Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(23)

I kissed him quickly, for an instant, on the lips, then rapped my knuckles on the glass of the Christian Women’s Hotel door once he was down the street and out of sight. Helen and I were friends with the doorman, who let us enter by this method instead of ringing and getting in trouble over curfew.

*

The last time I saw Dickie was at the first party that Helen and I threw at our brand-new place: the sixth floor of the six-floor walk-up in Murray Hill. He came bearing booze. He did not stay the night. I did not want him to. It would have been impractical, for one—the place being too small, with Helen in the bedroom and Abe in there with her, and I in the room designated for living. But that aside, I could feel it was over, and I told Dickie so.

He explained to me calmly that he knew I was only saying that because of the upheaval of moving to a new place and because of my mistaken ideas about where my “career”—he sneered semi-intentionally as he said that word—might take me.

“You’ll call me up again, Lillian,” he said, placing a hand at my waist as we stood in the doorway, me trying to see him out, him seeking to stay. “I bet you will in under a week’s time.”

But I didn’t. I was too busy. Doing new things—writing new poems and learning a new trade and meeting new people. New men eventually.

In the month prior to that party Helen had gotten her job in advertising illustration at R.H. Macy’s, and thanks to her, I’d gotten mine there, writing advertising copy.

When Helen had told me to apply that June, after she was hired on, I had been leery. I had not entirely enjoyed the PR work in D.C. But advertising, I found, was a different and entirely more rideable beast.

With the pure driven vision of Phoebe Snow glimmering in my mind, I sent out my rhyming application letters—not only to R.H. Macy’s, but all over the place, just in case. Thanks to Helen and some mild exaggeration on my résumé—or a bit of finesse, as she suggested I call it—R.H. Macy’s took me on on a trial basis, and I tried and tried until they agreed to keep me.

Ginny had moved out of the Christian Women’s Hotel that first weekend in July, too. Independence Day indeed. She became a journalist, and we invited her to that first party, as well, full of goodwill and gratitude at being so free. A few years later Ginny would have to return to Kansas City to help her parents after the crash and through the Depression, settling in to work for the paper there. But Helen and I, we stayed in the city.

We couldn’t stay that way forever, Helen and I, living together, but while we did, everything was charmed. We never fought, we never felt crowded. We gave one another everything we required by way of fun and friendship, and the only necessity either of us could not get from the other was male companionship.

Before that party, we stood together on our fire escape, smoking and waiting for the guests to show up. The ravines of the city as seen from that vantage were sublime: Some of the other fire escapes strewn with shirts hung to dry, and clouds shifting overhead, dyed red by the sunset.

The following Monday I came home from work and paused to get the mail, our first delivery there.

I looked it over in the lobby—two letters for Helen and two for me. One was from my mother in D.C., expressing her worry at my ability to maintain an income steady enough to support this excursion into independent living, insulting as ever without meaning to be. “My darling girl,” she called me, and “my beloved child,” making me feel somehow even older than my twenty-six years.

The other, to my surprise, was from Abe. Seeing his return address and fluid handwriting, I thought at first that there must be a mistake and that he’d meant to write Helen, whom he was still seeing, even though Dickie and I, as of the last forty-eight hours, were officially uncoupled.

But no, it really was for me.

“My Dear Miss Poisonfish,” he addressed me, good-humoredly. Then, “In all seriousness, Lillian, Lily, most appealing Miss Boxfish, I fear you’ve broken poor Dickie’s heart, and poisoned the well of his zest for life, at least temporarily. I do not think this will make much difference, but since I hate seeing my pal so crestfallen and downcast, and since selfishly I adore the pleasure of your company on our double dates: Reconsider?”

The lobby felt stifling, and I crumpled both letters, one per fist, thinking to throw them in the trash bin near the stairs before I walked up, reluctant to carry such burdens to our rented heights.

Then the feeling passed and I felt all right. I loved them both, but neither Abe nor my mother had any purchase on me. They could say what they liked, and I would love them still, but I would not change my behavior, would not change my mind. I smoothed the letters flat again, replacing them in their respective envelopes, and kept them.

So for that first year of freedom, until the lease was up and we each had enough money to acquire our own places, Helen and I lived like happy cliff dwellers with our kitchenette and our combination shower and bathtub.

We had all we needed: work to do, vegetables and fresh milk and money to pay for them, even though they weren’t cheap. I think they would’ve sold autumn leaves for fifty cents a bunch if they could have found a market for them. It was a bandit city then, as it would always remain.

But the sidewalks were clean and the garbage was collected and I gave no thought as to where it was hauled or burned.

Up there in my snug sweet tower, I felt I’d made landfall in the shoals of shifting clouds. Far enough from the crowds to relish the crowds.