Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Nicole died, was killed, one spring night, because she married a sadist, because she loved him too much and then not enough, because she answered the door at the wrong moment, because the person at the door was a tall white man, because she was blonde, because she was beautiful, because her mother left her glasses at a restaurant called Mezzaluna, because the night was so still, because the moon was fat and lonely—because of so many things, not a single one of which could be construed as having been worth the trouble.

  EPILOGUE

  Did I Shave My Legs for This?

  What he requires in his heart of hearts is that this struggle remain a game for him. while for woman it involves her very destiny. Man’s true victory, whether he is liberator or conqueror, lies just in this: that woman freely recognizes him as her destiny.

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

  The Second Sex

  This is the problem for us. Remaining single is not really a choice, it’s a sentence. The idea of life without a man, without children, seems impossible. This is, in fact, the law of nature, and when your parents bug you about when you will settle down—grow up, hitch up and start delivering grandchildren—they have history from time immemorial on their side: mankind is dyadic, God gave a lonely Adam a helpmeet named Eve, and He made procreation a mutual and mutually exclusive experience. “Therefore shall man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” So it is written in Genesis, as if to give us an operating manual for a two-sex planet, as if to make it simple as baking bread: you grow up in your parents’ home, you are emancipated as soon as possible so that you can wed as soon as possible and become as one—in biblical times, there was no such thing as co-dependency—with your spouse (i.e., the woman assumes the man’s identity).

  If you believe the paleontologists and evolutionary biologists, all of us are only a collective of containers for the genes we carry: as far as the aeons leading into infinity are concerned, we are not subjects, we are not emotions and personalities and talents and SAT scores and year-end bonus figures and excellent taste in home furnishings, because we are useful only as evolving gene pools. People who don’t reproduce are not really fulfilling their point and purpose as people. We belong in couples, procreating with the gusto of germs, of vermin, of climbing ivy.

  And I am not willing to concede that it is all biology. I think society really and truly does not offer a supportive atmosphere to he who goes it alone. But men are granted a little bit of leeway, men are offered a few available variations: if you’re John Wayne or Steve McQueen, you can gallop your horse into the sunset, if you’re the Lone Ranger you chase bad guys with Tonto, if you’re Don Quixote you chase windmills with Sancho Panza, if you’re Butch Cassidy you chase rainbows with the Sundance Kid—and with any luck all these womenless men leave a trail of illegitimate children in their wake, genetically responsible, socially irresponsible, but always seen as solitary and solid. The female loner—a nonexistent icon, as far as I can tell—is always just lonely. Or worse: like Amelia Earhart, she simply disappears on her solo flight, as if rejected by the planet for desiring and daring the thrill of thin air, for piercing into Father Sky like a lady entering a gentleman’s club back before lawsuits were filed to ensure this puny, pathetic right.

  All this is just to say that single women are not societally sanctioned in their singleness. No matter what clever tricks feminism has come up with, it has not quite succeeded at truly legitimizing an unmarried woman as an autonomous being, as a person in a chosen living arrangement and not as someone whose life is in abeyance, someone who is supposed to be dreaming of playing the princess bride in her Saturday night Plaza Hotel wedding, envisioning the just-so off-the-rack Vera Wang gown, the salmon entrées and soufflé desserts from Glorious Food, the tasteful, charmingly dorky ballroom stylings of the Peter Duchin Orchestra—imagining all the floral arrangements and flower girls, seeing it all so clear, everything is there except the groom, who is basically just an accessory anyway. Even with bohemian variations—nuptials in a gothic SoHo loft, setting free five thousand butterflies after Vermont vows, the bride in black and the groom in white—even if we try to make this Cinderella fantasy somehow more feminist and modern and all that stuff, it still comes down to the same big bash for what is essentially, unsentimentally, the signing of a legal contract. I don’t say this to minimize the occasion, but more to note that despite perfunctory City Hall possibilities, every little girl grows up wanting a wedding at the Waldorf, the persistence of puff cloud dreams of a white dress and a train down the aisle is so deep-seated that my guess is—no exaggeration—it would be easier to eliminate racism or end poverty or cure illiteracy or oust Fidel Castro than it would be to make girls stop wanting to be brides.

