Spinster (2 page)

The Bolick family home, Newburyport, Massachusetts

Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman's existence, regardless of where she was raised or what religion she does or doesn't practice. She may grow up to love women instead of men, or to decide she simply doesn't believe in marriage. No matter. These dual contingencies govern her until they're answered, even if the answers are nobody and never.

Men have their own problems; this isn't one of them.

Initially the question of whom to marry presents itself as playacting, a child pulling a Snow White dress from a costume box and warbling the lyrics of “Someday My Prince Will Come” to her imaginary audience of soft-bottomed dwarfs. Beauty, she's gleaned, is her power and lure, a handsome groom her just reward.

Next she deduces that a flammable polyester gown with tulle underskirts does not an actual princess make, and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder—which is to say, she discovers her market value. For me it was the morning in second grade when I understood with a cold, sharp pang why I disliked gym class, even though I was the fastest runner and could do the most chin-ups. As our gym teacher, a man, led us toward the playground, I saw that he didn't playfully tease me the way he did my friends—the pretty ones. And so I learned,
I am not pretty
.

With puberty comes yet another opportunity for self-inventory. In fourth grade, I was second in my class to develop breasts, which I hid by wearing two heavy wool sweaters simultaneously all through an exceptionally warm spring—intuiting, rightly, that when the world saw what my body was up to I'd be thrust into a glare of visibility I wasn't prepared to meet.

Fifth grade: buck teeth. Sixth grade: braces. Seventh grade: popularity. I'd always found friendship easy, with boys and girls both; now I was also getting romantic attention and the two beams of social approval wove themselves into a crown. During class, my friends and I traded intricately folded notes about our crushes and practiced writing our someday surnames in fancy cursive letters. When I saw the high school girls' soccer team circled for warm-ups, one girl at center leading the stretches, I decided that someday I, too, would be team captain.

Eighth grade brought with it hourglass proportions, which I learned while swimming in the pool at my grandparents' retirement complex in Florida. Two college boys appeared out of
nowhere, cannonballed into the water, then shot to the surface, wet heads gleaming. “Gotta protect that one,” they leered, loudly enough so that my mother, reading on a lounge chair, could hear. I blushed with pleasure and shame—and the shame of pleasure. What did it mean? Later she explained my “nice figure.”

And so the approach of ninth grade made me mournful and agitated. I suspected that thirteen was the last, outermost ring of the final stage of childhood, and that those idle diversions I'd never thought to question—long hours paging through picture books trying to spot an overlooked arm reaching out from the rubble of Pompeii, or “praying” to the Greek gods (the most plausible deities, I'd decided)—would soon seem immature, unsuitable. When I turned fourteen and began my freshman year in high school, I'd have to cede the private kingdom of my imaginary life to the demands of that larger empire, where the girls who were already drinking beer and having sex were writing new laws I didn't want to play by but couldn't ignore.

Braces and breasts—and so a girl becomes, if not one of the pretty ones, attractive. To boys, I mean. College sees a few more adjustments—baby fat melts away; the late bloomer sprouts curves; the blandly pretty cultivates envy for the beautiful's chiseled bones—and then the real games commence, carrying on from campus through her twenties and thirties.

Some get the matter over with as quickly as possible, out of love or duty or fear. I've had friends who consider themselves plain tell me they seized the first husband they could get, leaving the playing fields open to the pretty and the hot. Others postpone the inevitable as long as possible, each passing year more thrillingly uncertain than the last. Their evasions are inscrutable to the romantics, who lie in wait, expectant, anxious.

It's hard to say which is more exhausting: the sheer arbitrariness of knowing that her one true love could appear out of anywhere, anytime, and change her fate in an instant (you never
know who's just around the corner!), or the effortful maintenance (manicures, blowouts, bikini waxes, facials) that ensures she'll be ripe for the picking when it happens.

Eventually, whether you choose or are chosen, joyously accept or grudgingly resist, you take the plunge.

You are born, you grow up, you become a wife.

But what if it wasn't this way?

What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending?

What would that look and feel like?

