Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Read online

  “We’re going to let the kids stay up until midnight this year. They’re all old enough. Even though I’ll be at the hospital—just being awake will be enough of a treat for them. What are your plans?”

  “Same as always. Dinner at Grimaldi at five, and then early to bed with a book.”

  “Veal rollatini with green noodles?” he asks.

  “As ever,” I say. “Alberto’s specialty.”

  The Grimaldis were family friends of Max’s family. Max, whose full name was Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo. The restaurant is just around the corner on Madison Avenue, and I’ve been going there since they opened in 1956. Max and I had divorced—why say it that way? Max had divorced me—before then, but because I got to keep the apartment, got to keep the city, I also got to keep the restaurant and that set of friends. It’s been my New Year’s Eve standard since the late seventies, back before pasta became the rage of the age.

  “Tell Alberto that Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo, Jr., sends his regards,” says Gian. “Tell Al junior that I say ciao.”

  “I will to Alberto,” I say, “but I can’t to Al. He absconded to Palm Beach to serve tortellini to the snowbirds.”

  I think of my rollatini, and I don’t feel hungry.

  “I bet his new place won’t require jackets in that Florida heat,” says Gian.

  I’d bet he’s right, and though I’ll never set foot in Florida, I resent that, just as I resent our summertime tourists who underdress, who take no pride in looking any better than bovine, in their shorts and their neon hues and their fanny packs. Even were Alberto no longer to require it, I would dress for dinner.

  “If I’m out when you have news, I’m at Grimaldi,” I say. “So don’t worry and just leave a message.”

  I used to use a service, but Gian and the kids set up an answering machine last week, one of their Christmas presents. The leave-a-message message speaks in the voice of Lily, my youngest granddaughter—my favorite voice, and not just because they named her after me, but because she’s musical, a singer like her father. She’s called me every day since they left, to record a reply to her own recording before I pick up and we talk a bit. Our new game: Lily ringing Lily, then speaking to Grandma Lillian.

  “All right,” says Gian. “Be careful out there. Love you, Ma.”

  I replace the Bakelite receiver in its cradle and look down at the kitchen table, where I’ve been sitting.

  Dark, glimmering crumbs, like potting soil, are strewn across the tabletop beneath my elbows, my face. I have just devoured half a package of Oreo brand cookies manufactured by Nabisco while on the phone with Gian without even realizing it.

  I never do that: Buy manufactured cookies. Eat that way, like an animal. I don’t even especially like Oreos. My mouth, which moments ago was obliviously munching, now teems with their industrial-strength sweetness. My fingertips are greasy with creme filling—creme so-called, as opposed to cream, because it must be just powdered sugar and lard, unless I miss my guess. I suppose I must have been twisting them apart, eating them disassembled, or how else would I have made such a mess?

  “Phoebe!” I say to the cat, creeping along the back of the sofa, staring at me green-eyed. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  Phoebe rotates her pert ears away and plops to the floor, pretending she hasn’t heard me, in much the same manner a cultured person responds to audible flatulence.

  I am, for the life of me, unable to fathom why I even had the vile black sandwiches. Did I buy them while the grandchildren were here? I’m sure I did not. My week prior to their visit was a Tartarus of sheet pans, spent in the creation of a Christmas-cookie fantasia; had the little goblins at any point asked me for packaged cookies, I’m quite certain I would have shipped them back to Maine with stockings full of coal. Wherefore, then, this evil visitation? The episode is enough to make me fear the onset of a condition that until now I’ve mocked: this Alzheimer’s disease that’s evidently plaguing the aged. Or so I’m told; I don’t often mix with the aged.

  No time for such fretting now: Worst of all, I have only a little more than an hour before I’m to be at Grimaldi. I doubt I’ll be famished again by the time they seat me, but I have to show up, or Alberto really will send a cop to look in on me. I couldn’t abide that. Plus, I have my dinner attire picked out, and I don’t want to stay in; I’ve been in all day. The weather, unwholesomely clement, dissuaded me from taking my usual stroll. The mercury hit sixty-five yesterday—December 30 in New York City—and the forsythia in Central Park thought it meant that they should bud. Tonight the low is supposed to be a more reasonable thirty degrees, so I can dress as befits midwinter.

