Bachelor Girl (32 page)

Her cheeks had collapsed around her gums. Her hair was gray and spongy, and she wore whole sets of clothes on top of other clothes as if she were her own personal closet. She looked like a character summoned to the present from an old fairy tale, only the summoning spell had played a trick. She was not the pretty, wide-awake heroine you’d been expecting. She was the embodiment of all that can go wrong to the pretty and wide-awake heroine. Hers was one of the classically awful female fates—the hideous hag—and there was nothing comfortably mythic or metaphorical about her at all.

To close this book, I naturally set out to identify the preeminent single icons of the moment, and to analyze how they had evolved out of all the many preceding incarnations. Most important, I needed to know if “single icon” as a term was still culturally relevant. The work itself at least seemed easier. After months of handling frail brown-edged magazines and fifth-generation copies of out-of-print books, I enjoyed arriving at my Internet portal of choice and typing in
single women.
As it turned out, that was like typing in the name of a continent: an entity so massive and complex that thousands of possible routes crossed any small section.

After several hours spent on-line I changed my metaphor. Single life seemed more like a huge, overcrowded refugee camp, the refugees desperate for help in escaping.

Here is the world’s most extensive catalogue of single life and thought, and it is dominated by a highly particularized collection of personal ads, and popular e-dating services, interspersed with creepy bride-buying offerings. (“Bulgarian girls! Russian, as well as from the Belarus and Ukraine! Also beautiful girls who will make fine wives from Greece and Turkey!”) Hoping to find less depressing expressions of single life at this point, I hung around in the ubiquitous chat rooms. But these “rooms,” with their cheesy masquerade-ball requirements, seem as awkward and unnatural a place to communicate as the sixties-era “trystorium.” (That included, as you may remember, rooftop daiquiri parties and go-go coed Laundromats.) The singular Web sites and e-zines (“Leather spinsters on the Web—the e-zine for the Happily Unmarried Woman”; “Young Spinster—No Marriage Prospects, No Apologies”) seemed more promising. Here was a new forum for the sardonic, faux-masochistic single sensibility—the self-deprecating jokiness of female stand-up comics—but mixed with fairly serious tables of contents.

Unfortunately, these sites are infested, as are the personals and chat rooms, with intrusive pop-up windows, the first and highest form of Internet graffiti. Some of these ads are for personal services (“alluring” hair braids; all-over body waxing; phone sex to aid in masturbation), while some hype “reconstruct-your-entire-self” kinds of books accompanied by inspirational CDs. A subcategory of these single books—a specimen rampant on Amazon.com—is the wiseass advice manual or what I think of as the clever novelette. The tone is sarcastic and funny, and each comes with lots of reassuring space between the paragraphs and a shiny “cool-girl” cover. (Cool-girl covers are all alike: They feature a skinny, dark-haired, red-nailed cartoon girl wearing a little black dress. Either her arms are folded, or she is smoking. The titles, in retro fifties-era fonts, announce the
Go-Girls Guide
or
Grrrrrl’s Rules for Love and Life,
although some titles are long and have a kind of Borscht Belt cuteness, recalling
Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York
. My favorite in this category:
Even God Is Single, So Why Are You Giving Me a Hard Time?
)

After touring the cyber singles world, I happily returned to the land of live subjects. But this last round of interviewing mirrored my experience playing around on the Web: Conversations were so digressive that in the span of minutes the person, talking about workplace dynamics, was very, very angry at some man she had not seen for several years and also, it seemed, if you asked her, that her nieces were the only sane or attractive thing about her sister. A number of women in their twenties talked for a very long time about the fun of writing and posting personals on various agreed-upon “cool” Internet sites. Many of them did it for the “hits,” the number of responses they got to the descriptions they’d written of themselves. Often they did not actually go on these dates. But the hits were a way of “moving self-esteem” and “keeping up.” Other women just stared at me and after checking messages and retracing lipstick wondered what I could possibly have to ask them. In fact, some women over thirty-five seemed to suffer a kind of celebritylike ennui, as if they had heard all the questions before and didn’t really need to hear them again before answering.

Here, a random sampling from my notes:

I tried to find a clear passage, a defining subject line, through my notes. Margaret, forty-two, a talk-show booker who’s twice divorced, said, “Forget it…. the single world is teeming.” She did not view it as a continent or a refugee camp. As she saw it, “What you have here is a swamp.”

If distinct single archetypes seem for the moment to have blurred, the conviction that single women are social outcasts—odd women who require constant translation—remains intact. Wherever she is, perhaps in a waiting room or on an airplane or lost in the morass of the Internet, she’ll eventually find a story about her uncertain future and her inevitable regret. As always, the story will include picture of a lone single woman holding a ginger-colored or Siamese Pywacket cat. I’ve got a picture in front of me now as I write, part of a recent
Daily News
special on women who insist (again and again) that they don’t want to have children. The caption beneath a photo of a long-
haired woman with her stretching cat: “Her cats are enough, says busy filmmaker Donna Gilardi, 35, about her decision not, ever, to have children.”

But if one stays with it, ignores all the ads and distractions and contradictions, there are discernible single icons for the new century. To bring them more fully into focus it’s necessary to look at those immediately preceding—the single types that were introduced and viciously attacked during the 1980s and ’90s.

THE BIG CHILL: THE ANTISINGLE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES

During the 1980s bookshelves were crammed with punishing tirades:
Otherwise Engaged: The Private Lives of Successful Career Women; A Lesser Life; Smart Women, Foolish Choices,
and many tomes that featured the words “biological clock,” a phrase repeated so often I began to think of it as a body part, perhaps a moody colon or a giant cyst. I include as an adjunct to this sad single genre the
Cathy
cartoon books, which seem innocuous enough until, on the fourth or fifth volume, the self-deprecation starts to seem like a pathological tic. In retrospect, I also think the most popular cat book of the era—and at the time “cat” was its own publishing category—played on stereotypes associated with single women.
Garfield
was a male cat, but his primary characteristics were borrowed from traits commonly ascribed to single females: he was fat, eccentric, sneaky, and lived in constant anticipation of food because there was nothing else in his life.

