Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  “Pecan cream cheese,” Leonard answered, a little nervously. He never knew what Lee would say next. “A specialty of the house.”

  “Is it a big goyishe thing or something?”

  “Shhh!”

  “They’re all goyim here. They don’t know what I’m saying.” Leonard glanced around nervously. “Dad, relax. We’re in New York City. It’s not against the law to say goyim.”

  “Where did you hear that word?”

  “It’s not f-u-c-k or anything,” she said, smiling at his attempt to remain unperturbed. “Grandma used to say goyishe all the time.” Leonard tried to appear as if this was a surprise to him; Lee made no effort to hide her amusement at his behavior. “And I heard it at Dorie Adler’s.”

  “Oh.” Leonard pretended to be absorbed in removing the gluey cream cheese coating from his teeth, following the dictates of good breeding—an impossible task.

  “‘Oh,”’ Lee mimicked. “Okay, I’ll put a help-wanted ad in the paper: Friend Wanted: Only Protestants need apply.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Sure you did!” Lee retorted, but she smiled when she said it, and she had such a generous smile that it softened the censure.

  “You know what’s great about you?” her father demanded.

  “No. What’s great about me?”

  “Your spunk. Men like that.”

  Lee put down her sandwich. “I don’t think so.”

  “Sure they do,” he insisted. “You don’t think there are a lot of boys up at Cornell who want a girl with brains and …” He searched for a word. Lee waited for him to say “beauty” or at least “good looks.” Finally he said: “… gumption. Listen, Lee, the most fashionable, beautiful—and wealthy—women in New York come into the salon. And you know what?”

  “They don’t have gumption.”

  “Right!”

  “But I bet they had dates for their senior proms.”

  “Maybe. But they can’t keep a man’s interest. Their husbands—uh—stray, if you understand me. Because when a man comes home from a day’s work, he doesn’t want a bubble-head. He wants someone he can talk to.” Loud silence: Leonard suddenly slammed on the conversational brakes, realizing that his uncommon honesty had almost brought them careening into the very walls of their home. Before it could last too long, he added: “You’ve got the brains to be someone special. You want to be a doctor? I’ll pay for medical school.” Considering that the worldview espoused in The Feminine Mystique had not yet made an impact on the psyches of male furriers, this was a remarkably decent offer. “A lawyer? A college professor? I’ll be behind you a hundred percent.” Then he patted her hand, and it was not a mere offhand caress; it was a pat replete with heartfelt warmth, the closest gesture to a genuine declaration of love she would receive from him in her life. “Lee, sweetheart, come on. You’ll get your MRS degree too. Iron those wrinkles out of your forehead. Stop worrying. I guarantee it: You’ll hook some guy.”

  Then Leonard waved to Olive, their waitress, a sourpuss he’d been trying to charm for a decade, and told her to bring his almost straight-A daughter who would be going to Cornell—that’s one of the Ivy League colleges, Olive—next September a slice of Miss Pansy’s famous Nesselrode pie.

  The only guy Lee got that year was her prom date, Nestor “Baby” Langley, who weighed two hundred ninety-seven pounds. If his ironic moniker makes it sound as if Baby was a future tackle for the San Francisco 49ers, then it is doubly misleading. Baby got his nickname simply because he called everyone “Baby,” believing it made him appear cosmopolitan. An amiable boy whose reputation for wit was based on his total recall of the epigrams of Oscar Wilde, he was as soft as the Ring Dings he was unable to resist. Baby, the editor in chief and movie critic of the Beacon, was the only boy in Lee’s crowd who still could not find a prom date the week after Memorial Day—not even among the pathetically eager ninth graders in the fast crowd at Shorehaven Junior High. At the urging of a half score of their journalistic colleagues (“How can you not go to your senior prom? Even if it’s with a friend. It’s better with a friend, because you know how superficial high school relationships are and friendships last forever”), and after Dorie Adler drove over to Baby’s house and stood beside him, holding his perspiring hand, as he phoned Lee and formally invited her, Lee and Baby became, ad hoc, an item.

  Sylvia was elated. Not about Baby, of course (although Leonard was not displeased, somehow aware that Baby’s father, Thaddeus Langley, was a member of Rolling Hills, the golf club to which Foster Taylor belonged). Sylvia was enraptured at the thought of shopping for a gown. “You need something very unique,” Sylvia declared as she sat on the edge of Lee’s bed.

