Tim Britton

I sometimes likened myself to that figure in the glass ball, felt myself hermetically sealed within an unbreakable sphere, trapped.

Each only child is a different only child. Some of us were raised by divorced or widowed mothers. (I would have preferred to live with my father, yet I know no only child raised, solely, by a father.) Others grew up in “intact" families — Papa, Mama, and Baby Bear. Still others, Elvis Presley as example, were sole survivor of twins. Others still were preceded in birth by a child who did not survive. The poet Richard Hugo, abandoned by his unwed teenage mother, was reared by grandparents. No matter circumstances, each only child has something in common with all only children.

Between 1977 and 1987 in the United States, the percentage of women aged 18 to 44 having only one child rose from 17 to 20. The numbers of only children are expected to continue to increase. In the early ’50s, day care had not entered the lexicon; for a preschool child to attend nursery school was an exception (if a middle-class child’s mother worked, the child was kept, days, by a grandmother or aunt or housekeeper). But the true only child, a child who until he begins first grade spends most of his time with adults (as did I), is a dinosaur. I had no cousins. Before I was six my contact with children was limited to neighborhood playmates and children of my parents’ friends.

I wasn’t aware of prejudice against the only child (which has not softened over time). I soon learned. (The mother of a grade-school playmate noted: “You share toys well. Most only children don’t.”) Always the stereotypical only child was and is the spoiled brat, sickly (he lisps, stutters, wheezes), over-fastidious, too demanding, and greedy. A boy only child is the finicky Fauntelroy, doomed — hetero or homosexual — to be a sissy. The girl is excessively willful, likely spiteful, destined to become a ball-cutting, frigid, even nymphomaniacal bitch.

Until I was adult, I did not know that as early as the latter part of the 19th century, Sir Francis Galton, a British geneticist and psychologist, observed that first-born and only children were more often successful in the arts, science, and literature than were later-born children. Galton’s findings have been supported by subsequent studies that show the only child is more independent and resourceful, scores higher on IQ tests, is mote verbally apt, and develops better social skills than do children with siblings. Magazine articles published in the last decade often quote Toni Falbo, a University of Texas psychologist who has collated some 500 studies about only children. Falbo’s conclusion: “Only children are at no disadvantage whatsoever.”

If you are an only child, anyone is likely to ask, “But, darling, weren’t [aren’t] you lonesome?"

Melancholy Sunday afternoons I recall by the dozen. My mother napped, she would have wedged the telephone — handset off the cradle — among clunky snow boots in the hall closet. She forbad radio. I could not go out because I might come back in, might slam the door. A friend over was not to be considered. Comics pages by then had smudged, my books seemed blank, my dolls were just stuffing with empty eyes rolled back. Sprawled out on my stomach, I drew with Crayolas on newsprint pads. Each brown line I scratched in for a tree trunk boomed, each green V for a leaf blasted the rugged mountainous silence.

Even a spiraling housefly was welcome. I would wave at it, invite, “Come on over, sit on my bare arm. Tickle me.”

Of course, then, I prayed God for a sister, a brother.

Especially for a big brother. (To this day, “Big brother” — the popping labial B, the buzzing dental TH — feels delicious in my mouth.) Someone with whom to play catch. Someone who would swat bees and hornets. Someone with whom to walk home after dark. Someone who when thunder rumbled would ruffle my bangs and say, “No sweat, kid!" (Who wouldn’t like someone with whom to grow through life who would say, “No sweat, kid”?) Instead I crawled under my quilt and counted: one, one hundred, two, one hundred to figure how many miles away the thunder was. (The only child is independent and resourceful!)

But lonesome? No. Rarely.

Among my friends have been numbers of only children. My elder daughter is married to an only child. We all endlessly speculate on our lives as only children. We concur: we seem in significant ways different from people with siblings. So bear with me as I try to build a foundation for better understanding this difference.

In utero the human embryo exists in a bliss of undifferentiated unity — a tiny goldfish weightless in a Ziploc goldfish heaven. Psychologists date the moment at which this bliss shatters as occurring at birth or at sometime after birth when the newborn first experiences hunger and cold (only recently, fetal research has suggested that intrauterine life may not be as paradisal as psychologists imagined, that for the embryo, the placenta is Other).

