Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

by Kathleen Rooney

  Since 1960, when Gian left for college, I had written him a minimum of three times a week. A lot, I knew, but not as bad as I used to be. When he first left home I wrote melodramatic poems with titles like “To a Distant College Freshman,” and I longed for the days when measles were the concern, not bouts of going steady.

  From the morning that Max and I brought him home from the hospital, Gian had delivered the gratitude and terror that accompany the gift of a beautiful thing: the implicit charge that you, thenceforth, will be responsible for its care and upkeep.

  I was not sentimental over him, though I was devoted, as he was to me. He understood my sense of humor. He got me.

  For my latest birthday he’d sent me a dopey card with a half a dozen tiny cats on it that looked just like Phoebe; inside he’d written You’re more adorable than a basket full of kittens!!! He’d led all three grandkids in drawing their own cat cards, too, and had mailed them all separately, thus ensuring that the postman was credited with a tour de force on the day they arrived.

  I finished the coffee and rose to take my dishes to the dish drop, wondering which of us would vanish first: me or this automat.

  When I typed up the letter to Gian, I decided, I wouldn’t tell him about the television studio. Only about the Horn & Hardart, and about the walk, most likely.

  I had leaned on him so hard for such a long time—in person, after his father left me for Julia, then in writing, after he himself left home for Bowdoin—that I strove not to do so anymore. We had held each other upright for years; now there had to be distance between us, only a little, if we were ever to learn to travel under our own power.

  Even when he was a kid, Gian seemed to understand the absurdity of what his mother did for a living—how my angle was to take common things and reveal them to be strange and attractive, and to thereby relieve the monotony of advertising. The monotony of living, really.

  I drew my coat around me and reemerged into the strangeness of Forty-Second Street.

  The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.

  22

  As Good a Day to Die as Any

  History is packed with poets more committed to memory than I.

  Take, for example, Clement Clarke Moore, the “Bard of Chelsea,” whose country estate provided the name and the entire territory of the neighborhood in which Wendy now resides. Though Moore himself is mostly forgotten, there’s hardly a parent or child in the anglophone world whose ear doesn’t quicken to the words of his single famous verse, even if they know it only by its first line rather than its proper title, “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

  As I lurch toward West Fourteenth—tilted off plumb by my unbalanced burdens, the amaryllis pot proving heavier than I’d guessed—I’m struck anew by admiration for Moore’s poem, which just last week, on Christmas Eve, I performed by heart for my visiting grandchildren. At the time I hadn’t paused to consider the extent of its success, so complete as to be all but invisible in its vastness: Not only did it universalize its image of Saint Nick as a rosy and rotund whitebeard borne from chimney to chimney by flying reindeer, it also erased itself as the source of these notions, allowing them to seem ancient and true, like something everyone has always known.

  It was, in a sense, the greatest print advertisement in American history.

  Lily was so impressed with my delivery of the poem that she promised to be the one reciting it next year. I have no doubt that she will succeed in her memorization, though whether I will still be around and alive to hear it is a separate question.

  “’Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house…” I speak the lines aloud as I turn at the spooky Beaux-Arts façade of the old county bank building, because the street beyond is too desolate and dark for total silence: the bulb of every shepherd’s-crook lamppost has been cracked by some meticulous hoodlum. I fall silent again when I reach St. Bernard’s Church, its steps crowded with bundles of fabric and plastic, some of which are trash, some of which are people.

  On this night, at this hour, I am the only moving figure in the landscape, the only person who is not where she means to be.

  I am almost to the party. The address that Wendy gave me is on the other side of Ninth Avenue, which is odd, because this is the last residential block between here and the Hudson: Ahead there’s only the brick butte of the Port Authority building to the north, defunct factories and packing plants to the west. For the first time it occurs to me that she might be living—squatting—in a warehouse, and I wonder, if this is true, why she didn’t mention it. I imagine her weighing the wisdom of telling me, thus risking my disapproval when I might not have any real intention of coming, versus not telling me, thus risking getting me lost in a perilous area on New Year’s Eve. Did she really not want me to come?

