Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [2]
I was smart, or as some ex-boyfriends liked to say, I really was in my own way very clever. For example, I had struggled against the single fates (“live at home” or “have five roommates”) and had won. I had a place. No matter that at first—and second—glance it seemed situated inside a tenement. It was “rent-stabilized,” a phrase that, for young New York women of the time, was a lot more exciting, filled with more possibility and the hint of adulthood, than “marry me.” The details—cabbagey, narrow hallways; spindly, crooked Dr. Seuss–like stairs—didn’t bother me. The point was to learn certain survival skills. How did you negotiate with landlords who conversed with your breasts? How to deal with the roaches my neighbor referred to as “BMW’s,” for “big mothers with wings”? And how to get past the grannies, the babushka ladies who hissed as a group when they saw me? Every day I ran an obstacle course—bugs, ladies, landlord—not stopping until I shoved open door #5 with my hip and stepped inside.
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,