Whatever the timing: at some point we discover we are not the world, the world is not us. There is “me" and "not-me," Self and Other. This result is consciousness.

We see in faces and hear in voices of those around us what they feel for us. From birth to last breath, we create and recreate “me” from the variety of selves others reflect back to us. That this history of the selFs steepening consciousness is different for the only child should surprise no one.

The only child’s first awareness of other-ness is awareness of adults. Put into day care and preschool, the only child remains nevertheless on daily and intimate terms only with adults; his initial experience of other people is an experience of adults.

Less, here, is more. Even the healthiest relationship between only child and parents is more intense than that between parents and children in larger families. He goes up and down with ups and downs of his parents’ marriage, cringes against their foul moods, basks in their pleasures.

Siblings speak daily among themselves of mother and father; the only child has no one with whom to discuss his parents. Much as Jews do not speak the name of God or pious Christians regret taking the name of the Lord in vain, the only child does not easily talk about his parents.

An only child acquires an exaggerated vision of what it is to be a person. This vision does not produce egocentrism, for the only child is less likely than other children to consider himself the universe’s center. This vision, this outsize version of selfdom, causes the only child to give to every self greater importance than does someone who grew up as one self among many.

No one grabs the only child’s toys or colors his color book or interrupts his dinnertime talk. He always has his own lamb chop, and were he to grimace and say he can’t eat lamb and cite some nursery verse as his reason, no one teases. He may have to wait for mother’s goodnight kiss, but not because she must kiss baby or a big sister. No one will push him to the far side of the bed or by bumping him, snoring, burgle his dreams. His life is supremely his own; the world — literally — is his oyster; he is its pearl.

You’re party to adult conversation. At table, with my mother and "company,” no one would have thought to chat me up about my doll buggy. The adults talked adult talk. Most of the talk was mundane — the UN, Adlai Stevenson’s troubles with Joe McCarthy, Mozart, varicose veins, a colleague indiscreet with a student. To my ears this talk was so puzzling and its subjects so unknowable that it seemed adults spoke in codes explicable only to adults. How they talked and what they talked about I thought must be acquired with chest hair and breasts.

Compared to other children, the only child will seem excessively secretive. He interprets much adult behavior and speech that he can't fathom as an act or statement about which adults are deliberately covert.

As youngsters, only children exist in monstrous innocence. Alone at home with mother and father, there’s no one to tell — “tattle” — on an only child. If his parents act beneficently toward him, he will learn little about betrayal. A child who is one among other children discovers that to escape punishment his sister will lie about him, will say it was he, not she, who broke the window. For an only child, the initial betrayal comes as surprisingly as jack-in-the-box popping out.

Each of us, only child or not, develops an interior self, the person who we ate in our old easy clothes for ourselves (as opposed to Sunday best for others). The “action” of that interior and rich, subjective yolky self can be described as what it is we do when no one is looking. Before the only child leaves home, he spends a considerable sum of time as a self, for himself.

Imagine yourself alone. You’ve put on a record and wildly flail about in a long-ago frug, a longer-ago Lindy hop, or up-to-date jacking. You don’t think how you look. For the only child, much of his life is this unselfconscious “dancing alone in a room."

With one other child, two or even three, I was at ease. Before I started school I learned to be a desirable playmate. No one, after all, had to play with me because I was a big or little sister and we lived under the same roof. Also, like most only children, other people interested me. I was famished for them.

I assumed that “child” was a generic term, that other children were similar to me, that our differences were gender, skin tone, facial features, body size, and skills. I took for granted we all entertained within ourselves similar secret lives: we were waiting to become adults, for our real lives to begin; we wanted to grow up and go free.

On the opening day of school, the teacher (by her desk the 48-star flag limp on its staff) checked me off on her roll card, told me to go out to play. I obeyed. From the stoop I looked out onto the rooftop playground (the school was a ten-story building at the 110th Street-end of Central Park). Whooping, yelping, screaming voices swelled toward me. So much was happening, and all at once. I doubted I could stand there another minute without fainting.

