On a recent Sunday, I went to get a coffee at my neighborhood muffiny-coffee place in Park Slope. Inside, there were three young couples with baby carriages. One of them was Lorrie, an old friend from grad school with her new baby, Hamish, and her quiet husband, Drew. I moved to New York around the same time as she did, in our early twenties. It seems like yesterday that Lorrie had a birthday party and got so drunk she was flashing her tits at strangers on Avenue B. Now she had a son staring at me with a disturbed look, taking me in as if I were a flapping bird. She held his little pruney face up to me, I sang hello, and we all smiled.
Many straight women in my life are a lot like Lorrie now.
Colette was skinny, smoked constantly, and had a short blond hairdo that she kept greasy and messy in a good way. I would meet her at straight bars, go gay around 1:00 A.M., and then call her the next day to trade trashy stories. She would often go home with this crafty, straight British photographer who had fleshy, muscular arms and wore soccer jerseys. I did coke off Colette’s coffee table with him. Her apartment was right across from a halfway house for homeless drug addicts, and they would call at her while she got dressed. She is still single but has a one-year-old now, lives in Maryland, and is a social worker.
Sylvia is a talented stylist, one of those people who have a special relationship with color. Once I went to Brighton Beach with her. We ate at a Russian restaurant that had a tacky live show. For some reason, we took Ecstasy. Actually she took two. Russian food doesn’t taste good on Ecstasy, so we drank a lot. Sylvia passed out on the subway home, turning a light shade of periwinkle. I carried her to her apartment and held her hair back while she puked.
She met a guy in 2003, and I knew within a week she was going to marry him. In an easeful way, without seeming forced, everything in her life corrected itself to fit him in. Her career flourished, her clubby social life became boring, her rickety studio apartment’s building was turned into a co-op and she had to move in with the boyfriend. Now she is an assistant fashion director at a magazine and her baby is turning two this fall.
Vida is Sylvia’s best friend, gorgeous and robust like a Thomas Hardy milkmaid. One time I took her along to visit my gay friend and his straight roommate on the Lower East Side. We all got very stoned, Vida and the roommate hit it off, and she stayed the night. The next day on the phone she told me she gave him head and he came in her mouth. “I didn’t want to swallow, so I just transferred it to the mattress,” she said pragmatically. A year after Sylvia was married, Vida’s life somehow fell into place, too, blessed by some natural law I can’t seem to perceive. She got married to a professor of American studies, had a baby, and is pregnant with her second while working as a political fundraiser. The straight-guy roommate married a yoga instructor and is a father now, too.
I have always been a hag fag, since the first grade when I hung upside down with my girl classmates on the jungle gym at recess rather than running around the playground trying to kill and destroy things. I have maintained intense relationships with straight girls up through high school, college, and our sloppy drunk twenties. Our emotional lives were not always exactly synchronous, but somehow we suffered our love, sex, and career anxieties in complementary ways. But over the last five or so years, something has happened between my gal pals and I that makes our lives separately drawn.
I feel like I was on the phone, put on call waiting, and then the next thing I knew, many of my female friends became married mothers with solid careers. Their lives are, of course, much more complicated than I make them out to be here, but still it feels like they all suddenly, swiftly transformed their lives, as if they were in a Sandra Bullock film, full of plot-propelling montages. Around the time we all hit thirty-two or thirty-three, they radically changed from being confused single women worried about finding a suitable mate (how twee and immature it all seems now) to being busy, married decision-makers who dash to their jobs from their apartments after they deal with ear infections, preschool politics, and nanny guilt. Is it because they stopped producing new episodes of Sex and the City?
Meanwhile, I feel like the only things that have changed for me are that my jeans are more expensive and my emotions don’t feel twenty-something-fresh. I have been circulating within the same gay narrative (meet a guy, have sex with guy, fizzle out with guy, worry about rent, repeat) like a bobbling buoy anchored to my spot, the weather moving over me chaotically. These women in my life are swiftly settling down in a megatrend of babies and weddings, and I am still in a dizzying maze of dating. I feel hapless and tangled and there is no way the world could speedily provide me with a family in a two-year extreme life makeover renovation. Something keeps me out of the market.
It’s not easy to feel Walt Whitmanesque, liberated by my rootlessness these days. I walk out my door and down Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, and I am drenched in the Settling Down lifestyle. I pass by Area Yoga & Baby, a new store on my corner where little crocheted toddler jumpsuits dangle in the window. Across the street is Lulu’s, a newly opened hair salon for children, painted in an optimistic nectarine (it used to be a bodega). Down the street is Umkarna, a clothing store with Moroccan, organic-themed clothes for women and their kids. The inside of the store looks like you are walking into the tent of a nomadic tribe.
Settling Down is very marketable these days; it involves a lot of gear you need to purchase. This engine of couplehood controls a level of the economy that confuses me as much as hedge funds or the futures market. I pass by these stores and try to calculate how many hundred dollar infant hoodies or forty dollar haircuts they need to sell simply to pay their rent, much less turn a profit, and I can never wrap my head around it. They must be lucrative, because there are more and more of these stores all the time, a bulky diaper tsunami that threatens to drown us all.
I still know a lot of single, defiantly unmarried women. But I notice that they, too, pass by these stores and have to defend their childless choices to themselves. The weird thing is that even my new mother friends are stumped. These are women who trade their tots’ clothes among each other and physically deflate when you ask them how much they spend on their babysitters. None of us understand who the hell can afford a five hundred dollar Bugaboo.
I open the paper and see settled, grounded couples smiling at me from the Real Estate and House & Garden sections of the Times, replete with articles about sweet straight architect couples who convert Methodist churches or missile silos into gorgeous minimalist homes for themselves and their sons named Cody or Bray.
