Solitude
Over the years my household during the summer months has dwindled down to mostly me. In the beginning I piled the kids into the car as soon as school was over and took them out to the country, late June to Labor Day. They went to day camp, messed around in the creek, pumped away on the swings, checked themselves for ticks before they washed off the grime in the tub. But now that they’re grown I’m alone in the middle of nowhere, with two dogs and two cats. There are deer, coyote, and fox here, and the occasional bear, but in this part of the world they’re scenery. My husband comes out on weekends, but during the week I’m on my own.
There are two different responses to this kind of arrangement. The first is pity, the notion that being alone is synonymous with loneliness and must be remedied with company at all costs. The second is the minority reaction: that solitude sounds wonderful. My closest friend is an only child, and when I first begin this summer idyll—which is nominally for professional reasons, since there is nothing much to do here except write—she always sounds faintly envious. She feels about being alone the way most people feel about chocolate. So does my father, but for a different reason: he was one of eight children.
The second of our three children loves being alone as much as I do. He is so in tune with the satisfaction of solitude that he, too, sometimes comes here alone, or, when I am here, sets himself up to write in his own space in such a way that we intersect, happily, only for meals. He has always been someone whose primary need was to go within to find energy and sustenance.
In the same way that many people assume that being by yourself is an unnatural condition, so when Christopher was young I overlooked or ignored his solitude gene as I buried my own. When he was little, and helpless against my most maniacal mommy impulses, I threw a big party every year for his birthday. Two dozen children and their families would trundle out from the city for a day of hay rides, scavenger hunts, barbecuing, and swimming. They all blur together in my mind now: the year of the Ghostbusters cake, the year of the Jurassic Park cake, squabbles, sunburns, the little boy who erupted in chicken pox during the course of the party and was summarily packed into the car and driven home. They were all the same party, really, and all the same in this: at some point, between the punctured swimmies that needed to be replaced and the tragic frosting in some sensitive little girl’s hair, I would realize that Birthday Boy had disappeared. I would almost always find him somewhere out of the way, sleeping, exhausted by the invasion, by the need to be social. If he had been old enough to drive, he would have gotten in the car, cranked up the music, and been out of there. A nap in a back bedroom was the best he could do.
Most of the world finds solitude strange. When I am on my own, I’m importuned with invitations inspired, someone will say, because “You’re all by yourself.” This is always said in a tone of sadness and concern, except for the occasional fellow traveler who looks at me with an expression that means she would trade places in a heartbeat.
For many years I had virtually no experience of solitude. The oldest of five children, from an extended family as populous as some small towns, I was always one among many. Because my mother had little interest in whether her furniture stayed pristine—with five kids, most of it was in what we like to call earth tones, which is more or less the color of dirt—our house was often the place where other people’s children congregated, too. I grew up in a neighborhood that was largely Catholic (“St. Andrew’s or St. Bernadette’s parish?” someone from the area asked my husband once when he heard where I’d been raised). There were families of seven, eight, nine, even the occasional eleven. There was a girl in my elementary school class who was an object of great curiosity because she had no brothers or sisters. It sounded like an Aesop’s fable, the moral being “Be careful what you wish for.”
I was truly alone for the first time after college, in a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a federal house in lower Manhattan. Even before the children arrived, with their obligatory christenings and birthday parties, I had an odd affinity for labor-intensive social events that sounded better in theory than they were in fact: a ladies’ tea for young feminists with homemade scones the consistency of Styrofoam, a Christmas tree–decorating evening at which most of the guests were Jewish (I still have a few of the ornaments they brought along, bless them). But a lot of my time during the years between college and cohabitation was spent by myself, watching miniseries on TV and eating ice cream for dinner with a beer chaser. The reason stereotypes of the haphazard lives of single women exist may be because they’re accurate.