Girls jumped into whipping double ropes. The ropes snapped — bit at — the concrete and turned faster than the eye could see. What one did see within the ropes’ blur were the jumpers, hair bouncing and eyes wide open, feet evading first one rope, then the other. Boys and girls, ferocious and intent, chased and tagged each other, tossed and caught large rubber balls. I knew I could never be them, not any of them, gliding and swerving as they did to catch with one hand in the air a yellow rubber ring — “pow!” the catcher cried — grabbed from a flushed girl in a game of keep-away.

Turn and go back inside the classroom was what I wanted to do. Instead, I searched the playground until I saw a girl standing alone against the fence. I climbed down the steps — and I remember sweat on my palms, the summoning to myself of whatever courage a child of nearly she can summon (God who watches sparrows, watch out for me). I remember knowing this was a crucial turning point, and I dared not fail myself (I understood some of this and felt the rest) and walked between and among children my size and slightly larger, threaded through their heated, doggy smells, stiffened against their catcalls and breakneck zooming speed, their grabbing of each other's caps and sashes and flying hair.

Mary Margaret the girl’s name was. By the end of the morning play period, Mary Margaret and I joined two other girls and confided as to what dolls we had and to learn who among us was able to write her name and roller skate figure-eights.

During recesses those first years I often leaned against the chain-link fence. I know I was goggle-eyed. All this looked as foreign and far away to me as the countries flagged on the world map. So many faces to look into, so many names and nicknames to learn and remember. I took home delectable syllables as round in my cheek as a gumball and standing in the hush of my bedroom, “Lucy," I’d say. “Beryl. Deidre. Anne. Mary Margaret. Donnell."

Freckled Anne Fildey and I became best friends. By October’s end we were part of a quartet of girls who made plans to ask our parents to buy us each the same dime-store senorita costume to wear at the school’s night-time Hallowe’en carnival. We agreed to arrive early so Mary Margaret’s mom could use eyeliner pencil to draw a beauty spot on our cheeks. I don’t remember why senorita costumes. I recall, though, how happy I was, riding in the back seat of the taxi through the twilit city. I sat carefully, coat unbuttoned, so as not to muss the costume’s cheap, cheesy fabric. I left my mother in the school cafeteria, went upstairs and there we were, all four wearing a low-neck, ruffled black blouse and red three-tiered skirt. We got our beauty spots drawn on. We put on our masks. Mary Margaret’s mother assured us, we were as alike as quadruplets. All that evening, burning mouths on wedges of the then-new food — pizza pie — and bobbing for apples, tossing darts at balloons, we four held hands and moved as one.

Back home, I didn’t want to take off the costume or wash away the beauty spot. My mother’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t introduce me to your friends,” she said, and quickly added (hissed, really), "Blood is thicker than water.” An only child in a different family might not have felt my simultaneous guilt and joy. Guilt because, normally, out in the world, i stayed so close to my mother that I often stepped on her heels, and that evening I abandoned her. Didn’t give her a thought. I betrayed my mother by loving others. The joy?

I did not need her. The world was wide and I could go out into it.

An only child of limited experience, I considered it my good fortune to have for study five days a week the rise and fall of school-yard fame. Fourth and fifth and sixth graders, as if they were great art, luminous and immutable Old Masters, dazzled me. Bigger and wiser, these boys and girls, smiling like football heroes or May queens, darted and skimmed across the playground. Not only that, but glamorous enough to be spotlit, each in his or her own way stood out from the crowd, meticulously rendered.

Untouchable beauties every one, girls already in sure possession of bodies jangled charm bracelets and flashed gapless smiles of permanent teeth. Bosoms rose in muffins under plaid, and from several earlobes gold rings bobbled. The boys’ faces hadn’t as much finish: their ears stood out too far, noses had yet to lengthen; mouths and cheeks were too pink. Their voices had begun to crackle like a scratchy radio. They gave off tigerish odors. In the unsure voices, behind flat noses, round cheeks, was already gathered a fighting stance, the butch carnivorous power.

I lived smitten. Cut to the quick.

By third grade I had become one among these brutally casual others whose hands clapped in perfect time to “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain." I practiced gestures, became indistinguishable at the lunchroom table from those whose heads tilted at such felicitous angles to dip a pink tongue tip into a spoon loaded with chocolate pudding. I acquired ten-year-old Deedee Richter’s bathy wide-open eyes and awed round vowels, her slew-footed walk and poodle haircut. I learned to snap my fingers, rock back on my heels, say, “Hubba hubba."

