Spinster (8 page)

In the mornings my father drove me to the bus terminal, and I made the hour-long commute to Boston. In the evenings, there he'd be again, waiting for me in the parking lot in his red truck. After dinner we'd walk the dog to the public pond at the top of our street, the still water indistinguishable from the night. This pond had been the beloved locus of my youth, where we went to ice-skate and picnic, but since I'd left home, the city had ignored its upkeep until it sagged into something more like a swamp, tall weeds and rushes choking the edges, the majestic swan fountain at its center as dry as bone. I grew terrified that I would never leave my little childhood bedroom, that little town.

“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies,” Edna Millay once wrote. I was twenty-three when my mother died, long past childhood,
but, like most progeny of the middle class, I'd indulged an unthinking helplessness about my parents longer than I should have, an entitlement to what I felt I was owed, a willful blindness to their lives as individuals with needs of their own.

There had been a fluke telephone conversation a few months before her death when it struck me that though my mother and I spoke candidly and often, there was a part of herself she held in reserve, that she was waiting for me to get just a little older—a few years, maybe by the time I was thirty, I hazarded, married and with my own family—to talk to me frankly about herself, woman to woman, and the two strands of our lives, necessarily divided by my growing into my own person, would twine back together into one long rope, and she'd unburden herself of the secrets she carried, and I'd learn things about her I'd never known.

And so I couldn't shake the conviction that we'd been robbed. She'd raised me in her image to be the one true friend she'd never had, and now neither of us would ever know the conversations we'd waited for all our lives. There was a sickening symmetry to her losing her first breast just as I began to wear a bra, and then exiting her adulthood at midlife, at the moment I embarked on mine, as if I were still a parasitic fetus leeching her of blood and calcium.

You are born, you grow up, you become a wife.

You delay your ambitions, you raise a family, you're struck down by cancer at midlife.

It was resolved: I had my own aspirations to live out, but also hers.

If you're lucky, home is not only a place you leave, but also a place where you someday arrive. Sometimes I wish I'd never left Newburyport, or at least that I'd stayed a little longer. Certainly
it was the last time I'd feel at home in the way I'd first known, where every familiar teacup and chair triggered the ongoing conversation that had been my relationship with my mother, which would soon fade to a whisper and then threaten to vanish outright. The literary critic in me resents her role in this book the way I would a sentimental plot twist in a movie. We all have had mothers; few among us want to lose them; I wish my experience had transcended such an obvious bid for your sympathy, and I could have become a different writer. But I can't erase the fact that the first day of my adult life was that morning in May my mother took her last breath.

Credit 3.1

Maeve Brennan, 1948

Boston, I'd decided, was a joke. Whether my scorn was a projection of my interior state or a legitimate critique, I still can't decide. I'd spent a lifetime immersed in New England's monotony of white faces, khaki pants, and little painted placards commemorating a colonial this or that, and I began to feel suffocated. Once, out with W, to make the point that everyone in the city looked
like someone from my hometown, I gestured at a group of guys in Red Sox caps and Bruins jerseys across the bar, who, when they got up to leave and I saw their faces, actually turned out to be a group of guys I'd grown up with. At least they made sense to me in a way the people I worked with did not.

I was acutely aware of how lucky I'd been to land my job at the magazine, but it was a while before I actually liked it.
The Atlantic
was founded in 1857 by a group of progressive intellectuals and poets; by the time I appeared on the scene, it was a hushed temple to WASP decorum, equal parts Henry James's
The Bostonians
and standard-issue Ivy League: nobody ever spoke too loud or too much, the men wore bow ties and played squash, the women looked sternly down their noses, or so it felt. In college I'd unconsciously befriended fellow work-study students; here, even the interns carried an air of privilege and entitlement I'd never encountered before.

My boss was frosty and inscrutable, the work tedious. When I wasn't booking her flights and managing her incredibly complex schedule, I was painstakingly encoding archival material into HTML, for “content” to post online. For instance, all seventeen thousand words of the first five chapters of Henry James's classic coming-of-age novel,
The Portrait of a Lady
, which first appeared in the magazine's pages in November 1880. I did not appreciate the irony.

At six o'clock I'd ask if she needed anything else, then take the subway home to Jamaica Plain, where I shared an apartment with three college friends. My bedroom was a Japanese tearoom our landlord had salvaged from a local museum—one room rebuilt inside another, like nested boxes. To enter, I'd turn a cut-glass doorknob on a paneled wood door, duck beneath the low bamboo opening, and hunch around, my own madwoman in the attic.

All this time I'd thought poetry a gift handed down by the ancients—a transcendent, elusive medium with which to try to capture every moment of being, and that the poet's greatest good fortune, perhaps the only one, was that, when bereaved, she could funnel her grief into elegies, and that these elegies would immortalize whatever was distinct about the beloved before all memory vanished into the cold black immensity of time, irretrievable.

