by Alison Lurie
Her attic was still, Polly thought, the only really attractive room in the house. The others were comfortable enough, but wholly unaesthetic; there was no vulgarity or pretension in their decoration — only utter lack of taste. In the sitting room forest-green upholstery clashed with olive-green carpeting and sea-green brocade curtains, all of the most durable quality; Early American furniture contended with heirloom Victorian and Danish Modern. The pictures and ornaments had been chosen solely for their symbolic value: family photographs, footstools covered in tapestry roses by Polly’s mother, ashtrays and a magazine rack made by her half brother in school, and an embarrassing sub-Degas pastel of a ballet dancer that had won her a prize in seventh grade. Even worse were the souvenirs of Bea and Bob’s vacations: tourist-shop watercolors of Provincetown and Paris, a gilt papier-mâché tray from Rome, a Royal Wedding plate from London, and a huge hideous prickly-pear cactus from New Mexico. (When she was eleven Polly, having heard that alcohol was a sure if slow poison, had tried to kill this monstrous plant by pouring sherry into its pot, and the following month gin. The cleaning lady had been accused of tippling, but the cactus had thrived, and continued even now to thrive.)
As Polly used to complain rudely and hopelessly when she was a teenager, the house didn’t have to look this way. It was large, well designed in the style of the 1920s, and built to last. An English professor just around the corner on Crossman Terrace whose children Polly had gone to school with had an almost identical house; but it was beautiful inside as well as comfortable, full of elegant furniture and pictures and leafy green plants arranged with thought and care.
But it wasn’t only for aesthetic reasons that Polly always felt uncomfortable in Rochester. The house reminded her, still, of what her life there had been like. Walking into it was like walking into a thin fog, a damp miasma of ancient anger and depression.
The move to Rochester had been great for her mother, she saw that now; it was what Bea had always wanted, a stable marriage to a reliable man who had progressed steadily if not brilliantly from physics graduate student to full professor. After what she’d been through it must have been great to have a big comfortable house near the park and two sons who were born at respectable intervals and had Bob’s placid temperament and his talent for math and science.
But in this happy family Polly was an outsider. She hated math; she had bad moods and screamed and wept and threw things. She was too old for her new family — ten and thirteen years older than her half-brothers. She didn’t match her mother and Bob and the boys, with their straight hair and neutral light-brown coloring. She didn’t even have the same name as they did; a girl in her class once asked if she was adopted. Often people who came to the house for parties didn’t know who she was. “You must be the baby-sitter,” a woman in a shiny red dress with beads on it said to her once in the kitchen.
Her mother did try to get Polly to baby-sit, but usually she wouldn’t, because her little brothers always ganged up on her as soon as their parents were out of the house, and wouldn’t mind what she said. They were stupid, spoiled little kids, she thought then; now they only seemed totally dull and conventional.
Lorin Jones also had a half brother she didn’t particularly get on with as a child, Polly recalled, feeling a faint echo of her old shiver of identification. Only it was worse for me, she thought: I had two of them.
When Polly was fourteen Bob Milner won a prize for a textbook on physics, and a reporter from the Times-Union came to interview him. Polly was at a friend’s house that afternoon, only two blocks away, but nobody called her to come home and be in the photo of Professor Milner and his family, or even mentioned her in the article. Bob said he was sorry about it afterward, when it was too late. “That’s okay,” Polly told him. “I’m not related to you anyhow.”
Her mother was different: Polly felt related to her, though she couldn’t understand why she liked Bob and the boys so much — didn’t she see how boring they all were? Bea at least wasn’t boring; she sometimes made surprisingly shrewd, even witty comments on people and events. But she was hopelessly unliberated and unambitious. She was still grateful to Bob Milner for marrying her and taking her to a dreary city like Rochester; she still couldn’t get over how nice he was compared to most men.
And the infuriating thing was that Bob was nice. He had always tried to do the right thing by Polly, she had to admit that. He paid to send her through college and graduate school; he never favored her half brothers over her when it came to presents or music lessons or trips. Of course, one reason he was so nice was that he’d always had everything his own way at home; Bea saw to that.
For instance, Bob Milner had been allowed to name his sons Albert and Hans after the two physicists he most admired; Bea had no input in the selection, any more than she’d had in the selection of Polly’s name — her father’s grandmother had also been called Paula. Once, when she was in college, Polly had asked her mother if she’d minded having her husbands choose the names of all her children. At first Bea had seemed not to know what Polly was talking about; then she smiled and rested her hands on the old treadle sewing machine at which she was piecing an ill-designed patchwork quilt. “No, it never occurred to me,” she said, shifting the folds of material. “But I don’t think names are all that important, do you?”
“I think they’re very, very important,” Polly had replied; at the time she had been thinking of changing her name to Stephanie, for no good reason that she could remember now.
Except maybe that was why I wanted to call my kid Stephen, she thought. I wanted him to be the kind of person I thought a Stephen or a Stephanie was then, probably because of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: independent and artistic and brave.
And what kind of person was Stevie now? Polly sighed. At the moment, she had no idea.
It had been a real dismal scene, as he would have put it, ever since he got to Rochester. She was stunned when she saw him loping along the airport corridor toward her, looking inches taller in his new cowboy boots, and transformed outwardly into a Western preppie. His unruly brown hair (so like her own, and before always about the same length) had been cropped and tamed, and he wore an unfamiliar red ski parka covered with zippers and flaps and strips of Velcro.
“Oh, Stevie, baby!”
“Hi, Mom.”
Not only was his greeting constrained, for the first time in his life Stevie seemed to suffer rather than return Polly’s hug and kiss. On the way to her mother’s house he suffered rather than answered her questions. He hardly looked at her, but kept staring at the backs of Polly’s half brother Alby and Alby’s new wife, Carolee, in the front seat. Maybe her son was abashed by Carolee’s presence, though strangers had never made him shy before: on the way to La Guardia in August he’d had an animated conversation with the cabbie about tornadoes.
At home it was no better. Polly had been looking forward to this moment for months, but she was unable to break through Stevie’s reserve. At her suggestion he sat in the kitchen while she made the walnut cake he had always liked; he cracked nuts for it and licked the bowl, but his conversation was a series of monosyllables and platitudes. “Yeah ... No ... Sure, I’m all right... Dad’s all right... School’s all right... No problem,” he kept saying. Her beloved child, whose lively volubility had always been her joy, had become a polite, inarticulate stranger.
At dinner, though, he fell into the familiar noisy, banal style of conversation at the Milners’, dominated as usual by the men. He and Bob and Bob’s sons compared computer games and sci-fi films; they traded stories of mountain climbing and white-water canoeing, while Bea and Carolee provided a cheering section. Afterward Stevie helped the men wash up and then followed Alby and Hans into the study to play poker. It was always that way in this house: you practically never had a private conversation. She might as well resign herself to it; after all, tomorrow she and Stevie would be leaving for New York, and she’d have him to herself for two days.
She certainly hadn�
�t had him to herself yet, Polly thought the following evening, clearing the table while her mother scraped and rinsed the plates, as they had done in this same kitchen every Thanksgiving since Polly was nine. Bea Milner had a new dishwasher now, and leaves had been added to the dining table as the family grew, but otherwise everything was almost eerily the same as it had been thirty years ago. Presumably, some of Bea’s dreary forget-me-not china must have broken and her flowered linen dishtowels worn out from time to time, but they had been replaced with similar china and towels.
Meanwhile, Bob and his sons and Stevie were watching football on TV, just as they did every year, and Polly and her mother were cleaning up, even though they had also cooked dinner. The men usually pitched in after meals, but on Thanksgiving they were always exempt. Polly had resigned herself to this; it was something else that riled her now: the fact that Alby’s wife, Carolee, was in there watching football with the men.
“I don’t see why Carolee doesn’t have to help us,” she complained, covering a Pyrex dish of cranberry sauce with plastic wrap. “After all, she’s not a guest anymore, she’s part of the family now, isn’t she?”
“Mm, yes,” Bea agreed placidly. She was a small, sturdy, rather pretty woman with tinted and waved light-brown hair and a more lined, less defined version of Polly’s features. Her large round eyes were pale rather than dark, and there was something neat and birdlike about her movements. “But you know, dear, she’s a tremendous football fan. I think she gets just as excited by a game as Alby or Hans, don’t you?”
“I guess so,” Polly agreed; she could hardly do otherwise, when her sister-in-law’s cheerleader shouts could be heard all the way to the kitchen. They were even louder in the dining room when she went back for a load of dessert plates. As she stacked them she thought how apt her roles and Bea’s were. She brought her mother complaints and irritations, like soiled dishes, and Bea, with her mild wash of resignation and explanation, patiently sluiced the mess away. Even though she saw through the process, it still made Polly feel calmer.
“I do really feel Carolee is one of the family now, you know,” her mother said as Polly returned.
“Oh, yeah,” Polly replied; in her opinion Carolee, who was a scientist and a jock, was all too much like a Milner.
“I think she’s going to be good for Alby. Of course, she’s not as brilliant as he is; but she’s an awfully nice girl, don’t you think?” Bea helped herself to a couple of grapes from one of the plates Polly had just brought in; her eating habits were also birdlike.
“She’s nice enough,” Polly agreed. “But she’s not very interesting.”
“Well, maybe not.” Bea sighed as she scoured the sticky dish that had held sweet potatoes. “But I don’t think that really matters so much. You know, Polly, when you’re young you always want people to be interesting. Then later on you find out it’s much more important for them to be serious and decent. I’ve noticed that at work.”
“Oh?” For the last eight years, Bea had been an assistant dean — a glorified secretary, really — in the university summer-school program.
“Whenever we get an application that says a student is ‘interesting,’ and not much else, I always put a little W next to his or her name now. For Watch out.” Bea giggled suddenly. Since she usually didn’t drink, the glass or two of sherry she allowed herself on holidays always made her a little blurry.
“How is your job going, by the way?” Polly asked, realizing that in the clamor of family news Bea had volunteered none of her own.
“Oh, very well. Of course, this is our quiet season, we’re only just getting the catalogue together.”
“So things are all right with you,” Polly said; it was hardly a question, for Bea was chronically contented.
“Oh, yes. I have everything I want.” She hesitated, holding an ugly Corning Ware serving dish under the tap; the warm water, splashing on its edge, sent up a kind of transparent fan. “I’d like for you to be happier, that’s all.”
“I’m fine,” Polly said.
“I worry about you sometimes, you know.”
“Oh?” Polly said, surprised; it was unlike her mother to worry about anything.
“Mm. You see, when I married Bob, I thought it would be the best possible thing for you, to grow up in a pleasant place like Rochester. In a normal family. But I wonder sometimes if maybe after we moved here I didn’t pay you enough attention. I was always thinking about the boys: Alby’s asthma, and the trouble Hans used to have with reading. But you were so sensible, so articulate, so talented; I knew you’d always be all right. At least, I thought you’d always be all right.” She wiped back a stray lock of hair with one wet reddened hand.
“I am all right, really,” Polly assured her. For years she had wanted to hear her mother admit that she might have done something wrong. But now that this was happening it made her embarrassed and uncomfortable, as if the kitchen were tilting and sliding into the cellar.
“You weren’t really unhappy, growing up here, were you?” Bea dropped the dishcloth into the sink and turned to look at her daughter.
“It was okay. It was fine,” Polly lied.
“I was so sorry it didn’t work out for you with Jim. But I expect you’ll find another nice man soon.” Bea put a handful of spoons into the dishwasher, giving Polly a quick little smile that was also a question.
“Mh,” Polly said. No, I’m not going to find a nice man soon, she thought, because there aren’t any “nice men” in New York. What I’m looking for now, probably, is a nice woman.
