Lillian on Life

by Alison Jean Lester

  Going to bed with Alec was my first experience of silver-backed hairbrushes, and of monogrammed sheets, and I brought Mother’s Missouri demons into bed with us. I knew I was an impostor, as she would have. After seven years in Europe, after Le Cordon Bleu and John, I knew how to order food, but Alec ordered for me. I knew that eventually he’d recognize that he did so not out of chivalry but because he was ordering what he wanted me to want.

  One of the things he seemed to love about me was that I drove that little old Jag around the city. I’d brought it over from Paris on the ferry when I moved. “Here’s my speed queen,” he’d say loudly to his friends when I’d show up at a restaurant desperate to get my hair in place before reaching the table. Everyone would look. But I only drove that car because Willis gave it to me. That car said more about Willis than it did about me.

  On the morning I began to wonder if I was pregnant, I was sitting in the tea shop up the road from my apartment. It was a Sunday morning. I had the Times—weighty and full of the promise of knowledge and wonder and regret—on the chair next to me. The waitress brought me my scrambled egg, fried tomato and mushrooms, two pieces of toast, and butter and jam in tiny brown ceramic bowls. There was hardly any jam at all. I should have asked her for more right then, but I let her go, and I ate my eggs, pushing them onto my fork with a piece of toast very thinly covered with raspberry preserves. When I called the waitress over to show her my empty jam bowl and ask for more, my tea was getting cold, but I didn’t ask for another pot. She came back with the little jam bowl overflowing. Now I had much too much. Suddenly it was too difficult. Tears stung my eyes but I smiled and thanked her.

  If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s jam an inch thick, the way George Junior spreads it. I put some of the jam on my second and last piece of toast and ate it. Raspberry jam is so delicious, especially when its tang is set off by good fresh butter. I had some of both left. Before I knew it I had taken the teaspoon from my saucer, had used it to get the remainder of the butter and the large dollop of jam out of their bowls, and had put all of it into my mouth. It was heaven. It made me want to cry again. I felt hot and prickly. I felt like I had a need no amount of jam and butter could ever satisfy. I went through the motions of reading the paper.

  The following evening I left the office without my handbag. Two days later I walked out of a tea shop without paying. When I was with Alec, I just let him take care of all our arrangements as usual, and listened more than I talked, which wasn’t too strange. On the next weekend I left my handbag in a gallery. Things kept falling off me, even more than usual.

  My body talked to my brain and I understood what was happening. I admitted to myself that I was pregnant as I walked through Regent’s Park to meet a visiting friend from Paris at her hotel. I can only approximate the way this felt by describing a dove whose foot is tied to a stone by an elastic thread. The beautiful dove began to fly inside me; I felt its good soft breast against my heart, lifting my chest, lightening my ribs. The cold stone began to sink. The thread stretched and reached its full extension. Joy battled dread. I could be a mother. Alec wasn’t kind enough to be the father. He’d be dismissive. He would never massage our child’s feet. He’d mock my instincts. He’d make fun of my strengths as well as my weaknesses. And no matter what he decided on, for my dinner or my wardrobe, I’d still be an impostor.

  I had to cut the dove free, leaving only the stone, which couldn’t be dislodged. By the time I reached the hotel I knew I’d terminate.

  I hate that something so physically beautiful as a pregnancy can turn out to be so emotionally ugly. On top of it all, abortion is such a disgusting word. It sounds exactly like the flushing of a toilet. Is there any word, even flush, that sounds more so? Disgusted, alone, resolved, I stepped out of the park to cross the road and have tea in an overstuffed silk chair across from my smiling friend.

  How effectively an abortion ends a relationship. If it had been love, there would have been no abortion. Even if it meant a baby soon after the wedding. If the wedding is dazzling enough, loving enough, elegant enough, if everyone’s smiling and beautiful, even if it rains, and no corners are cut, the guests will forgive you anything.