My apartment had a fireplace, a wall of windows, and a kitchen the size of my current dining room table; it was what was called charming, which meant it was just the right size for one person who wasn’t claustrophobic. I’m not, but even I was frequently driven out into the streets of New York, walking for hours while my winter breath hung in front of me like a ghost leading me on to some glimpse of the future, or the past, or happiness, or conviviality. My memories of those walks are of two related things, lamplight and loneliness, the warm insides of rooms that, in my fantasies, were full of pretty old furniture, lovely pictures, people murmuring to other people about whatever it was that they had to be pleased to be murmuring about. And outside, my fingers numb with cold, me. I had that feeling you have when you’re watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn’t exactly real, that it will be gone by the time you get home and make a cup of tea. I found a lot of life like that when I was younger, as though I was practicing for what came later.
It seemed very real at the time, though, that introduction to solitude. And it was completely self-inflicted. New York offered parties, events, plays, readings, restaurants. And yet for all of that it can be the loneliest place on earth, far more redolent of isolation than the country place where I maroon myself each summer, silent except for incessant birdsong and the grinding sound from the quarry over the mountain and the faint dribbling noise from the basketball camp up the hill. In the country you are merely alone; in the city you’re alone surrounded by thousands of others, close enough to touch, close enough to brush up against, to bump into. When your own solitude is a beating bruise in your chest, it makes it no better to know that on the other side of the kitchen wall is another kitchen, another cook, another person. It makes it worse, like sitting in the obstetrician’s office surrounded by big-bellied women when your own is flat and empty.
But that’s the involuntary alone. It’s something different when it’s freely chosen, and over time I realized that if there were so many opportunities to be in company and I still stayed home, it must mean I liked it. People do confuse alone and lonely, but when you’ve made the choice to be by yourself, the first has no shadow of the second. Inevitably, age is a time of solitude, not only because at a certain point your friends begin to die—“Last man standing,” my father said one day after the news of another passing—but because they, too, become less interested in frantic roundelays of socializing. I remember a time in my life when I gave big dinner parties the way kleptomaniacs steal, and with as little purpose and joy. Boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, all manner of things that could be made in the big orange Le Creuset pot we got as a wedding gift. Cloth napkins, purposeful seating, bright conversation. I was always so happy when those evenings were over.
Sometimes, for some of us, being sociable is a tyranny, a function of custom, society, peer pressure, sheer youthful craziness. I gave those dinners at the flip-up table in my single-girl apartment, invited all those third-graders to run ragged through our country house, put on the shoes and the mascara and got in the cab for cocktails, to send a message to the world: this is the sort of person I am. Only I wasn’t, not really.
When one of my children was being tested for attention deficit disorder—and I was answering yes in my mind to all the questions the therapist asked—it occurred to me that perhaps I had a mind that was easily overloaded, that needed t
o wipe itself clean with some regularity. Maybe I’m hardwired to want to spend time alone; I remember a childhood reading books in the living room while my friends were playing street games just outside. Or maybe it’s a function of my chaotic upbringing. Eldest children are often much more understanding of the need to be alone; I am an eldest child, as is my husband, a marriage of two executive-function humans that I sometimes joke should be outlawed by Congress. (“The eldest child of two eldest children”: that is how our son once described himself, which I believe was subtle shorthand for “heat-seeking missile.”) As a group we are actually rather good at being alone in a crowd, like that old film construct in which the spirit climbs out of a character and comments on the scene. We’re there but not there, social, smiling, but somehow somewhere else.
Or maybe my yearning to be by myself is a function of my life as a novelist, the need to go within to create an imaginary world, although when I think of all those stories about hard-partying writers, about Hemingway and Mailer and Capote, I know that not all writers need or can even tolerate solitude. (Come to think of it, the female of the species seems more inclined: think Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, the Brontës.) I’ve stopped trying to figure out why I do what I do, which is another gift of late maturity: I fear heights, love liver and onions, prefer big dogs to small ones, work best between the hours of ten and two. Who knows why? Who cares? I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen’s remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though being alone is hanging out with someone I like.