In groups I remained timid and afraid. Circle ball and square-dances where we held hands, my hands chilled; my pulse thumped under my dress front, the thumps showing like a bird’s heart shows. Even recitation of Boise is the capitol of Idaho, and the potato its most important product, I’d gulp air. Eyes on me burned like raw sun. No one had ever looked at me as baldly. This was not the adult gaze, falling down from above, forgivingly if need be. These eyes took the mercenary measure peers take.

The child born into a family of children will be compared. Inevitably, it will be said: John is stronger or weaker, better or worse, faster or slower than George. This child grows up in a climate in which comparison is the natural order. The only child, however, within his home is a nonpareil — "a person or thing that has no equal, peerless.” It is not that the only child grows to believe he is incomparable — “so outstanding as to be beyond compare” — but that comparison itself, as it describes him, is without meaning. Not that he won't compare himself favorably and unfavorably to others, but what remains most important to the only child is how fast he runs, how completely he knows his times tables. I didn’t then, don’t now, feel any sense of competition with peers. I run against myself.

The summer after fourth grade, I was signed up for eight weeks at a girls’ camp near Bear Mountain. On a rainy afternoon in mid-June, my last before camp, I sat on the sofa, warmed by my mother’s warm hip. Taking tiny whip stitches, she sewed name tapes onto uniforms, bathing suits, bathrobe, and windbreaker. The next morning a bus was to come for me and my footlocker. We talked about what she would do that summer — write her master’s thesis and go to her vocal coach on Wednesdays. I’m sure I wondered aloud what camp would be like, and I’m sure I told her what friends said about camps they’d gone to. “You must not give in to homesickness,” she warned. "Stick it out one week, and any unhappiness will pass."

After supper, clouds cleared. I rode down in the Otis elevator, most likely scuffing at the flat bronze world that is Otis’s trademark. (I loved to rough it with my toe.) I ran outside to meet William and Derrick. Our apartment complex was built around the edges of two city blocks. A quadrangle, onto which the buildings’ interior windows looked down, was where we played. William and Derrick and I, all the same age, had known each other since first grade. We met regularly after school and on weekends. What we did that evening I don’t remember. Perhaps we left the quadrangle for a few minutes to go down to the comer drugstore and buy ice-cream cones. Maybe we knocked tennis balls against the windowless first story of the north wall. We said goodbye: I was tearful, so was Derrick, and William’s lip trembled. The sky had become inky blue-black, the color my mother used in her Parker pen. The boys went in, and I lay on my back on the grass.

I looked up into the sky. I bet I was smiling at what I thought of as ‘‘the sky”: a supra-ceiling carpentered in above the rafters of “outdoors." A roof over the hut of the world. Whatever, nothing smiled back. A deluge of hard-eyed sparks poured toward me. I saw more stars than I had ever seen, and these stats stared like unmovable bullies. 1 couldn’t find the Big Dipper. The stars made no sense to me. I made no sense to myself. Why was I me and not William, not Derrick? Why was I not a dog, a salamander, an African violet, dinosaur bones?

I had believed that at some point “sky” stopped and then, that night, I knew that was not so. Nothing was fixed. All was in motion. Every bit of information I had to that night accumulated was called into question. Wobbly as boiled macaroni, I got to my feet, my head so light I clapped a hand at each ear and grasped tightly so as to keep my head from flying and floating off at an angle through the dark. 1 ran home fast. I stepped into the elevator cage, and when the door whined shut and I saw my Keds next to the Otis world: I finally felt safe.

That day I had played hard and I was tired. I slept. Early morning disappeared in the flurry of breakfast, toting my footlocker and overnight case downstairs, the goodbye kiss from my mother and our barely concealed relief at pulling apart, and then gratefully I took a seat on the bus (for this experience for which I’d longed was at last starting). I don't remember the drive or what girls were on the bus.

I remember the cabin (which mixes with other cabins from four summers I attended this camp). Iron bedsteads lined the walls.

Windows were glassless, protected by canvas shades. I remember the uniforms — navy blue shorts and boxy white shirts and a neckerchief in our cabin color (yellow that year). In each cabin were seven girls plus me plus a college-age counselor. Looking back, I cannot recall the name of one of those girls.