  Most days I don’t see many people, per se, but in Manhattan, when I go for my walks, seven million sets of eyes—fourteen million eyeballs, potentially—stand to land upon me. Someday soon I may not be able to dress myself, so I intend to try to look stylish until I can’t any longer. Julia in her blouses with bird appliques, in her colorful sweaters with knit pom-poms—such is not my way.

  Phoebe follows me into the bedroom and watches as I dress. I used to always wear nylons—real pantyhose, nude—but my legs have grown pale and veiny. I put on a pair of mustard-yellow Coloralls. They are warmer than nylons, and I appreciate their optimism. But though the ads suggest treating them like hosiery and underwear all in one, I do wear underwear under them. I am a lady, after all; plus I don’t want a yeast infection, and who cares if I have a visible panty line? I wore leg makeup during World War II because of the stocking shortage. I even helped advertise it: “As sheer and gauzy in effect as the most beautiful nylons, and so much more economical.”

  I like to think I do not dress like a typical old lady. I have some old pieces, yes, some classics that still fit me, but I like new clothes and have the money to buy them, so I do. I do not eschew the shoulder pads and jewel tones I see on the mannequins, silly though they may be. Everything in fashion these days seems so childlike and bellicose, bright yet aggressive, a cute positivity that recasts every woman as a cross between a majorette and a Sherman tank. My dress tonight is dazzling green velvet with long sleeves, pleasingly boxy.

  I sit at my vanity. I am a vanitas. My hair of yesteryear was glossy red-gold. All the old photographs—from the society pages and the ad-industry trades—are black and white, so in those I look brunette, like film stars do in precolor films. But it was red-gold, friends, brassy and dyed though it is today.

  I’ll wear a hat, too, a wide-brimmed fedora of navy blue.

  If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready. I apply my Helena Rubinstein Orange Fire lipstick from one of the tubes I stockpiled in the 1950s. When I heard it would be discontinued, I bought twenty-five. One more reason, I’m sure, that Max thought me crazy. That lipstick fascinated me then, it fascinates me still: its color, its spiral stripes, its waxy fragrance and ineffable taste. No cosmetic has ever suited me better.

  Women in my day spent $150 million on cosmetics annually. I helped get them to do it. Tonight on the street, under orange lights, women will walk by, their arms through the elbows of their men in overcoats, their eyes lined in blue. The blue pencil I used in my day was to mark up copy, ad copy.

  I finish with a bit of mascara, plain black, then sit back and gaze at what I’ve done.

  I think I look all right. But who’s to say? The insouciance of youth doesn’t stay, but shades into “eccentricity,” as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I’ve always been this way. The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably.

  I pet Phoebe’s fur of purest white and walk to the foyer.

  Now for footwear. The snow’s mostly melted following yesterday’s freak heat, but I’m not going to risk a fall, not me. Not these hips. I put on my riding boots, from when I used to spend time on horseback in Maine. With some socks inside, between boots and tights, they’re just right for me, a cold old lady.

  I top
it all off with my mink coat, obviously. The seams aren’t done the way anyone’s been working them for years, but I don’t care. I bought it for me. Myself. In 1942. It was not a gift from Max. I used my own money. I have enough to buy another, but this one is the one.

  In my girl-poetess days, I wrote the lines:

  I’d rather have a fur coat now

  Than crumbs at fifty anyhow.

  * * *

  Why is Ogden Nash remembered when I am forgotten? The funny thing is, I was closer to fifty when I wrote that than anyone realized. That poetic sentiment now seems very early twentieth century. The only century I’ve known. Or so I claim—born in 1900, I always say. I’m lying, though, because my real birth year, 1899, made me sound like a grotesque relic, even when I wasn’t. A woman can never be too rich or too thin or too young, truly. So I revised.

  I descend in the elevator, bid the doorman good-bye and return his “Happy New Year,” and then I am out in the late-afternoon light.

  In the air hangs the scent of dampness and birthday candles blown out, which I have always associated with the presence of ghosts.