Luckily I’m not alone. One of my friends came to our house in the country one weekend and, after breakfast, disappeared into her room or into the woods with a book. She showed up for lunch, disappeared again, then showed up showered and dressed to help with dinner, have a drink, talk, as the evening lowered and then came down like a Roman shade of soft summer night. I wasn’t worried a bit, but my husband, who is a more social animal than I am, pulled me aside to say, “I’m afraid Jean isn’t having a good time. She keeps going off by herself.”
“She’s fine,” I said. “She’s perfect.” She was.
When I was young I was loath to admit that I liked being alone, but not anymore. By the time you’ve lived for fifty or sixty years, you are better armored to embrace the things about yourself that are true, even if you might think the world sees them as odd, eccentric. I have a much greater tolerance for ambiguity now. Human progress on both a political and a personal level means dicta are always a moving target: God Save the King gives way to All Men Are Created Equal, Always Wear Hose is blessedly retired in favor of Whatever Gets You Through the Night. I remember learning the Baltimore Catechism word for word, mainly because along with spelling bees we had catechism bees, and I’m your girl if you’re looking for some competition. “Why did God make me? To know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next.” Trust me, that’s the right answer. To something. Although not to something to which I’ve been able to subscribe for the last thirty years of my life.
There are a few eternal verities, and many of them are rock songs: love is often all you need, you can’t always get what you want, and the new boss is indeed the same as the old boss. But so much of what we say and do is empty. I remember one afternoon when our elder son made this clear to me. It was second semester of his junior year in high school, a time that for a smart, directed boy is akin to being locked in a room with a hive of angry bees. And he just got tired of being stung. “I want to know the point of all this!” he yelled. “I worked hard in grade school so I could go to a good high school, and I’m working hard in high school so I can get into a good college. And after that, what’s the point? A good job, right? And then? And then? What’s the endgame?”
“Oh, honey,” I said, lapsing into the pat answer we absorb in the kind of obsessive miasma of free-floating worry we call parenting. “Your dad and I just want you to be happy.” And with that he slammed his hand down on the dining room table so hard I jumped in my seat, and shouted, “Mom, none of this has anything to do with being happy!”
When I was young I wasn’t bright or brave enough to ask that sort of question, just wanted to get things settled, although it often turned out that I had no idea what that meant. I saw a boy across a crowded room in college and decided to marry him with no thought about how long marriage was, and how challenging. I nailed down a profession and pursued it single-mindedly. In my early twenties I asked my doctor to tie my tubes so that I would never have children; to his credit, he stubbed out his omnipresent cigarette—a doctor who smoked: now, there’s a marker of age—and said he’d be happy to discuss this if I saw a therapist to thoroughly talk over my reasons. (My reasons were simple, and understandable: my siblings were motherless, I had been cast in the role of reluctant caregiver, I didn’t like it, they didn’t like it. Later there would be many made-for-television movies on this and related topics.) A decade later, with no sense of the inherent irony, I suddenly decided I wanted a baby immediately, and that time no doctor stopped me, and there was a baby, then another, and another.
But of course it’s not that things get settled, as though life was a résumé or a checklist: husband, children, work. “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” as John Lennon famously said. It’s taken me years, not to understand that intellectually but to internalize it emotionally, which eventually leads to the “one day at a time” approach, favored by 12-step addiction programs, applied to your actual life. It’s one of the best parts of growing up and growing older, I think, that feeling that you’ll just get through one day, and then the next, that a week from Saturday will take care of itself. I couldn’t do that when I was younger.
