Spinster (12 page)

Surely, by the twenty-first century, women “ought not find themselves, by birth, in a place so narrow, that, in breaking bonds, they become outlaws,” as Fuller wrote. I was just another person trying to figure out how to live, and I needed a boon companion to talk with, not an idol to adore.

It had never occurred to me that this private process might affect anyone but myself. So when I reached this final part of the study, I nodded in rueful recognition:

Positive and negative possible selves…often make it difficult for an observer to fully understand another person's behavior…. Thus, difficulties in an interpersonal relationship may reflect the fact that one person's behavior is being guided by a possible self that the other person has no access to, or is unwilling to acknowledge.

It was paradoxical, actually: Though my pursuit of my “possible self” had brought both R and me to New York, I was in thrall to this vision in ways I didn't know how to articulate, and so I hid in plain sight, lying by omission, so to speak. My conscious self was trying to “do the right thing.” Meanwhile, it's likely that R, who had never suffered a crisis, wasn't quite as captivated by his own “possible self.”

More broadly, the study validated my inchoate aversion to prepackaged heroines. What I was actually responding to was how our culture's paucity of options results in a necessary overemphasis on the available few.

Hazel Markus, one of the authors of the psychological study, explained to me the relationship between possible selves and the cultures we live in. She was inspired to study self-schemas by the women's and identity movements of the late 1970s. “Black Power, Latinos, Chicanos—all of it was premised on the idea that you should claim and reimagine your category. I was very impressed by this concept that representational autonomy is important for women and minorities,” she said.

Did this mean there's a verifiable gender component to who is most influenced by possible selves, I asked.

“I don't know of a good study that actually pins down men versus women,” she said, “but in my own experience, I find that women are very focused on their possible selves, perhaps more so than men are, and feared selves have a hand in that.” Men, she posited, tend to have more independent selves, and feel more immediately in charge of their lives, and therefore don't worry quite as much about the future.

She said there's an inarguable cultural discrepancy. Our Western emphasis on the individual makes us believe we are singularly responsible for and have control over the shape of our lives, she explained, whereas in the East there's a greater awareness that many factors—norms, obligations, expectations, other people, the situation, luck, circumstance—determine how our lives turn out, and if they turn out the way we want. “In those Eastern worlds, the idea of having a positive self is less important, because the individual isn't afforded as much efficacy,” she said.

“Possible selves are particularly important right now in the West,” she continued. “We need much better and many more models. We need movies where women are attractive and interesting and have great lives and may not be married.”

She cautioned that conjuring possible selves on our own isn't enough—institutional support is also necessary. “Schools, workplaces, laws, norms, the media—they all need to make it clear that there are other ways to be a woman or a member of one minority group or another.”

She paused, then added, “The West's focus on the positive makes the feared self particularly powerful. In Eastern cultures the negative is also part of life. You can't avoid it. Light and dark are braided together. It's important to have some failures. Having possible selves that didn't materialize is how you gain experience and mature and develop as a person.”

Little did I know when I chose Maeve Brennan that she'd also
guide me in this respect. The main reason I was able to glamorize her as a possible self is because I knew next to nothing about her life. Much later, when her biography was eventually published, she'd assume a new role for me: the feared self.

At any rate, I'd found her: the first of my five awakeners.

Credit 4.1

Neith Boyce, circa 1898

I've always known that a book will find you when you need to be found; in New York I learned that so does history. In the doing, I met my second awakener.

R and I had only been in the city for several months, but already we lived in two separate realities. His was the daytime ghost town of our two-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and the social isolation of his freelance magazine editing. Mine was an
all-out, interborough carnival. The city was enormous and deafening and arranged to suit my pleasure—the trains were timely, Katz's sauerkraut bin was bottomless—and I hopped on and off its carousel, electric with possibility. This is what I'd come for, noise and hustle and grit; I loved my new school for being unabashedly un-collegiate.

Evenings, borne back by the subway, my neon fizzled; emerging from the station into the hushed gentility of our new neighborhood, my lights cut out completely.

By dumb luck we'd landed on one of the more desirable blocks in Brooklyn, in a brownstone on a street actually called Cranberry, a quiet byway of worn slate sidewalks and tall, leafy trees just off the Promenade, a long esplanade that overlooks the East River and Manhattan skyline and glittering expanse of New York Harbor, even the Statue of Liberty herself—and I hated it, all of it. Living amid so much ready-made beauty felt inimical to my striving; I was smothered by the sensation of having been handed a prize I'd yet to earn.

Even worse was the neighborhood's eerie resemblance to New England. Frail, elderly men in blue button-downs and khakis were a fixed feature of my peripheral vision, heads nodding beneath their canvas boating hats, as if once again they'd gotten lost on the way to the yacht, docked circa 1960 in a marina that no longer existed. The quaint clapboard houses with their pretty, painted shutters could have been airlifted from my hometown; the haughty brownstones radiated the same smug complacency as the historic brick town houses on Boston's Beacon Hill. When I ran across a 1946 essay by Alfred Kazin, in which he describes the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights as fortresses “that shut out the street and shut in the people who live in them,” with only their weathered wooden front doors to “redeem them from pompousness,” I laughed out loud—until I reached the very next sentence, and a chill ran up my spine: “But there is a touch about them, too,
that reminds you of the merchants' houses of Newburyport…where everything looks out to sea.”

