Old Maids - The Return Of Spinsterhood As The Final Goodbye To Men

It might be too much to say that the relationship between Joanna Parsons and Esther Pilchman was a harbinger of things to come, a bold statement about the overheated sexual dynamics of the day, a retreat into a simpler, Victorian world but one which without men was significantly satisfying; but it certainly resonated among women tired to death of either or - abusive, indifferent men or hungry lesbian women. 

Sex had become the be-all and end-all of the early Twenty-First Century experience.  It was sexual identity that was one's most defining feature, and the expression of that identity increasingly compulsive.  It wasn't enough to be one way or another, but to be it defiantly. 'I am this or that' was the meme of the day, and the gender spectrum the smorgasbord from which one must choose. 

'I am sick and tired of dykey women', Esther confessed to her friend Joanna who readily agreed, 'and these ditzy girly-girls as well', and those confidences shared in the Russian Tea Room were the beginnings of a fond and lasting relationship. 

It wasn't that the friends hated men or the many incarnations of women; it was just that they were indifferent to sex, gender, and the whole hoopla surrounding it.  Men per se were simply not that interesting or appealing; and it certainly was enough to be a woman without wanting some kind of intimacy with them.  

While colleagues naturally assumed that the two women were lovers, nothing could have been farther from the truth.  Their interests were purely Platonic but went far beyond the usual aside about 'no sex here' to a far more engaging consideration of the philosopher and his ideas.  'We're shadows in the cave', Joanna said to Esther many years later as their friendship had matured well beyond simple camaraderie. 

Joanna Parsons and Esther Pilchman had been friends for over fifty years.  They grew up together, went to grade school and high school together, moved to the same town after college and were inseparable, an example of the durability of friendship. 

Joanna was the more attractive of the two – her face, despite a longish, Breughel nose, had a pleasant symmetry which only in early middle age began to lose its tenor.  There was a noticeable sag to her eyes, her lips had thinned out to a spinsterish narrowness, and her skin had a sallow touch to it.  She, however, had learned cosmetics from her mother, always carried a travelling make-up kit with her, and was able to put off the inevitable well beyond the expected years.

She had only one serious relationship which ended badly to an engineer from Chillicothe who had tempted her with a sexual interest which she was unused to.  Well into her 40s she had lost all sense of courtship, and took her suitor’s attention for serious love when in fact he was simply looking for wealthy company in an interim period in his life.  He had been married twice before and would undoubtedly marry again, and Joanna was a pleasant, inoffensive stop along the way.  

Their relationship lasted two years when he announced hat he had had enough and was off to Atlanta  to complete a liaison which had begun right under Joanna’s nose.  To add insult to injury he had finagled the finances she had entrusted to him and walked off with a good piece of her savings leaving her with only a small pension and a few thousand dollars in inheritance.   Alone again, she regretted her mistake, and was off men for good. 

Esther Pilchman was the daughter of a modestly well-off family from Far Rockaway, Queens which at the time was solidly Jewish.  So Jewish in fact, that only when she went to college did she know any Christians who, despite early attempts to be friendly and inclusive, had this thing about Jews, not anti-Semitism really, but a kind of dismissive stereotypical reaction to her nose, her New York accent, and her huge shock of untamable hair.  Crying and disconsolate after her freshman year, she asked her parents for cosmetic surgery and after a painful but not entirely unpleasant summer at a hospital-cum-spa in Bangor, she returned to school a different girl.  

The nose of course didn’t change much other than get a few catty remarks from the big men on campus.  It wasn’t the sexual draw she thought it would be, and she spent the rest of her time alone and celibate.  The school, like many other small liberal arts colleges, had a definite liberal tilt, and she found solace and camaraderie in the academic chapter of The Young Socialists of America.  

There she was among her own kind – Jewish, New York, and deeply committed to the legacy of Samuel Gompers, unionism, and anti-capitalism.  Of course this was all psychological window dressing.  Socialism was a dalliance, a legacy of her parents’ activism, and what she thought would be a means to an end – boys.  Yet the boys as a lot were unattractive, dull, and uninspiring on all fronts.