  Since Max and I moved here almost forty years ago, I have felt at home in Murray Hill. The name sounds like a person: Mr. Murray Hill. Cheery Mr. Hill, a living friend, stalwart Murray who has not yet forsaken me.

  I have a little under an hour until my reservation. Perhaps I can walk off the abominable Oreo cookies I savaged and dine happily after all?

  Off to traipse the Century’s corpse outleant—or 1984’s, at any rate—I head east on Thirty-Sixth Street toward Third Avenue. Maybe I’ll walk by one of my old apartments, the second one I lived in after I first came to the city from that much duller metropolis, Washington, D.C.

  That I was a success is not apparent now; that I would be a success was not apparent then.

  Within a few steps, though, I feel that it’s hopeless. I can’t walk this fullness off by five. How am I still making stupid mistakes in my eighties? Whenever somebody says to me, “Maybe it’ll come with age,” I want to say, “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Gian is not wrong about the great decline. Even Murray Hill is shabbier than it should be. The sycamores looking sickly, trash gathered at their roots.

  I have half a mind, next time we talk, to ask Gian to secure as my epitaph that most poetic of the signs planted in the parks back when I first arrived in this city:

  Let no one say and say it to your shame

  That all was beauty here until you came.

  3

  Your Brain Is Showing

  In my reckless and undiscouraged youth, I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street.

  When I arrived in Manhattan in 1926, I scrimped along on help from my parents and pittances from ballet performances until I landed the job at R.H. Macy’s: Forty dollars a week as a lowly assistant copywriter.

  From the first moment I took to my desk and touched a needle-sharp pencil to a steno pad, I felt a sense of correctness that I have never known before or since. I would look down at the streams of strangers moving up and down Seventh Avenue, at the fog of their breath beneath their black and gray and brown hats, and I knew by instinct just how to buttonhole them. In my little walnut nook I was like a human cannonball, snug and ready to be launched above the unsuspecting crowd.

  By one muggy morning in hot, late August 1931, I’d become a salaried institutional copywriter for that great department store, and the highest-paid advertising woman in America.

  I had a front-page article in the New York World-Telegram to prove it: “Personality, Understanding, Interest: Those Are Keys to Success Says Mere Girl Who’s Found It,” read the headline.

  I carried it with me up to the thirteenth floor, lucky number thirteen, with my coffee in one hand and, in my bag, an apple that I’d bought from one of the apple sellers on the street. Lucky, truly, not to be one of them, tattered and desperate in Herald Square, in the midst of the Depression. Lucky to be cast as the plucky starlet of a human-interest puff piece, a spry and spritely gal getting over in spite of everything, making it sound so effortless—making no mention of the drudgery I sometimes felt, grateful though I was to have the chance to be a drudge.

  That headline calling me “girl,” even in my early thirties, made me think of my mother back home in Georgetown. I’d be sending her a copy later, because it would fill her with complicated pride: happiness that I wasn’t starving, and disapproval at what she’d perceive as my being showy and immodest.

  Quoth the subhead: “Lillian Boxfish, Who Upset Advertising Ideas to Win Executive Recognition Found Personality and Sense of Humor Helped Her to Goal.”

  I resolved, as ever, to maintain my good humor as I approached Chester Everett to ask for a raise.

  The days the copywriters put in, 8:30 to 6, were long, but mine were usually longer, and I was there that morning before almost anyone else, which had been my plan. Chester, too, was already in; as I unlocked my office I could see him wedged behind his desk, morning light ablaze in the thick, white hair of the small, wide head that topped his former-football-lineman’s frame. My boss’s appearance, while not entirely unhandsome, evoked an icebox crowned by a cauliflower.

  Chester was a good egg, by and large. He had no gift for writing copy but knew that about himself. He did, however, have an unerring sense of what would and wouldn’t work: what approaches would attract, inspire, confuse, or offend our prospective shoppers. He was a good manager, too, in an environment resistant to being managed. Our office was a field richly seeded with volatile and mercurial temperaments, and Chester’s firm but gentle hand was adept at selectively pruning them such that they would flourish rather than wither. I liked him because he ran a tight ship; he liked me because I was both creative and even-keeled. Overall we got along well. Then again, overall I rarely demanded much of him.

