Lillian on Life
Authors: Alison Jean Lester
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
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Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2014 by Alison Jean Lester
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lester, Alison Jean.
Lillian on life / Alison Jean Lester.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-15265-6
1. Middle-aged womenâFiction. 2. ReminiscingâFiction. 3. Autobiographical memoryâFiction. 4. Life change eventsâFiction. 5. Man-woman relationshipsâFiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.E8193L55 2014 2013039008
813'.6âdc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BIG POCKETS
ON BEHAVING ABROAD, AND IN GENERAL
ON ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
the Dual Purpose of
Things
W
henever I wake up next to a man, before I'm fully awake, I think it's Ted. Of course it never is.
That's okay. This morning I watched Pandora walk the length of Michael's naked body. His skin turned to gooseflesh as she started up his thigh. Her pretty gray paw depressed the flesh of his belly, and his sleeping penis rolled toward his hipbone. She stepped off him at the shoulder. She could have walked on the bed; there was a little space between him and me. Maybe he doesn't exist for her. Maybe she was saying that he's no better than a mattress. She snuggled into my neck, purring smugly like an idling Jaguar.
I wanted Michael to wake up and see us like that: an independent woman beloved of her elegant cat. But of course he didn't. They don't. They wake up at all the wrong times, and see all the wrong things.
To be fair, we drank a lot of red wine last night, and I can hold it better than most people. My eyes still snap open in the morning. Wine is still my friend. I hate that I can't drink coffee in the wee hours and then sleep anymore, though. The body evolves, then it devolves. It's terrible. One
day you're someone you know, and the next you're someone you don't. You dry up. It's embarrassing.
Every once in a while I wonder if I'm glad Ted didn't stick around for my menopause. A woman has so many things to hide after fifty. I ask myself if we could have tolerated so much physical change, followed by dotage.
I don't have to wonder with Michael. He comes and goes. There isn't time for him to notice everything.
The trick at my age is to keep some K-Y Jelly in an attractive pot on the bedside table. You squeeze it out of the tube into the pot for when you have a visitor. When his hands are beginning to move on you, you turn away and slip your fingers into the jelly. He can caress your bottom or your shoulders in the meantime. When you turn back you take him in your hand and lubricate him. Maybe he's not even erect yet, and this way you have the satisfaction of knowing that what you're doing for him is working. I'm not sure there's a bigger satisfaction than that in life. And as long as he's feeling it's for him, you've diverted his attentionâand even your ownâfrom the fact that the lubrication is for you. On top of it all you maintain your sense that you've still got plenty of sap in your tree. Name me a wife who does that.
Michael's wife is crazy. She probably didn't seem it when
she was young. She probably just seemed young. Now she just seems silly. That hair band of hers. The tangential things she says. She's almost as tall as I am, and only about five years younger, fifty-two I think, but she blinks at you. She stands up tall and her chestnut hair sits perfectly turned up on her shoulders in the same way I'm sure it has since 1960, and she smiles and blinks, as if to protect herself from anything modern or unpleasant. Imagine life by her side. How would you ever connect? Well, you wouldn't.
Do some people not need excitement? I've always thought humans were too complicated not to need stimulation. What does Michael do to keep his wife hanging on? Or what does she do that keeps him married to her? I don't like to ask. I've learned not to cling.
He sleeps really late when he's with me. I don't think it's allowed at home, certainly not naked. He's intimated as much. Separate beds too.
I thought my parents' marriage had come to an end the day their twin beds arrived. I didn't know it was happening all over the neighborhood, probably all over the country, and Mother was merely keeping up with the Joneses. But how often did the Joneses go up to my parents' bedroom? Never. Mother just felt them walking around in her head, and had to keep up.
I got up when my stomach started rumbling. Thank God Michael sleeps through that too. Accommodating Pandora was giving my neck a cramp. I wanted my usual breakfast: milk so skim it's almost blue, a banana, an English muffin with a thin slice of cheese, black coffee. The breakfast I like happens to be excellent for the bones and muscles and digestion of a woman my age. I think just about everything has a dual purpose, like K-Y Jelly.
It's lonely eating alone when there's someone in the house, but then again, you can use the bathroom and get that all out of the way before they get up. The advantage to not living with a man is that you avoid each other's smells. For the most part, Michael moves his bowels elsewhere. I learned early on to keep matches in my cosmetics kit for when I was “visiting,” and in my toilet when being visited. You light one and guide the flame around the inside of the toilet right after flushing. You won't burn yourself if you hold the match between the first joints of your index and middle fingers like a tiny cigarette. Then you wash your hands thoroughly. Since the sink is usually closer to the door than the toilet, anyone entering the bathroom after you will smell soap before they smell anything else.
Mary taught me this back in Missouri. Poppa's bathroom had bright sun in it in the morning, a small TV,
eventually, and a box of matches on the windowsill that she had put there. This was one of the many reasons I could list as a child why black people were superior. They were clearly the smart ones; we obviously couldn't cook without them, and that was just the beginning.
I loved hearing Mary in the bathrooms when I woke up in the mornings. In Poppa's, she opened the window and flapped and refolded the towels, then there'd be a quiet moment and that was when she was using a match in the toilet bowl. Poppa's “time” was right after his early breakfast and his second cup of coffee. After airing his toilet, Mary'd sing down the hall to my room, where I'd pretend to sleep, and sometimes she'd sit down heavily on the end of the bed and feign surprise that I was there. “Still in bed, missy!” she'd say. “You get on out of there or you'll end up being too beautiful, it's the truth.” Then she'd get up and cross the room to my bathroom. “I'd best clean your mirror so you can have a look-see at your too-beautiful self,” she'd say, or something like it.
I wonder if beauty has a dual purpose.
No. It has no purpose, and offers no guarantees. In my experience, beauty merely has a dual result: one, lots of people talk to you; two, nice photographs.
A wife's got to serve a dual purpose. Michael's
doesn't.
the Back
Seat