Lillian on Life (11 page)

H
aving is better than not having. There's just not enough time sometimes. Often. People don't give it to you. They sleep too long. Or life doesn't give it. The Fates don't. I'm completely with the Greeks on that. The Fates spin your life's thread, tie it up in knots for fun, and when they think it's the right length, they snip it, moving on. When people talk about changing their fate, I always want to laugh. If you're going to talk at all about being fated, then that's that. If you “change” your fate, then you were fated to change your fate. The words cancel each other out.

The one thing I didn't want the Fates to fool around with was my relationship with Poppa. It was so good. I never understood why he didn't want to come and live with me after Mother died. I visited him five times, and I asked him every time.

The first time, we were about to have breakfast. Poppa was sitting at the dining table with the paper, and I was in the kitchen. It was summer, and the sun was shining in through the windows, but even so, the kitchen didn't feel
alive. I opened the old fridge, feeling it rock in a way I didn't remember, and found English muffins, butter, and the apricot jam I'd sent down in a care package. There was an unopened deli packet of ham on a shelf, dated ten days before, and there were a few rubbery potatoes in the salad drawer. I put the muffins in the toaster and took the top off the milky white Pyrex butter dish. The butter inside was bright yellow, and crumbled like soft chalk when I pressed the knife into it. It was the right color in the middle, and it took a long greasy time to cut the outside away and spread only the good stuff on the muffins. I doubted Poppa would even notice the difference in the butter himself. He'd spread it no matter what color it was, and he'd cover it with jam, and he'd eat it. Maybe he'd get sick. Then what would he do?

I opened the jam and put it on a saucer with a spoon so he could serve himself, and took that and the plate of muffins out to the dining room. The dining room didn't look dead. Dining tables and sideboards never look like their time has come and gone like fridges do, not as long as they've got all four legs. Poppa folded up the paper to make space for the food, and patted my hand when I sat down. “Anything interesting?” I said.

“Nothing I'll remember for long,” he answered, and pulled the jam toward him. I watched him put a big dollop
on his first muffin half. Seeing him anticipate the first mouthful gave me the same feeling I had when I had fed John's children. They'd always wanted me to eat too, so I'd pretended to, but mostly I'd just watched them chew and swallow and study what to attack next.

“I'd like to be able to sit and watch you put jam on your muffin every morning, Poppa,” I said. He chuckled a little, and leaned over his plate to eat. Old age had collapsed his handsome straight nose and made it whistle, and he nearly got the tip of it daubed with apricot. I needed to come at the subject another way. My mouth was dry. “If you came to live with me,” I said while he chewed, “I'm sure we could get the
Post-Dispatch
delivered to my apartment for you.”

He swallowed, and then he looked me in the eye for the first time that morning. “Don't give up on me yet,” he said.

“Give up on you? Poppa! How can you think that's what I'm doing? I'm not giving up on you! I'm celebrating you!” God, that was so upsetting, that first conversation! “I'm rejoicing in you, Poppa,” I said as he took another bite of his breakfast and patted me on the hand again, looking straight ahead, chewing. “You wouldn't be putting me out, you know,” I said, in case that was his concern. “Not at all. It would be no burden at all to have you with me.” He just smiled.

“I like it here, Lillian,” he said.

For a moment I had an image of throwing out all my furniture and moving all Mother and Poppa's up to New York, so he could still wake up and sit at that table, and make drinks in the evening at that sideboard. Then he said it was time to go to church.

He had always been the one to drive, so he drove us there, and only gently bumped the car behind us when he parked. At church he exchanged warm greetings with people who'd known him for decades, which was a bit of a consolation, so I didn't bring the subject up again until the cancer had been confirmed and I flew down again.

Which was harder, asking him the first time, or asking him the last time? That initial rejection wasn't easy: that “I like it here” that meant nowhere else would do, not even the home I would make for the two of us. But the last time, the visit before I went down for his colon surgery . . . No one should have to experience a conversation like that. We were at the dining table again. I'd made sandwiches he'd hardly touched. We'd been having a sweet conversation about Mother. I'd asked him to remind me where they met, and he'd said, “At church, I guess,” and then went on to describe how he would visit with her on the porch of her parents' home. He told me how the wicker love seat creaked,
so they tried to sit stock-still even when he kissed her. We laughed at that, and then I blurted out, “Maybe I could get us a place with a porch, outside the city, and a couple of rocking chairs,” and that shut him down. He pushed back his chair, and then he put his knuckles on the table to heave himself up to stand, and the effort made him let loose into his adult diaper with a sound so embarrassing for him my heart broke in two. He made his way to the stairs, and I sat in the dining room with the smell he left behind hanging around me like a reprimand. I listened to him climb the stairs and close the door to his bathroom. I sat and cried, knowing that he was changing his own soiled diaper in the bathroom he'd been using all his married life, the bathroom he'd read the daily news in, and watched television in, and shaved himself clean and handsome in.

