Spinster (7 page)

The far-off security of a boyfriend was almost better than having him nearby. I busied myself furnishing my little room, set up a bank account so I could write checks to my landlord and the utility companies, and started to pay off my student loans. Most extraordinary was waking alone, into my own thoughts. I'd re-plump the pillows and stretch my legs until my body spanned the entire mattress, and I'd lie suspended in that gauzy dreamscape between sleep and real life for as long as it lasted. Once the spell broke, I'd get up and dress and follow the day wherever it went.

Soon enough I started exercising my right to see other people, which turned out to be problematic. Far from feeling even more self-sufficient, I became ensnared in complications of my own making. I'd wake up, rue the day I was born, stuff the pillow over my head, and try to will myself back into the sweet obliteration of sleep.

This is when reference to a mysterious “spinster wish” first appears in my journals—shorthand for the extravagant pleasures of simply being by myself.

The journals: I opened a whole box of them recently, fifteen
slim hardcover books chronicling my first half decade out of college, 1995–2000. Reliving those years was not unlike watching an overwrought performance from standing-room-only at the back of an opera house, but without the liberty to cut out at intermission.

My frantic, slanted scrawl smothers hundreds of pages (you'd never guess handwriting was in its final throes), analyzing every last hiccup of my newly melodramatic romantic life, faithful to fact as a car manual, and just as tedious to read.

But every thirty or forty pages a clear, calm voice pops to the surface, a life preserver bobbing on my own stormy sea.

O
CTOBER
3, 1995: Ah, finally, W has left; back to my little spinster ways.

O
CTOBER
18, 1995: We all know how a body in the bed can be so much lonelier. Still, I can't believe I'd actually want
nothing
over
him
. It makes no sense.

N
OVEMBER
12, 1995: A long, perfect spinster wish of a Sunday, read all day, took two naps.

In my mind's eye, the spinster wish was the shape of that small, steel sylph gracing the nose of a Rolls-Royce, arms outstretched, sleeves billowing, about to leap from her earthbound perch and soar.
*
Itself an incongruous image: culture tells us that a spinster is without future—no heirs to bear, nobody to remember her when she's gone—not a woman racing toward it.

I was going through my Milan Kundera phase, so snippets from his work pepper the pages. From
Immortality
:

Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude.

This moved me. Why must women always be leaving marriages to find what they want? Why couldn't they find what they want first?

I was taken, too, by this line—“That calm was in her soul and it was beautiful; let me repeat: it was the calm of silent birds in treetops”—which, on a fall afternoon, inspired some long journal philosophizing. “Exactly,” I'd scrawled after the quote. “Something especially peaceful in the quiet of the potential for noise—like a drawer full of silverware just before it's opened, or just after it's shut? Yes, that is the more solitary way, just shut, alone in the drawer until it's opened again—and when will the hand come, and whose will it be? And this question is the excitement.”

But like a nineteenth-century diarist, rather than address my attraction to being alone head-on, and behave accordingly, I concealed it, if not in calligraphy, then in the privacy of my journal.

In my actual life, the one beyond those pages, my spinster wish manifested itself as a confused and confusing ambivalence and, ultimately, a sort of double existence.

D
ECEMBER
9, 1995: Really? You've been boy crazy since middle school. Isn't it time you stop squandering your energy and direct it toward something more—dignified?

I even turned on the spinster. About a tryst with a crush:

A
PRIL
13, 1996: I did it because I was curious, I felt excited by the unfamiliarity of the evening, the blackness of the graveyard, the electric of the moment, felt self-righteous that I
should
be able to experience other things, not lock myself into a spinster's dry, unfeeling tower. And yet I regret it already. I regretted it halfway through.

Meanwhile, I was engineering all sorts of passive-aggressive fiascos, telling W we needed to “take a break” one week and changing my mind the next; falling hard for L, a broody philosopher-musician who kept me on a string; applying heretofore unknown powers of detection to cracking the mystery of whom W had been with when we'd been apart, in spite of our mutual pact to “do whatever you want as long as you don't tell me about it.”

At that point I'd been coupled for one-third of my life. Actually being alone was proving to be genuinely incomprehensible.

One afternoon a strange thing happened. It was February or March of 1996, eight months since I'd moved to Oregon. I was on the curb, struggling to wrest a used bookshelf I'd just bought at Goodwill from my rusty Toyota hatchback to haul it upstairs to my room, when out of nowhere my vision began to blur and time slowed down and I was suddenly overcome by the blinding realization that everything I considered so important—my new jobs, friends, the bookshelf—would be rendered instantly meaningless should the phone ring with news my mother was sick again, that I'd leave the bookshelf standing there on the sidewalk, get into the car, and drive the three thousand miles back across the country to help her get well.

I'd blinked, seen the snow on the roof, blinked again, and the
snow was gone. My mother was in perfectly fine health. There was nothing to worry about.

The moment was so uncanny that I didn't take it seriously. For years afterward I told myself that I had no idea what was about to come next, but that isn't exactly right. It was that I hadn't learned to decipher the mysterious ways of the undermind, how occasionally it erupts into an avalanche of clarity, a sheet of snow shearing off the roof and thundering to the ground, leaving the shingles exposed—knowledge issuing a messenger to announce its arrival.

The phone call came several months later, in May. It was very early on a Saturday morning, an odd time for the phone to ring. My father: “Her cancer has spread everywhere.” By Tuesday I'd broken my lease, quit my four jobs, and pushed all my furniture and appliances—even that crummy Toyota—onto whoever would take them. Wednesday I packed my remaining possessions into six cardboard boxes, and that night I boarded a red-eye flight to Boston.

When I arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital on Thursday morning, my mother was a deflated life raft in a sea of white sheets, more pale and tired than I'd ever seen her. Her hazel eyes lit up when she saw me. I didn't know how to hug her through the tangle of IV sacks and tubes.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “You're finally here. What's the latest with W, and with L?”

I cringed, embarrassed by my months of histrionics, some of which she'd kindly talked me through. Could she possibly think that I cared about them now?

“Oh, God, Mom, who cares! They don't matter!”

“Sure they do,” she said.

I steered the conversation toward other topics, and very soon after she drifted away into a morphine haze.

My father and brother and I spent the next five days at the hospital, driving home to Newburyport at night. She wandered in
and out of consciousness, and when she spoke, it was about things the rest of us couldn't see, or comprehend.

We remained very hopeful, along the lines of,
None of this should be happening; therefore, it isn't
.

On Tuesday afternoon the doctors pulled us into an empty room and told us she wouldn't last.

“It's hard to say how long. A few weeks. Maybe even a few months,” they said.

Did we cry? All I remember is explaining to my father that, even though I knew Mom wasn't going to die that very night, I couldn't leave her alone, knowing now what I did.

The nurses set up a cot for me by the window. The Charles River snaked below. I fell asleep.

Wednesday morning I was woken by a familiar voice, resonant and warm.

“Honey, is that you?”

I turned over. My mother was sitting up in bed, wide awake, smiling. I got out of my cot and climbed over her bed rail and snuggled in, IV sacks and tubes be damned.

“I thought I saw something red!” She laughed. “And it was you!”

We talked and talked.

It felt like an actual, honest-to-God miracle.

Neither of us acknowledged that she was dying.

I knew for sure. Did she?

Her rings glinted on a string around her neck; the nurses had removed them before her fingers had swollen into puffy pink sausages, useless.

When breakfast came, I peeled the foil lid off the tiny orangejuice carton, and shook salt onto the eggs, but neither of us felt like eating.

Same with lunch.

We talked and talked. I have no idea what we talked about.
Talking was just what we did, always. It wasn't an activity; it was our shared condition.

That night she slipped away again.

She slept all through the next day.

Thursday evening the doctors told us: tomorrow.

Did we all spend the night in the hospital? All I know is that at seven o'clock the next morning the three of us were sprawled on her bed, holding her hands. She didn't breathe so much as gurgle, as if drowning. She actually was drowning.

The sound was unbearable.

We stroked her arms, told her over and over how much we loved her, as if our words could penetrate her unconscious state.

Her breathing rattled and slowed until each pause seemed like the very last. Eventually my father whispered, “It's okay, Nancy. You can go now.”

She died almost immediately. She had heard him. She had heard us.

We stood silent. A terrible unknown nurse none of us will ever forgive barged in and asked how things were going. My father bellowed at her to get out.

My brother leaned down to close our mother's eyelids, the way he'd seen people do on television. They wouldn't stay shut.

My father reached over and unfastened the string around her neck, slipped her wedding and engagement rings into his pocket, and handed the other two to me. The stones were lavender—one amethyst, the other glass. I put them on and didn't take them off for a decade.

We collected her things and found the car in the parking garage and drove home.

It was the last day of May. I couldn't cry or think or read. The weeks piled up.

Nothing in Oregon to return to, I stayed in Newburyport, sleeping all day, or fighting on the telephone with W. Our already
strained relationship groaned beneath my grief. I hated him for not knowing how to take care of me. And then I hated my friends for that, too.

The days disintegrated into a gummy torpor.

W and I broke up, got back together.

My torpor mobilized into a mania.

I'd seen a posting online about an unpaid internship program at my favorite magazine,
The Atlantic Monthly
. A plan snapped into shape: if I was accepted, I could live at home rent-free and intern for a few months, use the time to apply to MFA programs, and the following year move to wherever I'd gotten into school.

When I went in for my interview, I was told that the assistant to the senior vice president had just been promoted—rather than apply for the internship, would I like to apply for the job? I wanted to think I was hired for my literary proclivities, but really it was my experience waiting tables. My new boss liked that I could juggle a lot of things at once.