We made beds, took our turn sweeping floors, emptied waste baskets. I was a sucker for these chores, for cabin meetings, council pow-wows. This sweet democracy reached its apogee on award nights: around campfires flames gilded foreheads and cheeks, we held hands sticky from poking marshmallows onto twigs, and sang “Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah.”

At the end of the bed stood the trunk we’d brought from home. I lifted its lid, and home came back to me. I wasn’t ever homesick. I missed no one. If I missed anything, I missed the silence of my bedroom, the diffidence of the four walls.

In our school science room the teacher kept a glass aquarium fitted out with rocks, white gravel, and greenery. Miniature turtles crawled along the gravel (a green scum lay in a veil over the gravel), and using their front feet, these tiny yellow-footed turtles pulled up onto the rocks, teetered for a moment, then either fell backward or head first from the rock. The aquarium smelled of wettish rot and turtle. It typically needed cleaning and didn't get it. Turtles died. I’d count maybe eight turtles flopping along, a few with heads out, eyes bugging, and a week later there’d be six turtles. Insofar as I had in mind a picture of the world, I saw it in its fiat Mercator representation. Countries and cities 1 saw as larger, more complex versions of this aquarium and people as complicated turtles. We were all — turtles and people — watched over by a benevolent monarch who as often forgot us as we forgot the turtles.

That night before I left for camp, the world as I understood the world cracked. A cozy planet turned dangerous, unstable, not predictable. The moment before I looked up to the sky I was a child whose worries were immediate. The moment after I knew, viscerally and mentally — as feeling and as fact — that sky went on beyond any boundary, that no one was watching, no one cared. We were on our own.

Indeed, I was on my own.

What's a child, an only child, or one of many, to do? I was anxious, leaving home. At the prospect of camp I felt about to leap into some great event. I had a child’s version of an anxiety attack. I did not have skills to describe what I saw and how that sight altered me. Where I had taken for granted a Grand Plan, some Eternal Habit, I found a never-ending uninterested and implacable abyss. The world staggered (or seemed to stagger). I staggered. Dis-ease took toot and anchored in me. I had fallen. Was no longer innocent. Felt ruined. Felt my childhood in some way over. I did not even have time to say goodbye.

This gaze into the sky on that starry night lasted a moment, and that was all it took. After that night on the grass on a summer evening, I was no longer able not to see what I had seen.

I lived precariously with this fear and kept it secret and tried — even began that summer to pray not to think about it. I knew the thought — the sense of staggering — was dangerous. That summer the memory of that night came back to me, dismay and dread thick. I became afraid of the memory itself. I am afraid of the memory now.

The only child, with his loose family ties, with time on his hands, with no siblings with whom to whisper, is more prone to this gothic, this morbid and ghastly black-and-white Police Gazette world view.

To escape the pain my mother and I gave each other, that, and the unspeakable absence of my father, I gradually slipped family ties and substituted, for home, the generic life of school and playground and camp. I relished cooperative effort, was attracted to any activity that called for a uniform. A man of my age, an only child, whom I have known since my late teens, spent his pre-college years in military school and served for 20 years in the Army. Not long ago when he told me, “I have always preferred barracks life, even to marriage,” I understood what he meant. I suspect that for only children generally, and more specifically for only children of divorced parents, to be one among a group, one tiny spoke in a driving wheel, feels close to what he imagines as heaven.

My grade school and junior high years were the years when U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy hunted down Communists. TV was in its infancy. In storefronts near our apartment, near Columbia University, people gathered around television consoles set on counters to watch McCarthy excoriate suspected Communists. Reds, we were taught, lived ‘communally’; indeed, Communist parents handed over their Communist children to state-run nursery schools where children also lived communally (a notion I found mightily appealing). I feared that perhaps I was, deep down, a Communist.

Like many only children, I had begun, by then, to make family of best friends and pals — boys and girls whom I considered “almost best friends.” The distinction between best friend and almost best friend came about for me when I recognized that I loved, intensely, one person at a time. To make a new friend was (to my dismay) to lose the intensity of desire I’d felt for the earlier. I could and did like the other person, but it was for the newest I felt passion, for whose invitations and confidences I waited. (The same would hold true later for “falling in love.")

