Spinster (5 page)

Credit 2.1

Nancy O'Keefe Bolick, 1968

The story of how I found my five awakeners is a true story about a series of fictions—the genuine desires and received expectations, confused yearnings and cagey half-truths—that go into making a life, and the ways in which fantasy and reality coexist. When I set out to write it, I assumed I'd start with my first awakener and proceed from there, only to discover a prelude leading up
to that main event, an antechamber of wishes, both my mother's and my own, which is where the story actually begins.

My mother once told me that as a young girl she'd lie in bed conjuring the man she would someday marry. Where was he at that exact moment? What was he thinking about? What did he look like? When would they meet? Sometimes she'd sneak into the backyard and wrap her arms around a tree, for practice.

She met her fate in February 1968, the month she turned twenty-four, at a Pennsylvania ski resort. They spied each other in line for the chairlift: a cute guy with curly hair and an adorably wrong white silk scarf (he grew up in North Carolina and had never been skiing); a curvy brunette in a kelly-green snow-suit (from New England, she was used to the slopes). Later, back at the lodge, they flirted over hot cocoa and discovered that they both lived in Washington, DC, where she worked for the just-founded Job Corps, and he was an Army intelligence officer, studying Mandarin Chinese. He asked for her number. She told him she was in the phone book. He liked her sass. Eleven months later they married in a small chapel just outside of Newburyport—frighteningly fast, from my adult perspective, but common then.

Growing up, I thrilled to stories of their genuinely romantic newlywed years, and I asked to hear them so often that eventually I could repeat the details verbatim, from dialogue to costume changes.

When I started thinking about my five awakeners in earnest, however, I came to see that, demographically speaking, my parents had made a series of very ordinary decisions at an extraordinary moment in history—providing me with a convenient
example for understanding marital trends in the second half of the twentieth century.

They were a good match: she gave him the stability he craved while also sharing in his adventures; he was caring and communicative, the opposite of her gruff, cigar-smoking father. Immediately after the wedding he was dispatched to Okinawa to fill a Chinese-language position in Special Action Force Asia; framed and hung on the wall at home in Newburyport is the telegram he sent a month or so later:

HAVE SNUG BUNGALOW SEND POWER OF ATTORNEY LOVE DOUG
.

They lived off base in an Okinawan neighborhood until he shipped out to Vietnam. She moved back in with her parents, got a job in Newburyport teaching English (at the same school Edna Millay had attended as a child, now long demolished). As my father put it to me later, those were “exciting, heady times. Winds of war, leave-takings, R & Rs, anguish.”

In July 1971 he finished his one-year tour of duty, and they returned to Washington, DC, so he could start law school on the G.I. Bill; she found work at the Council for Exceptional Children, a professional advocacy group. In July 1972 I was born, followed four years and one day later by my brother, Christopher; in 1977 we moved back to Newburyport, where my father established his private law practice downtown, and my mother returned to teaching school.

Every time I see the numbers, I'm amazed all over again. In 1890, only 54 percent of all households were married couples. By 1950, that number had grown to 65 percent. By the time my parents were getting married, so were 80 percent of their peers.

Completing school, leaving home, starting a career, getting
married, having children—until very recently this lockstep progression was taken for granted as the fast track to the American dream. But as Betty Friedan famously revealed in 1963 with
The Feminine Mystique
, even then there were cracks in the pavement. In one particularly telling 1962 poll, the majority of wives claimed that they were happy, but only 10 percent wanted their daughters to follow suit.
Wait a little longer to get married
, they whispered.
Live a little; go to college
.

Which is exactly what happened. By 1970 the number of married households had plummeted to 61 percent. Between 1966 and 1979 divorce rates doubled.

By the time my mother was raising me, whispering was no longer necessary. The second wave of the women's movement that flared into being in the late 1960s had gone mass by the early 1970s, swiftly spreading beyond urban centers all the way out to small towns. Newburyport wasn't exactly a feminist hotbed, but my mother found a certain sisterhood with the local chapter of the League of Women Voters, and in 1980, when she was thirty-six, became its president. “
If
and when you decide to have children,” she would say as soon as I was old enough to start thinking such thoughts.

She once surprised me by confiding that one of the most blissful moments of her life had been when she was twenty-one, several years before she'd met my father, driving down the highway in her VW Beetle, with nowhere to go except wherever she wanted to be. “I had my own car, my own job, all the clothes I wanted,” she remembered wistfully. Had she been born just a little later, she could have spent an entire decade enjoying that unfettered lifestyle.

Instead, she pushed aside her own ambitions, raised two children, and in her mid-thirties began finding her way toward work she enjoyed, only to discover that she had an awful lot of catching up to do. She was deeply happy with us, her family, but she was
also frustrated, and this tension had an enormous influence on the adult I became.

When I was a teenager, my mother wrote a short essay about the time a neighbor had spied me walking along the street, and she gave it to me as part of my high school graduation present. “Kate has your bearing,” the gentleman had said, “the same narrow shoulders held erect.” My mother was delighted with the comparison and concluded that, long after she was gone, she would live on through me, there in my very deportment. I told her I loved the piece, but inwardly I cringed.
Really? Was I doomed to look like her forever?

If you're a daughter, your mother's face is your first mirror, and if you share her features—in our case hazel eyes, brown hair, a serious amount of freckles, a small frame with those “narrow shoulders held erect”—odds are you'll unconsciously adopt her attitude of self-regard. My mother considered herself to be plain, if not homely, and so I believed her, and so I considered myself. She'd spoken so vividly about her awkward adolescence that I could conjure that mousy girl in a heartbeat—in my mind's eye she was always slumped against a wall of lockers at Newburyport High School (along with our looks we shared the same alma mater), hair dull and limp, painfully alone in an ill-fitting plaid dress. I carried this phantom twin wherever I went, no matter that I couldn't have been more different myself, outgoing and athletic. A favorite family story was of the time her college admissions counselor, dismayed by my mother's lousy grades, advised that she apply to beauty school. “I don't even like brushing my
own
hair!” my mother had moaned.

The joke's extra punch was how successfully she'd outgrown that sad, hapless girl to become a woman whom others looked up
to and described as strong. All through her teens and twenties she was racked with self-doubt and insecurity—and then, at thirty-four, she did an about-face: she quit her job teaching middle-school English and convinced
The Newburyport Daily News
to hire her as its features editor, despite not possessing a single professional credential. Two years later she quit her full-time job and reinvented herself as a freelance journalist, contributing travel stories to national magazines and newspapers. Because my father worked for himself, he was able to keep the household running as she flew to Greece or Germany on assignment.