Lillian on Life

by Alison Jean Lester

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

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  Copyright © 2014 by Alison Jean Lester

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lester, Alison Jean.

  Lillian on life / Alison Jean Lester.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15265-6

  1. Middle-aged women—Fiction. 2. Reminiscing—Fiction. 3. Autobiographical memory—Fiction. 4. Life change events—Fiction. 5. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3612.E8193L55 2014 2013039008

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  ON THE DUAL PURPOSE OF THINGS

  ON THE BACK SEAT

  ON HOW TO STUDY

  ON GETTING TO SEX

  ON “US”

  ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BIG POCKETS

  ON BEHAVING ABROAD, AND IN GENERAL

  ON ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

  ON REMODELING

  ON THE FOOD OF LOVE

  ON LEAVING IN ORDER TO STAY

  ON BIG DECISIONS

  ON THE DANGER OF WATER

  ON LOOKING THE PART

  ON THE WAY TO GO

  ON NOT LOVING THE HELP

  ON WHITE

  ON ONE-NIGHT STANDS

  ON MEMORY’S MISMATCHED MOMENTS

  ON GETTING OUT OF BED

  ON FATE

  ON OVERFLOWING

  ON THE END

  ON WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  On the Dual Purpose of Things

  Whenever I wake up next to a man, before I’m fully awake, I think it’s Ted. Of course it never is.

  That’s okay. This morning I watched Pandora walk the length of Michael’s naked body. His skin turned to gooseflesh as she started up his thigh. Her pretty gray paw depressed the flesh of his belly, and his sleeping penis rolled toward his hipbone. She stepped off him at the shoulder. She could have walked on the bed; there was a little space between him and me. Maybe he doesn’t exist for her. Maybe she was saying that he’s no better than a mattress. She snuggled into my neck, purring smugly like an idling Jaguar.

  I wanted Michael to wake up and see us like that: an independent woman beloved of her elegant cat. But of course he didn’t. They don’t. They wake up at all the wrong times, and see all the wrong things.

  To be fair, we drank a lot of red wine last night, and I can hold it better than most people. My eyes still snap open in the morning. Wine is still my friend. I hate that I can’t drink coffee in the wee hours and then sleep anymore, though. The body evolves, then it devolves. It’s terrible. One day you’re someone you know, and the next you’re someone you don’t. You dry up. It’s embarrassing.

  Every once in a while I wonder if I’m glad Ted didn’t stick around for my menopause. A woman has so many things to hide after fifty. I ask myself if we could have tolerated so much physical change, followed by dotage.

  I don’t have to wonder with Michael. He comes and goes. There isn’t time for him to notice everything.

  The trick at my age is to keep some K-Y Jelly in an attractive pot on the bedside table. You squeeze it out of the tube into the pot for when you have a visitor. When his hands are beginning to move on you, you turn away and slip your fingers into the jelly. He can caress your bottom or your shoulders in the meantime. When you turn back you take him in your hand and lubricate him. Maybe he’s not even erect yet, and this way you have the satisfaction of knowing that what you’re doing for him is working. I’m not sure there’s a bigger satisfaction than that in life. And as long as he’s feeling it’s for him, you’ve diverted his attention—and even your own—from the fact that the lubrication is for you. On top of it all you maintain your sense that you’ve still got plenty of sap in your tree. Name me a wife who does that.

  Michael’s wife is crazy. She probably didn’t seem it when she was young. She probably just seemed young. Now she just seems silly. That hair band of hers. The tangential things she says. She’s almost as tall as I am, and only about five years younger, fifty-two I think, but she blinks at you. She stands up tall and her chestnut hair sits perfectly turned up on her shoulders in the same way I’m sure it has since 1960, and she smiles and blinks, as if to protect herself from anything modern or unpleasant. Imagine life by her side. How would you ever connect? Well, you wouldn’t.

  Do some people not need excitement? I’ve always thought humans were too complicated not to need stimulation. What does Michael do to keep his wife hanging on? Or what does she do that keeps him married to her? I don’t like to ask. I’ve learned not to cling.

  He sleeps really late when he’s with me. I don’t think it’s allowed at home, certainly not naked. He’s intimated as much. Separate beds too.

  I thought my parents’ marriage had come to an end the day their twin beds arrived. I didn’t know it was happening all over the neighborhood, probably all over the country, and Mother was merely keeping up with the Joneses. But how often did the Joneses go up to my parents’ bedroom? Never. Mother just felt them walking around in her head, and had to keep up.

  I got up when my stomach started rumbling. Thank God Michael sleeps through that too. Accommodating Pandora was giving my neck a cramp. I wanted my usual breakfast: milk so skim it’s almost blue, a banana, an English muffin with a thin slice of cheese, black coffee. The breakfast I like happens to be excellent for the bones and muscles and digestion of a woman my age. I think just about everything has a dual purpose, like K-Y Jelly.