  For some reason, the groom role, insofar as it has been implanted in the male collective unconscious, is a nervous inevitability, with or without tails.

  And I hate the way the looming bridal vista is a prism putting strange bends and unanticipated colors all over my perspective, all over the social class of single women. Right now, as I write this, I am recently turned thirty, I am by myself where it is sunny and I am happy to be far from the madding crowd. I am happy to be single; tomorrow or next week or next month or next year, I may not feel so sanguine in my solitude. But any notion that I will deal with my desire to pair off then is tacitly denied me by a societal tidal force so fierce I would think it a conspiracy but for the fact that there’s no need to plant weeds: female anxiety flourishes in a self-perpetuating pattern that resists rational feminist analysis.

  So here I am at age thirty wanting to be serenely single. It is still okay for me to feel this way. I am still pretty. I still have time to work out my marital status. But it’s getting dicey. Clearly I am beginning to be a misfit in my refusal/inability to settle down with someone. Now, I have male friends who are ten or even twenty years older than I am, and while I suppose their parents may wonder if they’ll ever see some grandchildren, it seems perfectly plausible that they will find some twenty-five-year-old and get hitched whenever. To tell you the truth, that seems rather plausible to me too. In five or ten years I’m sure I’ll still look great—meaning: I will still have that youthful buoyancy—and I will still be fertile, and I can hook up with some guy half my age or twice it, and it will all still be fine. But as much as I believe that, I don’t feel it, because society does not want me to. Why won’t the world endorse that plan? And I am so sick of so many of my friends suffering similarly. Here I am trying to live a life in which man is not my destiny, but the powers that be have done all they can to stymie any burst of joy this self-determination might give me. And though the world does not support me in my autonomy, it also does not like—or even so much as tolerate—the Fatal Attraction–fraught desperation that a woman is driven to by an obsessive, unuttered, oxygen-borne fear that she may find out much too late that man is her destiny after all. Basically, there is no acceptable, comfortable way to be a single woman.

  Even worse, it seems inevitable that there will come a time when I won’t look good, when men will stop flirting with me, when this freedom shit will start to feel like free-falling. Will I know? Will I become pathetic? Nothing could be more frightening than seeing the number the press did on Gloria Steinem when she got involved with Mort Zuckerman—she was accused of being girlish and frivolous and desperate to marry and have a baby after all this time. And even if none of it were true, even if she did not feel sorry for herself at all, that the idea got so much mileage was disturbing, but understandable: here was the feminist fatale, portrayed by Kirstie Alley in a television movie about her Playboy Bunny exploits; here was the woman who abandoned her fiancé after graduating from Smith because she preferred to accept her fellowship to India; here was the women’s libber who would arrive late and breezing fast and frantic through the lunching crowd at the Four Seasons, her Kenneth-streaked hair trailing her like a golden halo, a speeding apparition’s corona, and all the room was said to sto
p and stare at this gorgeous, determined creature, fabulous and leggy in her thigh-high boots and miniskirt, breathlessly setting herself down at a table with some powerful man or some wealthy man or some influential man, taking her to lunch to be convinced to contribute in one way or another to one worthy cause or another; here was the woman whose sensual appeal was such that her status as intellectual it-girl went unchallenged until the do-me feminists of the nineties played the babe card once again. If ever there was a woman who was single by choice, she was it—so what to make of this turn of events? Did she have regrets or did the media invent them? And what did this mean for me?