And every now and then, I will see a feature on a gay couple and their clean, sharp-edged furniture in their beautiful farmhouse upstate. They are shown smiling in white T-shirts in front of a warped barn façade and a wildflower field that would inspire hundreds of watercolors. They look comfortable with each other and are talented with handicrafts: “Tim and Jorge converted the old slave quarters into a ceramics studio.” I look at their serene faces and my apartment suddenly feels too messy and I fear that I drink too much and I need to stop being so adolescent and flakey and make a decision about the men I keep meeting. I wonder if I should have stuck it through with Stephen or called Sam back before he moved on and started dating Matthew so I could be shown holding a basket of snap peas next to my landscape architect husband in front of our modest three-acre organic garden.
I was on the beach last summer when two people sat near me and began talking loudly about a mutual friend named Sally. It sounded like she was making a triumphant comeback from some squalid single person time in her life: “Sally is doing great. She met her fiancé at Lisa’s engagement party. She’s really turned around.”
“Yes,” the other replied. “You have got to want it. Just want it and things will happen for you.”
I remember my confident, curvaceous friend Ayn saying something to this effect when she married Scott. Ayn and I lived together when I first moved to New York, as she was just starting to study environmental law. Once Ayn and I had a party and someone brought hash. Ayn kept the door shut to her room and did a fair amount of it with this talkative filmmaker. I took way too many mushrooms with two hardcore gay guys. They wanted to go out, but I was afraid to get off the couch. Everyone left, and Ayn stayed up with me and we watched the E! channel. That night all I remember is seeing Demi Moore’s face morph into Elizabeth Taylor’s on the TV screen. That was my one dumb hallucination.
Now Ayn is married and pregnant and works for a senator. A year into her marriage, she told me that right before she met Scott, she had a strong feeling she was going to meet her husband. “I guess I just decided it was time,” she said. I had never heard her say something this self-help-flavored.
Is it that simple? Is that what it takes to become part of the Settled-Down Set? I get so anxious when I hear that I could change my life if I just “wanted” it enough. I have tried wanting it until I am red faced, like I am straining on the toilet, and it never happens so brightly as it does for others. I become pissed off at the vague force called the Universe that seems to have less energy and time to be clear with me than it does with other people. I barely do drugs now, I work hard, I try to go out sensibly and not date jerks, but still haven’t figured out how to want it enough. Maybe I have intimacy issues. But while I am here, at thirty-seven, in my stunted adolescence, before I succumb to the baby trend, get married, adopt two kids, and start shopping at a store called Rock Star Baby Couture, indulge me over this: Why are we all so powerless to this pricey pathway? Is there really no other alternative?
I am supposed to find that partner and living space and scramble for an adequate income to afford health care in an economic system that favors CEOs and HMOs, and then say things like “God, I am so out of it,” “I never go out anymore,” and “Remember that crazy PJ Harvey concert? Those were the days.”? There is something limiting about the Settled Down paradigm. Don’t misunderstand me—I adore all these new little beings my friends have brought into the world. I love making them smile, I love watching their crafty brains try to figure out a way to get what they want, I love talking to them about trees, confetti, and outer space. I just don’t want to stop having fun.
And I miss my girlfriends.
Last Monday, I went out to dinner with Sylvia and Vida. They described their anxieties about buying property, having to liquefy their assets to afford a down payment, their concerns about schools.
I remember how in her last month of pregnancy with her second child, Sylvia was put on bed rest, and I went to visit her. She asked me how I was and I told her about some guy whom I thought I liked but we fizzled out. I realized it was the same conversation using the same “fizzle” word that I have had with her since I was twenty-five.
“Will you be patient with me while I still go through such square-one love conflicts?” I asked her.
“Yes. Will you be patient with me when I become a boring mother of two and have zero social life?” she said to me. We both slouched there on her couch, tired and hungover in our very different ways.
I had gone out with this “fizzled” guy the night before. He lived above a bar. I was very, very attracted to him. We went to an Italian restaurant; he had ravioli and I had tagliatelle with mushrooms. We shared a bottle of wine, and then walked to another place for two more glasses. I went to the bathroom and closed my eyes to check and make sure I didn’t have the spins. He asked me if I wanted to buy some pot with him; his dealer lived nearby. I said sure, thinking that this would bring us closer to making out. The dealer was red-haired and affable; we bought a bag and talked for a time and then walked back to the guy’s place. He pulled out his pipe, packed it, and I puffed on it. We began to kiss, and at least for me, it felt as if there was something electric between us, my lips into his neck, our exhales lengthening, his waist fitting in front of mine, everything communicating effortlessly.
Unfortunately I forgot that when you are this attracted to someone, your head reels and you detach from gravity. The little internal gyroscope that had been keeping me from spinning too much tipped on its side like a top. I felt that unsettling feeling like a prophecy as I got up, kissed the guy on the neck, calmly walked to the bathroom, and threw up a nefarious borscht of taglietelle and red wine six times. The guy, thankfully, was passed out by this point and didn’t hear a thing. As I brought it forth, hovering over his grimy toilet, I tried to understand why this was happening, again. I honestly hadn’t had that much to drink; I sure as hell have held down more. Maybe it was because I was hot, or had mild food poisoning, or was an alcoholic, or thought I was in love.
Maybe it was that pure moment of focus I had been waiting for—a time to be used to want it and imagine a spouse and nice house with a low mortgage rate. But vomiting up everything inside of me, I had an easier time envisioning myself splintered off into a million bits, that my body was a part of the porcelain and didn’t end at its edges. For a brief moment I was emancipated from the Settle Down agenda and its pointless opposite. There were no expensive stores there, no Times profiles, no perfect lives to linger over. There wasn’t even a bar or a cute guy or drink tickets. It felt freeing.