Verified by 
“Are you sure you want to do this?” my lawyer asked, shaking her head sadly and sighing. Co-op living, she said, was the worst possible form of home ownership, checkered with financial and managerial pitfalls. But the small one-bedroom was to be my spinster apartment, and I wanted it. Having recently turned thirty, with a dismal dating history, I had resigned myself to a solo future that fit quite nicely into 700 square feet. The apartment was big enough for one, and that was all I’d ever need.
It’s not that I hadn’t gone on dates, or had boyfriends. But I’d never had “the hots” for anyone the way my friends had. Was I just missing the lust gene? My off-and-on high school and college boyfriend, and later an earnest young man with a charming smile, both told me they loved me as they made their moves. I just wasn’t feeling it. Either guy could have been perfect for me, and I was honestly perplexed with myself. If there was nothing wrong with them, then what in the world was wrong with me? I was convinced I would be forever unattached.
That fourth-floor walkup was my coming out, so to speak, as an unrepentant single. I would live there until the mortgage was paid and my old-lady legs wouldn’t get me up the stairs any more. And best of all, on my 30-year journey to dotage I’d be having a pretty good time. The building was filled with friendly, companionable folks of all ages, races, and creeds, proving my lawyer wrong. When we found ourselves thrown together in defense against a bankrupt developer (okay, so she had been right about some things), we discovered the very best of cooperative living. We learned co-op law together, balanced the budget together, decorated the lobby together, and in between we had parties together and hung out together. My new best buds became a graduate student, a gay couple, and a taxi driver.
The grad student and I traded cat-sitting, helped each other tote packages up those long flights of stairs, and when her boyfriend was away we had dinner parties with the gay couple. I thought she was great – funny and smart, if a little fragile, and with questionable taste in boyfriends. But we hit it off. We were like Mary and Rhoda, but in Brooklyn. Life was good, and my 30-year plan was on track.
Until it got completely derailed in Year 3. That summer I faced a cancer scare, a job loss, and – unthinkably – a career opportunity on the west coast, all in the course of eight weeks. Upended by the emotional tsunami, I found myself actually considering the move. What if this was some kind of wake-up call? Maybe my life didn’t have to be spent in my spinster pad after all. Maybe I should take a chance, do something different, start over somewhere else and see if my life could be different – if I could be different.
Since I had no job prospects in New York the offer was also eminently practical. I had a co-worker who needed a sublet, so I knew I could try California for a year while keeping my 30-year plan on backup. I accepted the offer and agreed to make the move. I would have five months of preparing the company’s New York office for the move, then I’d go west.
“Why?” asked my Mary Richards. “Why go to California when everything you need is here? Your family is here, all your friends are here, I’m here. Why do you want to leave?”
Then she told me about how her life had been a series of abandonments – her mother had left her, friends had left her, boyfriends had left her. And now me – I was leaving her. How could I do this to her?
As the months ticked on, I found that last question increasingly hard to answer. I thought about her all the time and I knew she was thinking about me too. We spoke on the phone almost every day, hung out at home when her frantic schedule allowed, and on weekends if her boyfriend was busy we rode our bikes down to the beach. We laughed a lot when we were together, but alone again afterwards I wasn’t laughing – I knew there was something going on here that I didn’t quite know what to do with.
I confided in one close friend, then in half of the gay couple. The first was horrified, the second gentle and supportive – if a little amused by my confusion. (He seemed to know exactly what was going on here.) The only one I couldn’t talk to about it was… her. I decided I couldn’t go to California, then that I had to go, and fast. The final four weeks evaporated in a blur of bewilderment.
The night before my flight, we sat together over a glass of wine to say our forlorn good-byes. It was okay, I said, I had only committed for a year and I’d be back on business several times. Friendships like ours could survive a short period of separation, and we’d be fine. But suddenly she was saying it – that what had developed between us had to be confronted, had to be called for what it was. How could this be happening, she asked, between two avowed heterosexuals? And all I could think was, I didn’t take that vow.
We talked, we cried, I asked her to come with me, I offered to bail on the job offer even now, at the eleventh hour. But we knew this had to play out – we’d work at this from opposite coasts and figure it out as we went along. And I’d be back in a year to pick up where we’d left off.
So I left. And I decided I would show her once and for all that not everyone abandoned her, that she was worth keeping, worth working for. And show her I did. I wrote, I called, I sent flowers – I was relentless. I was kind of a nut, even. But I was determined that she would never feel as though I had abandoned her.
Unbeknownst to me, she was working from a different script. In her version I flew off into the sunset, she grieved and cut another notch in her belt, and then she moved on. I was history. She didn’t answer my letters; she wouldn’t pick up when I phoned; she didn’t return my calls. On my first business trip home she wouldn’t see me. When she finally did write, it was to tell me to leave her alone. Without even having had the relationship, I’d been dumped.
I was devastated. A lifetime of pent-up emotions had been unleashed, then left to scatter in the wind. I felt as if I had no skin – raw and defenseless against an all-consuming heartbreak. The evening that I found myself considering, fleetingly, turning my steering wheel into the path of an oncoming bus I knew I had to find a way to pick myself up and find a new skin.
I knew it wasn’t just the pain of rejection that had flayed me. There was that interior door that had been opened in me that had to be dealt with. Oh, I knew it had tried to crack open a few times before, only to have me slam it shut. But this time there was no closing it. It had been yanked open against my will and I was now irrevocably across that threshold – and not in a jubilant, liberated way, either. This was more Edvard Munch than Keith Haring.
I knew now why I hadn’t been able to tell my college boyfriend that I loved him, why the guy with the charming smile hadn’t floated my boat. A lifetime of women swam, finally, into focus. That sales rep, the boss, the neighbor, the teacher (in grade school!) – yes, they’d all been crushes, attractions, desires, unrecognized at the time. Those feelings that I could never seem to summon up for boyfriends? Turns out I’d been having them all along, but had been too… innocent? ashamed? deluded? to name. And now I knew their name – and mine.
When my California year was up I felt no need to return to Brooklyn. The lovely couple who took over my spinster apartment probably never referred to it by that name, and I never lived in it again. It took a while for my new skin to grow in, but I found that it fit me much better than the old one had. And when I was ready to risk my heart again, I discovered that effusive gestures of affection don’t seem quite so nutty when directed at someone who loves you back.
The next time I shopped for a home, I ended up with a 3-bedroom colonial in Queens that bore no resemblance to my spinster pad. My life barely fits into 2,000 square feet now and I can’t imagine living in less – not when I look out my window and see the swing set in the backyard, the minivan in the driveway, and the bicycles left out on the lawn (again). I haven’t seen my Mary Richards in years, and I don’t know what I’d say to her if I did. What could I possibly have to say to someone who toyed with me, who opened my heart and then ripped it out of me? I guess I’d be inclined to start with “thank you.”
Roseann Henry and her wife have two children, two cars, two cats, and no, we are not getting a dog.
