THE EXTRA WOMAN

For most of my life I have been the extra woman, the one who does not belong to anyone. I have no mother, no husband, no children, not even pets these days. I did not plan to grow up to be superfluous any more than some men I’ve encountered planned to grow up to be the total twit they are. I don’t think any little girl dreams of being the third wheel on every wagon, the tire by the side of the road. But karma propels and circumstances pile up until a pattern emerges. I was born with Virgo rising and so it has. Ecce donna, the woman alone with nobody's name and phone number to list in event of emergency.

The extra man is of course more familiar and comes favorably wrapped. He is de luxe, connoted in tuxedos and camel hair, dinner parties and gossip columns, Nancy Reagan and all that cotton candy vanity. A widower, a bachelor, a playboy is the poof kiss, the glamorous trinket of an arm passed around like an after dinner mint. Men find security in numbers, women in men and flattery is always in demand.

Nobody finds much in a spinster or childless widow. The unattached woman might as well be buried in a burqa, she is so invisible. Certainly nobody creates ad campaigns or products for the demographic. Nobody brags about a maiden aunt or widowed friend; people more likely sigh about her as a crutch to bear. The lone woman alone is forced to take care of herself, to come to grips with self-sufficiency.

The extra woman is also so stigmatized by negative nomenclature, a Hungarian noblewoman I once knew pushed her daughter to get married because being a 30-year-old divorcee would make her far more attractive than being a 30 year old maid. But that doesn’t really change much because nobody invites an extra woman to a dinner party, eagerly like the extra man, for fear she will morph into something worse: the other woman.

I have been that, although never as a dinner party pickup. I got the role because I came first and he came back. So technically, I was not the other woman. I was the first, reduced from the lead to a cameo role, truly a supporting player. Once too, when my childhood friend was dying at the age of 35, she proposed I marry her husband so I could raise her children. I said no. But I did keep a promise to be the other woman who helped the children.

I have also been overtly fashioned into the other woman by spouses whose marriage teetered like a tot on a two-wheeler. Both seemed to need the third wheel balance of validation or expiation, novelty or a referee or maybe just plain safety. Whenever one was out of town, they wanted to be sure the other went out only with me. Whatever, the husband and wife behaved better in public and to each other when I was between them.

I have been pitched into action as the would-be daughter, a young woman whose demeanor, manners and lifestyle were acceptable to people of my mother’s generation when their real daughter was an embarrassment or impossibility. I could be shown off, trusted, taken into the empty nest. I have also been made into the other woman as a beard: the cover-up “date” for a gay friend secretly coupled or just plain secretly gay. It’s the sort of social work that gets me invited to dinner parties where I get to show off table manners.

My childhood classmate, the late Laurie Colwin, in her sparkling short story, The Lone Pilgrim, created a diplomatic, self-effacing and chameleon-like houseguest who seemed to exist to compliment and complement her hosts. Her coming and going from the mannered houses that contained their tortured lives somehow made them feel better. Her character was not me but could have been, for I immigrate into lives as a guest worker, then go into exile when they are up and running.

As a lifeguest, I have been the barometer that registers fog with a chance of pain, cloudiness, blunder and frightening, all the suffering central to samsara. I have been in the thick of that, because people totally happy with each other didn’t need me. But when going goes flat, everybody seems to reach for that spare tire.

And so, like any survivor of contagion, I developed antibodies, noticeable immunity that keeps me afloat. Before I became a Buddhist, I became the eye of storms who learned to stay calm amid human suffering, who also learned a little about how to cope with it.

This turns out to be fitness training for a major role recently illuminated: the mother superior. When I look at my calendar and phone bills, I realize I have maybe three or four heart children for whom I am the designated grown-up and maybe another four for whom I am the maternal understudy. I go on when Mom is far away or too far out. I am the woman nobody is related to, yet the one younger people actually want to relate to. I think it's because my genes and dreams aren't so vested in them, I see them for who they are. I don't want them to be mini me but whoever they want to be. I am a stepping stone to that.

The role requires a knack of all trades. During the past month, I have been called upon to find a runaway dog, evaluate a real estate possibility, teach the tactics of a formal New York wedding, approve a new apartment and advise on a career move. I have had to ameliorate the upcoming death of a business partner, console two who can’t find a life partner, coach over that speed bump known as toxic parents, send cooking instructions, commiserate to instill confidence, consult on a reading list and give a birthday party.

The mantra of the marketplace is: find a need and fill it. Evidently, I have done so. After I started composing this essay, by auspicious coincidence the local paper featured news that research shows, despite all our flaunted and vaunted improvements in instant messaging and social networking, Americans are sorrowfully lacking in confidants. Apparently Dr. Laura, Dr. Phil and Rush don’t do it, for most people claim there is nobody out there to talk to.

This is not news to me. That sort of solitary confinement defined my life from its beginning. I was born into a family of cannibals whose needs were so great they consumed my own. I did not exist. When the physical support of my spine and neck showed premature debilitation before I was 50, healers asked if I’d grown up without support, for evidently holding myself up had overtaxed my system. I know too well the unbearable despair of having no one to turn to.

But I also know what it means to find sunshine in that darkness, how it feels when someone sees you. My much widowed and childless great aunt, the extra woman in her own right, always put herself out for me, making me feel worthwhile. She came, she sewed, she fussed. She fought for me, shared everything with me, including her experience and thus advice, which was basic but infallible. She also gave me jewels to signal I was one. She thought they, like her advice, would buoy me when she was gone. She died over 38 years ago and I never remove her heirloom wedding ring from my finger.

Like flowers, we humans are heliotropes who will always turn our faces toward the sun. Many foundering lives have been righted as mine was by the extra woman: perhaps a house maid, nanny, old maid sister, widowed aunt or stalwart self-effacing secretary. She didn't have to do much more than be there. That was enough to be the vital difference between being lonely and being alone.

Life is an emergency for which we all need a listed name and number. “A man don’t mind if the stars grow dim,” Kurt Weill wrote for Lost in the Stars, “just as long as the Lord God’s watching over him, keeping track how it all goes on.” We all want somebody to be out there bigger than us, checking on us, looking after us, helping us be us. Whole civilizations depend on the extra woman: Athena, Tara, Kwan Yin, the maid of Orleans, and the so-called virgin, Mary— extraneous to the trinity much less beloved.

All I did was to be for others what I so fiercely wished others had been for me and circumstances piled into the alchemy of turning lead into gold. In the past month I've not only been many times the other mother. I've been the other woman, other daughter and beard to boot. Supplying demand to be everything an extra woman is asked to be makes me feel like a whirling dervish. I seem to belong to no one yet everyone. Over my birthday weekend at different meals, three of my heart children volunteered that when they have their houses, that house will have a suite for me. It makes me think the French are onto something when they say: le superflu est le necessaire.

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