  At the end of the block ahead I can see the tracks of the West Side Line where they pass through the walls of the old industrial structures. I remember when they opened the elevated line in 1934: the West Side Improvement Project. What a brilliant idea it had seemed at the time, getting those freight trains up off street level.

  I remember, as well, when the line closed in 1980. The last shipment they sent down the rails was a load of frozen turkeys, cargo that seemed like a punchline for a joke that no one could be bothered to write. Now most people seem to think it should be torn down, and I expect it will be, once the city finds the money. I wish they could leave it standing, fix it up, run trains on it again—or come up with some other function for it, though I can’t imagine what that might be. Everyone is always too quick to discard things.

  When I get to Wendy’s block there are no marked addresses, only a cramped compound of interconnected brick buildings that stretches to all four bordering streets—and indeed beyond, by way of a pedestrian skywalk that spans the space above my head like a latter-day Bridge of Sighs. Some of the buildings are windowless; some that aren’t are boarded up with graffitied sheets of plywood. Not one betrays so much as a flicker of light.

  The stubborn insistence of the human body—even an old one like mine—on keeping itself alive is a source of increasing amusement for me. On this deserted street, my unreasoning heart and lungs have commenced their rote double time, my pupils yawn, and even my steady knees have acquired a quiver.

  But like all impulses, the desire to preserve oneself can be mastered, controlled. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk all the way back to Murray Hill tonight still lugging this incipient amaryllis.

  About halfway along the block, amid a line of boarded windows, I find a set of double doors propped with a mop bucket; from the bucket’s handle rises a spray of helium balloons. The door opens—with a haunted-house groan and no small effort on my part—on a hallway lit at its far end by a platoon of votive candles. There’s no buzzer, and from the music I can now hear pounding above, it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to hear it if there were one.

  Behind the candles a piece of pink poster board leans against the wall. PETER’S N–Y–E PARTY, I read as I draw closer—not Peter and Wendy’s; just Peter’s—7TH FLOOR FOLLOW THE LITE! Around the text, the poster is collaged with dozens of tiny hand-tinted prints of the same black-and-white photograph: the appraising face of a handsome heavy-lidded young man. Wendy’s name may not be written on the poster, but the photo clearly announces her presence, reassures me that I’m in the right place.

  The hallway extends parallel to the street in both directions, but more candles scatter to the left, leading toward what looks like a distant freight elevator. My hosts’ trail is charming and romantic to be sure, but also entirely unsafe: the propped door and low light create a perfect workspace for muggers and rapists. I hate thinking this way but also can’t justify partaking in plain foolishness; I pause to search my purse for my trusty penlight, click it on, and proceed.

  The bluish oval that it casts discovers a ceiling veined by pipes, ducts, and conduits, none of which provides a good clue about what this place used to make, or store,
or process. The walls show signs of having been whitewashed so long ago that the whiteness is all but gone; here and there there’s a flash of some more elaborate adornment. At one point a pair of pale painted hands takes shape from the darkness, each holding a doubloon-like circle—one black, one white—in its long bloodless fingers, as if illustrating an occult ritual.

  As I study the image, I spy words painted above it, and I angle my beam upward to read.

  OREO SANDWICH, it says.

  The shock of recognition almost jolts the light from my hand. At once I know exactly where I am, and I can’t suppress a laugh—though I don’t much like the sound of it when the echo sends it back to me.

  This is the old National Biscuit factory: an amalgam of packaging plants, storehouses, loading docks, offices, and industrial-scale ovens that has overflowed this Manhattan block since Teddy Roosevelt was police commissioner. In disuse now for more than a quarter century—ever since the whole operation trimmed its name to Nabisco and decamped, like so many of my other aging neighbors, to New Jersey—this was once the nation’s snack laboratory par excellence, where wizardly denizens invented tricks that would change food forever.

