"Becoming an Odd Woman" by Yoojin Na
I’m no stranger to loneliness, but the loneliness of the last six months, I was entirely unprepared for.
It began at the onset of the pandemic; not knowing when I’d see my loved ones again, I rushed into a relationship with the man I was dating only to discover that he was also sleeping with a twenty-three-year-old knitwear designer.
“I meant what I said at the time,” he told me when I confronted him, referring to our premature decision to be exclusive. Dating an ER doctor during a pandemic was more than he had signed up for.
The six weeks following our unceremonious breakup turned out to be the bleakest period of my life. The most difficult part about my loneliness was enduring the separations created by the ongoing pandemic. In the ER where I worked, potential Covid patients were separated from non-Covid patients and placed in the “Hot Zone.” Then, the Covid patients were separated from the doctors and each other by walls and glass doors. I was further isolated from my patients through layers of protective equipment. My respirator helmet and hazmat suit made me feel like an astronaut but instead of outer space, I was exploring death. At home, I was again completely alone.
My lowest point came one afternoon in June. I was walking home with my mask on and my earphones in. I was listening to a playlist I had named “Pandemic 20” and busily eyeing the pizzas in the window of Rocky’s when I heard a man’s voice creeping through the gaps in the beats. It was an urgent, angry voice, but I didn’t pay it any mind until it started to follow me. I looked over my shoulder to find a mean, middle-aged face uncomfortably close to mine.
“Are you talking to me?” I asked.
“Run down the block!” he said, divulging an incomprehensible rant.
Why would someone follow me just to tell me to get away? I studied him to see whether he could be a psych patient from a nearby hospital, but he did not have a recognizable hospital bracelet or gown. He had a hint of a beard but nothing to suggest he was without shaving tools for a prolonged period. And in a lightweight, black jacket and jeans, he looked like any other New Yorker.
While he followed and yelled at me for half a block, other pedestrians walked by as though they did not see us. Finally, I stopped and turned around, after which he began to walk away. I felt naked yet invisible at the same time.
Soon after, I made a trip upstate to see whether I could spend the summer and perhaps the rest of the year away from NYC—an epicenter of disease and conflict. The surrounding nature in Beacon, NY was inviting, the town quiet, and the house I stayed in, just as pretty in person as it was in the photo I had seen. Still, I could not sleep a wink.
On the train back to the city the next morning, I read Vivian Gornick’s latest memoir Odd Woman and the City. The term, taken from an 1893 English novel by George Gissing, refers to women who are “leftover” after others have paired off, though it isn’t meant to be pejorative. Gissing’s heroine, Rhoda Nunn, questions existing social norms. She educates other women to become independent thinkers. She engages in erotically charged banter with men who consider her exciting. But, in the end, Everard Barfoot, her would-be love interest, finds her too intelligent, too challenging, and too independent. He “retreats into a conventional marriage,” leaving Rhoda to become the eponymous odd woman.
Told in vignettes, Odd Woman and the City also tells a story of how Gornick became the odd woman. Much like Rhoda Nunn, Gornick doesn’t end up alone due to a lack of attraction. Many times, she loves and is loved in return, but her relationships do not last. Sometimes, they burn out of their own volition. Sometimes, her lovers ask her for things she cannot give. Only one man remains a constant in her life—a friend named Leonard.
She describes Leonard as “a witty, intelligent gay man, sophisticated about his own unhappiness.” Together, they’re both weary of everything—their exes, their mutual acquaintance, and sometimes even of each other. Like an old, married couple, the pair can’t keep their exasperations in check, and their relationship is confined to a once-a-week affair. Still, Gornick makes it clear: Leonard was, is, and will always be the perfect counterpart to her odd woman.
The other significant relationship in Gornick’s life is with the city itself. She sums up all her adolescent longing in a single sentence: “Manhattan was Araby.” The Araby she’s referring to is the marketplace of childhood fascination in James Joyce’s short story from Dubliners. It is a place one grows out of the moment one loses their innocence. Yet, even after Gornick trades in the blind ends of her Bronx neighborhood for the “center-of-the-world,” she never stops being enthralled.
I’m walking up Fifth Avenue at noon straight into the cold hard sunlight of a morning in November. Mobs of people are coming at me… We are all here on Fifth Avenue for the same reason and by virtue of the same right. We have all been walking the streets of world capitals forever: actors, clerks, criminals; dissidents, runaways, illegals; Nebraska gays, Polish intellectuals, women on the edge of time. Half of these people will be lost to glitter and crime—disappearing into Wall Street, hiding out in Queens—but half of them will become me: a walker in the city; here to feed the never-ending stream of the never-ending crowd that is certainly imprinting on someone’s creativity.
For Gornick, it matters not that the fellow “walkers” of her beloved island are, for the most part, strangers. They still bring warmth, movement, meaning to her art, and she to theirs. This invisible yet palpable exchange not only inspires but comforts Gornick.
On the train back to Grand Central, the city itself did not feel enough for me. I longed for the presence of another human being—a person I can touch, feel, and shelter with—to save me from the coming isolation of the second wave.
Once the Hot Zone in my hospital was packed away, I began to go on dates with men who were—at least on paper— smart, interesting, well-read, and well-traveled. One man I had been texting for three months showed up thirty minutes late to our first in-person date and talked nothing but of his mother and the stock market. He did not ask me a single question yet was shocked when I left after an hour. Another man told me that women should behave like women and that I was too much like a man. He called me an “alpha female” when I called him an Uber so that he wouldn’t have to wait for the bus. It did not sound like a compliment. Others did not fare any better, and I could not imagine surviving even a few dates with them, let alone a whole epoch.
Then, the very thing I feared the most happened. I developed a fever that came for me like a steamroller. Unable to regulate my temperature, I felt too cold and too hot all at once. My bones hurt in a way I had never experienced and my whole body felt as though it were sinking deeper and deeper into the mattress. By the next day, the fever subsided and a vague fatigue replaced the intense first blush of illness. That’s when it hit me with all the weight of my built-up anxiety: I had to be in isolation for thirteen more days.
All I wanted was to consume a pound of peach gummies, one ring at a time, until I felt even sicker, but even the smallest of human interactions—getting coffee, sitting outside, walking, and going to the bodega—were now off-limits. It did not matter that my swab came back negative. Rules were rules, and as a doctor, I knew them better than anyone.
Exasperated, I popped tabs of Tylenol and swallowed them dry. If I could not do anything, at least I’d sleep, I thought. Once under the covers, I realized: No one could have saved me from this solitude of being ill. It was an eventuality that was coming for me since the beginning of the pandemic. Surrendering myself to that fact surprisingly didn’t come as defeat. I turned on my side, looked out to the apartments facing mine, and felt for myself the same “shock of pleasure” that Gornick experiences every night.
… as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers. This swarm of human hives, also hanging anchored in space, is the New York design offering generic connection. The pleasure it gives soothes beyond all explanation.
Yoojin Na is a writer and an ER doctor. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Quartz, The Rumpus, and others. She is working on a memoir that explores her identity as a 1.5-generation Korean American and a formerly undocumented immigrant. She currently lives in New York City.