  “Not ‘very unique.’ ‘Unique’ means one of a kind.” But Sylvia had become distracted. She scanned the room—now white and yellow, with a daisy-chain stencil painted high on the walls and around the edges of the oak floor. Hmm, she seemed to be saying to herself. Apparently, she had forgotten that she’d redecorated it a year earlier. Placing a Bougainvillea Pink-enameled index fingertip on her one-shade-darker Appassionata Pink lower lip, Sylvia appeared lost in thought—although not so lost that Lee could not see where she was headed.

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “We’re not doing my room now. We’re doing me.”

  Sylvia offered an apologetic smile and even touched her daughter’s cheek for an instant. “I made a list of places to look for prom dresses.”

  “Mom, I just want a plain, peasant-style—”

  “Why? Are you a peasant?”

  “We’re not exactly descended from the Hapsburgs.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They live on Driftwood Drive. He’s an accountant.”

  “I don’t think we know any Hapsburgs.”

  “I was just kidding. They were an aristocratic family.”

  “Well, your father is an aristocrat in the fur industry.” Lee knew what was coming next. “How many furriers got mentioned in last August’s Vogue and Bazaar?” Sylvia demanded. “We all have to keep up a fashion image … me, Daddy, Robin and you.”

  “The editors of Vogue aren’t covering the Shorehaven High School prom. It’s safe for me to wear a peasant dress.”

  “Do you want to wear work boots and carry a sack of potatoes out onto the dance floor?” Sylvia, no fool, quickly saw that the notion of work boots was not without its appeal, so she talked fast. “We won’t look on the Island, because then you’ll see yourself coming and going. But you want something classic. You’re not Henri Bendel. I crossed that off my list. Too severe for you. You’re Bonwit’s. Saks. Bergdorf’s too, but their stuff is so matronly this year you could throw up. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not talking about anything sweetie-pie pastelly for you. You’ve got high coloring.”

  “I’m sallow.” Lee didn’t close her eyes, because she knew what she’d see in her mind’s eye: Jazz Taylor at his prom, twirling a wisp of a girl, an ethereal violet-eyed gamin who had waist-length blonde hair, a letter of acceptance to Radcliffe, and a complexion somewhere between peaches-and-cream and porcelain.

  “You are not sallow. You’ve got what they call a slight Oriental undertone to your skin—and you’re the one who won’t wear foundation, or even a little dab of rouge, so what do you expect?” It was not lack of rouge that made Lee a plain Jane, although this was one of the rare occasions when her mother was right: a little strategically-placed color would not have hurt. It was Lee’s lack of sexual confidence that made her appear drab. Put her in front of an eligible boy, and the spark that fired her during a tennis game or in Honors English class flickered and died. She became mousy. But to defend herself against her mother’s onslaughts, she had espoused a staunch No Makeup position. In her mind, the equation read: makeup = my mother = falseness. Too bad, because she had one of those fine, strong faces that cause readers of women’s magazines to gush “Unbelievable!” when they compare a ravishing “after” photo to the ungainly, large-feat
ured “before.” It was not until two days before law school, when getting her hair cut at Bloomingdale’s, she allowed the hairdresser—whose uncle was a judge in Minnesota and who claimed to have memorized every episode of Perry Mason—to talk her into an eyebrow tweezing, a facial, and a consultation with Miss Judi, who specialized in the Natural Look, that Lee began to allow herself to see that she was a damned good-looking dame.

  “We have our work cut out for us,” Sylvia said. “Can I safely assume Baby is going to wear black tie?”

  “What else would he wear?”

  “I don’t know. Something beatnik.”

  “He’s not a beatnik. No one’s a beatnik anymore.”

  “What do you call your friend Dorie, with those black tights?”

  “I call her my best friend. And Baby is wearing black tie.” Lee leaned back. Her white wicker headboard whined in protest. The truth was Baby could not find a tuxedo to fit him anywhere on Long Island. He and Dorie finally made a desperate, secret trip to a king-size store in southwest Brooklyn, but all that the salesman at Big Barry’s Formal Wear+Apparel could offer was an oxford-gray morning suit or a baby-blue tux that he swore had once been rented by Neil Sedaka’s piano player.

