Spinster (11 page)

In my mind's eye there I was, sitting in a red vinyl booth, alone, reading, taking a sip of coffee, carefully placing the cup back on its saucer, occasionally glancing out the window onto the sidewalk's everyday bedlam, a person who knows exactly what it means when someone says “Fourteenth and Broadway” or “Just take the 2/3 train; it'll be faster than a cab at this hour.”

The fantasy was irresistible—and bewildering. As I'd done when I'd written poems, I held the image in my mind and walked around it, looking at it from every angle, interrogating. To be a woman sitting by herself in a crowded New York City restaurant, amid the bustle and clatter of other people's lives—what kind of a thing was that to want? What was I saying to myself?

That I wanted to be alone?

As if. Me, alone. Me, the conversation addict.

Talking was so central to my sense of self that I'd never even thought to question it, and now that I was, I saw that this brook sprang from a source so deep inside me that I couldn't even name it, and once the stream passed through my mouth and hit air, it vanished into vapor.

Did becoming a writer require being alone?

Which wasn't an option, because being alone meant not being with R, whom I loved, obviously.

I circled and circled.

Was it that I didn't want to be married?

But of course I wanted to be married. In college I'd decided I'd marry by thirty—that seemed enough time to learn a little bit
about the world before settling down. To choose to not do something so normal and expected would require a very good explanation, which I certainly didn't have.

Before, I'd looked at the adult women I knew—those older than me, in their forties and fifties and beyond—to see who I wanted to become. Now I consciously divided them into married versus unmarried, and it was revelatory.

The first thing that struck me was how the single women of my acquaintance were exceptionally alert to the people around them, generous in their attention, ready to engage in conversation or share a joke. Having nobody to go home to at night had always seemed a sad and lonesome fate; now I saw that being forced to leave the house for human contact encourages a person to live more fully in the world. In the best instances, the result was an intricate lacework of friendships varying in intensity and closeness that could be, it seemed, just as sustaining as a nuclear family, and possibly more appealing.

I began to listen more closely to the variations in these women's advice. Married women, especially those with children, tended to assume a superior stance, as if their insights into people and relationships came preapproved, even though single women drew from a larger store of experiences and had often seen more of the world, from which the wisdom I wanted to discover is derived.

Yet, for all their vitality and stores of empathy and insight, none of these single women had actively chosen her state, or even simply failed to meet “the one.” Each had come to it through some form of bad luck, whether death or divorce. Most were on the lookout for love, only one or two swore they were done with it, but all of them behaved as if their married selves had been their true selves, and this present-day version a peculiar aberration.

None seemed to enjoy what I imagined to be Maeve's quietly confident self-reliance. That this was sheer projection didn't exactly strike me at the time.

And if my faith in her, this woman I knew next to nothing about, sounds misdirected, a touch magical, that's because it was. When the present feels as endless as an impossibly long hallway between airport terminals, white and sterile and numb, we're particularly receptive to signs.

In the winter of 1999 I did two things: apply to two graduate schools in New York City, and write an essay about Filene's Basement, in the Maeve Brennan tradition—an urban flaneur's wanderings through a bustling retail emporium. In the doing, it became a memory of shopping there with my mother. After waiting for the managing editor to leave his office, I left the essay on his desk chair.

If he published the piece, I decided, I was a real writer. If he didn't, I had to figure out a new plan.

It was, of course, preposterous to put my entire fate in someone else's hands.

A week later, he left the essay on my desk chair, with the word
Yes
circled in red.

Not long after, I heard back from the schools I'd applied to: I'd been accepted to both, and New York University had offered me a fellowship. The instant I received the acceptance e-mail, I knew I wanted to move to New York City alone, but once again, I didn't know how to say it out loud. To even
think
of leaving my boyfriend on the cusp of thirty felt recklessly immature. I kept telling myself it was time to quit my spinster fantasies and grow up.

In August R and I packed the contents of our Somerville apartment into a U-Haul and drove to Brooklyn.

