Edith had dreamed up between 1900, when she published her first book of fiction,
The Touchstone
, which features a famous widowed writer who was married only very briefly, and 1913, when she divorced Teddy. During that thirteen-year period she produced six novels, three novellas, and forty-three short stories. Including minor characters, that adds up to at least eighty-two single women (fifty-seven unmarried, twenty-two widowed, three divorced) and seventy-eight wives, one of which is having an affair, another who is separated, and two who are scheming to kill their husbands.

Who knows? Maybe just as Edith dreamed her new life into being by designing The Mount, she created these fictional single figures as a way to imagine herself beyond her own marriage, testing the waters, so to speak. What did they teach her?

I'd already decided what she had taught me. Maeve, the first of my five awakeners, had supplied an image and point of view that set my adulthood into motion. Neith had given me the words to think critically about marriage, and actually establish a life of my own. Edna had led me through those early, confusing years of sex as a single person.

What Edith taught me was this: to live happily alone requires a serious amount of intentional thought. It's not as simple as signing the lease on your own apartment and leaving it at that. You must figure out what you need to feel comfortable at home and in the world, no matter your means (indeed, by staying within your means), and arrange your life accordingly—a metaphorical architecture.

Some decisions I'd made intuitively: along with city life, I'd prioritized mobility (proximity to subways over parks), peace and
quiet (an “uncool” neighborhood rather than a more lively area), and sociability (I was within walking distance of friends). To be able to afford these specific requirements, I had very little space and even less storage, zero conveniences (dishwasher, washer/dryer), and none of what I deemed “luxury” items (stereo, television, car), though I did eat out often and buy clothes.

Too, I'd cultivated an active social life that combined light connections with deep friendships. I was constantly engaged with other people and had a strong emotional support system.

But I'd failed in one crucial respect: on my quest to be self-supporting I'd overlooked those classic architectural principles, balance and proportion.

By 2008, the magazine was doing incredibly well. Only three years old, we'd won several industry awards and sold nearly one million copies each month, to an overwhelmingly female readership. I often wondered who all these women were. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, home décor offered a way for idle society wives to professionalize themselves and enter the public sphere, where they transferred their values to the middle class via advice books and newspaper columns, literally spreading the gospel of home décor, popularizing ideas of taste and of the home as a marker of taste, a means of expressing and even forming the self. In the 1950s, as the postwar tidal wave of products and appliances helped usher modernism into the American home, home décor provided creatively frustrated housewives with an expressive outlet.

How does home décor serve us in the twenty-first century, now that women are flooding workplaces and universities in unprecedented numbers? Do we flip through interiors magazines as a way of longing for an idealized home, a vision we've largely left behind?

Or is something more pernicious at work? Is the airbrushed dreamscape of perfect surfaces the Victorian domestic prison by
another name, a glass castle of unachievable aspiration to which we think we'll gain entry if we stay late at the office, work enough weekends—in short make enough money to buy all those beautiful things we never have time to enjoy? Where is the line between a true appreciation for surfaces and superficiality?

Or so I asked myself as I created these domestic illusions. By now I'd been promoted twice and had my own office with an enormous window overlooking a towering electronic billboard in Times Square; pulling down the shade muted but didn't block the frenetically blinking digital displays. I liked being “successful” for all the reasons anyone would—the comfort of a big, steady salary; incredible benefits; an expense account; authority. But I couldn't shake the sensation that I was living out someone else's version of success, not my own. Like many corporate executives the world over, I fantasized constantly about quitting.

This, then, was the most important lesson Edith had to teach me: the trade-off I'd made in order to live alone—that I would be an editor-writer and, therefore, have less time to devote to writing that mattered to me—was a sham. Like Edith, I, too, had to break whatever chains were holding me and actually start writing for real.

Credit 8.1

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, circa 1900

Sometimes you don't have to find the courage to break whatever bonds are holding you; the ropes simply loosen and fall from your ankles and wrists, and you stand up from the railroad track to which you'd been tied, reborn. Or so it seemed at the tail end of January 2009, when my boss announced to the staff that the magazine was dead, effective immediately, victim of the recession.

The following week I was snuggled on my green velvet sofa, steaming mug of tea at my elbow, reading a novel. The ceilings of my apartment soared with possibility. My bookshelves were troves of abandoned volumes waiting to be rediscovered, convivial with knickknacks: cheap blue china horse, antique silver vial of smelling salts, tiny plastic gorilla. Finally I was free to write whatever I wanted.

Instead, I fell back into the freelance grind and dashed out every night to see friends, go on dates. By July I still hadn't gotten a writing project off the ground. My friend Karen intervened.

“I'm sending you into a ‘convent,' ” she said. “A metaphorical convent. No dates, no parties, no events where men might possibly be. Your job is to stay home and concentrate on starting a writing project. Three weeks.”

Karen is a visual artist who creates extraordinary sculptures and installations. My college friend Michael had introduced us several years before, and initially I'd been intimidated by her willowy height and dusky beauty, but ten minutes into the conversation her warmth and emotional acuity overwhelmed surface impressions, and I drew her close in my mind and didn't let go.

“It's a pretty classic notion that a frequent dater should take a pause for inner development,” she explained.

We were on the telephone, she working in her art studio, me puttering around my apartment. Interpersonally speaking, I'm like a round-the-clock beat reporter, always chasing a story, always curious to hear what someone has to say. Sometimes it felt as if I couldn't walk down the street without winding up on a date. Karen was trying to make me see that this openness to experience could also be a hazard, distracting me from myself. In effect, she was advising me to build a few walls. I thought of Edith's line in
The Decoration of Houses
: “While the main purpose of a door is to admit, its secondary purpose is to exclude.”

