MESSY by Polly Howells

Neatness was important. I was six years old when Mummy came into my bedroom and saw my unmade bed. “Oh Polly, you used to be such a good girl,” she said. Apparently I had already been making my bed for years. Messy was bad. Neat was good. Very simple.

My sons never made their beds, growing up. I never taught them how. Do they now? I don’t know. They both have wives, perhaps they make them.

But Mother was very lax in other areas. She never taught me to wash my hands after I peed, for instance. My younger son scolded me, as a young adult, that no one had taught him that.

Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It doesn’t seem to have affected my health. When I’m in a public ladies room and others are washing their hands, I usually do.

From a very young age I criticized Mom. She was different from other mothers. She didn’t wear push-up bras, she didn’t care that her breasts hung low and spread out flat against her chest. Sometimes in the heat she didn’t wear a bra. I was appalled. Six years old and I was appalled. It was 1950. In truth, she was ahead of her time.

I thought Father was cool. In fact, he was. His feelings rarely got ruffled. “Damnation!” he cried if he hit his finger with a hammer. That’s the closest he ever came to swearing.

I wanted to be like him when I grew up. I saw the letters of the alphabet in color. Only the consonants; the vowels were clear, or white. But not incidentally, the letters that started Father’s names -- Jack, or John, and Howells -- were the same colors as the letters that began my name: Polly Hayes Howells. Blues and blue-reds and purples. The letters that began Mother’s and Toni’s names -- Toni, Brown, Katharine, Kay, Franchot, DuBois -- were in greens, oranges and browns. Toni and Mother belonged together, Father and I did too. Father and I were painted in sky hues, Toni and Mother in earth tones. Sky is clean, earth is dirty. We were clean they were messy. Mother and Toni expressed their feelings, shed their tears. Father and I tried not to. This was how I saw it.

The problem was I would become a woman one day. I would bleed. I would be messy. I was terrified of that fact. The insides of bodies freaked me out. Father worked at the Boston Museum of Science, and we went there to see The Transparent Woman. We sat in a darkened hall with a huge Plexiglas model of a woman, all her organs lighting up one after another in vibrant colors. I got dizzy, almost fainted, had to walk out. That’s what happened to my feelings; they went inside and came out to knock me over the head, to knock me out.

Better I should have been messy like Mom and Toni.