Lillian on Life

by Alison Jean Lester

  Ted taught me the sweet tension of having a constant sexual connection, work or no work. Even if he was thinking about work when we were alone, or needed to talk about work, he was touching me somehow. It helped him. It helped me. But that was a few decades after Corky came crashing toward me through the Wisconsin woods. Such a funny thing. She married that boy. They got older and he studied architecture and grew a mustache and needed thick glasses. Turned out he was a very fine sculptor, in bronze. Small, heavy bulls. Roaring lionesses. It’s no surprise Corky treats each day as another opportunity to run around in shoeless wonderment.

  On “Us”

  Maybe I would have had sex with Dave after college back in Columbia, but the first time he hugged me, he squeezed me so hard I passed wind. I’ve had a lifelong dread of being the first one to fart in a relationship. The fact that Dave went on to propose marriage less than a month later should have put paid to that, but it didn’t. George Junior doesn’t realize how lucky he is sometimes. Judy thinks gas is hilarious. It annoys him, but he should be glad.

  Dave said, “Oh no! I popped you!” and took responsibility for the embarrassing sound I made. Dave was impeccable. He was like the men in early Richard Avedon fashion shoots—as elegant and happy and delicious stepping out of a go-go bar as out of an embassy function.

  “No, you didn’t,” I said, my face burning, and took his arm and pulled him along the dark sidewalk toward his car, in case there was a smell. “One day I will,” he said quietly, and I laughed because of course I pretended to think he was still talking about me as a windbag when I could tell from his voice that he was speaking sexually.

  When he kissed me at the door to my parents’ house he breathed in through his nose like you would over a warm pie fresh from the oven, and then he sighed. “I want to meet your parents,” he said.

  “Now?” I asked.

  “No,” he said evenly.

  “When?”

  “When you also want me to,” was his answer. I loved this about Dave. He was so fun and easygoing, and then suddenly he’d fix you with an honest stare and say things as straight as they could be said.

  My parents wanted me to meet men who wanted to meet them. This was the whole point of all my activities, as far as I could tell. It had been very slim pickings until now, though, and it had taken a Vassar connection to bring David Carter Allen into my life. He was the older brother of a friend of a girl from college, and was at law school in New Haven. He’d come to St. Louis for the summer to intern at Hawk & Mattingly, and had been told to look me up.

  It was a two-hour drive to Columbia on a good day, but having met me once he made the trip often. He even had to borrow a car each time. There were pretty girls in St. Louis. Career girls too. Every time I knew he was already on the road to come and see me, I had to talk to myself all over again about how it could be that he kept making the trip. The answer was problematic. During our first lunch and walk around the university quadrangle I asked him why he’d taken an internship in Missouri rather than New York or Washington. “I’ve been imagining a simpler life for myself, so I thought I’d come and see what that might be,” he said. I remember nodding, looking at the ground, because St. Louis didn’t seem simple at all to me. Crossing all that traffic always got me hot and bothered. But what did I know? And then he started visiting, making the drive on a Sunday, or even a Friday afternoon, and I started thinking that I might be right: Maybe St. Louis wasn’t really that simple. Maybe Dave had decided he had to come all the way to Columbia for life to be as quiet as he thought he liked. Every time he was on his way to visit I thought about how he might want me to be cute and compliant, and I thought about how I would rather be interesting and tantalizing, and I didn’t know what to do. I knew he was charming, though, and I knew he was handsome, and healthy, so I waited for him to arrive and hoped I could be cute when I was listening to him and interesting when I was doing the talking.

  Mother took against him immediately when he came to dinner a few weekends after the fart. It seemed to be because he wasn’t one of “us.” But if she was so devoted to “us,” why was she always insisting on cosmetic improvements? We were constantly upgrading. I imagined that she would be happy to think a well-bred young man like Dave would want an alliance, but after he had had dinner with us and left for the long drive back to the city, Mother started slamming things around in the kitchen. I picked up the cocktail glasses from the living room but hesitated to join her. Poppa was tidying the bar.

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered to him.

  He leaned sideways to whisper back, “I think next time he might consider calling her Ma’am.”

  Young men in Missouri were brought up to address their elders as “Ma’am” and “Sir” until invited to do otherwise. They’d expected the same from Dave, who had called them Vivian and George, as he’d been brought up to do in Connecticut. If we got married, he would be invited to call my parents Mother and Dad. Their first names were out of bounds for life, in fact. Dave hadn’t thought to ask permission. I hadn’t thought to explain to him. It was all new to us. We were so young.

  Mother seemed more relaxed the next morning when I came down for breakfast. I stared blindly into the fridge, hoping she’d talk first.

  “Well,” she said, putting her cup on the table and sliding onto the bench of the nook, “Dave seems like he’s going places.”

  “I’m sure he is,” I said, and smiled, ignoring her tone. “He’s also very fun, and kind. And he seems to really like Columbia.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, and I pulled out an orange. I stuck my thumbnail into it to start peeling, spraying myself in the eye with stinging skin juice. She said, “It would be kind of him to marry you.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said, blinking from the acid in the juice, and in her voice.

  She made me wait while she sipped her Sanka. “No, actually, it would be unkind of him to marry you.”

  Where was Poppa?

  “What are you trying to say to me, Mother?” I asked, feeling a prickly blossom of tears in my throat. I still had my thumb in the orange.

  “I’m trying to say, Lillian, that you will feel like a fish out of water among his people.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they are just as warm as he is,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said, getting ready to take another sip. “Just don’t come crying to me if he’s cooled off a bit today after meeting us last night.”

  When we’re young, we’re unfit to judge whether our parents know what they’re talking about. Sometimes we want them to be right, sometimes we want them to be dead wrong, but we can’t tell which they are actually being. If we could figure out which instinct guided them, the terrain would be much easier to navigate. I couldn’t tell if Mother was speaking from the instinct to protect me, or the instinct to protect herself. It was gruesome.

  In any case, Dave hadn’t cooled off at all. We went out to visit the Budweiser Clydesdales. Driving over, we had the windows down because the day was so warm and muggy. Dave had to shout to ask me how I thought dinner with my parents had gone. He was smiling and his normally neat and gleaming hair was flapping crazily every which way. I couldn’t bring Mother’s cutting comments into that sweet car. I squeezed his hand and smiled back. I didn’t mind lying, but I didn’t want to have to do it at high volume. He took my smile as an answer and went back to concentrating on the road.

  We joined a tour. Walking from the ticket office toward the beautiful old stables with my hand in Dave’s, lagging a bit behind the group, I experienced a wonderful shiver of anticipation, like the ones you get on the nights before Christmas when you step out of your house or out of a warm car and the full, sparkling force of the season hits you. I could marry a handsome northern lawyer, I was thinking. An enthusiastic and handsome northern lawyer. The shiver went up my trunk and into the roots of my hair. I squeezed Dave’s hand again, really hard, to
stop my scalp from popping off the top of my head. He squeezed back, and leaned over to steal a kiss, and we walked from the sun into the thick darkness of the stable.

  We reassembled as a group to listen to the guide. As my eyes adjusted to the low light and my nose started to relax after the initial shock of straw, piss, leather and ripe maleness, the guide opened the half door of a stable to our right, motioned us to move back a bit and led a horse out. Dave pulled me around the side of the group to get closer. Clydesdales were originally bred in Scotland. That’s all I can remember from the guide’s spiel. That’s all I remembered even on the day we went, because once the horse stood before us I felt like a child. We only came to his shoulder. The guide, who was quite short, invited volunteers to come forward and stand by the animal to let us all feel the shift in perspective. Dave stepped forward first, looking so pleased, and my sense of childishness intensified. All I wanted was to get back out into the sun and feel tall again. The guide made it possible for us all to touch the patient Clydesdale if we wished, one by one, and of course I got in line. I’m happy around horses, but when I stood at his head and reached up to place the palm of my hand on his muzzle, the softness between his enormous nostrils suddenly felt deceptive, like it might be quicksand.

  We went to see the hitch, and Dave asked questions about how much the reins weighed when held together at one time, and it was a lot. “Wow,” he said, “you’d have to really prepare yourself for that.”

  “Imagine lifting weights just to be able to control a team of horses,” I said.

  “Preparation is everything,” he said.

  We drove back to Columbia and went to lunch at the soda fountain near my house. On the way there I looked at Dave a lot. I studied his hands. They were grown-up hands. Were they elite hands? I thought so. Were they elitist hands? It had never crossed my mind. Sitting at the counter with our liverwurst sandwiches and root beer floats, like I had so often in high school, I didn’t feel any better. Dave looked happy as a clam, but I felt hokey. The reason the men in Richard Avedon’s fashion photos look so gorgeous in the seedy parts of Paris is that they’re not from there. They’re visiting, or they’re leaving, having visited.

  That was the summer the chance to work in Munich came up. I didn’t know anything about moving yet. I now know, from moving and moving and moving, that the only way to handle being asked to leave a country you love for another you don’t know is to start looking forward immediately. If there’s anything you’ve been meaning to buy, buy it, then pack it, and start imagining it on a new mantel or in a new closet. Start imagining yourself around new landmarks, investigating new supermarkets, tuning your ear to the new language.

  I remember waking up on a Saturday morning that summer, not long after Dave’s proposal, to the sounds of neighborhood lawn mowers. Suddenly I couldn’t bear the idea of more lawn mowers. I didn’t know if I could bring Mother around on Dave, and I didn’t know how much I wanted to. When he proposed, walking hand in hand with me around the quadrangle for the umpteenth time in our courtship, he’d kept it simple. No dinner, no knee, no ring. He took my face in his hands. I loved that; he was the first to do that, and I’ve loved it ever since. But I blushed red hot and told him I didn’t know. I asked for time. I didn’t know if I could handle being in his family but not of his family. I also figured Poppa would have defended him if he’d felt Dave was the one for me, and he hadn’t. Poppa hadn’t said a word.

  The opportunity in Munich was a six-week position. A woman Mother’s age from the Junior League, with whom I often did hospital visits, had an older brother who was in Munich working on a book, and his typist had come home due to a family emergency. He had a deadline, and he needed to finish. Could I type? Fortunately she didn’t ask if I could type fast.

  Six weeks in Germany. So I lay there, frightened of the unknown but maddened by the eternal lawn mowers of central Missouri, and decided that getting away was exactly what I needed. Getting away by marrying someone your parents mistrust isn’t getting away at all. The parental presence is eternal. It’s either benevolent or malevolent. You get to choose.

  Mother never would have agreed to Munich if she hadn’t been so afraid of feeling judged by Dave. She was worried about me, of course, but this time Poppa did step in. He took me with him to the hardware store on an errand one morning and he said to me, “Lillian, you’re going to have to make your mother just a little bit happier with your arrangements in Germany, and then it’ll all be fine.” The writer, Mr. Jessop, had told his sister that I could take over his typist’s room, as she had decided not to come back, but Poppa told me Mother didn’t like that I’d be living alone.

  “But it was okay for the other girl,” I pouted, and he said, “And it’ll be okay for you too. We’re just going to have to tell a little fib.”

  “What kind of fib?”

  “Well, can we not tell Mother that one of your Vassar girls is in Munich as well? And that you’ll be able to stay with her?”

  So I lied to Mother, and I lied to Dave. I told him it would be great for me to get some experience before coming back and talking about marriage, since I didn’t feel I was bringing much to it. “Preparation is everything,” I said.

  He shook his beautiful head. Dave was no dummy. “Anyway,” he said, “the fire has gone out of your kiss.”

  “Has it?” I said. “Was there fire in my kiss?”

  “Not really,” he said, which seemed unkind at the time, but in fact wasn’t. Dave was honest and good. I was in for much, much unkinder partings.

  God, that was so long ago. I remember crying at the airport, and I remember mixed feelings about everyone, everything. But transitions are so unclear.

  I don’t remember the last things I said to Dave, but I remember what I packed. I arrived in Munich in September 1956 with one suit. This one was beige, made of good cotton twill. The jacket had a belt, and the kind of pockets on the hip meant for slipping your fingers into when posing for photos. Change and tissues and train tickets fell out of them. All women’s suits had skirts then. The skirts were below the knee, of course. And mine always were, anyway, even in the sixties. My legs are just too long to show that much of them.

  On the Importance of Big Pockets

  In those days you could wear the same outfit to work every day as long as it was presentable. I had to buy a second one, though, because I was cold. I hadn’t realized how quickly fall comes on in that part of Europe. The one I bought in a shop near the office was dark green tweed. The jacket was shorter than the beige one, with heavy buttons that felt so good as I slid them through their buttonholes. They felt dependable, and hugged me securely inside. I had to have the sleeves let down, of course. The pockets on the jacket could accommodate my whole hand, and I discovered they were even big enough for the paperback copy of The Brothers Karamazov I had brought with me from the States. I also bought shoes. Good leather no-nonsense German lace-up shoes for walking the streets to work and back. I changed into my pumps when I arrived at Mr. Jessop’s office in the morning. In the pumps I was six feet tall, and I loved it. I’ve never minded getting attention for my height, except from Mother. “For God’s sake, put a necklace around that thing,” she said to me once, as I was about to go out. She was referring to my neck.

  At the end of each day I put the walking shoes on for the trip home and the four-story climb to my room, formerly a maid’s quarters. Once there, I took some marks out of my bag and put them in one pocket, and put The Brothers into the other. Downstairs, a few doors along, was a small restaurant. I would order, then open the book. I felt small again in the evenings, and horribly self-conscious. I didn’t stand out for my height in the evenings, but for my foreignness.

  I suppose a few words of the unbelievably complicated novel went down with my schnitzel, but I can’t say I’m sure I ever digested a full sentence. It never occurred to me to toss it and get a book that suited me better. I was supposed to have r
ead it in college, and I was still trying. It was important to me to finish it. I will one day.

  I would have gone insane if Mr. Jessop’s office hadn’t been in the bureau where he had formerly worked as a journalist. He was all work, and the monotony would have killed me. Being in the bureau gave me the chance to interact with the interesting people working around us. One of the girls who typed for the journalists, Sofia, invited me to a dinner party. Very informal, she said, but still, I had nothing to wear, only suits. I had no choice but to go back to the only shop I knew. Whatever I bought would require alterations, and I didn’t have the time to look around in other shops in town. I’d seen other places on my weekend walks, but I couldn’t remember where they were. I always meant to note them down when I got home, but I never did. And beyond not being able to imagine seeking them out, I couldn’t imagine going into them. Every time I thought about entering a place where The Brothers couldn’t protect me, I practically stopped breathing.