An only child proffers or accepts invitations not out of distaste for being alone but because he wishes to be with that particular person. Unaccustomed to the casual any-time-of-day play that is built in for siblings, the invitation to an only child will feel more like the romantic “date”; a certain eroticism radiates from any scheduled encounter. I doubt any of you who grew up with brothers and sisters can easily imagine how intensely the only child (even as an adult) looks forward to his lunch or squash game with you. I hesitate to tell you, for embarrassment, how hurt we are when you are late, or if you call to say you can’t make it. We have looked forward to you with a depth you can guess at by relating our emotion to what you feel when you are in love.

What, too, the person with sisters and brothers won't likely guess at is just how easily we can for long periods do without company of any other human. We may long for you, desire you, but we can always do without you. It is also true, to a degree that alters as time and circumstances alter, that for the only child, no one is as important as himself. For the true only child, not despoiled or altered by myriad cousins or commercial nursery school, everyone else — parents, best friends, pals, boyfriends, lovers, spouses — comes and goes as bit players. The only child is for himself the central player, the hero and heroine, the very own single self who adheres.

The post-World War II baby boom was not a propitious time to be an only child. Most of us who were in grade school then and were the one child in a family like as not were children in whose families something untoward had happened — divorce, illness, financial failure, a death.

The only child of divorced parents is a special case. I knew I would always be my parents' only child unless some miracle (unlikely) intervened. Between them there had been barely enough love (perhaps simply hormones, or, habit) to produce me. I wanted to believe I was more than a mistake on the list of two lives’ errors that divorce represents. Being my parents' only child carried despair: I defined myself as what was left over from the failed experiment of my parents’ marriage.

So in that way it was for me (as it has been I am sure for many other only children) an embittering experience to be an only child: I was an only child because my parents' life went bad on them.

Richard Hugo, reflecting on his childhood, wrote that he felt himself "a wrong thing in a right world,” and Hugo’s words describe what as a child I often felt about myself.

Papa Bach's dozen children. J.D. Salinger’s fictional Glass family — Seymour, Buddy, Franny, Zooey. The Roosevelts, Kennedys. Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa, Theo Van Gogh's passionate concern for Vincent. Families, siblings’ attachments incited my envy.

On a visit to a home where a large family lives, adding to itself child after child, I am (still to this day always) amazed by how many of everything heaps, gathers. Towels, rubber boots under the coat tree and at summer houses myriad bathing suits and swim trunks (still showing wearers’ shapes) tossed to dry over the porch railing, and mugs imprinted: Joe, Roger, Betty, Mitchell, Peg, Sylvia. Nothing amazes as the photographs do. On walls and chiffoniers and desks and somebody’s grandmother’s end table, in black and white and color, the faces gape out into rooms. There are the group portraits, and there is each family member, solo, from babyhood through graduations to the lucent white wedding, and after the wedding, shoulder to shoulder with the new spouse and holding a baby. How does one person have so many people in his life? How can he care for, wittingly, Roger, Betty, Mitchell, Peg, Sylvia? How can affection stretch itself out to cover so many?

Thanksgivings and Christmases and Easters, Memorial Days’ grave decorations and picnics on lawns, Fourth of July beach picnics, Labor Days when station wagons were loaded down under the faded beach umbrella and scuffed canoes were days of torture for me. Our small family (my mother, me, my mother's unmarried brother, my maternal grandmother) seemed able at best to parody these celebrations. No matter how lavishly with cedar and spruce and red-berried hollies our several apartments and houses were draped and decked, no matter the tumble of cards and gifts and sugar cookies, no matter how gleaming the high-plucked breastbone of our turkey and no matter how wide its legs were spread to spoon out the crumbly rich dressing, nothing we did filled the hollow with which holidays demanded be filled; nothing we did seemed as real as what big families were doing. Every festive gesture announced the truth about us: we were not people enough to propagate ourselves wildly, we had not faith enough in life for more (and more) of us to have been born.

I conjured faces and homes of families I knew. I’d check the time on my Mickey Mouse watch. On Easter Saturday afternoons, 1 would clench my jaw, think, "Now, they are coloring the eggs,” and would lay out before them water tumblers in which the jewel colors bubbled. I could hear an egg plop into my favorite cobalt blue. I’d choose which decal (bunny or chick?) to press against which damp egg. In my bed, trying to sleep, I pictured the father and mother tiptoeing out the back door to tuck eggs under forsythia and privet hedge, between sprouting jonquils and in the rusty corner of a Flexible Flyer. The mother and father, before they went in to bed, stood on the stoop under moonlight and kissed, discreetly (June Allyson and Fred MacMurray kisses), on the cheek.