  No hyperbole, that. National Biscuit not only found ways to ship their empty calories halfway round the world with crunches undiminished, but also to make sure that somebody was already craving them upon arrival. With such a wide reach achieved, their products ceased to be mere treats and took on the status of institutions, as unifyingly uniform as any flag, oath, or anthem. These brick walls witnessed the nativities of Zu Zu Ginger Snaps, the Lorna Doone, Ritz Crackers, and, of course, my hated adversary, derailer of my New Year’s Eve, that dark satanic sandwich, the Oreo cookie.

  I suppose I ought to be pleased by the evening’s serendipitous circularity, but I can’t quite manage. While it’s tempting to cast my long walk as an accidental mock-heroic—arriving at last in the lair of the beast that wrecked my dinner plans, defeated though it now may be by my powers of digestion—there’s nothing but phantoms to counterattack. Aside from this painted wall, no physical trace of my enemy remains.

  Anyway, this is silliness. If my enemy were on hand to be vanquished, what would it look like? A crisp morsel composited from sugar, flour, and fat? A bookish child in a TV commercial? An invisible pile of money, flashing around the globe in the form of Nabisco Brands stock?

  Or would it just look like me? After all, no one made me buy those Oreos. Or did they? I imagine Leslie Monroe and Geraldine Kidd emerging from the darkness, glamorous and camera ready, reminding me with a cluck of the tongue and a pat on the shoulder that real advertising—not the primitive quilting bee I apparently mistook for my own copywriting career—is an inside job: deep inside our heads and hearts, the secret crannies where we hide ourselves from ourselves. Who’s been more the mother to Gian in the years since I fell apart, vigorous me or dying Julia? How did my son get by when I was fogged with liquor, or rebuilding at Silver Hill? All my cherished memories of his smartness, his sweetness: how many other such moments slipped by me undetected? I can brood, and I can speculate, but I can never know for sure—although I can buy a package of cookies.

  Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself, I find myself a traitor with the rest.

  The freight elevator elevates me not into the party but to yet more blazing candles, these blazing a trail down a wide corridor toward the ever-louder music. The hallway is lined with prints of Wendy’s photographs, alternating with canvases presumably done by her husband, all hanging unevenly against the bricks from thick steel wires strung between exposed pipes.

  I’m no art critic, but even though Peter’s paintings look accomplished—abstracted landscapes in an attractive California palette that reminds me of Richard Diebenkorn—I like Wendy’s work better and think that she is the superior artist. Partly this is because Wendy’s work pulses with rhythms and textures that I know well; it’s of the city, while Peter’s is simply in it. Or maybe my preference is even more straightforward: Wendy’s images have people in them and Peter’s don’t. My biases always run against the systematic and the stylized in favor of the mess and adventure of human life. It’s the same with music: Gian is always chiding me about my inability to appreciate all the modern compositions—atonal, aleatoric, serialist—that he and his colleagues inflict on their students, the poor dears who a year ago were playing Leroy Anderson tunes in high school gymnasiums.

  The music coming from the party, though, I enjoy. It’s not like anything I’ve heard before. It sounds as if it’s coming from inside a cave or a subway tunnel, a simple repetitive bass melody with the occasional crashing cymbal and distant, slightly yelpy voices repeating something about slipping in and out of phenomenon. I don’t know what that means, but it feels evocative and exciting.

  I emerge from the corridor into a vast central space.

  A pair of bare bulbs and a Vaticanload of candles barely succeed in lighting the room, which is thronged with people, mostly men, a few women, all young. What little furniture there is has been pushed to the walls. Some people sit but many are dancing. A lot of the women wear lace tops, and skirts over capris or fishnet stockings. A lot of the men wear trousers that seem impossibly tight. Both the women and the men wear interesting earrings. Everyone seems to have taken great care with his or her appearance, which I appreciate. I take off my hat and smooth my hair.