Later I'd go up and light a match, and flap and refold his towels, like Mary had taught me.

I don't know how I managed it, for those two years between their deaths, knowing that he was alone in Columbia, diapered, running the Cadillac through red lights, sorting through a dozen types of medication with his clumsy hands. It was a nightmare. There were times I wished he'd have a minor traffic accident to force the discussion again, but I scared myself doing that because he might hurt someone
else in the process. I don't think you can actually desire things in a specific degree. You can wish for an accident or no accident. You can't wish for a minor loss of control, some damaged garbage cans and a dented fender. If he'd had a little accident like that, though, George Junior certainly would have been able to get him to be reasonable and give up the house and move in with me. Did he think it would be disloyal to Mother? I would have made him see that it wasn't just an ending but also a beginning. And also a middle, actually. A more involved relationship with me—where's the ending in that?

Beginnings are crystal clear. Endings are too, once they're final. It's always difficult to tell what part of the middle you're in, though. This morning I decided that if Michael walked into the kitchen and said he thought it best that we stop meeting like this, then it would be the beginning of the end. If he didn't, that would mean we're still at some unspecified part of the middle. He didn't. It's wonderful that he's started coming back to New York regularly. There's never been any mention of a plan to end his marriage. We don't pretend to be in love. All the same, I think I'd like him here more often. I don't mention it, though, since that might be the end, or the beginning of the end.

Relationships don't end when you stop seeing each other
and talking to each other. I think you have a relationship—you as an individual have a relationship with someone—as long as the memory of him plucks a string on your heart. In the beginning of the end, that string is still very taut. Your body resonates and people can see the effect of hearing his name vibrate through you. Over time, the string gets looser, and plucking it has a weaker response. You avoid plucking, because the sound it makes is less and less beautiful as it goes slack. The relationship is over when thoughts of him don't send your fingers out to the guitar at
all.

W
hat month is it now? April? Oh God, I have to do my taxes.
God
. I was going to clear up my desk before now, so I'd be ready. Something happened. There was the board meeting. I had a brunch for my London and Paris colleagues. I stayed up late boiling and peeling and deviling dozens of eggs. Yes. It was such a great party. I can't believe I ever left Europe. I thought I'd make some more deviled eggs this morning, so that if Michael walked in he'd see I wasn't just waiting for him. But something happened. I did something else. Can't remember what now.

April. The pool will open in about ten weeks. That's good. That's really good. Feels like forever, but it's some consolation. I swim my laps, and I sit in the sun, right in the sun, and I watch all the bizarre people come and go, different every time I'm there. Maybe there will be some more regulars like me this year, maybe a bachelor or two. I always wonder what it would take for that to happen. It seems to me the chances of a middle-aged bachelor joining the pool for the summer should be pretty high, but it hasn't
occurred. What would it take to improve those chances? What part of the cosmos needs a nudge? In the meantime I watch the people, and wonder why they feel comfortable in the bathing suits they've chosen. You won't see me there in twenty years with my skin flowing like lava out of my suit. And you won't see me there this year in a bikini. So many women don't realize that a bikini often makes their bodies less attractive than their naked selves. The skin bunches and folds. I guess some women actually know this but don't care. Which is worse, not realizing or not caring? I haven't decided. I don't know. Extra skin is awful.

Extra feeling is awful too. It hangs out beyond the edges of the relationship. Edges are so sad. It seems that the edges should be the problem, but then I always end up feeling that the feelings are. But they're not like lasagna noodles. You can't just cut them off when they don't fit in the pan you've chosen. I'm doing pretty well with Michael, keeping everything in the pan. It's a small pan, with feelings to match. And the sex is fine. Not stunning. Fine. So it fits in the pan too.

At least there's a pan. At least there's sex in it.

I need it so much. Do most people pretend not to? I can't lie down at night without feeling my body drag at me for it, like a child pulls on its mother's arm when they pass a
toy store. Strange that it's okay if I lie on my side, but on my back it's unavoidable. My breasts whisper against my nightie, my pubis wakes up, egged on by the bone it's supposed to sleep on. This isn't supposed to be happening at my age. I can't get any reading done, and when I give in, I cry afterward. And now I want to have it again. I don't know when Michael has to end this visit. I forget what he told me, if he told me. Every morning I let him sleep, and I know I
should
let him sleep, but I always wonder how he'd feel about me waking him up with a hot kiss. I hate that I can't be sure. I hate the constant wondering. I feel like I'm dissolving. Or dispersing. I'm a dandelion and my fluff is gone, carried away on the slipstream of the people who've left. And now I'm just a stalk, pretending I've still got fluff, pretending that I'll plant my seeds where I choose to when I choose to, but in reality it's too late, they've already blown away, and they landed on Ted, and they haven't come
back.