These books had various points to make, but the primary conclusions were always, however expressed or disguised, that women had paid an enormous personal price for the successes of feminism, in particular the demands and sacrifices required by their jobs. Married women with children, those said to “juggle”—the euphemism for impossible trade-offs between work and family—were well known to confront physical breakdown if they did not ultimately choose the part-time “mommy track,” meaning the relinquishing of their career goals to work a nontenured, nonpartner three-day week that allowed them to leave at five.

The single woman confronted different kinds of possible and likely
breakdowns. One of these, as described by a
USA Today
reporter in 1989, was “an O.D. of Machisma.” The other can be summarized as a kind of all new quiet spinsterly death by pathos.

This last was best described in a 1991 story, “What About Alice?,” that appeared in
The Washington Post
. The piece, written by a man, began, “I shall invent a woman.” And he did. A prototypical lawyer, good salary, fairly attractive, and, at thirty, still unwed. As the story begins, it was “dawning on Alice that she [might] never get married. And the same thing seemed to be occurring to many others she knew.” Nobody understood why, but that’s how “things were working out” and it was becoming frustrating. And expensive. Her creator explained:

“Alice,” he wrote, as if addressing all the unmarried law-school grads and unattached MBAs of the universe, “my heart goes out to you. You are the grim smile of every Academy Award loser.” And he concluded by reminding us that Alice did not exist. Had she been real, she’d have “broken your heart.” For all those like her—those contending with their non-chance of marriage, all those still forced to argue (years later!) about
Fatal Attraction
—it sounded grim. The
San Francisco Chronicle
summarized the dating climate, circa 1990, as an anti–greeting card: “Modern romance is a mess. To enter this magic land, one must maneuver through a gantlet of expectations, confusing miscommunications, desperate avoidance of intimacy and fears of everything from rejection to sex disease.”

The professional woman “O.D.ing on Machisma” was just as sad. Older than Alice, this single character had spent years struggling against sexism, suppressing anger, and she was thus in her dealings with the world and men especially a brittle and sarcastic presence. The essential icon in this cate
gory was TV journalist Murphy Brown, as played by Candace Bergen on the long-running TV series. Murphy was known for many things, but I remember most the dresses that had openings at the shoulders, as designed specially for the show by Donna Karan. These “cold-shouldered” outfits were the power look of the moment, I always thought, because the metaphorical chips on Murphy’s shoulders were so huge they mandated special tailoring. It seemed that women who’d worked their way to a position like Murphy’s were just as pathetic as the Alices, if in a different way. They were tougher, more accomplished, richer, and had fabulous perquisites, all to cover unsuccessfully for the fact that they had forfeited their ability to do anything “female” in life. The macho career woman was depicted as an update on the harsh 1930s career woman, that intersexual, mannish, possibly lesbian postwar working bitch missing a heart. As it was most often expressed in the late 1980s and ’90s, this woman had some kind of cerebral and/or neurological inability to deal with children. (Other people’s children, of course, for it was presumed that she wouldn’t have any of her own.) For example, if there was a baby in her apartment, how was she, a person with important work to do, supposed to know what it wanted?

Movies, again, form an excellent primer. One precursor to this 1990s archetype is Elizabeth Lane, the Barbara Stanwyck character in
Christmas in Connecticut
(1946), an early Martha Stewart kind of columnist who writes of her farm and her fabulous meals and her babies, although the entire thing is made up. She lives in the city and can’t boil water. At Christmastime, the great Mrs. Elizabeth Lane is asked to play hostess to a war hero. On her farm. With her cows and antiques and babies and all the rest, including a husband, and so the panicked Stanwyck promises to marry a man she detests in order to borrow his farm. She also “borrows” a baby. At one point we hear the baby crying in the other room. Everyone looks at Mrs. Lane. Finally she understands! It’s the baby! “It’s crying!” she says, looking panicked. “Oh, um, I must
go to it!
” Forty years later Diane Keaton, the harried “tiger lady” in
Baby Boom
(1987), is not even capable of lifting the infant that’s been left to her by a relative. Even with the improvements since Elizabeth Lane’s day, “J. C.,” the MBA and brilliant marketing executive, cannot get a diaper on the baby. A diaper is not within her conceptual framework.

A related example from real life: When the late film executive Dawn Steel had a baby, people in the Hollywood community asked, jokingly, “Who’s the mother?”

But life among single professional women, or any other single women, simply was not all that harsh. In 1986 the government funded a large six-state study of single women’s sex habits. It turned out that a third of all subjects at one point had cohabited because they did not feel “ready” to get married. With more than half of all marriages failing, and a hefty percentage failing during the first two years, some felt no rush to marry. And, for many women, the question was, “Marry who?” (“All the men I meet are either gay, married, crazy, or just plain boring,” went the popular lament; if it could have fit onto coffee mugs and bumper stickers, it would have.)

Research also showed that women in the eighties and nineties were not as depressed or as suicidal as others liked to think. It had long been a truism, for example, that single women were twice as likely to suffer from depression as married women. But a 1992 study of 18,600 professional middle-class white women and men, single and married, showed that the difference in rates of depression was pretty low. Of all the married women interviewed, 3.5 percent had been diagnosed with major depressive disorders, compared with 4.1 percent of the single women; after divorce, the transition back into singlehood, the rate flew up to 9 percent, then dropped down within eighteen months.