Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Read online

  Olive was in the habit of saying “honestly” so often that even a child could see that she must be deceitful. I marveled at her mother’s prescience in having named her daughter after a green—with envy—cocktail garnish: hollow and bitter.

  “It’s hotter than blazes,” said Chester, “so I hope they listen. But look at you, Lily, fresh as a flower, like the heat can’t touch you. Just like in the article.” And he read again from the page: “‘A slim, copper-haired girl in a softly clinging yellow dress is bending over a great clipping book, studying the full- and half-page advertisements pasted there.’”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “And ‘green eyes that smile.’”

  “Oh, but those eyes are not smiling now,” said Chester. “What’s the matter?”

  Perceptive as always, that Chester. It was he who’d first seen my talent, calling me clever and breezy as he plucked me from the forty-dollar-a-week field in which I’d been toiling—where Olive was still hung down—and flung me into the stratosphere. I had no reason to think he’d accede to my request for more money, at least not easily, but I had to make it. Not out of greed, I hoped he would understand, but out of justice.

  “Chester, do you see what the lede of the article calls me?”

  “The highest paid advertising woman in America,” he said. “I should think that’s correct and that you more than deserve it. We owe our loyal advertising readership to you. You’re better than vaudeville.”

  “Thank you,” I said, giving a stagey bow from my seat. “But woman, Chester. It says woman. Why not person? I’ve come in here to ask for a raise. We both know I bring R.H. Macy’s more business than anyone else on the thirteenth floor, woman or man. Why not pay me what I’m worth?”

  “Lil,” he said, resorting to the nickname he always used when things between us became strained. “About that … I know it’s been on your mind. But I’m afraid it’s been decided that we really can’t do that at this juncture.”

  “The passive voice, Chip?” I said, resorting to my counterpart to Lil. “The use of the passive voice to disguise one’s role in the making of a decision is imprecise and obfuscatory. You’re a better adman than that. Active verbs! Why not say ‘I refuse to pay you fairly’?”

  Chester picked up Olive’s paper, folded it, and handed it to me, though I was still clutching the one I’d walked in with. I could tell Olive wanted to ask for hers back but was too meek to do so.

  “In here,” he said, tapping the article from behind his mahogany desk, “you sound so gracious and unassuming. I wouldn’t have expected we’d be back on this again today.”

  He folded his shirtsleeved arms—too hot for a jacket—across his barrel chest, their cross echoing the barricade his desk seemed to have become.

  “I love it here, Chip,” I said, looking at him as I handed Olive’s World-Telegram back to her. “I love working for you, and I would never speak ill of Mr. R. H. Macy or the store that bears his name. Not in print and not in private. But the two-track, male-female pay grades don’t make much sense. While I’m at it, it seems as though Helen should be paid the same as the male illustrators, too.”

  Though I was fantastic at my part of the job, Helen McGoldrick’s visual bravura pushed my words that extra mile into the contested territory of our audience’s minds. Her technique was advanced, anticipating the jazzy, kinetic midcentury style, each stroke a smile, streamlined and forward-thinking. Each image vibrated with such sheer American cheer that even my darker copy came off as droll, the perfect inducement to buy buy buy.

  I knew that Helen, generously paid though she was, wanted to attain a male pay scale almost as much as I did. I also knew she’d never ask.

  Olive, on the other hand, had never been one to understand that her own self-interest might be attached to the interests of others like her. She decided to offer her two cents, like an idiot pitching change into a well that nobody ever said was open for wishing.

  “If you ask me,” Olive said, picking at the corner of her paper, “I think you and Helen should be grateful for what you already have. Chester has given you both so many opportunities. There are plenty of people in this very department who would give a whole limb to be like you two.”

  “Olive,” said Chester, “thank you, but would you mind letting Lillian and me continue our conversation in private?”

  With the posture of one who actually would very much mind, Olive fluttered herself out in a flurry of certainly-sirs, shutting the heavy door behind her with theatrical effort.