I awakened Easter mornings and pictured every hour: they gathered eggs out of emerald grass — each grass stalk dew-tipped — the big brother helped the toddling little sister extricate a green egg from in among greener foliage. Then it would be “They are sitting down to the breakfast,” and I’d construct one of the breakfast casseroles pictured in women’s magazines I’d pick up in the doctor’s office -eight white-bread sandwiches of cheese and ham slices, the sandwiches dipped in beaten egg and placed in a glass dish and baked. I watched each member of the imagined group pour syrup over his and her sandwich. Then dressed in pastel frocks and new suits, they hopped into the station wagon to drive to church In the back seat, brothers and sisters poked lavender and aqua jelly beans into each other’s open mouths. Their bosomy mother leaned over the front seat, finger at her lips (cheeks and mouth shaded by a wide-brimmed straw hat). “Ssssh, my darlings,” she cooed. “Shhh.” (All my imagined mothers peered out from beneath wonderful hats, all of these mothers cooed.) I could and would and did take entire families through entire holidays. On one of these days I loved it if rain fell. I thought, “Serves you right. Now you can be as miserable as I am.”

"The old woman who lived in the shoe, she had so many children she didn't know what to do!” is what my mother said when I asked if she wished she’d had more children.

Always, I summoned, called upon, howled for my invisible father who never heard and of course didn’t answer.

From grade school on, I was in love. Boys. Men. Monotheist that I was, I loved one at a time. Playmates: David, Derrick, William, dark-haired Terry in his reindeer sweater. Art teacher. Violin teacher.

The swimming coach who pushed his white hair under a red-billed cap; his whistle gleamed from the white furze curling out from his chest. Social studies teacher — half Arapaho, Marine vet, left kneecap blasted in Korea. These loves were religious conversions. The boy or man for two, three, six months reigned, absolute over my imagination. I talked to him in my head, patched responses from what he’d said and what I hoped he’d say.

You can buy a heavy glass ball, which holds a tiny figure, customarily dressed in a snow suit, perhaps a fir tree grows up beside the figure. You shake the ball and snow falls. I sometimes likened myself to that figure, felt myself hermetically sealed within an unbreakable sphere, trapped. I wanted out of myself.

Before I was 20, I married. My husband came from what seemed to be but wasn't a huge family. Christmas, we flew to his parents' home. The breakfast casserole that as a child I served imaginary families was served by my mother-in-law. My father-in-law parceled out gifts with the merriness of an assembly line worker (and was soused by ten a.m. on vodka poured into orange juice). Drooling toddlers stumbled over crumpled wrappings — which were their mothers, their fathers? — and were indiscriminately scolded and petted. An ancient aunt, an even more ancient cousin gummed breakfast. What relation were they to whom, and who cared about them and why and if they did care why were this aunt and cousin gifted with the generic — a scarf and gloves, aftershave. Conversation was blizzard, addressed to no one in particular and answered by whoever happened to hear. All this communal feeling, this unfocused chitchat felt to me like the soul-murdering Communism about which, years earlier, McCarthy had warned, except this time I knew I wasn’t a Party member.

That spring, we sat, my husband and I, on the back step and looked at our first garden. Peas had begun to twine. Inch-high com formed four green rows. Slug bait circled the dozen tomato plants. My husband took off his glasses — his lenses corrected nearsightedness — and rubbed his eyes. I took off my glasses — my lenses corrected an astigmatism and farsightedness. This, now, seems laughable ... but, at that moment, more than two decades ago, it occurred to me we would never sit as we were, at the same distance from some vista, and see that vista precisely as the other saw it. So that when we exclaimed at the tender corn’s beauty, we were exclaiming at a vision that only approximated that seen by the other. I had taken the liturgy for marriage with the literalist’s heart; I had believed that this young man and I — two spirits, two sets of flesh — through the church’s sacrament and lovemaking's consummation, would be made one. A kind of being together I had imagined marriage to make of a man and woman did not after all exist.