  Alec was sitting in his armchair reading his Financial Times when I told him. It was a Sunday morning, a week after my decision. The sun was still quite low, knifing through the window to point out the bowl of roses on the table by Alec’s elbow. Always a bowl of roses. I bet putting roses in bowls was first done by peasants. Peasants didn’t own vases. When they couldn’t jam them in a jug because it was full of milk or ale, they’d use bowls. I bet. But a bowl of roses became classy. I put bowls of flowers in my apartment a lot too, but never roses, not after that day. Peonies, usually.

  “I thought you might be,” Alec said, turning a page. “What are you going to do?”

  I had imagined he might ask what we were going to do, or what I would like to do. Then I would be able to say I’d made a decision, and feel strong but also appreciative. The fact of that “you,” the fact that he already insisted the decision was mine alone, took my breath away. He turned another page.

  “I’ll set you up somewhere,” he said. Maybe he thought this was what my silence was intended to drag out of him.

  “Oh, Alec,” I said, standing up, finally crying, finally being honest with him. “You have such a horrible personality.”

  On the Way to Go

  That night I had dinner with my friend Nigel. Where Alec was an oak, Nigel was a weed. His eyes were limpid, his metaphors dripping with feeling. His hands were long and gentle. I could relax with Nigel.

  “So he’s an ox,” he said over the cod. “But I knew that already, at the beginning.”

  “And you didn’t say anything, you dog.”

  “Men like me don’t get in the way of men like him. Words don’t work.”

  “What works?”

  “Oxen need to be penned. Otherwise they run amok. Trample villages.”

  “Well,” I said, “this one’s populated mine.”

  “Yes,” he said, and he touched my arm with those long gentle fingers.

  “Come with me,” I blurted.

  “Of course,” he said, completely matter-of-factly, forking up some boiled potato.

  Waking up from the anesthetic was one of my life’s worst moments. I was so, so cold, but my forearm was warm because of Nigel’s hand on it. He was sitting by the bed, reading a book. I watched him for a while, waiting for better control of my groggy eyes before letting him know I was conscious.

  Gay men love me. There have been times when I’m sure one wished he were me. Something about my neck and my dramatic hair. But also because I’ve had to suspend judgment for so long. The culture shock of Europe knocked the ability to judge other people’s behavior right out of me. Nobody came from where I came from or felt what I felt, so I adapted. Gay men loved how unconventionally I lived, I think. But I wanted to get married and have children. That had been the plan. Lovers and wine, cigarettes and skinny black clothes—those were the detritus on the rings circling the planet of my dreams. I was in orbit and I couldn’t find my way across the void.

  I still am. I still can’t. Gay men take the edge off, though. They notice when I change my hairstyle, and help me move furniture, give me tours of their window boxes and invite me for Thanksgiving when there’s no family in town. They save me from the cold.

  When I die, if I can’t have six former lovers as my pallbearers, I want six strapping gay men instead. Some will be stoically clenching their teeth and making their jaw muscles dance; some will be singing lustily with tears streaming down their cheeks.

  On Not Loving the Help

  I need a haircut. I had my hair washed and styled before Michael arrived, but I’m crazy if I think that will keep it under control. I’m lucky that I can brush it off my face and it will stay there, though. It doesn’t flop around now that it’s white, and s
tiffer. But it’s not neat. Everyone else in the family’s was. All our hair went prematurely gray, and mine went white even before George Junior’s. But his got really thin, so I didn’t complain. Poppa’s was white on his pink scalp. Mother had that blue rinse that looks pale lavender. She continued to wear her bold red dresses as if her hair were white, which I saw as a mistake.

  One summer George Junior and I coordinated a visit back to Columbia so that we could see each other. It must have been sometime in the late seventies, since Zoë was about ten, which would make me forty-two. I wanted to see her. George Junior had also got Mother to invite Mary over so we could see her again. Or maybe that was for Zoë’s sake. I had just returned to New York from a board meeting in Munich. I’d been up all night drafting the minutes before flying down, so after a family lunch—some sort of Wonder Bread casserole; it was eternally 1955 in Mother’s kitchen—I went upstairs to lie down, as my parents did. I knew Mary was due in the early afternoon. I thought I’d just close my eyes for fifteen minutes or so. I never do this. Over an hour later I woke up snoring. Not the way Poppa snored. He was like an outboard motor with gallons and gallons of gas to run on. I snore in starts, like a startled pig.

  I didn’t know where I was at first, or what the time could possibly be. When I began to recognize my old room, the silly pale blue curtains that never fully opened, I fleetingly wondered when Mary would be coming to get me for breakfast. I lifted my head and saw my adult body. I saw my black blouse and remembered putting it on for the flight, remembered Ted unbuttoning it in Germany a few days before, remembered not having much time to pack, remembered putting in a gift for Zoë, remembered Zoë, remembered Mary. My heart skipped a beat. I swung my legs off the bed and walked through several yards of mental fog to the bathroom.

  The facecloth was dusty. It had obviously been hanging a long time on the towel rack. That was how Mother felt a bathroom should look, whether or not there were visitors. It’s true: A bathroom without towels on the racks looks abandoned. Towels and facecloths are good. But this facecloth clearly hadn’t been put out expressly for me. I used a corner of it to freshen my face. I combed my hair. I went down the light blue stairs to see if Mary had arrived.

  I heard her before I reached the bottom of the stairs. She was speaking slowly, and her voice was a little rough, but it was Mary. “Yeah, Russell’s doin’ fine, I thank yeh,” she was saying, and I pictured coming around the corner and throwing my arms around her. When I reached the bottom of the stairs and looked into the living room on my left, I saw that I couldn’t fulfill this fantasy. Mary was sitting on the big footstool of the armchair by the grand piano, with the front windows behind her and a side table moved next to her for her coffee cup. George Junior was crouched on one knee in front of her, looking up into her face with an expression I couldn’t identify as closer to awe or closer to begging for forgiveness. Mary wasn’t looking at him, but had her face tipped up a little proudly. Mother had told us she was almost blind, so she was just listening, not looking. She wasn’t offering much. We had invited her and she had come. She was answering George Junior’s questions, that was all. Judy and Zoë were watching from over by the fireplace. “Russ’s got three grandkiddies now,” she was saying.

  “So that means you have how many great-grandchildren?” asked George Junior.

  “I have eleven,” she said.

  “Wow!” I said from the stairs. I couldn’t help it. Everyone turned my way, except Mary. She just waited. I wanted her to say, “Come here, missy,” but she didn’t. George Junior got to his feet, kind of reluctantly I thought, giving me the space to hurry over and bend down and kiss her. She smelled of talcum powder and hair oil and warm polyester. Her hairline scratched my face and I realized she was wearing a wig. I wondered if her hair was white too, underneath. If she could have seen me clearly, would she have preferred a black wig over my white hair? I sat at her feet.

  “You sure love the floor, you two.” We laughed. “I don’t remember you ever sitting on the floor as children. You was always sitting up straight and proud as can be at that fancy old dining table.”

  George Junior said, “Mother and Dad are upstairs asleep now, aren’t they, Mary? So we can do what we want.”

  Mary wheezed a bit at this, in her way. She’d never look at you when she laughed, not in the eye. That would have been a shared moment I suppose. She stayed above us, God bless her. And now her eyes were milky and upturned.

  “How much can you see, Mary?” I asked.

  “I can see Heaven, child,” she said regally.

  “Wow,” said Zoë. Mary nodded as if this were the correct response.

  “One thing I’m gonna do when I get there? I’m gonna throw a ball for old Sparky up there, throw it far, toward the Pearly Gates, and watch Sparky run too fast and slow down too late and crash into them gates in his joy.”

  “Do you have a dog now, Mary?” George Junior asked, laughing.

