Anna Sinclair

It’s 1955 and I am sitting at the kitchen table in my New York apartment on 51st Street. My name is Anna Sinclair and I have just discovered that I am not satisfied with my life as a successful saleswoman, wife, and mother. I have not been for years. One of these issues would be easy enough to solve, I would simply quit, however, I’m afraid it is more complicated than that. You see, I am married to the founder of my company, a wonderful little man named Irving Sinclair. We met in the summer of 1947 and were married a year later. I never had many regrets about Irving, save for a few moments of reminiscing my high school sweetheart, Arthur McAllister. It never would have worked between Arthur and I, we were kids, kids not suited to be partnered in the adult world. There is something so precious about a love held in the ignorance of adolescence and I have so presumed that this is the reason for any attachment I have held onto for Arthur. So aside from the transient memories, I have quite enjoyed my life as Mrs. Anna Sinclair, wife of Irving Sinclair, mother of Stella Sinclair, and the proud owner of a Lincoln Continental. But it has just occurred to me that maybe I have not been who it is that I was meant to be or truly am.

As a little girl I was always a bit shy to the touch, but once I warmed, many used words like “unique” and “vibrant”, I absorbed these as virtues of mine and in time, perhaps took them for granted, assuming that whatever it is I were to do would naturally be infused with whatever qualities I’d been told made me special. I was special when I hadn’t even thought to be it, but when I grew old enough to desire such a thing, the magic ran out and somewhere inside, I felt abandoned. I was 19 years old when I came to New York City. A girlfriend of mine, Sandy Lipman, and I decided we would move here and try our luck at modeling, meanwhile, most of the aspiring girls our age were moving to Los Angeles with dreams of working for MGM, some of them even made it too. Sandy did fairly well for some time, then she met a Wall Street man, Franklin O’Hare, they moved to the Upper East Side, had a couple of kids, and now I only see her on the holidays. From what I hear, Franklin spends most of his nights in the office with his secretaries, while Sandy spends her days with a wine glass in hand. Sandy deserved more in my opinion, but she’s got a comfortable life in the suburbs and two darling children. Maybe it’s just the world we live in that asks us to sacrifice our ideals for the sake of safety and comfort, but a question had been stirring inside me and the answer has all but slapped me in the face.

My own modeling endeavor lasted for about a year, until I realized that I would only get so far riding on the coattails of my sparkling doe eyes and a small town’s worth of compliments. So when that spark seemed it would no longer catch, I began to settle into the idea of what ladies my age ought to be doing. I got a job as a cosmetics saleswoman for a small company that was set to rival Avon. I figured I would be of more valuable service to an up-and-coming company, than another cog in the wheel of national Avon ladies, and I was right. I became fairly successful at my work and in time, our company expanded. The next Summer is when I met Irving at a company barbecue. I found him quite funny, maybe not my typical match, an inch or so shorter than I, but he had a warmth to him that made me feel compelled to be near him. We talked for hours, I shared my ideas of what I believed could take our company to new heights, and he listened intently, I appreciated this about him very much. He told me of his father, the kind of brutal man he was and how he could never bring himself to be the same, no matter how much he had tried. I also appreciated this about him. And so we fell in love. He asked me to be his wife a year later and for the last eight years we have enjoyed a truly pleasant marriage together, that is, until my revelation, of course.

This morning started as any other, I slid out from Irving and my’s shared bed and headed to the wash room. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, set my hair, and made for the kitchen to start breakfast for Stella and coffee for Irving. I woke Stella for school and after breakfast, I sent her on her way to the bus. The usual. Irving and I shared coffee at the table, he read the paper, and I looked through the latest issue of LIFE magazine. The very usual. The only unusual part is that I’ve not been feeling myself these last few days, so I’ve stayed home from work to tend to the house, rest a bit, and catch up on any details I may have missed. I often feel that I have forgotten to do something very important. This is my fifth day at home. It is Friday and soon my family will be home for the weekend. Stella will come home in the afternoon and Irving will arrive shortly after in the evening, only I don’t believe that I will be here to greet them as I usually do. Even when I do work, I am always home before either of them, preparing dinner and tidying the home. It takes quite a lot of effort and consistency to maintain such a space as ours, no one really tells you that before you buy the New York City apartment of your dreams.

It isn’t the case that I don’t love my family or appreciate the comforts we enjoyed, but rather, quite the opposite. I have sat at this kitchen table for years now, I have felt the warmth come and go from my seat and it is only now that I feel just how uncomfortable of a wood it is beneath me. I have sipped from the coffee cups in the cupboard, ate countless home-cooked meals from the dishes, and slid the metal of forks and spoons through my lips, but only now have I realized their tastelessness. I have indulged myself in the actualization of our goals, those of Irving and I, and now I look at them as a shining example of a sacrifice I believe I have made to the Gods of Creature Comforts. It is my punishment now to feel the truth of my own dissatisfaction, crumble under the efforts required to uphold this material world I have moulded, interwoven with the lies I have spun within a web of niceties, unveil the monster behind the facade I have casually worn even to my own self, and admit my most detestable attempts to project my own ego’s dissatisfactions onto my  family. How can I both love them and resent them all at once? I do so to myself. After all, I chose my path and willingly accepted what was given, believing that I must make the best of an otherwise fruitless life. What was I to do? Model for ladies’ magazines and showrooms my whole life? Stay in that dusty old farm town in Oklahoma where my crowning achievement was just that, a first place crown for the local teen beauty pageant? Maybe none of it would ever have been good enough eventually. Maybe it makes no difference whether I stayed home and married Arthur or changed my name and ran away to Timbuktu, but as I sit here with my cigarette, reviewing my life, I see that my deepest regret was not the choices I had or had not made, but that I had not found the courage within my own self to be honest about how much better I thought I was than all of it. Through the status and the wealth, the safe and happy marriage, the sweet beautiful daughter. I must admit from the depths of my soul, on the surface nothing was wrong and I believed my own lies for years, but inside of me, I knew that I did it all to serve a suppressed desire for superiority and comfort, as a consequence, my accomplishments are empty to me now. The family I’ve made, the life I’ve enjoyed, the husband I’ve loved. They all were secondary to my own selfish desires. But how did I get here?

You see, it was just after Irving left for work that I went to the window to watch him go, driving down the street in the Continental I had once found so exquisite. Eventually the car blended into the others and he was soon out of sight. I stood there for a moment with the window open, the gentle breeze and sunshine flowing in and through my hair. I closed my eyes and leaned forward a bit more so as to feel its touch on my skin. My mind was silent. My breathing was the only sound I could hear and I felt lulled by its rhythm. It was the last and only moment of true Earthly peace I would feel, before I heard a shriek from the street below. When I opened my eyes, I was no longer standing in my 15th story apartment. I saw concrete and asphalt rushing toward me, as a blur of surrounding buildings and empty space swirled around me. I reached out, but nothing was there for me to hold onto anymore. The whole ordeal seemed to have lasted for only a moment, yet I had plenty of time to understand what was to be my fate. I closed my eyes, once again feeling the touch of the sun and wind, deeper than I ever had before. When I opened my eyes again, I was here, sitting at my kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, understanding the truth beneath my whole life as Anna Sinclair.