But whenever a promising image burbled to mind, I'd take out my notebook, write it down, and then recoil in disgust. Nothing remotely conveyed what I actually felt. Every phrase was, in fact, a lie. I'd glare back at the page, then chastise myself for being so stupid and utterly without talent. I couldn't believe that language was completely failing me exactly when I needed it most. Or was it me, I wondered, who couldn't rise to the rigors language demands?

Despairing, I'd tear out the page and toss it into an old wooden fruit crate I kept on the tatami floor, beside my mattress. Very deep down there was a kernel in me that thought maybe someday far in the future I'd want to read these failed attempts—as if they weren't trying to be poems after all, but cryptic letters to a version of myself I'd yet to meet.

My problem, I decided, was that I didn't know where to picture myself next—a failure of imagination, you could call it, though it felt more like a flailing response to an unseen adversary, or a refusal of the options as I saw them presented. How do you embark on your adulthood when you don't know where you're headed?

Everywhere I looked women were leading lives I didn't want for myself. There was the Childless Executive, my boss, the most ambitious woman I'd ever met, who'd raised herself up from nothing
to the top of the business side of this venerable institution, and stormed around the office with a constant scowl, only seeing her husband on weekends.

There was the Ex-Wife, a friend's mother, whose husband had left her for a younger woman; she'd never worked, and her struggle to find an identity now that she was no longer married was painful to witness, her loneliness and desperation a void she couldn't figure out how to fill.

Then there was Having It All, the neighbor I passed every morning on my walk to the subway, hurrying from her beautiful house in a visibly uncomfortable state of chaos, hair still wet from the shower, papers trailing from her briefcase, yelling instructions to the nanny about what to feed the children for dinner because she wouldn't be home until very late.

She wasn't much older than I was; I could be her if I wasn't careful.

Once upon a time all of these women had been young like me, with a fantasy of how their futures would go. Something didn't add up.

The only example that seemed even remotely appealing was an elderly widow who worked at the magazine. Phoebe-Lou Adams was trim and athletic and made all her own clothes—chic sleeveless sheaths, slim tailored pants. During the summer she topped herself off with outrageously broad-brimmed straw hats. She'd been hired as an assistant in 1944, when she was twenty-five, and started writing her own book-review column in 1952; for the centennial issue in 1957 she was dispatched to Cuba to wrangle a story from Ernest Hemingway (he gave her two).

Three days a week she'd drive in from her home in Connecticut, shut the door of her office, and bang out her reviews on a loud old electric typewriter, chain-smoking all the while. Her voice was gorgeously raspy and brusque in person, pithy on the
page (regarding
On the Road
: “Neither of these boys can sit still”; her full summation of
Sabbath's Theater:
“As a protest against inevitable death, sexual excess is as futile as any other. Mr. Roth's latest novel makes it tiresome as well.”) In 1971, when she was fifty-two, she'd married for the first time, to the magazine's former editor-in-chief, Edward Weeks; every year they went salmon-fishing in Iceland or New Brunswick, and after he died in 1989, she carried on their tradition by herself.

That, I thought, seemed like a very good life.

I was alone with her once. It was fall, and we were both waiting for the elevator. I decided to ask her about the blazer I'd just bought at Filene's Basement, not from the sale rack, a bit of a splurge. Was it all-season, I hoped? Assembling an office wardrobe was an enduring challenge. She reached out her tanned, wrinkled arm and fingered the hem. “No,” she said, “that's linen.” When the elevator arrived, we rode down in silence.

In the spring of 1997, an editor slated to interview the novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick for a Q&A to be published online had come down with the flu, and she suggested I take her place. The assignment literally changed my life. For a week of evenings and stolen workday minutes, I read as much of Ozick's writing as I could and labored intensely over my questions. I conducted the interview over the phone. For an hour I hardly breathed, I was so nervous about missing a word. I loved every second.

After that I published an interview with the author of a new book every six weeks or so—Nadine Gordimer, Edna O'Brien, Annie Proulx. My boss didn't mind, as long as I took care of her stuff.

By now, my father was seriously involved with a woman who
lived in Newburyport. He'd started seeing her several months after our mother had died—insultingly, heartlessly soon, my brother and I thought. We were righteous with rage.

You are born, you grow up, you become a wife.

You delay your ambitions, you raise a family, you're struck down by cancer at midlife, your husband moves on without a second thought—or so it seemed to us.

At the end of the summer, W left for Iowa to pursue an MFA in poetry, and we finally broke up. Though it had been ages in coming, I hadn't anticipated how lost I'd feel without him. When he told me not long after that he was seeing someone new (indeed the woman he eventually married), I writhed with jealousy and self-loathing. She'd gone to college with us; like my father's new girlfriend, she was very pretty and soft-spoken—the antithesis of women like my mother and me. Since finishing
The Portrait of a Lady
, I'd developed a Henrietta Stackpole complex: feisty, overly talkative journalists were all well and good, but you only secure a man's heart if you're as pretty as Isabel Archer (an instance of revisionist literary history: I'd decided to forget that Henrietta marries in the end). I hung up the phone and cried so hysterically that my common sense had no choice but to snap awake and intervene: