Lillian on Life

by Alison Jean Lester

There were other hands distracting me, early in my second year, when those of us studying early childhood education were placed in nursery schools for experiential training. When I got back to our room at the end of those days, I was the one standing in front of the mirror, playing with my hair, picking the glue out of it, showing off the finger paint under my nails, telling stories of adoration and frustration, but most of all remembering the little hands on me. It felt like all the energy of the world was coming to me through the tiny palms the children would place on my calves to steady themselves or get my attention. I was supposed to put them down at naptime and teach them to calm themselves, but I couldn’t. I’d keep one or another in my arms on some pretense—I couldn’t get a shoe untied, I needed to wipe a runny nose—just to feel them go a little heavier in my arms and see that final instinctive reach toward my neck as I put them down and they allowed sleep to take over. Their hands gave me goose bumps.

  There was one little girl named Joan. She was the tiniest one in the group, with soft dark ringlets that reminded me of me, and a methodical approach to playing that kept her one step behind the other babies. I was standing in the doorway one breezy October day, watching the others play on the little playground and also waiting for Joan to finish lining up all the dollies so they could go to sleep. A few times before, she had just pushed unsteadily past me through the door when she was done, but this time she patted the back of my knee, and when I turned around she had her arms up and her head tipped all the way back, throat exposed and pulsing, the way little children do to signal that they really mean it and they’ll probably make a fuss if you don’t agree. It was as if we’d already been communicating, and she was just taking it up a notch. “Oh, sugar,” I said as I picked her up and sat her on my hip. “You all worn out from putting your babies to bed?” She just looked out at the playground, and seemed contented to stay and look, her body still, not leaning forward and kicking the way some of the children did to make you go somewhere. So I looked too. We stood in the doorway like mother and child, like wife and child looking out from a home, keeping a watchful eye on the rest of the family playing. Her left arm was behind my shoulder, and after a while I felt her little fingers idly exploring the hair at the back of my neck.

  Goose bumps.

  We all had a meeting with the head of the department at the end of that term to discuss the feedback from the teachers we had been assisting, and to receive our next assignment. Her name was Mrs. Wade. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and no makeup at all. She resembled an aging movie actor, Spencer Tracy maybe, in sort of the way Margaret Mead’s face was a practice run for Anthony Hopkins. She had square gray teeth, and bright eyes. She told me she’d received a glowing report and that I was clearly well suited to the purpose of helping children learn and grow. There was a little bit of concern regarding my use of time.

  “You mean I wasn’t efficient?”

  “More that you didn’t check the clock quite often enough,” she said. “Do you recall having to be reminded that it was time for another activity, or lunch, quite a lot?”

  I thought. “Maybe. A few times. But Mrs. Wade,” I said, “the babies! I couldn’t take my eyes off them to look up at the clock; they were just too sweet and interesting. I didn’t want to miss a single thing. If they could ring bells or something when we are supposed to change our activities, then maybe I could be more attentive.”

  Mrs. Wade laughed. “An excellent idea, Lillian. It’s interesting that you refer to them as babies, dear. The youngest would have been two, I’m sure.”

  “Babes in the woods, then,” I said. “Innocents.”

  I saw Mrs. Wade’s eyebrows twitch down at this, but she smiled again. “Fair enough. Anyway! Well done. And on to a kindergarten class now, where the youngest will be five, and most of the children will be six.”

  Suddenly my tongue tingled with a panic I usually reserved for standing up to speak in class. “Can’t I stay at the nursery school?” I blurted.

  “No, dear. You’ve got to do next term in a kindergarten, just like all the others.”

  “How about a couple of hours a week?”

  Mrs. Wade folded her hands on the desk in front of her. “What for?” she asked.

  “For the babies,” I said. “We know each other now. Won’t it, I mean, isn’t it hard for them to adjust to new people all the time?”

  “Hard for the children?”

  “Yes!”

  “It would be difficult if their teacher changed every term, yes, but as it’s only the assistant that changes, and they know it’s going to happen, it seems to be fine. Anyway, Lillian,” she said, unclasping her hands and pulling my file into her lap, “I can’t see a gap in your schedule here that would allow for extra time in a nursery school.”

  I don’t remember what was said after that. I returned to my room with a piece of paper in my hand, giving me the details of my kindergarten assignment, but I couldn’t look at it. I stood and stared out the window. Did six-year-olds hang on to your neck? I didn’t think so. I couldn’t bear it.

  That evening in the library I tried to continue with my reading of Methods for the Study of Personality in Young Children, but all the flavor had gone out of the meal. The next morning, I didn’t get up. I think I went to class once or twice in the next two weeks, but I wasn’t really there. One afternoon Ann came and found me sitting under one of the big trees by the chapel. When she pulled me to my feet and put her arm around my shoulders I realized I was cold. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there. It was hard to think.

  I went home to Columbia and started at the University of Missouri. Just English lit this time.

  I’ll have children of my own, I told myself. I don’t need to take care of other people’s.

  My class schedule didn’t allow me to be home at the same time every day. I had to study after dinner, which worked very well when Mother was watching television in the sunroom and Poppa was reading the evening paper in his chair in the living room. There were times when I would sit down with my books and sigh and run my hands through my hair before starting, and Poppa would get up, come over to where I was sitting, slide off my shoes and massage my feet. He didn’t slide both my shoes off at once. He’d take one off and massage that foot, and the other foot would stay on the floor like a girl on the edge of a dance, waiting to be noticed and chosen. With both thumbs he’d press the ball of my foot, spreading my toes out slowly. He squeezed both sides of the foot from the top, from the ankle and toward him to the toe. He’d always finish by placing the mount of Venus of one hand against the arch of my foot, and curving his other hand over the top of the foot, closing me in, warming my blood, always taking care with every movement.

  Did Mother let him do that for her? I think there was quite a lot Mother didn’t let Poppa do. Poor Poppa. His hands were so strong and sensitive. He didn’t talk when he massaged my feet. He just looked at them.

  The way I saw it, the reason we didn’t really suffer during the Depression was that my father was so handsome. As a silver salesman in Missouri and beyond, he shouldn’t have been able to make a good living. Doors shouldn’t have opened to him, but they did. I’m almost sure Poppa was faithful, but the image of him in the sitting rooms of pretty Missouri housewives, giving and receiving the flattery and pleasure that weren’t common currency at home, was too sweet to discard. After all, it was thanks to them that Mother had the house, the Wedgwood, the bourbon, the cigarettes, the weekly dress money, the silent grand piano. George Junior’s piano. I had piano lessons too, of course. Dance lessons first, though, to go with the ringlets. Mother insisted I was going to be the next little Shirley Temple. Later there was piano, and singing. I had perfect pitch. I’ve lost it by a half step lately, but it’s a perfect half step. So I could play piano, and did, but only when I was sure Mother was upstairs or out and wouldn’t come and stand in the bay of the baby grand and get all mushy about how George Junior u
sed to play whenever she asked him to, even for guests, before he left for California.

  She was right. He was wonderful at the piano. He still is. It’s just that perfect pitch didn’t mean a thing to Mother. There’s nothing as perfect as a talented firstborn son who has gone away.

  When he went to North Carolina for training, near the end of the war, it felt so far away that he might as well have gone to France. I was twelve. I started knitting argyle socks right away, like we all did. Well, sock. I could never just pick it up and get back to work on it in the evenings. The instructions defied me. If I looked away from my knitting to consult them, I was completely lost when I looked back at it. Eventually I finished the sock, but the war was ending, so I wrapped it up and sent it off to him, just in case he needed one replacement sock or something. The letter that came back was mocking. There was no chimney to hang it on, he said, and it wasn’t even Christmas anyway. A woman would have felt something positive, receiving one handmade sock. A sister would. I never sent gifts in half measures after that, ever.

  Professors didn’t like half measures either, I learned. They saw inconsistent work as inconsistent effort, which was never the case. There were just days when I’d sit in the library with the perfect pencil and a notebook with lines ruled just the way I like, and they might as well have been a twig and a stone. Nothing would happen. I’d turn in a stilted, hard-won paragraph or two. Professorial eyes would roll. Professorial lower lips would jut. “Lillian,” they’d say, “what happened? You can do so much better.” They ganged up, too. I was walking through Main Building to get back to my room sometime in the middle of that first winter, bundled up and sniffing to keep my nose from dripping, when I turned a corner into a trio of women: Mrs. Wade; a beige woman I didn’t know holding an armful of files; and Miss Blanding, the college president. “Is that you, Lillian?” Mrs. Wade said. “How funny, because we were just talking about you.”

  “Speak of the devil,” I said, sniffing.

  “Not at all,” said Miss Blanding, taking control in her tailored black wool and bold silver choker. Her Kentucky accent caught me off guard. I’d heard her voice before, but not at such close quarters. I’d been working to minimize my Missouri accent and did pretty well at it until someone from the Midwest or the South stepped into the conversation. “Not the devil at all,” she continued. “Just an intelligent girl trying to make her way in the world, isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t know about intelligent,” I said, fighting the urge to tack “Ma’am” onto the end. “Trying to make her way toward a heat source, anyway.”

  The three of them laughed, and I started to relax, and then Mrs. Wade cleared her throat and said, “We were talking about girls who have a . . . shall we say complicated? . . . relationship with concentration.”

  “Oh,” I said. Mrs. Wade carried on when I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “We’re wondering how to help.” She and the other woman raised their eyebrows to show they were open to suggestions, but Miss Blanding seemed to be assessing me. When I didn’t talk, Miss Blanding said, “Do you exercise?”

  “I do phys ed, like all the girls,” I answered.

  “Exercise does wonders for the mind, you know.”

  I nodded.

  She stepped back to take me in from boots to hat. “Basketball might be your sport,” she concluded.

  “Maybe it is,” I said, twinkling at the eyes, as if I thought Miss Blanding’s idea was brilliant. I made to move around them. “It would probably keep me warm,” I said.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Miss Blanding, sounding as if she felt the meeting had been very successfully concluded, but Mrs. Wade called after me. “Come and see us anytime, Lillian. We’re here to help.”

  I couldn’t bear the idea that I was being talked about. Worried about. Couldn’t bear it. I bought a marker pen and highlighted the hours in my study schedule that I was determined to make sacrosanct. But when I tried to study, my brain literally felt like a damp bathing suit, and I was wringing it and wringing it, but the water was distributed too finely through the fibers to come together into droplets. I couldn’t drench the page with thoughts, only smudge it. I did fine in high school. I did well. College rocked my confidence. Except with men. I’m so glad I went north to college, for that reason alone, even though I had to leave early. At the evening socials organized with Yale, I met young men older than I was, and taller, but more importantly, young men with a more sophisticated charm, men who didn’t squirm in a tweed blazer and who told me I looked beautiful rather than swell.

  Professors were frightening. Men weren’t.

  On Getting to Sex

  Corky has only had sex with one man in her entire life. But she got to sex so much earlier than I did. One moment we were girls in bobby socks finishing up the school year, the next moment we were at camp in Wisconsin and I was walking down the path to the lake and she was crashing toward me through the bushes. She had her sandals in her hands. Her feet must have been sore from running out of the woods, but she didn’t stop to put her sandals on. When she reached me she was grinning, her chest was heaving, her eyes and cheeks were glowing. I fixated on her soft brown curls as she talked. Her hair was extremely soft, like a little child’s, but the rest of her was a locomotive, whistle hooting, steam hissing.

  “You have got to let a fella touch you like that,” she panted as we headed to the lake.

  “Like what?”

  Corky just kept panting.

  “What did he touch?”

  “Everything,” she crowed.

  We walked a little. She knew I’d ask.

  “With what?”

  “With everything!”

  She said it was “glorious.” The path disappeared into the narrow beach. I took off my shoes and drew circles with my toes in the silt at the edge of the water. Corky tucked her skirt into her panties and walked in up to her knees, splashing water onto her face and thighs with both hands. You’d think she’d grown up on a farm, but her father was dean of physical sciences at the University of Missouri.

  Corky was my best friend, but sometimes I felt this was by default. I really wished I were good friends with Mary Cate Myers. She was such an elegant girl, and so nice to everyone. She always did the right thing. I’d watch as she chose a subject for a history paper or answered a question about cosines, and above all when other students talked to her. She was always pleased, or kindly amused, or genuinely concerned. She knew. She arranged her face right. Corky got to sex at the right time for Corky, but too early for me. I wasn’t ready to hear about it. Mary Cate would have gotten to it at the right time for everybody, so no one would have been shocked.

  Mother had been able to see I was anxious as the departure for camp approached. Maybe because I was being such a dodo about it. Mother had never been away to camp, but I kept asking her what it was like. Finally she asked me if there was someone in my class I especially admired for the way she behaved. Of course I said Mary Cate Myers. “Well,” she said, “when you’re unsure of what to do, just behave the way you think that girl would.” So far it had worked a couple of times. I gave new people I met a warm Mary Cate smile, and if it was an adult I shook hands. I didn’t wait for them to probe me; I asked them where they were from first. But with close friends it’s tough. They’re so far under your skin you can’t push them back up to the surface and act like an acquaintance. They look at you funny. So I made circles in the silt.

  It’s so odd to look back on. Sex is so important. In high school and college, it was really important to me not to have it. Now it’s just the opposite.

  About five years ago George Junior called me at eleven at night to tell me his daughter, Zoë, had just told him she was going to spend the night at her new boyfriend’s apartment. She must have been about twenty at the time. He didn’t know what to do.

  “But it’s wonderful!” I told him.


  George Junior’s wife, Judy, was out of town. Zoë’s birthday was coming up, so the next weekend I went out and bought her a pale salmon silk nightgown and a cotton kimono covered in large pastel flowers. When I gave them to her I told her they were for when she went “visiting” and twinkled my eyes at her. There’s a scene in Rear Window where Grace Kelly shows up at Jimmy Stewart’s ridiculous little apartment with a tiny case, and when she pops the clasp she releases a small cloud of whitest silk and a pair of feathered mules. I could imagine Zoë doing this, changing into something coolly attractive.

  Doing it myself took me so long to achieve. People were always interrupting me, taking me by surprise. Women’s underwear in the fifties was like armor. I’m sure that men’s fantasy of removing it was much sexier than the reality. When a woman went into her room to change into bed wear, she left the man to imagine her slipping out of her dress, stockings, panties and bra, and he could see it however he wanted to. He didn’t have to witness the permanent grime on the elastic or struggle with the hooks, which in those days almost always came in a line of three and were designed to stay resolutely put. While he sipped his drink, he could imagine something pale and cupped falling to the ground or being draped on the bed, then she would come out in her beautiful ensemble and he’d look up, and smile, and put down his drink, and come to her.

  Except that so often he didn’t. I’d open the door and he’d be standing right by it and there would be no conversation, no toasts, no ceremony, just whiskey lips and five-o’clock shadow and the cold door frame against my spine. He’d be right there clasping me against him and I could watch the ice cubes melting in my drink, right next to his empty glass. Eventually I learned to take the drink into the bedroom or bathroom with me as I changed. If he even let me change. Some men didn’t.

  I’ll admit something, though. When it did happen that I’d come back out in a negligee and peignoir, hair brushed and perfume renewed, and the man would hand me my drink and tell me what he’d been thinking while I was gone, something usually to do with company politics, I’d feel hurt. He acted as if my going away to slip into something more comfortable was simply a matter of my own preference. You’d think I’d come back into the room in a housedress and friendly old slippers. I never, ever understood how professional concerns could trump a blooming female body in silk. Never understood it. Everyone and everything about our society said the reality was otherwise. I thought career obligations were something men met when there was no flesh available for pressing. Once I had come around to sex and even presented myself on its platter, it was a shock to be turned away. Okay, not turned away. That didn’t happen. But postponed. Once I’d heard the whole political story and the decks were cleared, then the man would notice what he had within reach on the couch. I often had the impression that I could see a man’s eyes change color when they started to focus on the present, and the fact that I was throbbing in the center of it.