  Chester’s transom remained open to catch the trace breeze. I was sure that Olive could keep eavesdropping even after she’d relieved us of her physical presence, but I really didn’t care.

  “Lil, you know I think the world of you, and Helen, too,” said Chester. “But that’s just not the way things work around here.”

  “It hasn’t been in the past, I know,” I said. “But perhaps the time has come for R.H. Macy’s to free itself from the yoke of historical precedent.”

  “Have you been consorting with those communists down in Washington Square Park?”

  “Chip, my request is as capitalist as they come.”

  “Lillian, I’m sympathetic, but these fellows whose salaries you aim to match have families to support.”

  “Nobody asked these fellows with salaries to reproduce themselves,” I said. “And were I ever to have a family, you wouldn’t let me keep working here. Ladies get the boot the instant they show signs of spawning. Not that that matters to me, since I’d sooner die than join the wife-and-mother brigade.”

  Chester had a sign behind his desk—NEVER USE A SUPERLATIVE IN ANY AD HERE. IT MAY LEAD TO EXAGGERATION.—and he insisted that each of us copywriters have a facsimile hung behind ours. But he knew as well as I did that I was not exaggerating.

  I was not on the hunt for my other half. Not only did I have no desire to find a husband, I had negative desire.

  “Might I point out, Lil,” said Chester, “that in fairness everyone does at least get an identical bonus at Christmas time? Pure egalitarianism.”

  “Chip,” I laughed, “the Christmas bonus is a turkey. And I haven’t got a wife to take mine home to so she can prepare it for me.” Fortunately this made Chester laugh, too, though our laughter differed in character: his nervous, mine not without bitterness.

  R.H. Macy’s kept out labor unions. But among the female salesclerks in their dark blue or black dresses and the male ones in their stiff collars and dickey-bosom shirts, nuptial unions were common. Even in the upper offices like mine, institutional advertising, employees joked that the store’s real name ought to be Macy’s Matrimonial Bureau.

  I made a point not to reveal too much of my personal life to Chester or anyone else from the office, excepting Helen, but I knew that he knew that while I liked to go out with men, they were never from Macy’s, and I was not on the prowl for a permanent connection. No taxidermy for me; strictly catch-and-release.

  “Lillian,” he said, steepling his fingers in that pose that bosses seem trained to do. “Please believe me when I say: I am truly sorry. But right now, in this Year of Our Lord 1931, this is just how it is. Maybe someday things will change. For today, will you at least let me take you to lunch to celebrate? I’ll tell all the waitresses you’re the beautiful lady in the papers.”

  Having already challenged him once on his grammatical evasion of responsibility, I let that one slide, but I was not a believer in things just changing. One had to try to change them.

  “Sure thing, boss,” I said. “What are you thinking? Horn & Hardart?”

  “Nah, let’s leave the automat to those overpaid guys who skimp on lunch to shore up Junior’s college fund. We’ll go to the Silver Room and have a real sit-down time.”

  And though Chester was an unflappable man, gifted at never seeming to try excessively at anything, I could tell that he was trying hard then to make it up to me. So I agreed.

  “Well, goodness,” I said. “Isn’t that fancy? If living
well is the best revenge, I’ve got to start living better more conspicuously. The Silver Room’s a sterling place to begin.”

  * * *

  Back in my office, settling into the day’s work, I was trying to console myself with the thought that while I was usually good at getting what I wanted in life, I was not always so good at enjoying it, so maybe it was all right that Chester had denied me. Then Olive knocked her milquetoast knock.

  “Are you busy?” she said, even as she walked in.

  She seated herself in a manner meant as devil-may-care, but it failed to convince. Olive had an enthusiasm that was studied, forced. She was no giant intellect either, though she was far from stupid.

  I thought of the day she’d debuted at the office. I thought of how I’d thought then that she and I could be friends. She started out as I did: assistant copywriter, forty dollars a week. But she did not climb the ladder. Could not. That had been almost four years ago. No one stayed in that job for four years. They either moved up or moved on to a different field.