  I set down my things—all but the newspaper—and headed toward Chester’s open door.

  To my chagrin, he already had a visitor. Olive Dodd—simpering, unctuous, not-quite-evil Olive—was perched on one of his two visitors’ chairs. Too late now to turn around and wait. I walked in.

  “Chester, darling, good morning to you,” I said. “Olive, lovely to see you, too.”

  Olive, with her prim posture, her ungainly manner, and her reliance on elaborate fashions inappropriate for the office, strongly resembled a fancy pigeon: a creature bred out of its dignity across many generations. Although pretty enough by the standards of the day, with a voluptuous figure and a pleasant if somewhat shapeless face, she always gave an impression of bigness, as if poorly fitted to any locale. Whenever I encountered her I thought I could detect an agitated quaver, as if she might be on the verge of bursting into laughter or tears or, God help us, song. I hadn’t yet been able to work out whether she was like this all the time or only when I was around.

  My dim hope that Olive might let me speak with Chester alone guttered when I saw what was in her hand: the same edition of the World-Telegram that I held in my own. “Oh, Lillian,” she said, “I was just showing Mr. Everett your wonderful news.”

  Olive was twenty-eight or twenty-nine if she was a day, but her cloying insistence on “mister”-ing Chester made her seem younger—not youthful, but simply unformed. Her early arrival to show Chester the story gave her the air of a tattletale, though I couldn’t see how what I’d achieved might be punishable.

  The store below us had just installed a state-of-the-art air-cooling system, but upstairs we still made do with oscillating fans. The one in Chester’s open window riffled the edges of the newspaper that Olive spread before him.

  Chester wiped his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief as he scanned the page. “Congratulations, Lily,” he said. “This is your finest write-up yet. And I’ll bet you helped them decide to quote your air-conditioning ad. Getting that word out to our simmering mass of sweaty customers seeking relief was a well-timed stroke. Particularly given that it didn’t cost us a red cent.�
��

  The reporter had asked if they could run a sample illustrating my greatest innovation to the ad industry and the secret to my success. “Humor,” read the story, “used judiciously, lifts Boxfish’s ads above the pomp and routine of Macy’s competitors.”

  Being funny—it was true; that was my innovation. Everyone took it and began doing it themselves, but nobody was funnier than I was, not for a long time, not for years. Mine was a voice that no one had heard speaking in an advertisement before, and I got them to listen. To listen and then, more importantly, to act on what they’d heard.

  I’d given the reporter the image that Helen McGoldrick, true friend and crack illustrator, had drawn, an amusing cartoon of a deer sporting eight antlers with a hat perched on each, as well as my verse that had inspired it.

  Chester read aloud from the newsprint in that thunderous voice of his, stentorian and clear as a Roman orator’s, just as he’d done days before when I’d brought him a draft to get his go-ahead:

  This reindeer finds Manhattan heat

  A shattering experience,

  For when he ventures on the street

  He undergoes the great expense

  Of weighing eight straw hats upon

  His antlers, in the hope that they

  Will separate him from the sun

  And keep him cool despite the day.

  Poor deer, his overhead is quite

  Absurd. He should be told to go

  To Macy’s where the Fahrenheit

  Is like the prices, sweet and low.

  * * *

  “It was also a not-so-subtle signal to the management that maybe they could pump some of that refreshing oxygen up here,” I said, taking the seat next to Olive and thereby clearing her route to the door, hoping she’d take the hint.

  To my utter absence of shock, she remained unmoved and unmoving. In recent months Olive, a junior copywriter, had emerged as my friend-rival. Not my friendly rival; rather, she was someone who pretended to friendship even as she was being boiled alive from the inside out by seething jealousy. My grinning enemy. Someone who, when Chester would approve my copy yet again, even after a tenacious fight, would smile—teeth gritting—and say, “Honestly, Lily, you’re undefeatable as always,” resentful and obviously longing for my eventual defeat.