  It’s lonely eating alone when there’s someone in the house, but then again, you can use the bathroom and get that all out of the way before they get up. The advantage to not living with a man is that you avoid each other’s smells. For the most part, Michael moves his bowels elsewhere. I learned early on to keep matches in my cosmetics kit for when I was “visiting,” and in my toilet when being visited. You light one and guide the flame around the inside of the toilet right after flushing. You won’t burn yourself if you hold the match between the first joints of your index and middle fingers like a tiny cigarette. Then you wash your hands thoroughly. Since the sink is usually closer to the door than the toilet, anyone entering the bathroom after you will smell soap before they smell anything else.

  Mary taught me this back in Missouri. Poppa’s bathroom had bright sun in it in the morning, a small TV, eventually, and a box of matches on the windowsill that she had put there. This was one of the many reasons I could list as a child why black people
were superior. They were clearly the smart ones; we obviously couldn’t cook without them, and that was just the beginning.

  I loved hearing Mary in the bathrooms when I woke up in the mornings. In Poppa’s, she opened the window and flapped and refolded the towels, then there’d be a quiet moment and that was when she was using a match in the toilet bowl. Poppa’s “time” was right after his early breakfast and his second cup of coffee. After airing his toilet, Mary’d sing down the hall to my room, where I’d pretend to sleep, and sometimes she’d sit down heavily on the end of the bed and feign surprise that I was there. “Still in bed, missy!” she’d say. “You get on out of there or you’ll end up being too beautiful, it’s the truth.” Then she’d get up and cross the room to my bathroom. “I’d best clean your mirror so you can have a look-see at your too-beautiful self,” she’d say, or something like it.

  I wonder if beauty has a dual purpose.

  No. It has no purpose, and offers no guarantees. In my experience, beauty merely has a dual result: one, lots of people talk to you; two, nice photographs.

  A wife’s got to serve a dual purpose. Michael’s doesn’t.

  On the Back Seat

  The first car I remember was a Studebaker Champion. Corky’s family eventually got one too, and theirs was a pale sea green, aquamarine in the bright sunshine, and I envied the color. Ours was tan, however the sun was shining, but it was the first in our neighborhood of Columbia, Missouri. I felt sorry for Mother that she always sat in the front and never got to sit behind Poppa and watch him drive. You can’t see that much of people nowadays because the seat backs and headrests come up so high. Also because steering wheels are smaller now. When Poppa bought that car it must have been 1948 or so—yes, it was; I remember because I was fifteen and Mother had allowed me to get my ears pierced when I turned fifteen, and I always made sure I had earrings on to go out in the car. The steering wheel was a smooth wide circle, set up high, and when Poppa drove I could see his head and neck and shoulders and hands, and the Freemason’s ring that flashed on his right pinkie.

  George Junior got that ring when Poppa died. I have the diary he kept during the war, somewhere, and his Purple Heart medal too. He wrote about advancing across French fields with his friends falling and dying to his right and left. I knew about that already because Mother told me. He kept writing in his diary after the war as well, when he was back in Hannibal with his parents and his sisters and wondering where to go from there. He met Mother in church. He didn’t mention that in his diary, though. He wrote about her only when he already knew her a little. “I don’t know what it is,” he put down in his slightly cramped hand. “When I’m with Vivian I have a feeling in my chest that I can’t name. It’s a tightness, and I have a notion that she can relieve it.”

  Did she? He looked contented enough, despite the limitations of twin beds and the lipstick she always put on before coming downstairs in the morning, marking the end of kisses for the day. She could receive them, of course, and would always proffer a cheek when any of us came home. She’d pat me on the bottom instead. I don’t remember her kissing Poppa, though.

  “I have a feeling in my chest.” It was so strange reading those words, knowing that when he wrote them he hadn’t declared himself to her yet, knowing that by the time I read them hundreds and thousands of moments had passed between my parents that I had never perceived and would never understand, or even accept. Their relationship seemed to function along the lines of a pattern. To learn that, at least for him, it started with the shortness of breath and a desire for sweet relief, well, I had to think about that. And when I thought about that, standing there three years ago in my dining room next to the box of Poppa’s things I’d opened on the table, I got angry. She just hadn’t appreciated him. When I think of my young self sitting on the back seat of the Studebaker, watching him drive so elegantly around town while she looked out the window and commented on the houses, I know I was in the right place. I used to put my hand on his shoulder to remind him I was there.

  On How to Study

  Where’d I put the crossword puzzle? I thought I’d finish it while I ate, but I couldn’t find it, not the one I was working on anyway. Where is it? God. It’s always like this. Stupid, Lillian. Stupid. Think. Focus.