  Chester was a Harvard man, and Olive went to Radcliffe, which is how she got hired. But as skilled as she was at proofreading, she had no wit or sense of the place and could not write a quality, well-voiced ad at all. At all. But being an adwoman remained her fixation; she wouldn’t let it go, and the company wouldn’t let her go. Some murky connection, some muddled sense of Ivy League loyalty between Chester and Olive’s father led her to be indulged, kept on in a way she wouldn’t be otherwise.

  I looked at her face, nearing thirty but with something babyish in it. Not fresh, but inchoate: something rudimentary that would never develop. Her sense of humor, I suspected. Olive was pretty, with velvety dark brown hair and huge eyes, but these she spoiled with excessive kohl, and her lipstick was too bright: a sad clown suffering from a lack of confidence. So far in the Macy’s Matrimonial Bureau, Olive had been unlucky—which I would not care about, except that she herself so obviously cared.

  We both had the age-old impulse to be attractive, though—or at least fashionable. She referred to my hair as silken, and tawny, and in abundance, and it worried me, this eerie connoisseurship, like she might sneak up behind me and snip it off. Yet because I found myself wanting, against my better angels, to be cruel to her, I forced myself over and over to be nice.

  “Olive, is that a new dress?”

  “Yes,” she said, actually blushing.

  “It suits you beautifully.”

  “Thank you, Lily.”

  “You’re welcome. You got it here, didn’t you? Women’s wear? Summer clearance, to make way for the new arrivals?”

  “I did,” she said, looking at her lap. “No one knows the store quite like you do.”

  “Well, we are working on the campaign for fall frocks now, aren’t we?” I said. “So I’ve been keeping an eye on the floor, making sure I know what’s come in.”

  “That’s why I’ve stopped by,” said Olive, handing me a typewritten sheet, heavily worked over with strike-through Xes and ink-pen cross outs. “I think I’ve written the ad you asked for. Fun and funny.”

  I tried to twist my anticipatory wince into a grin. I had only given Olive that assignment to make her feel better and to keep her busy, and I had to resist the urge to hold her attempt with two fingers at arm’s length, like something disgusting. Stay, gentle Boxfish, I chided myself. Today may be the day she finally figures it out.

  I looked at the sheet, intending to read her verse aloud, but got no further than the title before my jaw clamped involuntarily shut.

  PARDON US, MADAM, BUT YOUR BRAIN IS SHOWING

  It’s tactless to be too darn smart,

  And hiding your brains is an art,

  But if you’d attract

  The boys, it’s a fact

  That beauty appeals to the heart.

  * * *

  Before I could say a word, Olive had snatched it back from me, saying, “Helen could work up some sketches that would really make it sing, I think.”

  “Olive, darling,” I said, “our aim is not to antagonize the bulk of the customers who spend their family’s hard-budgeted money here. If you imply that the frock-purchasing ladies of Manhattan aspire to be empty-headed, then it’s likely they might make the logical leap that shopping at Macy’s is itself not smart.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Olive, folding the sheet into the tiniest square. I was afraid she was going to cry.

  “No, of course not,” I said, trying to sound reassuring, “but that’s how it might read.” With anyone else I’d have tried to make it into a joke, but with Olive that was the whole problem. “Tell you what let’s do. I’ll keep thinking about this. In the meantime, I have all these proofs of ads that Chester’s already approved, and they need to be proofread. Nobody’s better at that than you are.”

  “I can do that, yes,” she said, taking the stack and rising to leave. “I guess you just have sort of an advantage, Lillian.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “At being funny, I mean,” said Olive, blinking hard. “Happy people are just bound to be funnier. That’s just how it is.”

  I thought about that, mildly awed by its wrongheadedness. I almost tried to explain what a mistake it was to take comedy for happiness, or good cheer for joy. But it was none of Olive’s business how happy I was or wasn’t, so I didn’t.

  If I had, I might also have told her that she had it backwards. It wasn’t that happiness led to humor, but more that humor could lead, perhaps, to happiness—that an eye for the absurd could keep one active in one’s despair, the opposite of depressed: static and passive.

  Instead I walked Olive out, just as Helen—lovely, ingenious Helen McGoldrick—walked in, blonde as a sunrise and just as warm, lighting the lingering darkness of Olive from the corners of my office.

  “Congratulations, sugar,” she said in her Alabama drawl, pulling a chair around to my side of the desk. “And thanks for getting that little drawing of mine in the paper.”

  Then she and I got to work, sprinkling each page of copy, mine and others’, with irresistible little eyedrop-sized points of wit.

  4

  Great with Imagination

  All my life, I have taken satisfaction in finishing things in order that I may experience a sense of achievement, regardless of whether the thing was really worth achieving.

  Graduating from college, writing scores of institutional advertisements for R.H. Macy’s, mowing the lush Maine lawn at Pin Point, weeding, washing dishes, and writing inferior verse—any and all of these have given and can still give me this lulling feeling of accomplishment. So does finishing a drink.

  Across Park, across Lexington, I’m beginning to think I might as well stop in somewhere for one. I turn down Third Avenue and head for the Back Porch. It’s a bar in my neighborhood, though I would not call it my neighborhood bar. My relationship with liquor has always been less regimented, more improvisatory. Sometimes I have an old friend or two up for cocktails, or walk to meet them somewhere just to get out and about. And sometimes, yes still, even still, sometimes I make myself a drink and have it alone, with no one else but purring Phoebe. What’s the harm?

  Death, I suspect, will likely be unsatisfying because I will no longer be present to feel the achievement thereof.

  The Back Porch is clean and dim and almost empty except for that mellow bar smell of disinfectant and beer and lingering smoke, and as I walk in the bartender greets me. I haven’t seen him before. Maybe the regular bartender will be in later for the holiday rush. By then I’ll be at Grimaldi.

  I hang my mink coat on a wall hook next to the stool I intend to occupy—I have my pick, apart from a couple at the opposite end of the bar—and as I do I see a television set. The Back Porch never used to have a television set. Now it does. I want to walk right back out and find another place, but there’s not really time before my reservation and I badly want a drink, so I sit anyway.

  “What’ll it be, miss?” the bartender asks, and I like
his tie and his mustache and the friendliness in his eyes that does not seem fake.

  “Thank you for not ma’am-ing me,” I say. “What’s your name?”

  “Sam,” he says.

  “You can call me Lily, Sam, and I’d like a Negroni, please.”

  “Coming right up, Lily.”

  I watch him walk down the bar and gather up the gin, the Campari. Then my eyes—what choice have they?—are drawn to that interloper, that damned TV. Sam has on some show that I don’t recognize, but the program’s going to a commercial break: a subtle thunderclap of increased volume and then that Wendy’s ad that everyone on the planet seems gaga over.

  There they stand, two-dimensional and flickering, the three little old ladies in a fast-food emporium arrayed around a preposterously large and fluffy bun. They open it up. Therein lies a meager amount of mystery meat. The ancient dame who comprises the right flank of the triumvirate appears to be wearing a doily around her neck. She bellows like a musk ox:

  “Where’s the beef?”

  Not once, but thrice. Is that what we, the aged, are like?

  I despise this ad, and the TV on which it plays with those flashing lights. I mourn the conversations murdered by their juvenile intrusions.

  “Your Negroni, Lily,” says Sam. “Bon appétit.”

  “Cheers,” I say, and sip the bitter red liquid.

  I am about to tell him that it’s funny he should say bon appétit, because that’s the whole problem, I haven’t got much of one now, when another ad comes on.

  It begins with the familiar image of a bespectacled boy who reminds me of my studious Gian when he was young. The pleasant recognition curdles and spoils as a folksy tenor sings, “O, O, O, bright ideas and an Oreo cookie!”

  My nostrils flare. J’accuse! I think. You did this to me. Caused me to eat that half package of mediocre black-and-white sandwich cookies. Exhibiting exactly the kind of distracted-old-lady behavior that I’ve long prided myself on avoiding.