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By Root 1496 0

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.

CHAPTER SEVEN

TODAY’S MODERNE UNMARRIED—HER TIMES AND TRIALS: ICE QUEENS OF THE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES, BABY BRIDES, SLACKER SPINSTERS, AND THE SINGULAR CRY OF THE WILD: “HEY! GET YOUR STROLLER OFF MY SIDEWALK!”

There is a thin and pretty woman in New York who thinks that Bloomingdale’s is the loneliest store in the world because, on Saturdays, so many couples shop there.

—THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1974

There is a single woman in New York, bright and accomplished, who dreads nightfall, when darkness hugs the city and lights go on in warm kitchens.

—THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1987

I am so lonely I could die. I wake, realize I don’t have a boyfriend and put my head in the oven…. I go to parties, night classes, museums, various clubs and mixers with my eyelashes curled hopefully and am wracked with disappointment to find only more hopeful women with curled eyelashes. I go to dinner parties and my throat seizes up with envy as I watch the happy couples, who are my friends. My nights are long with longing. Grief. Also, I have a large bridge in New York to sell you. Ho. Ho. Ho.

—CYNTHIA HEIMEL, PLAYBOY, 1997

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