  Lee and Sylvia’s shopping forays, while more upscale than Big Barry’s, were certainly a lot less fun. Although mother and daughter, they were so different that to differentiate between them was not like comparing apples and oranges; it was comparing apples and catchers’ mitts. In a dressing room in Bergdorf’s (Bonwit’s and Saks having failed them), Lee looked in the mirror and watched her mother watching her model in a navy-blue strapless silk sheath that brought the saleslady and Sylvia to the brink of ecstasy.

  “Is it fabulous or fabulous?” the saleslady called from outside the cubicle. Sylvia withheld comment. She was staring at Lee’s midsection. By any objective standard, it was not a ballooning midsection. Lee was in prime shape, it being tennis season, and her all-over muscle tone was quite fine. Still, there was a slight natural convexity to her tummy. “Mrs. White?” the saleslady called out again; her voice was tense, as if Sylvia’s answer could hurt her. Lee fought down rage as her mother, ignoring the saleslady (and Lee as well), rested her tight, recently-operated-upon chin on the back of her hand so she could concentrate on studying Lee’s flawed middle.

  Stop it! Lee wanted to shriek. Stop it! Such noise as she would make had never been heard in Bergdorf Goodman since they drilled into solid bedrock to lay the foundation! Leave me the hell alone, you scrawny bitch! I hate this fucking dress!

  But Lee also knew she was a disappointment to her mother. What more did the woman want, after all, than to have a pleasant mother-daughter day and buy her a gown that cost five times as much as anything her friends would be wearing?

  So why can’t she buy me … Okay, nothing peasant. Then a nice gown with a tulle skirt? Or something in chiffon, like that one in Bonwit’s that was such a pale blue it was almost white? But Sylvia had grilled her: “You like that? You don’t think it says ‘Pittsburgh’? You like the way your bust looks with all that”—her voice curdled with contempt—“tucking?”

  It was late afternoon. Lee was worn down. She sucked in her midsection. “Nice,” Sylvia called out to the saleslady. Then she glanced up at Lee. “Do you love it?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Because if you don’t love it, we can come in again next Thursday and look in some nice little places on the Upper East Side.”

  “No. I love it,” Lee said. She turned from the mirror and looked at her mother’s flawlessly made-up face. It was still tense, unsatisfied. “Thanks for coming with me, Mom.”

  “You don’t have to thank me!”

  “I know,” she said, “but you’re an absolute saint for putting up with me. So patient.”

  Her mother’s expression softened until it was almost benevolent. “Lee,” Sylvia said, “don’t forget. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Do I have to say the word? ‘Accessorize.’”

  Three months later, Lee arrived at Cornell University with a glorious wardrobe of pleated tartan skirts, coordinating knee socks, cashmere cardigans, Shetland crewnecks, flannel slacks, a camel-hair Chesterfield, a dark-green loden coat, and not one, not two, but three perfect-for-fraternity-parties little black dresses that of course looked marvelous with the gold Omega watch and double strand of seven-millimeter pearls that were part of her high school graduation gift.

  By mid-October of her freshman year, when the leaves were turning such vivid reds and yellows that they looked like a kindergartner’s painting of autumn, Lee had barely unpacked. In fact, during her four years of college, the stunningly expensive wardrobe remained just as Sylvia had left it, in its cocoon of flowered tissue paper in a trunk scented with lavender sachets. With the two hundred dollars she had realized from the sale of her eight-hundred-dollar watch, she bought a pair of jeans, a tie-dyed T-shirt, a denim shirt of the sort worn by sharecroppers, and a pair of ankle-high shoes that might be issued to a marine on his first day on Parris Island. Of course, these purchases did not consume Lee’s entire two-hundred-dollar profit; she donated ten bucks to Students for a Democratic Society and purchased six joints of excellent marijuana, which she shared with her boyfriend, Philip Mullen, or Flip, as he was called. Flip was a junior who had come all the way to Cornell from Denver, Colorado, to study physics, although in four years of college he probably learned less about quantum theory than Schrödinger’s cat.

  Flip learned a lot about women, though. He was a true believer in the antiwar slogan: “Make love, not war.” And making love was easy, what with the sexual revolution of the late sixties dispelling both the Eisenhower era’s peppy prudery and the Kennedy generation’s insistence on a certain grace. A young man didn’t even need clean fingernails, much less looks or personality or intelligence, to get laid. All he had to say was: “Wanna?”