  By instinct I make my way through the bustling darkness to the provisional kitchen—a hodgepodge of countertops and cabinetry, basins and hot plates, threaded with rubber hoses and extension cords—to set down my gifts. Here, too, to a person, the guests all have meticulous outfits and thoughtful haircuts. I am glad, as I always am, that I made a point of dressing up, as I always do.

  The crowd parts slightly so I can reach the counter. Except for one young man—with a face like a jack-o’-lantern: snaggled teeth and too-wide eyes—who peels himself from a conversation to stand in my way.

  “Who the fuck invited Nancy Reagan?” he says.

  He strikes the high-chinned pose of a movie gangster and tries to stare me down. He is not bad looking, but his cheeks are gaunt, and he seems to be under the influence of something stronger than alcohol and holiday cheer.

  For an instant I’m taken aback by this affront. Then habit takes over and I relax, square off. I may be out of practice, but I have attended a lot of parties through the years, been challenged by many boors in many kitchens. Those old muscles still flex.

  “When you’re insulting someone,” I say, “the trick is to be fast, specific, and accurate. Two out of three won’t do. You fumbled the third. Please note that I am six inches taller, twenty years older, and more adventurously dressed than Nancy Reagan has ever been. Does every woman over the age of fifty who spends a little money on herself look like the First Lady to you? Or do you have some sort of fixation on her?”

  “Fixation?” he says. “Yeah, I got a fixation. I fucking hate that shriveled-up old hag.”

  “Well, you won’t hear me defending her. I voted for Mondale and Ferraro. I think it’s high time we put a woman in the White House to do more than pick out china services.”

  “My, aren’t you quite the activist,” the young man says. “Are you running for office? Do you want us to sign your petition? Or did you come here to save us? Did you get us confused with those nice violin-and-opera queers from the Upper West Side?”

  “I’ve come here,” I say, “because Wendy invited me. What’s your name?”

  The challenge in his face is losing its edge, becoming plain sullenness. “What do you care?”

  “I’d like to be able to complain about your manners on an informed basis.”

  “You should keep away from me, Nancy,” he says. “I’m a scary homosexual.”

  “My name is Lillian,” I say, shuffling my burdens to extend my hand. “Not Nancy. And I’m not scared of homosexuals.”

  “Jason, lay off,” says another man, coming up behind him and touching his shoulder. “You’re b
eing an asshole.”

  Jason ignores him, and takes a sip of the pink drink in his clear-plastic cup.

  “Haven’t you heard, Nancy?” he says. “We all have AIDS. Aren’t you afraid?”

  This irritates me in a way his previous gibes haven’t because it’s exactly what I am thinking: Does he have AIDS? and Am I afraid? He certainly doesn’t look healthy. As I try to remember what I’ve read about the disease, I can’t help but steal a downward glance at my own exposed fingers, veined and pale against the dark.

  I decide I’m not afraid. “It’s my understanding,” I say, “that I am in little danger of getting AIDS from you, if you have it to give. Or I would be in little danger, had your parents raised you to be polite enough to shake a hand when it’s been offered.”

  The venom creeps back into his eyes. “You don’t want to hear about how my parents raised me,” he says.

  He tips the last of his drink down his throat, flicks the empty cup onto the dancefloor, and passes his palm across his mouth with a theatrical slurp, pretending to lick it.

  At least I think he’s pretending.

  “Okay, sweetie,” he says, extending his arm slackly, like the pope presenting his ring. “Put ’er there.”

  “Jason,” the young man behind him says, then he doesn’t say anything else.

  I am unable to suppress an exasperated sigh.

  Whenever I encounter strangers on my walks through the city, I always try to provoke them to reveal something of themselves, hoping they’ll surprise me, jolt me out of my own head. I’m generally good at doing this. When I fail, though—when they brush me off or, worse, when they begin to perform, behaving like some version of what they think I want or don’t want them to be—the results are terribly dispiriting.

  I’m failing with Jason. Looking at him is like looking at a mirror, a haunted-house mirror that reflects everyone as a corpse.