I might as well tell her the truth, she decided, staring past Bea at the new kitchen wallpaper, which had a clumsy pattern of spice tins in avocado, orange, and brown. (Why would any graphic artist have wanted to design such a drearily hideous wallpaper, or any shop have ordered it?) She’ll be upset, Polly thought, but so what? It was always so hard to get a rise out of her mother; why shouldn’t she be upset for once? “I’m not sure I will,” she said. “Uh, you know my friend Jeanne, that you met in New York last year, the one that’s sharing my apartment now.”
“Mm.” Her mother nibbled absently at the end of a leftover breadstick.
“Well, she’s a lesbian. And I think I might be one, too.”
“Oh, Polly.” Bea dropped her breadstick into the dishwater. “Really?”
“I’m not sure. But I might.”
“Well, dear, if that’s what you want,” Polly’s mother said finally. She wrapped some celery in a piece of plastic. “I mean, your friend Jeanne seemed like a very nice girl.”
“Yes, but she’s not, I mean, we’re not —” Polly stuttered.
But Bea wasn’t listening; she was gazing past her daughter with an odd faraway smile. “You know, when I was in high school, I had this tremendous crush on the captain of the girl’s tennis team.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes.” Bea giggled again; she was certainly tipsy. “She was so tall and athletic; she reminded me of your father, in a way. Well, I suppose I should say he reminded me of her when I met him, because of course that was years later.”
“You mean, are you telling me, you and this girl were lovers?” Polly stared at her mother across a counter of marbled avocado vinyl.
“Oh, no. Well, not exactly, anyhow,” Bea said, smiling and fitting a plate into the dishwasher. “I mean, I positively adored her, but we didn’t do anything, of course. Well, not anything serious, you know.” She giggled.
“I thought you’d be shocked,” Polly said, a little shocked herself.
“No, dear. It’s not like men, after all, is it? With those awful bars they go to, and the dreadful diseases they get. If it was Hans, say, of course I’d be very worried for him. But it’s different for us. There’s a woman in my office now, she and her friend have been together for eighteen years, and they’re the nicest quietest people you’d ever want to meet, except they do have rather an awful Abyssinian.”
“An Abyssinian?” Polly, confused by everything her mot
her had said in the last few minutes, saw a dark-skinned butler — or cook, maybe? — in a turban.
“A cat, you know.” Bea giggled. “But I think really it would be better not to say anything about it to Jim,” she added. “I mean, not until you’re sure. He likes people to be consistent. And if it turns out not to be so after all, he’ll think you don’t know your own mind.”
Polly stared at her mother again; never in her life had she heard her suggest that anything should be kept from Jim. “Okay,” she agreed, wondering if she knew her own mind, or anyone’s.
“And the same for Stevie, don’t you think?” Bea added two cups to the dishwasher.
“I wasn’t planning to say anything to Stevie, not yet,” Polly agreed. “I thought I’d wait until he moves back home.”
“Much better. Well, I think that’s all the plates we can fit in on this load.” Bea poured the detergent dispenser full of grainy pink-and-white powder from a box named Comet, closed the door, and pushed ON.
When Polly, with Stevie behind her, unlocked the door to her apartment on the afternoon of the day after Thanksgiving, she expected to find it as she had left it: empty, cold (she had turned down the thermostat), dark, and untidy. Instead it was full of warmth and light and flowers. An explosion of ice-pink long-stemmed roses crowned the desk; another even larger one of gladioli spread green-and-white moth wings above the coffee table.
She stood dazed; then there were steps in the hall and Jeanne came running in.
“Oh, Polly!” she cried, almost laughing. “The most wonderful thing has happened, Betsy’s left her husband!”
“That’s great,” Polly said, jerking her head to warn Jeanne that her son was there.
“Oh hello, Stevie.” Her friend’s voice dropped an octave and lost volume.
“Hi,” Stevie replied with an equal lack of enthusiasm.
“Well, anyhow.” Jeanne took a breath. “I’ve moved my things into your spare room. I thought I’d stay here tonight and tomorrow, it’s so horribly crowded at Ida’s. People are sleeping all over the floor, and you can simply never get into the bathroom.” She smiled uneasily. “If it’s okay with you, that is.”
