Spinster (36 page)

And then, after the sadness had passed, I saw that I'd crossed into an entirely new country.

I wasn't alone again. My life was teeming with people: family, friends, colleagues. The tailor at the dry-cleaning shop who hemmed my dresses and skirts. My hairdresser, a gifted gossip. The college friends I'd kept close with even though we lived in different states and countries. The convivial widow who on warm afternoons sat on her stoop with a magazine and a glass of bourbon and drew me into a chat when I passed.

The following year, my brother and his wife would have their first daughter, and my heart would do exactly what people say happens, expand even further.

I started jokingly referring to my job as my “husband” (as in, my source of economic stability), an “antidepressant” (it was so demanding, I didn't have time for melancholy), and a full-time “vacation” (even with the long hours, it was far easier than writing freelance), all rolled into one. It even enabled me to go on actual vacations. That fall, when the man I'd just started dating went to Puerto Rico for work, I decided that sex in a tropical location while
in the flush, first stages of a romance was well worth the expense, and I flew down to join him. That winter, I skipped out on Christmas by traveling to Argentina for a week with a new female friend, also single. We had so much fun, we called it “our honeymoon.”

Now I wanted to make my studio apartment look as beautiful as it felt. I was flipping through a book about Charleston, the farmhouse that Virginia Woolf's sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, had rented in the English countryside a century before. It seemed to embody my fantasy life: sunlit rooms cozy with sagging bookshelves, oil portraits hung beside overstuffed chairs, and nearly every surface—walls, doors, windowsills—covered in her own hand-painted designs.

I was captivated by a specific corner—nubby lavender linen love seat, white paisleys hand-painted on lavender walls, French doors open onto a wildflower garden—and I submitted to the magazine's powers-that-be that we produce a feature about making over my tiny Brooklyn studio in its image. For a furious month a stylist sorted through fabrics and paint chips, even commissioned a replica love seat. My own piles of books and thrift-store treasures would round out the effect—everything but the French doors opening onto a wildflower garden.

The stylist and his team did the entire makeover in two days, while I was at the office. The night I returned home to the completed project, a low lamp was glowing on my desk, and Bach's cello suites warbled from my ancient boom box, hidden from view. I sank onto the love seat. The walls were covered with hand-painted paisleys. Dramatic curtains with a Bloomsbury-esque blue-and-purple floral print hung to the floor. I felt as if I'd just been pulled into a deep, warm embrace. A Technicolor fantasia of Woolf's famous “a room of one's own.”

A few weeks after the feature was published, I started receiving e-mails from women I'd known growing up, mothers of friends, friends of my mother: “I was standing in line at the grocery
store and saw your apartment in a magazine! You are
so
your mother's daughter!” And, “Good Lord, if your mother could only see what you've done—to think you have exactly her style!” I stared at their messages. My mother didn't have style. What in the world were they talking about?

I learned the answer a couple of years later, when the magazine sent me to New Orleans to write a feature about the home of an interior designer. I was thrilled; the novelty of traveling for work hadn't worn off—I'd never stayed in such nice hotels. Besides, New York was getting to me—all the endless late nights, the screeching subways. Even so, the Puritan in me kept guard; becoming accustomed to luxury seemed unwise.

Each afternoon, after finishing my research, I strolled through the various neighborhoods, marveling over the astonishing charm of it all: bright red geraniums erupting from clay pots; wisteria vines curling over a wrought-iron balcony; coral paint peeling from a weathered façade. But it wasn't until my last day that the low-running conversation I'd been having in my head finally made itself heard. “Oh, Mom would love those tall, narrow shutters,” I'd say to myself, or, “Just look at those faded chintz curtains! Mom would die and go to heaven.”

Did I actually laugh out loud? I wanted to. I couldn't believe it. Not only had my mother had a very specific sense of style, but I'd inherited it. Exactly. All this time, I thought I'd been perfecting my own “neo-Victorian bohemianism” (or so I'd come to think of it), but in fact I was channeling her and the lovely old house she'd furnished, trying to invoke its familiar comforts in each small apartment I moved to. The careworn antiques, the weakness for scrollwork, the floral prints. How had I never noticed this?

The explanation dawned slowly. When she was alive, I was still directing my aesthetic energies into my clothes. I was proud of our handsome home (not to mention proprietary of the living room walls) but completely blind to the effort that went into making it; hanging new curtains seemed a tedious, grown-up chore, like filing taxes. After she died, and my family life changed, the house became a mausoleum to my lost, happier childhood, one shrouded in grief, not a place I could experience with any objective distance.

It wasn't until I became an adult myself, living on my own, that I graduated into paying close attention to where I lived, analyzing and upgrading, eventually developing a domestic language, which felt far more natural to me, I suddenly realized, than fashion ever had. When you're insecure about your appearance, trying to make yourself look better is a fraught endeavor. The home is a blank canvas, or empty vessel—a place where the will toward beauty can be expressed unchecked, without the messy complications of the self.

Several months later I received a mysterious e-mail.

“Is this Nancy Bolick's daughter? I'm Margaret, the friend she wrote a romance novel with…”

“Romance novel?!” I typed back. “What romance novel?” My mother had written many newspaper and magazine articles, and several young-adult history books, but a romance novel? She didn't even read romance novels.

It turned out that over brunch one morning in the 1980s Margaret had suggested that they collaborate on “one of those stupid books that are selling so well,” for fun. My mother confided to her that she had, in fact, already started writing one—this in itself blew my mind—so the two decided to pick up where she'd left off.
When the publisher asked for a “racier” rewrite, they gave it up. I asked if she could mail me the manuscript.

Several weeks later, there it was, stuffed into my building's tiny metal mailbox. I'd worked late, and on the walk home from the subway a thunderstorm had decimated my umbrella; I tugged gingerly on the package, trying not to get it wet. Once upstairs, I poured a bowl of cereal for dinner and sat down at my kitchen table. That night my apartment felt particularly empty and dark, in a way it didn't usually, rain driving against the windows.

Since my mother had died, I'd longed to hear her voice one last time—and here it was, an unexpected communiqué from the grave. Not only that, but I was about to encounter her fantasy life. Why else would a happily married mother of two embark on such an uncharacteristic project, if not to dream up an imaginary existence, a make-believe version of what might have been? “We put in a lot about our children and our lives,” Margaret had said in her e-mail.

However gently I opened the envelope, it tore anyhow. Out came a thick stack of white paper yellowed by age. The font was pale grayish, from an old 1980s dot-matrix printer, and the title page read
Design for Love
, by Rena Hart (a pseudonym!). In disbelief I began to read, forcing myself to go as slowly as possible, fighting the desire to devour the entire thing in one fell swoop, so I could savor each precious paragraph, each spectral sentence, for as long as I could.

What I read astounded me. The book is first-rate Harlequin, replete with heaving bosoms and star-crossed lovers. Its plot, a complicated scenario involving a real-estate investor scheming to take over a sleepy New England town, is lifted straight from a community issue my mother had felt passionately about. But one thing in particular pulled back the curtains, not just on my mother's life but on my own: the book's heroine, Ivy Winter, is an unmarried interior decorator living alone in New York City.