My decorating efforts had been devoted to painting over wallpaper (maypole theme) the landlord had refused to remove, and that had left little time and money for things like furniture. The primary piece, and the center of all activity, was the “divan,” a bed/couch/office made up of three futons stacked and transformed by a shiny black red-fringed cloth of my grandmother’s. Layered with pillows, newspapers, typewriter, phone, it formed a bountiful square in the midst of my large, naked space. (It was important at the time to describe any area as a “space,” a potential venue of art, even if referring to a closet. Not that I had a closet.)
I shared this bounty with the expected singular companion, a black Siamese cat I called “Py-Not,” a negation of Pywacket, the magical witch cat in Bell, Book, and Candle, and the only single cat name less clichéd than Cat, of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Rarely were my Py and I home alone. I had boyfriends, “fellas” as my mother called them, plus my girlfriends and just-friends, the many acquaintances who lacked their own spaces and stopped in at mine, then stayed for hours.
Never did I believe that this was it—My Space! My Cat! My Three Plates!—but it had seemed part of a definite forward progression. When I was fifteen, no one had gone on dates. This was during the 1970s and “dating” consisted of standing in parental basements alongside boys and getting high. Hardly anyone spoke. It was bad form to cough, indicating that you, as a girl, could not hold your smoke.
In college, it was bad form to smile. As a “womyn,” a last-dregs junior feminist, one found all men suspect. If they smiled or, rather, “usurped” you with their “gaze,” you demythologized them with your death stare. We’d learned well from our unmarried female professors: No sister, meaning us, was to mate before making of herself a coherent, unified being, a new woman, as there’d forever been new women who—
“Shut the fuck up!” some guy would shout. “Who the fuck’s gonna marry you?”
Still, despite such hostile repartee, the many stilted conversations, and analogous sexual encounters, I assumed, as I had always vaguely assumed, that I’d get married. Somehow. To someone. In my apartment life, age almost 28, I was technically no closer. But I had met certain males whom, in my journal, I referred to as interesting men, not inscrutable or angry myn.
I WANNA BE SEDATED
I had arrived in my late twenties at one of those moments—one of those recurring spells of media frenzy in which single women appear as marginal creatures most frequently described as “pathetic.” But, hey, I worked in the media, as I told every concerned, lip-biting woman I met, and these overblown, underverified stories were deliberately slanted to terrify the reader. I had personally manufactured, or manipulated, such terror stories on a variety of subjects, minimum, five times a year. And because I’d once been a womyn, I knew that this kind of media harassment had a history that stretched back for decades.
Despite my special knowledge, however, I was annoyed. People kept asking me questions, and essentially the same questions: Did I still live alone? And if so, why? What kind of life was that, and where was I going in that “bigger picture”? And what about (the Laundromat lady really said this) my “need for the babies”? After a while I stopped answering the questions “Seeing anyone?” “How old are you?” and “Big date?” I refused to speak to people who used the phrase “biological clock.” As I saw it, the only relevant clock was the immense cultural one that seemed to be running backward into the 1950s, where a wan Frank Sinatra song was playing and in a few more bars it would be autumn.
In 1956 one women’s magazine polled 2,220 high school girls on the unfortunate social plight of the single woman. As the authors paraphrased, 99 percent of participants rigorously agreed that “single career women [had] …so thoroughly misunderstood their central role and identity that they had failed to achieve even the most basic task of establishing a household.” One teen elaborated on this spiritually homeless female: “They’re misfits. Out there alone. It’s crazy. And hard to understand…. They are not in the normal range.”
Apparently, without our even suspecting, that view had held and here we all were in the wrong range. For some time I’d been receiving unsolicited mail from matchmaking and other single services. These packages (“Jewish?” “Jewish, culturally?” “Jewish, downtown?” “Like Jewish men?”) included booklets on writing personals that sold “the you you alone can see,” as well as pamphlets entitled “Accepting, Grieving, Dating” and, in true 1950s form, “How to Make a Normal Life You Can Live With.” My favorite piece of advice came from a brochure entitled Out There Alone—Guerilla Tactics: “At the movies, or theatre, should you feel self-conscious by yourself, attempt to convey, using hand gestures, that you are with the couple, or individuals, seated next to you.”
That’s when I began to collect evidence of single pathos. On a large bulletin board in my kitchen, I pinned up anything that commented subtly, or not so very subtly, on single women. For example, I compiled an unrelated series of ads featuring female executives, each in standard eighties-era floppy-bow suits, each placed in a large, impersonal office, and each holding a hand to her abdomen, back, or head in pain. But the products advertised had nothing to do with physical ailments. Two were for Caribbean/Bermuda airline getaways; one was for an adjustable bed; and one showed a new lightweight leather briefcase. The subtext was louder than the copy: These attractive, successful women suffered the disease of the mistaken path, a condition familiar from popular T-shirts. (NUCLEAR WAR? WHAT ABOUT MY CAREER? and OH, MY GOD, I CAN’T BELIEVE I FORGOT TO HAVE CHILDREN!)
My best find, however, was a cartoon pulled from a local newspaper I found in an airport. In it, seated on a double bed, surrounded by teddy bears and Chinese-food containers (incriminating signs of singleness), was a thirty-fivish woman in bra and underpants. This would seem commentary enough but for the fat bubbling out from her abdomen to form six fleshy rings. It looked as if the classical spinster had lost her neat bun and excellent posture and given up tea for Snickers bars smeared with peanut butter.
Then several developments interrupted my work.
I got married. Immediately we moved across country and back, only to move within New York City twice in two years. After a while we had kids, moved again, and began to lose track of certain friends, in particular, I found, my single friends. They resented my distraction while on the phone. (“Being always out of breath is not a status symbol!”) In person, they did not like the way I spoke to them while looking and making faces at my baby. They didn’t like the way that, exhausted, I often fell asleep mid–hilarious anecdote. Someone said I snored. It hadn’t been that long since I’d been single. But so much had happened in so short a time that my apartment life with Py-not seemed kind of foreign, exotic, like a year spent abroad sometime in college. I had pictures from the trip but the actual details were starting to blur.