Recently I came across a study by the social psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius that illuminated my fascination with Maeve Brennan—and the necessity of increasing culture's store of heroines in general.

The thirty subjects had recently experienced a significant breakup or death of a loved one. After self-diagnosing where they ranked in the recovery process, the subjects were divided into two groups—“good recovery” and “poor recovery.” Each group was given a list of attributes and instructed to choose the ones that best described their “now selves,” as in, who they were in the present. The same list was given to a control group of thirty people who had not experienced a crisis.

The researchers were working in the critical domain of “self-knowledge,” a technical term for the store of information you draw on to answer the question “Who am I?” This information bank is a collection of “self-schemas”—understandings about yourself that you've accumulated over time; e.g., “I'm a pretty good swimmer” or “I'm a terrible dancer” (which just about sums up me). In other words, we look to the past to describe who we are in the present.

Markus and Nurius believed that a third sphere had gone unexamined: the imagined future. They posited that along with our “past selves” and our “now selves” we all contain “possible selves”—our ideas about who we wish to someday be, as well as who we're afraid of becoming. These possible selves could simultaneously be the rich self, the thin self, the married self—and also the lonely self, the sick self, the homeless self. A junior lawyer in a firm, for instance, may hope to be made partner—the successful
self—while at the same time worry she's about to be laid off, in which case she'd become the broke self, the depressed self, the self who can't make her car payments.

These possible selves are crucial, the researchers theorized, because along with self-schemas, they're what you draw on to shape your perception of yourself in the present. If the junior lawyer feels that a promotion is imminent, the gap will narrow between her now self and her possible self, and she'll be more confident, which probably helps her get the promotion.

What Markus and Nurius wanted to know is whether these possible selves not only influence how you feel about your “now self,” but also function as incentives that actively motivate you to achieve your goals.

They'd assumed the “good recovery” group would feel better about themselves than those in the “poor recovery” group, but this was not the case. Instead, both crisis groups described their “now selves” in extremely negative terms:
lonely, underachiever, poor, weak, resentful
. Certainly, this is how I would have described myself those first several years after my mother had died, when I was living with R. Just as, before her death, I would have fallen into step with the noncrisis subjects, who chose much more positive words:
optimistic, secure, adjusted, loved, confident
.

Next the subjects were asked to describe their “possible selves.” Looking to the future, the “poor recovery” respondents saw themselves as unpopular, a failure, likely to experience a breakdown or to die young—outcomes even more dire than those of their now selves. In contrast, “good recovery” respondents believed they could be powerful, independent, rich, creative, and so on. (As did the noncrisis respondents.) This was as expected.

Here was the surprise: the “good recovery” respondents felt their positive possible selves to be significantly
more viable
than those who hadn't experienced any tragedy at all.

The researchers theorized that the mere presence of possible
selves is an important element of recovery and can even be liberating, offering hope that the miserable present is transitory. Likewise, negative possible selves can become imprisoning, thwarting the ability to make necessary changes.

Obviously, as someone who'd experienced a crisis in her early twenties, I strongly identified with the study. I'd long sensed that Maeve Brennan served a psychological purpose for me. By climbing into her point of view and trying it on for size, testing the fit and feel, mulling her decisions, eventually even buying the perfume she'd worn, I was cobbling together a template for my own future.

As a possible self, Maeve embodied my longings—for an independent self, a writer self, an elegant self. Her relative obscurity was crucial to my choosing her. A preordained heroine—some prepackaged version of Amelia Earhart or Frida Kahlo—meant to inspire with her larger-than-life accomplishments, would make me feel small by comparison. I'm no wilting lily, but nor am I a daredevil or an artist for the ages. As the great Margaret Fuller put it in 1845, in her
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
, the first major feminist book in America:

Plants of great vigor will almost always struggle into blossom, despite impediments. But there should be encouragement, and a free genial atmosphere for those of more timid sort…. Some are like the little, delicate flowers which love to hide in the dripping mosses…. But others require an open field, a rich and loosened soil, or they never show their proper hues.