  “No, sir,” she said. “Dogs are a terrible nuisance. Nasty too.”

  “But Sparky was a dog,” protested Zoë.

  “That Sparky was no dog,” Mary replied to the air. “That there was a clown in a dog suit. Crying shame, that was. Crying shame.”

  I used to come home from middle school, when George Junior was already gone, and I’d throw the ball down the hall next to the kitchen. Mother was often out, and Mary’d be in the kitchen saying “Ouchie!” every time Sparky hit the wall. In his joy Sparky used to run after the paperboy on his bicycle. The paperboy panicked each time, and one day when Sparky got too close he kicked him as hard as he could. Sparky died a few days later. One day he seemed fine, still joyful. Then he convulsed and died.

  Once Sparky was gone, I’d come home and sit in the kitchen talking to Mary, or if Mother was there I’d talk to Mother and send my thoughts to Mary, who’d keep chopping quietly and didn’t seem to care one way or another. Then one day, at the beginning of high school, there was no one chopping in the kitchen.

  “Where’s Mary?”

  “We don’t need her anymore, honey, so she’s working for the Tremains.”

  “I need her!”

  Mother turned from the sink. She was washing perfect tomatoes. Her tomatoes always grew perfectly. “What do you need her for?”

  That was hard to answer.

  Mother turned back to the sink. “You see? You’re a young woman. Chop your mother some onions.”

  I needed Mary’s hugs. Mother would put her arms around me at her cocktail parties and then slap me on the hip so that everyone could hear. It made my eyes sting. I’d always say, “Ow, Mother,” and she’d say, “Aw, honey, it’s just a love pat.” I wasn’t concerned whether Mary loved me or not. It was enough that she didn’t criticize my looks or my friends. What concerned me was that I loved her. I could tell her what I wanted to tell her, and it would stay with her, just as I told it, and not become something else. Mary kept secrets. Or maybe she just forgot what I said, but it felt like she kept secrets, which was good enough. But I was sure, sitting there on the floor in front of her under my white hair, that she didn’t think about seeing me in Heaven. So I asked.

  “Think I’ll get to Heaven, Mary?”

  “No, child,” she said. “You’re too full of mischief.”

  “Ha!” I said, delighted. “How do you know?”

  “Who knows but me?”

  We were all smiling, and didn’t talk for a while. Zoë fidgeted.

  “More coffee, Mary?” asked Judy, who understood that neither George Junior nor I would initiate a parting. Mary clearly hadn’t touched the cup on the side table.

  “No, I thank yeh. There’s Russell anyway.”

  The doorbell rang. Only she had heard his footsteps on the walk.

  George Junior stepped forward and offered his hand to help her up but she didn’t see it. “Lots of things to do before Heaven,” he said, putting his hand un
der hers to make the offer clear.

  “Couple three,” she agreed.

  Zoë giggled at the expression, and tried it out. “Couple three.”

  “At least,” said Mary, heaving to her swollen feet.

  Judy and Zoë stayed where they were while Mary accepted kisses from George Junior and me. Russell, such a big man now, leaned forward and helped his mother down the stairs and along the path to the car. George Junior and I stood side by side, white-haired, almost the same height, and watched them go. We turned toward each other to return to the living room and he put an arm around me, so of course I started to cry. I should never have been left alone with Mary as a child. She knew me, and I’d never see her again. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all is just so much rubbish sometimes.

  On White

  Why did I buy these paper napkins? Tartan? Things so often look better in the shop than in your home, where there are so many other things to compete with. I wish everything in my apartment were white, actually, except maybe the geraniums on the windowsills and the fruit on the dining table. A white porcelain soup tureen, even if you never use it, even if it sits for decades on the sideboard, can make you feel clean and calm. Imagine opening it to reveal red pepper soup. Red berry tea in delicate white cups on a glass table touched with sunlight. An ostrich egg. I used to have one, don’t know where it is now, but I could put my hand on its excellent cool shape and feel a funny connection.