It was worse than I'd thought: I was back where I'd started.

R and I hadn't learned that it's possible to eat out cheaply and well in New York, so we continued as we had in Somerville, staying home to cook our meals and saving restaurants for special occasions, as if settling into quiet domesticity were possible, or even recommended, in this sleepless city. After dinner we'd sit on the sofa to read, one's feet in the other's lap, the traffic heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge like the din of some far-off party. Our routine was as sound as a well-rigged ship, the two of us drifting in the general direction of marriage without ever actually discussing it.

But walking through the city, I heard the firm, sure click of Maeve Brennan's heels on the pavement. When I cinched my coat against the cold, I imagined my passing shadow as hers. I wore her point of view like a pair of borrowed glasses, assessing everything I saw with her insatiable omniscience. I was most alive when alone, negotiating odd encounters on the subway, surging along the sidewalk with a million faceless others. It was an expansive sensation, evasive, addictive. Each morning I rushed from the apartment to find it, as if late for an appointment.

One afternoon, nosing through a used bookstore, I picked up a book by Vivian Gornick and found myself reading about her decision in the early 1970s to leave her husband and live by herself. She'd been exactly my age. She woke to their first morning apart infatuated with solitude. “The
idea
of love seemed an invasion,” she wrote. “I had thoughts to think, a craft to learn, a self to discover. Solitude was a gift. A world was waiting to welcome me if I was willing to enter it alone.”

The book vibrated in my hand, a telltale heart.

I'd never been alone in my life. As in, truly alone, made to rely solely on myself for a substantial stretch of time. Obviously I was independent; independence was my generation's birthright. Yet all through my comings and goings I'd been looked after, listened to, accompanied, coddled, whether by parents or boyfriends; essentially, I'd led the life of a child. It wasn't merely that my identity was constructed entirely out of my relationships with other people—my relationships
were
my identity. My relationships took the place of myself.

As I paid for the book and left the store, I wondered: Who was I on my own?

How could I possibly become an adult if I didn't know how to answer that?

More important: How could I possibly become an adult if I didn't know how to take care of myself?

It was a perfectly reasonable question, relevant to just about anyone. It had nothing to do with gender. And yet it had everything to do with gender. Because the question concealed an uncomfortable truth: as a woman, I wasn't
required
to take care of myself—ever. Here in the year 2000, the future itself, men were still expected to be breadwinners and providers. No matter how hot my ambitions burned, I always knew, deep down, that if I couldn't make it as a writer, and if I failed to find my way in the working world, I could create personal meaning and social validation through getting married and having children. I had an escape hatch; men didn't.

Only now did I see the implications of this double standard. To be genuinely independent, I had to be both emotionally and financially self-sufficient, truly so, prepared to not merely split bills with a boyfriend but weather any potential future disaster on my own.

In the 1970s, to leave an unsatisfying marriage, as Gornick had, or decide to forgo the institution altogether in pursuit of a meaningful career, was a significant political act, a battle in the larger war of reinventing interpersonal relationships and righting the balance between the sexes. A lot had changed in thirty years. My liberal milieu took for granted that women should go to college and have careers and be equal partners in marriage. The idea of divorce was sad, sure, but commonplace. Casual sex was ordinary.

But—and here's what surprised me—though marriage was no longer compulsory, the way it had been in the 1950s, we continued to organize our lives around it, unchallenged.

One evening in early fall R and I treated ourselves to dinner at the Middle Eastern café around the corner that let you bring your own wine. It was still warm enough to eat outside; we had the sidewalk seating area to ourselves. After the waiter uncorked our extra-large bottle of Syrah, we tilted back in our flimsy slatted chairs and started to talk, about our usual things—school, work, family, friends, what we were reading and thinking and feeling—and kept talking all through dinner—steaming pillows of pita hot off the griddle, mounds of tangy hummus, leg of lamb drizzled with mint-mayonnaise—and drinking, until finally our tongues were so loose that R just came out and said: “It's not always easy for someone like me to be with someone like you.”

We'd finished our meal and were on to our second big square of warm, flaky baklava, dense with honey.

“You know, someone not sexual like you,” he continued.

At first I didn't understand what he was saying. Not sexual? What was he talking about?

“I love sex!” I said.

I licked the honey off my fingers as if I was making a point, picked up the wine bottle, and divided what remained between our two glasses. As I did, his words sank in.

He was right. I wasn't a “not sexual” person, but I'd
become
one. I'd noticed that I was less interested in having sex than I used to be, but I thought that's just what happens after a few years. It was part of growing up, making compromises, settling down. I'd been trying to make my peace with it.