  Who, if not Ms. Steinem—who virtually invented the word Ms.—has lived as a confirmed spinster with any kind of style? The woman of independent means, the woman who has lived through multiple marriages and picked up some inheritance, some property, or even a noble title along the way, is an age-old figure of great distinction in her old age, the deranged dowagers like Diana Vreeland, stylish ruins of royalty like Wallis Simpson, intercontinental widow Pamela Harriman—these are women who died alone but lived very much accompanied. Even Elizabeth Taylor, who is addicted to the altar, must enjoy looking back on a hotel mogul, a U.S. senator, a British thespian, a Jewish vaudeville act, a white trash construction worker—one can hardly say she did not try a little of everything. And Margaret Mead had a husband for every book she wrote. Jane Fonda appears to be taking the time-of-life approach to husbanding, getting Roger Vadim, the Svengali of sex starlets, during the breathy Barbarella phase; Port Huron hero Tom Hayden was the political Jane’s consort-in-arms; Ted Turner gets her for the charity lunch years, the swank socialite of good stock arrives at last. Of course, the ideal is to find one that works the first time, but even these multiple marriages bespeak richness, life lived, chances taken, connections consummated, and dresses, dresses, dresses.

  Doesn’t Barbra Streisand seem so much better off married to James Brolin? Doesn’t Madonna, after all, seem rather miserable having her baby with some random guy while Sean Penn seems so in love with Robin Wright?

  But in love and married do not necessarily equate—in fact, Simone de Beauvoir once said, “The greatest success of my life is Sartre,” though she chose never to make it legal with her longtime companion, her intellectual partner, her lifelong experiment in egalitarian love. “When you are married, people see you as married, and you begin to see yourselves as married,” Beauvoir said in a 1972 interview with Ms. magazine, explaining her decision to forgo nuptial vows. “This is quite different from the relationship you have with society when you are not married. Marriage is dangerous for a woman.” Whatever decisions Gloria Steinem might have made as a feminist firebrand, a true believer who, perhaps like Simone de Beauvoir, refused marriage because of her desire to deny a dated and inherently sexist institution, that choice is not the same as wishing to be alone, to live alone, to die alone. Lacking a Sartre to grow old with—which may not be the case for Ms. Steinem herself, I have no idea what her relationship status is or what it will later be—or lacking the physical fact of someone to share a bed, a house, a life with, can’t have been the goal of feminism. And it is not a pretty thought for most of us, regardless.

  In The Rest of Life, Mary Gordon writes her horrible vision of growing old alone, in an undesired, burdensome body. “Do you know what it’s like when you give up the idea that you’ll ever again be prized? In a way it’s not so terrible. But all the songs, the stories, are about someone else. Some other kind of person,” ponders a forty-eight-year-old single mother who is having an affair with a younger priest in the novella “The Immaculate Man.” “You hear songs or stories, you see lovers, any age, any people, just walking arm in arm … Or teenagers will be kissing in the shopping mall. An old woman will help her husband across the street because the light is beginning to turn. Anything can do it. Anything you see, or read, or hear on the radio and think, That’s not me. None of that is me. I won’t have that anymore.’ You feel a bit self-pitying, a little angry, but it passes, it’s not terrible, many people live that way, a number of my friends. I expected to live that way the rest of my life. Living, knowing your body is of no concern to anyone except yourself. You worry that one day you might get sick, that you’ll become a nuisance or a burden. No one will look at you again attentively or lovingly. No gaze will ever rest on you for anything but the merest second. Then it will move on. You grow to expect that, you give up expecting anything else.”

  I’d throw myself off the Brooklyn Bridge—which is actually the plan of the characters in the not-much-seen 1997 movie If Lucy Fell, in the event that they aren’t married by age thirty—before I’d utter Mary Gordon’s narrator’s words so calmly. I mean, what a horrible thought. Although, I suppose having such a hysterical response to being unmarried at thirty is just as horrifying.