Marriage shocked me. The pre-summer camp, Starry Night experience returned: all was precarious, the world staggered under me.

I had hoped in romantic love and marriage and then motherhood, in raising two children (because I knew even then that one was not enough) and making family, for some rhapsody, some extreme perhaps as yet unknown and secret act to occur that would break the glass of that small airless glass ball world in which I lived. I wanted to be shaken loose, rescued from the burden of myself. And I was still, am still, alone.

“So am I,” you — if you are not an only child — will say. I will counter, however, and insist: You do not likely feel that alone-ness as keenly as will an only child, a person born and reared in an only child’s peculiar solitude. I don’t count this alone-ness as entirely negative, nor do I by any means always feel it as pain.

However, knowing what I did about an only child's life, I intended to have more than one child, and did. This is why. In childhood, we only children are more small-size adult than child. With merely a child’s experience to guide us, we begin early to try to understand a world peopled largely with adults. I am reminded of Old Masters’ portraits of children, likenesses painted in an era when “childhood” as we now know it did not exist. Children were portrayed as miniature adults. Their heads look over-large for their bodies and their faces pinched, as if the visage drapes more knowledge than the brain pan can hold.

“Precocious” describes something or someone that or who shows “unusually early development or maturity.” Botanists use the word to describe plants that blossom before their leaves sprout. The botanist’s use of the word fits certain aspects of the nature of the only child.

We only children have always been old and never, I believe, quite “mature.” Over years, only our size changes. There is something dwarfed in only children, some part of what it is to be human seems stunted. We grow into our 30s, 40s, even 50s, still more precocious child than adult. I have suggested this hypothesis to friends who are only children and to my new son-in-law (who loves my elder child and yet finds life-in-tandem with another person extraordinarily difficult), and I have watched them, every one, blink and gulp. None disagreed with this assessment. I think that on the mouth of all only children the word “help” is being formed, that what we want help with is escape from self, we want to be one among many, part of a litter of people.

Individuals

The three Apollo VII astronauts William Anders, Frank Borman, and James Lovell — are only children. On lists of only children one finds ...

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Ansel Adams

Alvin Ailey

Edward Albee

Hans Christian Andersen

Hannah Arendt

John Ashbery

Lauren Bacall

Burt Bacharach

Baudelaire

James Beard

Ann Beattie

Ingrid Bergman

Elizabeth Bishop

Eubie Blake

Anthony Burges

John Cage

Truman Capote

Dick Cavett

Carol Channing

Kenneth Clark

Van Cliburn

Roy Cohn, Jr.

Gary Coleman

James Gould Cozzens

Clifton Daniel (New York Times editor and husband to only child Margaret Truman)

Sammy Davis, Jr.

Robert De Niro

Alan Dugan

Loren Eiseley

Erik Erikson

Arlene Franci

Betty Furnes

Indira Ghandi

Clark Gable

John Kenneth Galbraith

George Garnow

Remain Gary

Jean Genet

Frank Gilroy

Elliott Gould

Sheila Graham

Alec Guinness

Arthur Hailey

William Randolph Hearst

Lillian Heilman

Mary (“Miss Mary”) Hemingway

John Hersey

John Irving

Elton John

Shirley Jones

Murray Kempton

Arthur Koestler

Ted Koppel

Jerzy Kosinski

Hedy Lamarr

Ivan Lendl

John Lennon

Charles Lindbergh

Walter Lippman

Robert Lowell

Don (“American Pie”) McLean

John Marquand

James Michener

Marilyn Monroe

Joe Montana

Lewis Mumford

Frank O'Conner

Flannery O’Connor

Al Pacino

Anthony Perkins

T. Boone Pickens

Ezra Pound

Rex Reed

Harold Robbins

Betty Rollin

Tony Richardson

Eleanor Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who had a half-brother 28 years his senior)

Jean-Paul Sartre

Brooke Shields

Frank Sinatra

Upton Sinclair

Roger Staubach

Robert Lewis Stevenson

Jacqueline Susann

Edwin Way Teale

John Updike

Gloria Vanderbilt

Sarah Vaughan

Robert Penn Warren

Andre Watts

Mary Well

Edmund Wilson

Jonathan Winters