In 2012, I read that modern America's first iconic single woman and my favorite girlhood poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, had lived in my hometown in the early 1900s. Obviously, Google Earth wouldn't do. I rented a car and drove the five hours north from my studio apartment, in Brooklyn, New York, to the house I grew up in, on the coast of Massachusetts.

The news had astonished me, both the exciting nearness of a woman I admire, and that I hadn't known it already. We the people of the historic seaport (so heralds a sign on the highway) of Newburyport put great stock in our civic past; it's how we compensate for having no contemporary relevance. Every schoolchild is taught that George Washington once spent a night in what is now the public library. John Quincy Adams slept everywhere, apparently. Yet we don't stake our rightful claim to one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.

Admittedly, it wasn't Millay's poetry that had inspired me to make the trip. When I was twenty-three my mother died unexpectedly, and in the months that followed I'd been gutted to discover that without our conversations, which I'd always assumed
would be there for the having, I had absolutely no idea how to make sense of myself.

Unconsciously at first, and eventually with something resembling intention, I began the very long process of re-creating our conversations—not with other, real, live women, who could only ever be gross approximations of the mother I missed, but with real, dead women, whom I could sidle up to shyly and get to know slowly, through the works they left behind and those written about them.

By now, including Edna Millay, there were five such women: essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

I'd come to consider them my “awakeners,” a term I'd borrowed from Wharton, who used it in her memoir,
A Backward Glance
, to describe the books and thinkers who'd guided her intellectual studies. Granted, mine was a more sentimental education. I'd encountered each awakener at a different stage in my own coming-of-age as an adult, which, I could no longer deny, I finally was. I'd just turned forty.

I'd made a very big deal of the birthday. Those of us who've bypassed the exits for marriage and children tend to motor through our thirties like unlicensed drivers, unauthorized grownups. Some days it's great—you're a badass outlaw on the joyride that is life! Other days you're an overgrown adolescent borrowing your dad's car and hoping the cops don't pull you over. Along the way I decided to take as faith Erik Erikson's famous theory of psychosocial development, which maintains that age forty is when “young adulthood” ends and “middle adulthood” begins, and I vowed that when that day came, I'd properly celebrate my place in the order of things, no matter how unsettling it felt to accept I was no longer young.

For six months my friend Alexandra and I planned a seaside clambake for forty of our mutual friends and closest family, to
be held several towns south of Newburyport the first weekend in July. Alexandra is married, with two children, and, possibly because of this, handled our wedding-like preparations with more sangfroid than I, who had never hosted a big event and fixated on every last detail, most fanatically, the exact-right motif.

It should be simple, I decided, and nautical (an anchor, a clipper ship, a crab) yet also…iconic, representative of transition, one door opening as another closes (Janus), or perhaps straddling two worlds (a centaur, a minotaur) but female obviously (not a harpy; a Valkyrie?).

That it took me so long to arrive at the obvious made my final preparations all the more manic. The night before the party I stubbornly carved a mermaid into a linoleum block—a skill last deployed as a YWCA camp counselor the summer before college—poured a pan of black ink, and doggedly printed her shapely silhouette onto forty red-striped cotton dishtowels, one for each guest, while my new boyfriend, S, gamely affixed homemade mermaid stickers to matchboxes, somewhat alarmed, he later admitted, to witness what happens when, as my family has long put it, I get a bee in my bonnet.

My heart hummed. Hadn't I wished as a girl to be a mermaid, and wasn't I a mermaid now? Never before had I been so liminal: astride the threshold between young womanhood and middle adulthood; in love but living alone; half invisible, half statistical reality
*
¹
—as in, over the course of my own lifetime the ranks of unmarried women (and men) had grown so swiftly that the number
reached a record high, turning what had felt, in my twenties, to be a marginalized status into a demographic so enormous it was no longer possible to question our existence.

The next morning the caterer, my childhood friend Martha, who'd reinvented herself as a feast-maker, arrived with buckets of lobsters and clams. Our friend Alison, an antiques dealer, laid the rented tables with black-and-white gingham cloths and silver candelabra. Like me, they were both unmarried mermaids, as were all but one of my female guests.