Free Spinster by Kate Bolick Page A

tiny drama that flared into being as quickly as it disappeared.
    A longing to leave Boston welled up in me like a flood.
    I wish I could say I brought the book home and read the whole thing in one night, without getting up even for a drink of water, and the next day bought a bus ticket to Penn Station. The truth is, it took a while.

    Often after work R and I went running. Once, we saw a woman jogging along with her toddler in one of those rugged, all-terrain strollers—the embodiment of modern motherhood, multitasking exercise and child care, Mrs. Having It All. R smiled and pointed “Look, there’s you someday.” My stomach lurched. There was no way I was going to become that woman, but I didn’t know how to say it.
    What I wanted was too ridiculous to voice. What I wanted was to be Maeve Brennan—a woman I knew so little about that she wasn’t even an actual person to me, but a disembodied mood. It would be several years before her biography was published, fleshing out the bones I rattled in my pockets, and it took me nearly another decade after that to find and have dinner with one of the last people she’d known. For now all I had were her books, which for the time being were more than enough to keep stoking my imagination.
    Because my way of coupling was to merge completely, whenever I felt the need to be separate, if only for a day, I got nervous and suppressed it. While with R, I developed a new habit of simply slipping this uncomfortable desire into the citadel of Maeve’s all-seeing, almost oracular tone, which created a mental space that felt safely contained and powerful all at once, practically glamorous. That The Long-Winded Lady is herself a fiction, in the way all writing about the self ultimately is, increased rather than diminished her appeal. Stepping into her point of view showed me how to look at the world around me more closely, and—crucially—to forget myself. From this vantage, the most ordinary interactions—conferring with the pharmacist, ignoring the old man barking obscenities from his lawn chair on thestreet corner, sharing a knowing look with the woman making my cappuccino—shone with significance and drama. I could almost pretend that I was a writer, too.
    Quite a few of her essays featured her eating alone at a diner in lower Manhattan called the University Restaurant, and so I began to imagine myself.
    In my mind’s eye there I was, sitting in a red vinyl booth, alone, reading, taking a sip of coffee, carefully placing the cup back on its saucer, occasionally glancing out the window onto the sidewalk’s everyday bedlam, a person who knows exactly what it means when someone says “Fourteenth and Broadway” or “Just take the 2/3 train; it’ll be faster than a cab at this hour.”
    The fantasy was irresistible—and bewildering. As I’d done when I’d written poems, I held the image in my mind and walked around it, looking at it from every angle, interrogating. To be a woman sitting by herself in a crowded New York City restaurant, amid the bustle and clatter of other people’s lives—what kind of a thing was that to want? What was I saying to myself?
    That I wanted to be alone?
    As if. Me, alone. Me, the conversation addict.
    Talking was so central to my sense of self that I’d never even thought to question it, and now that I was, I saw that this brook sprang from a source so deep inside me that I couldn’t even name it, and once the stream passed through my mouth and hit air, it vanished into vapor.
    Did becoming a writer require being alone?
    Which wasn’t an option, because being alone meant not being with R, whom I loved, obviously.
    I circled and circled.
    Was it that I didn’t want to be married?
    But of course I wanted to be married. In college I’d decided I’d marry by thirty—that seemed enough time to learn a little bitabout the world before settling down. To