Spinster (6 page)

When she was thirty-nine (I was ten), my mother found a lump in her breast and underwent a mastectomy. The surgery was a success, and the scare inspired her to live more fully and bravely than before. During her recovery she redoubled her freelance efforts, taking on more challenging topics, reporting on important social issues, and publishing history books for the young-adult market. Her true ambition was to someday publish fiction; in her rare free time she worked on short stories and joined a writing group.

In 1990, my senior year of high school, she ran for the school board in our small town. Sometimes I joined her as she marched up and down the streets of Newburyport, knocking on doors and leaving behind fliers. Everyone commented on how much we looked alike in person. In her campaign photo, she was a tougher, more polished version of the warm, generous mother I knew: short hair brushed into a no-nonsense coif; mascara brightening her eyes; full lips closed in a resolute line. Her real self she saved for real life: after she won, she didn't merely revel in her victory but shared it, holding a public meeting encouraging other women to run for office, then teaching them how to do it.

Deep down, though, we all knew the cancer could strike again at any moment.

We were a family of people who loved and lived to talk, and
we openly discussed seemingly anything. Every night when I was a very small child, as my mother or father tucked me into bed, I'd snuggle deeper into the blankets and croon my favorite (albeit ungrammatical) phrase: “Let's talk about.” Let's talk about the books we just read, or the walk we took after dinner, or what we're eating for breakfast tomorrow. You tell me; I tell you. Anything. All of it! Every close relationship since, friendships included, had coursed along this river of conversation. For me, closeness was talking.

But the only time of year we'd truly acknowledge the ticking time bomb in our midst was Valentine's Day, when my mother first learned she was in remission. It was her event—we three were her chosen guests. She'd set the dining table with our best finery and put a small, special gift on each of our plates—I distinctly recall a red-and-blue Siamese fighting fish in a plastic sack fat with water—and before we ate, she gave a sort of secular grace about how grateful she was to still be alive, doing work she cared about, married to a man she loved, watching her children grow up.

I'd look down at my hands in my lap, willing her to hurry up and finish, ashamed of my impatience. I preferred not to talk about this particular topic.

My sports-obsessed public high school proved a welcome distraction. I'd always loved to run and was very good at it; little in life since compares to the intense pleasure of winning a half-mile race. By senior year I was co-captain of the track and soccer teams.

Where my mother had been a teenage misfit, I was a social butterfly, flitting between school dances and Friday-night football games. Our worst battles during my teenage years were over clothes. Oh how I longed, circa 1989, for a pair of white Guess jeans with ankle zippers. Her objections started with cost and impracticality, then shot straight to my character: How had
her
daughter become so superficial, heart set on such frivolities? I'd glare at her—in my mind's eye she is forever frozen in her uniform of fat white running shoes, loose khaki pants, off-brand polo shirt,
a crewneck sweater around her shoulders—and wish she'd get off her high horse and care about what she looked like for once.

My romantic life was equally anodyne. Freshman year I fell in love with B, a junior (his sports were baseball, hockey, and football). He was smart and funny and kind; my parents made him part of our family. We stayed together all four years, until I graduated.

At my small liberal-arts college in Maine I fell in love again, with W. When a friend introduced us in the dining hall our sophomore year, we shook hands, and a bolt of electricity shot up my arm. One night not long after we met, he ran over to my dorm room and knocked. When I opened the door, he wasn't standing there so much as pausing, like a hummingbird hovering in place. He'd come to tell me the moon was incredible. I must come see it. I threw my winter coat over my pajamas, and we ran outside.

Our first summer together we spent our spare time in the converted barn behind his family's home outside Boston, painting and writing (him), reading and writing (me), having sex, taking long walks through the orchard, picking blackberries for our morning cereal. His mother owned a little flock of bedraggled sheep and a peacock named Dick, who screamed like a woman tied to railroad tracks (as peacocks do). I wanted to quit my plans to study abroad in Ireland that fall, but I didn't, and we ended up seeing quite a bit of each other anyhow; that October my mother's cancer reemerged, and when I flew home for her second mastectomy he picked me up at the airport and stayed with me for the duration. Back on campus that winter we were that couple that is rarely apart.

But this was the 1990s, not the 1960s. I loved W for all the obvious reasons—his curious mind and dry humor and enormous blue eyes—but also because we were both trying to be artists, and as we neared the end of college, I began to sense a friction between the intimacy we shared and the autonomy required to become the people we wanted to be.

Or that I wanted to be; he was pretty sure of himself already. I had a long way to go.

After graduation, W and I moved to opposite coasts—he to his family's summer home on Martha's Vineyard, me to Portland, Oregon—and maintained our relationship long distance, through phone calls and visits and letters (dial-up Internet access having yet to reach the masses). While apart, we decided, we were free to see other people, as long as we didn't tell each other.

I remained in constant touch with my family, as well. My brother was enjoying his first year of college in New York. My parents were working and seeing friends and tending to Newburyport's civic life; rare was the night they weren't out saving the waterfront or debating zoning laws. Now that my mother's second bout of cancer had finally come and gone, there was nothing to worry about. She'd even run for reelection the year before, so infuriating the opposition—who'd discovered during her first term that she didn't truckle to the entrenched good ol' boy regime—that she received actual death threats in the mail. Take that: she won with the biggest landslide in the town's electoral history.

I'd found a room in a huge falling-down house full of aspiring artists on the worryingly named Failing Street, and to make rent I acquired four part-time jobs: three days a week as the events coordinator at a Barnes & Noble bookstore; four mornings helming the register at a Japanese takeaway eatery in a strip mall; four evenings waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant; ad-hoc weekends at a tiny literary journal that paid me in martinis and copyediting lessons.

On my days off I tried to write poems—I wanted to be a poet; my plan was to apply to an MFA program and eventually teach—and when the trying got too torturous, I'd bicycle on a blue three-speed
I'd found at a yard sale to one of the city's countless coffee shops to read. My banking system was to cash my paychecks and divide the currency among separate envelopes. When I'd depleted the one marked
coffee
, I'd forgo the cafés and read and write at home.

In fourth grade I'd set out to complete all the biographies on the shelf in my classroom, two rows of squat mustard-colored hardbacks. There were a lot of presidents (my favorite was Abraham Lincoln, with his long, craggy face and soulful eyes), and Benjamin Franklin, and Betsy Ross (though I didn't get why someone who'd sewn a flag warranted an entire book). Their accomplishments were inscrutable and beside the point; the intrigue was in watching a fellow child grow up into an Important Person. Taken together they were a dynasty of adopted uncles and aunts—adults who weren't my parents who opened portals to lives I couldn't have imagined until they showed me how.

Now I was reading biographies of my favorite poets, in order to learn how to be one: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. The vocation, I felt, came with its own set of concerns, that only its practitioners could answer: Was a poet born, or made? How did you get a poem published? Could I support myself by writing? When the time came, how would I balance the demands of creative work with those of being a wife and mother?

Cross-country expatriation aside, the coincidence of all four poets being from my same little northeastern corner of Massachusetts didn't even register, though I trust it gave me unconscious comfort.

I hadn't expected the lives of poets to be as straightforward as those of presidents, but the futility of my quest for answers did come as a surprise.

In college, my vague impression of the grown-up worlds of Plath and Sexton had seemed perfectly ordinary: they were married women with children and houses. It was remarkably easy to
imagine myself out of my derelict surroundings and into a very specific fantasy of the East Coast: relaxing in an Adirondack chair on a wide, freshly mowed lawn, pleasantly tired from a rigorous day of writing, icy gin and tonic in one hand, cigarette dangling from the other—all this even though I can't stand the taste of gin, don't smoke, and could hardly tolerate two uninterrupted hours of writing poetry.

But now that I was twenty-three, to realize that Plath was my same age when she'd married, and Sexton only nineteen, gave me pause. I adored W, but marriage was the last thing on my mind. My objectives were purely vocational: figure out how to be a writer; become financially independent. Then marriage.

That isn't to say, given the chance, I wouldn't have crashed into love with a “singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer” with “a voice like the thunder of God,” as Plath once described Ted Hughes. I'd possibly even be fool enough to marry him. But surely having two children by thirty (Sexton had hers by twenty-seven) while also trying to be a serious poet and devoted spouse was a catastrophe I'd have sense enough to avoid—or so I told myself rather smugly, not yet fully aware I had the second-wave women's movement to thank for such sagacity.

One of the first things I'd done when I'd moved into the Failing Street house was take a book of Sexton's to Kinko's and repeatedly enlarge the cover—a black-and-white portrait of her looking straight at the camera—on a photocopier, until her face was larger than life, over which I stamped a poem she'd written in the late 1950s, “Her Kind,” in cobalt ink. I taped my DIY poster to the wall above my bed. The first stanza:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

Even I didn't understand why I'd chosen this, of all poems, to be my bedroom manifesto. But after the restaurant had closed, and my co-workers and I had mopped the floors and prepped the tables for the following day, then migrated to the bar next door to drink beer and play darts into the early hours, I'd bicycle home through the dark, silent streets, a little drunk, wide awake, a thick stack of tip money bulging my coat pocket, aloft on a freedom almost shocking in its purity, and recite those lines to myself.