She drifted between academic options until Junior year when she declared a Psychology major.  She saw herself as a female Freud, tapping into her Talmudic roots, using Menscheit and acquired Christian severity to cure the mentally ill.  She dived into her studies with vigor and enthusiasm and graduated Summa Cum Laude.  She was accepted into graduate school, and her career was launched.

Joanna Parsons had lost touch with Esther during their college years.  Joanna had gone to small, unassuming Catholic college in Maryland while Esther was making her way at one of the East Coast’s premier institutions.  Joanna graduated in the bottom third of her class, untouched by the either the Aquinian logic of her professors or the religious vocation of her classmates.  She was indifferent to religion, and went to St. Anne’s because it was one of the few which accepted her without question.  

She drifted intellectually and emotionally, and graduated with little idea of what to do next; took a number of low-paying secretarial and administrative jobs, was taken in by the Chillicothe engineer, left on the curb more desperate than ever, at which time she contacted her old friend, Esther who was delighted to hear from her, invited her to stay with her in New York until the dust settled and she was back on her feet.

Both girls were delighted with the arrangement.  The rediscovered each other and concluded that if you become friends with someone at the age of twelve, the friendship – established before the set-in of concerns for social status and personal worth – would last a lifetime.

There is something about emotional recourse – in this case the friendship of two women who had never had an interest in men, women, or sex - never ended in caricature.  Joanna and Esther had their fussy moments, moving tchotchkes and bibelots at a whim without consultation (“My dear, could you please replace that Austrian shepherd?”), but all in all settled in to each other, listened to Brahms by the fire, and took high tea every Sunday at four.

Esther had become an East Side psychologist) and over the years drifted far from the Freudian straight and narrow. Her clientele was exclusively women who found her neutral, very objective, and surprising take on sex and sexuality refreshing.  'Sex isn't all it's cracked up to be', Esther noted to overwrought, frustrated women, sounding a lot like Paul in his letters to the Ephesians, warning them off sex and marriage, the surest way off the heavenly track; but seriously offering her niche between feminism and Fifties complaisance. 

Meanwhile Joanna found a job as a junior editor of a small literary journal based in Greenwich Village. Its readership, although small, was discerning and demanding, and the Editor-in-Chief came to rely on Joanna’s judgment and literary insights.  She felt comfortable in her eyeshade and tube lighted  desk, never complained about her insignificant salary, and was delighted to meet the authors who came to make a personal appeal for publication.  

There was no Updike, Mailer, Roth, or Cheever among them, but she had grown accustomed to the genteel mediocrity of these Midwestern hopefuls.  She like Esther tended toward the less sexually inflammatory writers, not that she had anything against Roth's obsession with sex or Cheever's drifting indifference to it.  She just preferred to keep sex out of it, as temporary a fix as it was. 

People said that Joanna and Esther were beginning to resemble each other the longer they lived together; and it was true that they began to share the same taste in frocks, hairdos, and shoes.  Both wore no jewelry – too forward for two now quite mature women – and seemed to be one thing, not two as they walked down the street.

They both were dutiful aunts, especially Esther who found in her brother’s children just the right surrogate family – easily kept at a distance but showered with candies, cards, and forget-me-nots on holidays. She cared little for the brother who did well at yeshiva but at nothing else, and even less for his dowdy, simpering wife; but family is family after all especially if life has not given you one of your own.

Joanna followed in the same path but had become a bit of a nuisance with her hovering insistence on ‘helping’.  Her cousin’s husband had made it clear that he was getting very tired of her importunity – she had no idea that she was loving a bit too much – but she soon got the picture and spent even more time closeted with Esther who had been read to from the same missal.

The two women spent their final days in a nursing home in Bayside as close as ever, never noticing the absence of visitors or mail.  They ended up as they had lived – alone together, sometimes fussy, but happy in a remarkably uncomplicated kind of way.

That, of course, was the fate of old maids - a misunderstood, underestimated lot, thought universally to be unhappy, unsatisfied, and frustrated; but neither Joanna nor Esther noticed, secure as they were in their friendship without sexual codicils, contracts, or disputes.  Had anyone bothered to look beyond the stereotypes, they would have put them front and center on the gender spectrum - the New Woman, the emancipated woman, and not the bitter, dry, and nasty woman of yesteryear's fancy.