  In high school I was never one to do my homework with the other girls. I have no idea how they got it done that way. You have to be quiet, sharpen your pencils, get the right paper, put your head down. I did homework in my room in the late afternoon, after a Coke with Mary in the kitchen. Poppa would come home around five thirty, unless he was traveling, and there was usually a good forty-five minutes when I’d be composing something at my desk and Poppa would be in his office next to my parents’ bedroom calculating something, looking at what he’d written on the little pieces of paper he always had folded in half in the pocket of his shirt. I felt a real freshness in my brain then. A clarity of focus. A breeze. Whatever I wrote was speedy and solid. Whatever I read made sense. I came up with ideas for term papers. I drew accurate graphs. Then Poppa would clear his throat. Funny how men do this when they stop concentrating, at the end of a project. This was the sign. It was time for him to make drinks. Mother was waiting downstairs with her hand already curved to receive her bourbon. That’s how she looked, sitting in the sunroom at the end of the day, lipstick renewed, waiting for things to happen the way they were supposed to happen.

  At dinner, I know Poppa liked me to talk about my schoolwork, but he’d always offer Mother an opportunity to talk first. “Shall we find out what Vivi Anne has to say about the world today?” he’d ask me, and I’d consider the question, and nod. Her name was Vivian. I never asked him why he played with the pronunciation. I assumed it was because she wasn’t the kind of woman you tickled with your fingers. It was a funny way to tease and show respect at the same time, calling her Vivi Anne, letting her have the floor first, listening as if he truly cared or would remember which store was having a sale.

  I couldn’t really think without Poppa nearby. It was as if my brain were a boat, and when I left home for Vassar I left my anchor behind rather than pulling it up and dropping it in the new place. My brain kept sneaking out of the harbor. It all had to do with hands. Phone calls and hands.

  The calls started on Wednesday evenings. Just a couple would come in, usually for the same girls, but sometimes there was a surprise, and then on Thursday evening there were lots more, and any girl without a date for the weekend would go to class on Friday morning with a heavy heart even though there was still time.

  The phone was quiet for the first few weeks of my first year, so I spent most evenings in the library rather than listening for the phone at the entrance to the residence hall. I was there to study, after all. I’d signed up for more than the required number of credits, in order to do a double major—early childhood education and English literature. Lots of girls were doing a major and a minor, or even a major and two minors. But what kind of word is that, minor? A minor in religion, or philosophy? It’s like taking only a thin slice of fruitcake. What if the cherry is on the other side of the cake and you never taste it? I was too hungry for that.

  On the wall by my bed I’d stuck up a schedule I’d made for myself showing how many hours a day I needed to devote to each class, and it looked perfectly doable, and I threw myself into it with my sharpened pencils and my notebooks and my belief that pretty little Vassar meant me no harm. But then, after some of the girls took me along to a dinner and dance at Yale, the calls started coming in for me as well. I’d try to study in the bedroom, but in fact I’d just be waiting like we all were, and my roommate, Ann, would start playing with her hair. She was a serious student. I couldn’t understand a word of the economics books she loved so much. Well, no, I could, but my eyes crossed, literally crossed, when I took a look at them. That made her laugh. Ann. Nice girl. She was one of the earliest women on Wall Street. She’s still there, I believe. J.P.Morgan, I think. She had long
straight hair, and was fond of saying she couldn’t do a thing with it, and on Wednesday and Thursday nights while we waited to hear the phone ring, she’d start by taking it out of its ponytail while we were studying, and then inevitably she’d twirl it around her finger, and that would distract us both, and one of us would pull out a magazine to look at styles, or she’d stand in front of the mirror and I’d watch her, and we’d both imagine her on a date.

  The phone calls threw off my study schedule completely. I told myself to get up early on Sundays and go back to the library. Sometimes I was able to, sometimes not. I told myself to keep to the evening study schedule, to let someone else take any call that came in for me and take a message, and sometimes I was able to, but I’d come home early. Sunday nights I fell asleep in the stacks.

  Hands. Yale men knew where to put them. First date: elbow, early in the evening, on the way into a restaurant; between the shoulders, lightly, on the way out. Second date: small of the back. Just a tad possessive, just a tad suggestive, with an I-know-which-way-to-take-us quality that was always encouraging, even when you had an inkling it was insincere. Third date: waist, or hand. Neck. Neck when they kissed you, fingers meeting on your nape, under your hair, thumbs in front of your ears. Eventually: hip, thigh. That was nice. It wasn’t supposed to happen too early, and it was supposed to happen in conversation, maybe when they leaned toward you to deliver a punch line or point, so that it wasn’t too raw, too frank. The ones who barely touched me at all on the first date—holding a door with no need to put a hand on me to usher me through it—reminded me of Poppa, and I liked them for it, but not if it lasted too long.

  Come to think of it, when Poppa held a door for Mother and me, we’d both let Mother go through first, then I’d go through, and he’d touch me. He always touched me when I went through a door.