Living single: Why alone is enough

It wasn’t as if this were the first time I was dining alone; I’d eaten by myself lots of times, but when I worried I might be eating this way for the rest of my life, my independence started to feel more like a liability. On that balcony, I had the sense that I was facing something that terrified me. I felt like someone who’s afraid of heights and confronts it by going to the top of the Empire State building and peering over the ledge, except this was a fear I was meant to face calmly, even cheerfully. I was choosing to be afraid, I was even told on occasion; after all, if you wanted to, you could always find someone. Lots of women are taking trips to Alaska these days.

I’d read about a study that said that people who thrive on danger, sky divers, ice climbers, often produce a natural opiate that masks their terror. The more they confront danger the less they feel it. If only, I thought, that worked for me. These days when I heard the song “Eleanor Rigby,” with its chorus of, “Ah, look at all the lonely people,” I practically needed a Xanax.

I observed my fellow solitary diners as the ghosts of Christmas future, all cautionary tales I was meant to heed. Looking at them, I started to wonder how each came to eat alone. There was the man who sat Indian style in his chair, one hand tugging at his beard, the other turning the pages of “Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective.” I imagined he’d been in love once, with a math major who shared his passion for The Monkees and “Dungeons and Dragons” marathons. She hurt him and now he was done. Aliens were much easier to understand. Across from me was another man who, it appeared, had fashioned himself as a kind of Burt Reynolds in Santa Fe, down to his woolly, plaid blanket jacket, Frye boots, and stiff, puffy toupee. He was divorced, I thought, at least once. Maybe he liked the falling in love part, but grew tired of the work that came later. He actually seemed like a perfectly nice guy, smiling and lifting his ceramic beer stein in my direction, but I looked away, as if to say, “no way buster. You’re not getting any of this,” ignoring for the moment that he hadn’t even asked. At another table, a dour redhead isolated parts of her salad, scratching the fork against her plate, so that the beets and onions were in a kind of ghetto along the edge. I pictured her online personal ad filled with so many explanation points it looked like there was a picket fence after each sentence. I LOVE FUN!!!!! I LOVE SUNSETS!!!!!! NO SMOKERS OR DRINKERS!!!!! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE!!!! I wondered if she scared men, revealing too quickly that she used to pluck out all her eyebrows in high school and commenting that these days, everyone she knew was being diagnosed as ‘bipolar.’ “It’s this year’s ‘Epstein Barr,’ ” she said.

Were these my people?

I guessed they were, as much as any married person has something in common with another married person. I wondered which of these people considered themselves in transition — I’m alone until I meet the right person — and which had resigned themselves to a solitary existence. In the past few years, I’d found that whenever I mentioned the possibility of ending up alone, it was usually met with, “don’t be crazy. Of course you’ll meet someone,” or from my friends who were worried themselves, “please don’t even say that word. I’ll stick my head in the oven right now.”

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My friend Ray admitted that he saw his life as a string of women who never quite understood him, but were perky and let him do whatever he wanted until he moved on. He said he hoped he died quickly — in a car accident or skydiving — because the idea of dying alone was the one part that really worried him. When I asked my friend Eve if she ever got nervous, she said, “It’s age. I started worrying when I turned thirty-seven. You wonder if you’ll always be alone because you’ve gotten so used to it. It’s scary and weird because you’re living it, but also trying not to think about it because if you thought too much about your life you’d never get out of bed.” We were on the phone and she sighed loudly. “If only I’d been blessed with lower standards. I’d be a happier person today.”

I maintained that part of the problem was that my generation didn’t have many single role models. Growing up, I knew of only three women who were unmarried. The first was my mother’s friend, Eden Levine, who always traveled with a padded photo album featuring professional snapshots of her cats posed in costume.

“Here’s Fluffy as a bandito,” she said, looking tenderly at a plump Persian wincing under the weight of a sombrero. Then she showed us a photo of a deeply aggravated white, American short hair. “And here’s Spongecake as a bride,” she said.

Breezing in for a week-long visit, Eden always seemed so glamorous. I remember once saying in awe, “Eden is so pretty. She looks just like a stewardess.” Her hair was the color of a lemon left out too long in the sun and her thick, white lipstick shimmered. She always dressed in short-sleeved leisure suits and smoked cigarettes as long as drinking straws, which added gravel to her powdery, girlish voice.

The second unmarried woman was my friend Jackie’s beautiful godmother, Denise, who sported lime green hot pants I initially mistook for underwear. She maintained it was her part-time job as a cocktail waitress that afforded her a huge apartment off Fifth Avenue, with a vast, mirrored ceiling over her vibrating, round bed and several different boyfriends who called every ten minutes to make dates with her. The third was my Hebrew School teacher, Miss Yarone, whose overbite was so pronounced that I often feared as she ate her egg salad sandwich, she might accidentally bite through the ample flesh of her chins.

In the same way you might go to China, meet a handful of people in a country of one billion, and think, “oh, so that’s what the Chinese are like,” these three women were my ambassadors from the land of the unattached. It never occurred to me to feel sorry for them, with the exception of Miss Yarone, but only because she was entirely unprepared for how restless a group of eleven year olds could be. She learned quickly not to let us take our coats, scarves, and book bags when we said we were just going to the bathroom. She was also the one who confiscated the thick, ham and cheese sandwiches we brought to a Yom Kippur service.

In the weeks before she stopped showing up, Miss Yarone quit trying to teach us Jewish history, preferring instead to teach us about life. She told us that Israel was essential to the survival of the Jewish people, and that Tel Aviv had some of the best health clubs in the world. She told us about her favorite singers.

“My favorite is Barbra Streisand,” she said. “You know if she had lived in Nazi Germany, she might have been gassed.”

To which one of the girls in class responded, “God, Hitler was so obnoxious!”

Miss Yarone also told us about her search for a boyfriend. “The mens here only want one thing,” she said, securing the bobby pins around her short, stringy wig. “They want bing, bang, bong, goodbye. In Israel, men don’t mind a fat wife because they just want to live in peace.”

As a child, I could sit on my bed for an entire afternoon wondering, “what would it be like if I had to use my feet as hands?” I saw myself in the supermarket, hopping through the produce aisle, lifting a heel up to sort through some cherries, and at home, getting a callous on my big toe while writing a thank you note. I could picture every detail of that life, but I still couldn’t fathom what Miss Yarone did on weekends. What did you do if you had no one to do it with? In the rare moments I did try to picture her on a Saturday night, I always envisioned her as an Edward Hopper character, sitting in a dimly lit apartment, on a shallow cot in a half-slip, listening soberly to the lively sounds of the street outside. This was my vision of a woman who lived alone. And now I couldn’t help but wonder: Was I going to become one of these women? Did some little girl think of me as her Miss Yarone or Eden Levine?

I met my group the next morning in the dark, chilly dining room of a motor lodge. A round of quick introductions followed. The Fabers were finishing up omelettes that looked like yellow, mangled sleeping bags. They were traveling with their two freckled teenage boys, both as long and lean as pipe cleaners. Jenny from Chattanooga, waved along with her husband, a lanky, kidney specialist named Eugene. Kip and Dot were there to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday.

Although I tried not to, I found myself thinking in terms of The Group and me. The Group is packing up their bikes and I’m still trying to adjust my seat. The Group took all the Granola bars, and now I’m stuck with the ambrosia with the flaccid coconut. The Group is taking off without me. The Group doesn’t seem to notice I’m not with them. Now I can’t even see The Group, and it’s just me on this scenic, but desolate and drizzly road.

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