I don’t know how much of this knowledge grows out of being female and having lived through layers of serial, often contradictory, lives. We women spend our whole lives going up and down hormonally, being one thing on Wednesday and another on Sunday, feeling bloated and then svelte, juicy and then played out. And our bodies have changed so often during our lifetimes—puberty, pregnancy, menopause, premenstrual, post-menstrual, posthysterectomy, sometimes postmastectomy—that having a different body than we had at thirty comes as less of a surprise to us than it does to many men. From the time they reach puberty, boys are, let’s be honest, sex bombs who live it 24/7. They tie much of their self-image to their potency and wind up, over their life spans, making an awful lot of remarks in an awful lot of settings about whose is bigger, both literally and metaphorically. The loss of that potency slowly but surely diminishes them in their own minds, while many women find the loss of fertility a relief, particularly if they’ve had a few kids.
It’s hard to communicate to our male counterparts that one of the greatest gifts of growing older is trusting your own sense of yourself; their investment in their reflected image was not forged in childhood, as ours was. Sometimes I think women, freed from societal expectations and roles, age into confidence, while men, losing the power, status, and strength of youth, age out of it. All I really know about myself is what the big rock outside my writing porch has engraved on it: “Nothing is written in stone.”
For years I lived every day devoted to the welfare of three exuberant, emotionally exhausting children. Because of what he did, their father went off to the office every day, where he lived a life separate from Chicken McNuggets, sticky surfaces, late-afternoon meltdowns, and the need to find graph paper and a compass right now. Because of what I do, I stayed at home. I envied Gerry the solitude of the car, the office, the bathroom break not interrupted by questions through the closed door or shrieks from the next room.
I don’t subscribe to the jokey dictum that retirement comes when the last child leaves home and the dog dies. I love being with my kids, and so does their father, and I expect that there will be dogs in perpetuity. Actually, I like solitude with dogs. You can hear someone else b
reathing, but you don’t feel obliged to tell them about your day, or to hear about their own, or to share the brownie batter bowl. You can’t do that with your children, can’t say, “Honey, Mommy had four younger siblings and she never got the brownie bowl all to herself, and now she really, really wants it. Alone. With a big wooden spoon.”
Being alone is not the same as being on your own, but it’s related to it. That’s something that women are supposed to hate and fear—the responsibility for the life insurance, the heating oil delivery, the dripping faucet, the car inspections. Or there is the greater fear, what is sometimes called bag lady syndrome, the terror that as the years go by the money will run out. Even prosperous women have it, and with good reason—a substantial percentage of those living below the poverty line are women in their later years. Sometimes we look at the amount in the pension plan, the retirement account, the investment portfolio, and do calculations that scare us. With longer life comes the need for a larger safety net, and we fear the holes in that net.
I suppose we older women have more reason to fear being alone than our male counterparts. Often we’ve made less money and more concessions. The great whispered story of too many marriages is that he left her for a younger woman. (And, by the way, if you happen to be one of those men, please spare me the rhapsodies about how you’re available for your second clutch of kids as you weren’t for your first.) The great public tragedy of many of those marriages is that he died first, leaving her without a lifelong partner. Our children start families of their own, families that take precedence and that sometimes take them far away, with only time for the occasional visit, and what it comes down to eventually is one woman living in a house too big for her. It can’t be good for her, being all by herself, can it?
But sometimes I think that in this, as in so much else, we tend to sell women short. I go to a funeral for a friend’s father, and she whispers that she doesn’t know how her mother will get along, that she moved directly from her parents’ house into the one she shared with her husband, that she’s never written a check or paid a bill. Her children are swooping in to take charge, to take over, so that now the woman in the corner, with her coiffed hair and nude hose and black knit dress, will become their dependent. But months later, I ask about Mom and am told, with a note of surprise and just a suggestion of suspicion, “She seems to be doing really well.” She’s taking a trip. She’s joined a book club. She’s selling the house. She’s learned to pay bills. She’s on her own. It is a terrifying thought, not dinner for one but life for one, too. It is a terrifying thought, and sometimes, for a woman who has always been surrounded by others, a liberating thought as well. There is so much obligatory generosity to being a good mother, a good wife, a good friend. Solitude is an acceptable form of selfishness.