Spinster (47 page)

Tomorrow morning, Willy, S, and I are driving north to Newburyport, and from there up the coast of Maine.

By now I've known Willy for thirty-seven years. These days she's seeing a sculptor who lives in Queens (he has a deadline, so he can't join us).

I met S in 2012, through friends. For our first date he brought me to see
Richard III
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For our second, he brought me to the US debut of Philip Glass's Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall. For our third, he met me at my office near Columbus Circle for afternoon coffee in Central Park; walking back, he took my hand and held it, and when we parted, we kissed for so long that I knew right then there wouldn't be anyone but him for a while.

He lives in Brooklyn, too, though forty minutes and two subway lines away. He's a freelance writer, seven years younger than Willy and me, tall and lean with dark brown hair, and when I say he's brilliant what I mean is that he has an uncommonly moral intelligence, and that talking with him feels like wandering through a library of books I've never read (and some that I have), where there's room enough for my own thoughts to roam. Sometimes I think he has a little bit in him of every man I've ever loved, and other times I think I've never met anyone like him. He's so unusual and honest—so much so that, to my occasional dismay, he is rarely romantic, though he did once say the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me: that he liked the idea of having a child with me because he admires so much the kind of woman I
am, and wants to see me raise a daughter in my own image. I have no idea if that will actually happen. Our age difference seems to have stripped away conventional expectations; for the first time I don't feel pressured to be ready for something I'm not. Every so often we get into a fight that makes me think we've reached the end, which can be unsettling, but even so I prefer this uncertainty to false comfort.

The three of us will spend a night in Newburyport, and then we'll drive two hours to Harpswell, Maine, where we'll ask a fisherman to ferry us out to Ragged Island, the one Edna Millay and Eugen Boissevain bought in 1933. It's at the outermost edge of Casco Bay, about eighty acres, with only one house, and no electricity or plumbing. After Edna died, it was bought by a couple in their early fifties, and through friends I was able to locate one of their grandchildren, today an editor at
The New York Times
.

“It's rough living there, not for everyone,” he'd said fondly when we spoke on the phone. “Wood stove. Kerosene lamps. Propane fridge.” He described walking a path through the woods to the well, filling up five-gallon water buckets, and “humping them back down to the house.”

While we talked, we both logged on to Google Earth so he could give me a virtual tour. The island is only hospitable during the summer months. According to locals, Edna spent most of that time in the nude, wandering around in what felt to her to be utter privacy, oblivious to the lobstermen offshore hauling their traps onto their boats, who could see her, plain as day.

“Hah,” I said. “Just like her poetry. All of these so-called private things made public.”

She swam laps in the nude, too. Seen from the sky above, the swimming cove is shaped almost exactly like a heart.

Preparing for our pilgrimage, I'd thought of the poet Mary Oliver, who was fifteen when Edna died in 1950. The morning after her high school graduation, she drove from her parents'
home, in Ohio, to Steepletop, Edna's estate in central New York, where she became friendly with Edna's sister Norma and stuck around. “I was seventeen; I was enthralled by everything, and more or less lived there for the next six or seven years, running around the 800 acres like a child,” Oliver later wrote.

As with my first visit to Edna's house in Newburyport, I won't know why I want to see Ragged Island until I get there. I suppose Willy and S and I will spend an hour or so walking around, then boat back to shore, drive to Portland, on the other side of the bay, and take the ferry out to Cushing Island, where Willy's family owns a house. This is the island my family used to vacation on when I was small, when Willy and I and the other children would sprint in our bathing suits across wide green lawns and down to the beach, where, if the tide was low, I'd break away to a long isthmus of rocks and tidal pools to “play Karana” (which in adulthood I misremembered as “Karenina,” that other outcast woman).

On this late-summer day we'll bring our groceries over on the ferry. Maybe we'll steam lobsters in a pot and dip the meat into shallow dishes of melted butter and share among us a couple of bottles of wine. Afterward we'll sit on the porch and talk in the deepening silence.

Maybe Willy will tell us stories about Margot Schuyler, her spinster great-aunt, who also summered on this island and formed a lifelong friendship with Edna after their disastrous one-night stand in Paris in 1922, when Edna was there writing for
Vanity Fair
. Margot had a tattoo on her inner thigh—a pair of birds perched on a pair of hands; the “Schuyler Family Crest,” she called it—and another, of a black widow spider, on her shoulder.

Willy will definitely give S and me the master bedroom, with its high, pitched ceiling—she's very generous that way—and take for herself the smaller bedroom at the other end of the house. S will fall asleep before I do, as he always does, and I'll probably lie awake thinking mulishly or perhaps accurately about how I can't
possibly let go of these five awakeners of mine after all; they're too much a part of me. I'll start to hatch a plan to visit East Hampton to see if I can find the little shingled cottage by the sea that Maeve Brennan lived in for a while, the one she described in a short story as “absurd” but that, “in spite of all it lacked, and for all its temporary air…had an air of gaiety about it, and even welcome,” and, like her, was “good-hearted in spite of itself.”

In the morning we'll be woken early by the birds, chattering at one another in the treetops all around and above us, their intricate conversation a delicate lace coverlet being draped over a long, shining breakfast table, readying the day to begin.

One evening not long after Mary Oliver moved from Edna Millay's estate to Greenwich Village, she went back to visit Norma and found her sitting in the kitchen with a photographer named Molly Malone Cook. “I took one look and fell, hook and tumble,” Oliver wrote decades later, in a photo book about her and Cook's more than forty years in love together.

In 1990, the year I graduated from high school, Oliver wrote a poem called “The Summer Day.” She ends it by asking a question that electrified me when I first read it in 1992, and that, when my mother died four years later, I absorbed into my bloodstream, like an unspoken mantra:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

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