Only two days into my “cloistering” I agreed to see a movie
with a man I'd recently dated, as “just friends.” Karen shot me down: “Totally against convent rules.” I obeyed her and didn't go.

Five days in, I snuck out to a dinner party. Afterward I confessed to my Mother Superior and admitted I'd even felt a spark with the host; at one point our eyes had lingered for one-quarter of a split second longer than necessary.

“You're married to God/your project right now!” she chided. “Still, ooh, I love that flash moment, when you just
know
there's a connection.”

Nine days in, I reported I'd been e-mailing with an old boyfriend—which didn't count, I argued, because I wasn't actually seeing him in person.

“I'm entertained you believe you aren't breaking convent regulations,” she sighed. “As your Mother Superior, I encourage you to remind yourself of your vows, but I acknowledge that being a nun is not your true calling.”

I made it all of two weeks before uncloistering myself.

Autumn skittered by like a leaf, or so I trust, because next thing I knew, it was winter.

I forgot to make a payment and lost my health insurance; I struggled to pay my bills. By the close of the year I'd fallen into the worst depression I'd known. It took everything I had to finish an assignment and e-mail it to the editor. Afterward I'd crawl onto the sofa—the only article of furniture, I'd noticed, with the same dimensions as a coffin—and sleep. And sleep. My bookshelves loomed menacingly, overcrowded morgues of forgotten ideas and dusty knickknacks (“modern litter,” Edith Wharton called them). Why did I collect so much junk? What was with all this infernal clutter?

Few realizations are as demoralizing as knowing that the
only thing standing between you and what you want is yourself, I thought to myself, then cringed. When had I started talking to myself like an inspirational poster?

To anyone who dared ask (e.g., my highly concerned brother and father), I insisted that, no, I would not look for another full-time job, because then I'd
really
never get a writing project off the ground.

One night I had a dream so vivid, it seemed to be shouting. The next day I recited it to my therapist:

I wake up in a stranger's bedroom. I don't know how I got there. It's impeccably decorated in dark blue floral everything—wallpaper, curtains, bedspread, pillows, those horrible tissue-box covers you hide the regular tissue box in. It's all very high-end, custom-made. Awful.

To be in a room made entirely of somebody else's decisions, a room I have absolutely nothing to do with, to just sit there looking around and hating everything I'm looking at, is shockingly liberating. I am elated. Then it dawns on me that Willy…

Here I interrupted myself to remind my therapist that Willy was my childhood friend who now lived and worked as a photographer on the Lower East Side, the one who'd hooked me up with the magazine. She is rail thin, with chin-length hair she dyes platinum, and bright cornflower-blue eyes that suddenly seemed not unrelated to the floral wallpaper.

Willy is somewhere else in this house, which is actually a thirteenth-century villa on the outskirts of a hamlet in Italy. We're there on a magazine assignment: I'm writing a story, she's shooting photos.

While still in bed I close my eyes and envision my apartment in Brooklyn, and everything—my beloved books and
knickknacks, my treasured silver candelabra, the green velvet sofa I bought off Craigslist—is covered in canvas tarps, the drapes drawn tightly across the windows. For the first time in my life I am overcome with the sensation of not ever wanting to go home.

For the first time in my life, I realize I don't have to.

I get out of the bed and find my cell phone in my suitcase and call my brother and tell him to go to my apartment and take anything he wants and leave the rest on the sidewalk. It is so unlike me to have figured out overseas cell phone coverage; I am very proud of myself.

He says, “What?” very alarmed.

I say, “Oh, don't worry—in Brooklyn, stuff vanishes the minute you put it outside. City people are vultures.”

He says no, what he objects to is basically erasing my entire existence.

I say, “Think of all the free stuff you'll get! Besides, you know you can visit me in Italy whenever you want.”

Then I walk downstairs and find Willy, and we get into a Fiat, and I drive us down a narrow road toward a collection of spires and towers in the distance—the hamlet.

We pass a massive white billboard with the words
When all is lost, I remain
—biblical and oracular, like an advertisement for The Lord Almighty, Inc.—written in huge black Gothic letters, and I say out loud with surprising force, “That is bullshit.”

Which is when I realize that up until that very moment I'd believed if not in God, then in that billboard. News stories about rich people going bankrupt and killing themselves—as if they were nothing but the sum of their possessions and being stripped of them was tantamount to death—had always saddened me. I'd think, pityingly, “All that matters is you are alive. The rest is gravy.”

But now, driving past the billboard, I know that losing everything
is
death, and that it's a good death, a death that I crave, and I don't want anyone to save me.

I keep driving. I drive through a forest. And then the trees thin out and give way to a vast, wide snowfield, and as I pass by, I'm acutely aware of both the massive, hard sheet of ice on top and the small, tender blades of grass beneath, and that when spring comes, there will be a glorious green meadow.

I stopped my monologue.

“So corny, right? Hello, incredibly obvious dream,” I said, afraid, as usual, of boring my therapist. Listening to (or reading) someone recount a dream is like listening to someone describe, frame by frame, a movie you will never see.

“What do you think it means?” she asked.

“That it's time I give up on life as I know it and start a new one,” I said. “That because I'm a freelancer, I can live anywhere I want. I don't have to stay in Brooklyn.”

When I said this out loud, it didn't feel dull and obvious. It felt terrifying.

“Do you know Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem ‘Renascence'?” she asked, then leaned forward and started to recite.