  Of course, Flip was pretty bright. And almost handsome. He looked like a sane Rasputin. His shoulder-length hair was the color of top-grade mahogany, and he had an impressive beard, smoldering black eyes, and a large and lively penis. Flip was a late sixties version of the Big Man on Campus. If he was not the leader of Cornell’s antiwar movement (that role being taken by a senior far more organized and much less sexually animated than Flip), he was at least its preeminent follower. The first time Lee saw him, her second day of classes, he was cutting Elementary Real Analysis and working for peace, handing out signs that pledged: “No more men! No more money! No more killing!”

  It had been a long day for Lee. Overwhelmed by the vast greenness of the campus, by the disdain of her roommate—a girl who had gone to boarding school in Switzerland and had actually laughed in Lee’s face when Lee said: “Ça me rend heureuse de vous voir”—and by the difficulty of her chemistry class, Lee only noticed the first exclamation on the sign. “No more men”? She thought: What did that mean? She felt that light-headedness that precedes nausea. No more men. Her worst fear: During the darkest part of the night, she terrified herself by thinking about how the world was not precisely half male, half female, but rather, forty-nine percent male to fifty-one percent female. What if she was in that two percent damned to eternal spinsterhood, to birthdays celebrated in her parents’ kitchen with Greta’s carrot cake and its inch-thick cream cheese frosting? Sylvia and Leonard would be there, dressed for the evening, on their way to the city for dinner, Sylvia in Guy Laroche, perfuming the whole first floor with Mitsouko, Leonard in a navy-blue suit made (he’d inform her for the fourteenth time, while ostensibly picking a thread off the lapel—but in fact mesmerized by the near-invisible hand stitching) by the bespoke tailor who made suits for the president of the Bank of New York and John Hay Whitney. Robin would be sneaking looks at the clock, letting Lee know how she was dying to get out and meet her boyfriend, not wanting to ask him to the birthday celebration because that would be cruel, his presence emphasizing Lee’s unremitting manlessness. Then one day Greta would die, and the cakes would come from Loaves and K
isses, three blocks from her father’s store, because Long Island bakeries made sickeningly sweet ick-looking cakes, so now the cakes would be in chic Manhattan flavors, like pistachio-cognac. And then Robin wouldn’t be able to come, because she and her husband and their three stunning children would be vacationing on the French Riviera. And then her parents would die and she’d be all alone, because the teachers in Shorehaven Junior High—that’s where she’d wind up, teaching social studies and coaching girls’ softball because someone else was already coaching tennis—wouldn’t want to call attention to the fact that Lee was forty-three or fifty-seven and living alone, her only companions a declawed, neutered cat and the seven fur coats that hadn’t been sold after Leonard’s lawyers arranged for a going-out-of-business-due-to-death sale. “No more men!” the sign said. She did not even notice Flip. Of course, her apparent indifference fascinated him.

  “Hi,” Flip said meaningfully.

  “Hi,” Lee said apathetically, wanting to get away from this bearded person whom she thought must be either a hermit or a Hasid.

  “Are you a freshman?”

  “Yes,” she said, realizing by his persistence and his clear, western accent that he was probably neither of the above. However, her mother’s influence still exerted its pull from the north shore of Long Island all the way up to Ithaca; thus an involuntary “Yuck, beard” response kicked in. “Excuse me,” she said, trying to get around him and his signs. “I have to get to the library.”

  “Isn’t there something that’s more important than the library?” he asked, trying to burn her with his hot eyes.

  The right answer, naturally, was: The war in Vietnam is more important than the library. For Lee, who was smart as a whip but (to be totally truthful) no great shakes as an intellectual, the issue of “Are We Fighting in a Really Stupid War?” genuinely was more interesting than “What Were the Philosophical Underpinnings of the Council of Trent?” To her pragmatic mind, the Domino Theory as a justification for intervention in Vietnam made no sense. “Domino” was not the operative word: “Theory” was. In Lee’s short life, she had never found a theory that could explain or serve as a guide to all human behavior. And if Marx and Freud couldn’t satisfy her, a couple of guys in wire-rimmed glasses in the Pentagon certainly were not likely to either. Besides, propping up a corrupt government headed by a debauched playboy did not appear to Lee to be an effective way to halt the spread of totalitarianism.