  It seems too remarkable to be a coincidence that in 1997 at least three newly made movies besides If Lucy Fell explored the same theme: My Best Friend’s Wedding had Julia Roberts distressed by being unwed at age twenty-eight, Picture Perfect had Jennifer Aniston faking a fiancé at thirty, and the independently released Wedding Bell Blues had three women—including the beautiful supermodel Paulina Porizkova—running off to Las Vegas for a weekend to get married before their thirtieth birthdays. When I consider the premise of these three films—and I am happy to note that only the Julia Roberts vehicle was a hit, which would seem to indicate that we resist indulging this kind of thinking—I am struck by what a crazy picture they paint of how women live. Our lot in life would seem to be enslavement to time—to time the avenger. To be a woman would seem to entail a denial of the present to scrounge and horde for the infinite future, which she approaches, the asymptote forever decreasing, always half the distance of the previous reach, but never quite there: her hand is forever extending out to this shining future finish line, but because marriage is in fact not the end but just a new beginning, a new occasion for more future planning, she never really arrives. There’s always the next lifeline to anticipate—children, menopause, old age, whatever.

  Meanwhile, men coast along in present perfect, watching football, a game in which four fifteen-minute quarters expand to take up hours. For a man time just kind of slipslides away, and there’s always more of it. A woman has no idea what it is to live in the present tense, and a man has no idea what it is like to panic with a pounding, pumping clock embedded in your chest where your heart should be.

  Henry Jaglom’s 1987 film Someone to Love basically documents a gathering of still-single people, mostly in their forties, some even older, discussing how it is that life led them to an aloneness that they consider permanent. This is a project similar to the one taken on individually by Vivian Gornick, in Approaching Eye Level, her book of life as a somehow single woman, and perhaps more delicately and engagingly addressed by Alison Rose in a New Yorker essay titled simply “How I Became a Single Woman.” Neither Rose nor Gornick is depressing, both just unfold events, many romantic and thrilling, many leading to all kinds of adventures overseas and underground, but none bound for the chapel of love. The message seems to be that a careless woman who craves chance and circumstance, who fails to focus on that golden ring, will find that her insouciance leads to forever singledom. The resignation of both these accounts is not presented as miserable, but considering that neither woman is dead yet—both are fiftyish, and it seems like much possibility still lies ahead—I wonder why they seem certain that their marital status is terminal. Is it just dating fatigue? Are they too tired to try? Is this what happens to you?

  Will this happen to me if I’m not vigilant? Will I just disappear into the darkness and isolation of my idle, inconsequential life like all the old and infirm and unloved, whose bodies, once beautiful, perhaps graceful as ballet or strong as a buck, are now withered, wasted—corpses that are not dead—will that be my life?

  And there have been long, struggling years, and my sadness at never getting it right with somebody has been huge. But I also be
lieve in the human project I have embarked on by choosing to remain single (and it is a choice). In the abstract, when I discuss my life alone, my misadventures, my travels, whatever, people always say, “That’s so interesting.” Or “It’s great that you do that.” They marvel at the way I prefer to vacation alone, they think it’s great that I’d rather provide for myself, buy luxurious and frivolous items for myself, that I love going to double features in the afternoon all alone, that there is pretty much nothing that I don’t like doing by myself. But at the same time that they are impressed or intrigued, this other question looms: Why aren’t you married? (To which my favorite reply is: Why aren’t you thin?)

  But I thought it ought to have been obvious by now that there is a real value in developing before marrying. We support this notion in men, we believe they should take their time to grow up. But there is little support for a woman going it alone through some part of her life. Partly it is just risky—women can be raped, and they can be victims of crime, and somehow they make less rugged hitchhikers. And they don’t age as well, plastic surgery or no. But still, I think we owe ourselves the opportunity to be free, and in this day and age, it ought to be a given. I want to be married as much as the next person—even Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain saw fit to get hitched—but I want to do it when I am good and ready, which is all that any man has ever asked—it is all he has felt entitled to—and it is all I should ever want likewise.