T A B L E++T A L K

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R E C E N T L Y

Mulatto millennium
By Danzy Senna
When being "mixed" is cool
(07/24/98)

Second Thoughts
By Sallie Tisdale
Forget quality -- it's quantity time that matters
(07/23/98)

The face of Zorro
By Luis Valdez
For 80 years, Zorro has been the shining star of a mythical California, set in a time and place that never existed. In "The Mask of Zorro," he still is
(07/22/98)

Zorro vs. Tarzana
By Stephen Talbot
How the masked avenger taught a white kid from the suburbs that California's past -- and its present -- was older, darker and more soulful than he had ever dreamed
(07/22/98)

Drama Queens
Bad trips: The road to hell is paved with good intentions, pickle-flecked vomit and the MLA convention
(07/21/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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THE MERRY RECLUSE | PAGE 1, 2
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Not long ago, in the locker room of my gym, I eavesdropped as a woman held forth about her upcoming wedding. We're thinking about a honeymoon in Hawaii, she said. We're registering at Bloomingdale's. We're buying a new car. We're doing A, B and C. We, we, we. I stood there, and I thought about how infrequently I use plural pronouns to describe the events of my life, and I felt a familiar stab of inadequacy, questions about priorities and social worth scratching at the subconscious. On the broad spectrum of solitude, I lean toward the extreme end: I work alone, as well as live alone, so I can pass an entire day without uttering so much as a hello to another human being. Sometimes a day's conversation consists of only five words, uttered at the local Starbucks: "Large coffee with milk, please." I also work out alone, and I grocery shop alone and I cook and eat and watch TV alone, and if you don't count the dog (I do; many don't), I sleep alone at night and wake up alone every morning. Much of the time I don't question this state of affairs -- it just is -- but I listened to this woman in the gym, and I spun out a vivid fantasy about her life (the best friend at the next StairMaster, the colleagues at the office, the fiancé at home, the 200 friends and family members at the wedding reception, the children two or three years hence), and I felt like an alien, a member of some mutant species getting dressed in the locker room before crawling back to her dark, solitary cave.

Why don't I want that? That's what comes up. Why do I find the fantasy -- husband, family, kids -- exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?

In fact, that woman at the gym, poised as she is at the matrimonial brink, is not necessarily headed for a more "normal" life than the one I lead. For the first time, there are as many single-person households in the United States as there are married couples with children -- 25 percent of the population in each camp -- but moments like that I understand that cultural standards and expectations haven't quite caught up with the numbers. Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you're destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why.

I suppose the why, at least for me, is internal, temperamental, as deeply personal as sexuality. Like most women, I grew up expecting to marry someday, expecting to have a family, expecting to want babies. And like some women (and men), I've found that the years have passed and passed and passed and those things simply haven't happened, as though some deeper yearning simply failed to kick in. Lots of life decisions are made that way: Choices are revealed by default, answers arrived at far more passively than we might expect. I look up today and realize, with some surprise, that I've spent the bulk of my adult life alone -- 15 of the last 18 years. For much of that time -- indeed, until my merry little epiphany in the kitchen -- I've tended to see my solitary status as a transient state, a product of circumstance instead of a matter of style. In fact, I suspect I've lived this way for a reason, that the degree of solitude I've chosen feeds me in some way, that the fit -- me with me -- is right.

Considered in that light, the "why" -- why spend so much time alone? -- becomes a more interesting question: why not? I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms. I eat breakfast pretty much 'round the clock -- muffins in the morning, scones for lunch, cereal at night -- which may be odd but is also oddly satisfying, if only because the choice is my own. I am master of my own clutter, king of the television remote, author of every detail, large and quirky: The passenger seat of my car, uninhabited by humans most of the time, will always be a disaster area, a repository of cassette tapes and empty coffee cups and errant dog toys; my alarm clock will always blast National Public Radio at precisely 6:02; my ashtrays (smoking permitted here constantly) will always be blessedly full and stinky. Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

Of course, living alone can make you psycho, too. I often feel deranged in the supermarket, hunting down grazable foodstuffs that don't come in family-size packages, wishing I could buy grapes in bags of 10 so that the other 80 don't rot in the refrigerator, wondering if the check-out clerk has noticed my apparent obsession with wheat flakes. The lack of backup can overwhelm the solitary dweller, especially when you're confronted with life's more fearsome tasks (decoding assembly instructions, killing spiders); the lack of distraction, which alters your core relationship to physical space, can make you think you're nuts. The other night, I caught myself talking to a spoon, which had twice fallen off the counter and clattered onto the tile. "Hey!" I said. "Stop doing that!" And then I stood there and shook my head, aware of that tiny persistent question, the low-level mosquito whine inside: Is this normal? Is it?

For me, the most pressing challenge involves negotiating the line between solitude and isolation, which can be very thin indeed. Social skills are like muscles, subject to atrophy, and I find I have to be as careful about maintaining human contact as I am about maintaining physical health: Drop below a certain level of contact with other humans, and the simplest social activities -- meeting someone for coffee, going out to dinner -- begin to seem monumental and scary and exhausting, the interpersonal equivalent of trying to swim to France. Solitude is often most comforting, most sustaining, when it's enjoyed in relation to other humans; fail to strike the right balance and life gets a little surreal: You start dreaming about TV characters as though they were real people; houseflies start to feel companionable; minor occasions that others find perfectly ordinary (the arrival of a house guest, an event requiring anything dressier than sweat pants) start to feel bizarre and unfathomable.

And yet I'd be hard pressed to leave this little world, singular and self-constructed as it is. I have lived in the Land of We; at times, I have pounded on the door for admission, frantic with worry and need. When the friend at dinner asked me how it felt not to be in a relationship, I remembered all too clearly what it was like to feel despair at the state, to regard my own company as scary and inferior. When I see that look of discomfort come over my friend Wendy as I talk about my unplanned weekends, I remember how horrifying I once found the concept of unstructured time, how much difficulty I've had simply sitting still, giving my own emotions room to surface. And when I hear people pepper their speech with the word "we," like that woman in the gym, I remember a lot of painful years spent struggling to define myself in relation to other people, as though my own existence didn't count unless it was attached to someone else's.

That night in my kitchen, fixing my Kellogg's feast, reveling in the order and quiet of my own home, felt like a gift, a victory of sorts, an awareness that some of those struggles have receded further into the past. I am shy by nature, a person who's always found something burdensome about human interaction and who probably always will, at least to some degree. Accordingly, I have always felt a deep relief in solitude, but I've not always been able to bask in it, to sit alone in a room without getting edgy, to feel that comfort and solace and validation are available outside the paradigm of a romance, to believe that my own resources -- my own company, my own choices -- can power me through the dark corridors of solitude and into the brightness.

I took my cereal bowl into the living room, settled down in front of the TV and thought, so merrily: I'm home.
SALON | July 27, 1998

Caroline Knapp is the author of Drinking: A Love Story" and, more recently, "Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs."