Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(34)
“You like it because it’s fashionable.”
“No, Olive,” I said. “I like it for the same reason that it’s fashionable. Namely, that it’s pretty swell.”
I was exasperated at having to explain myself to her, but unable to stop. I suppose in a sense I was happy to be fighting with her, freed from the need to hide my dislike and glad at the chance to voice thoughts I’d long harbored but never had the call to speak—because no one ever challenged me. Everything Olive was saying, I knew, was something that my mother also believed but had long since lost the temerity to say. But Olive—poor Olive. She was like one of those miserable dogs that it takes more effort not to kick than to kick.
“This may be hard for you to understand,” I went on, “but I’d rather live here in the city, in a microscopic apartment—like, for instance, this one, my home, where, as you might wish to recall, you are a guest—than ride a train to and from the suburbs. If you enjoy living with your parents out in Westchester County, then what do I care? And why should I do the same?”
“You’ll end up there one day, I’ll bet,” she said. “You’ll have a house in the country and a husband and a baby bouncing on the lawn, and you won’t remember a word you said to me tonight.”
“Olive, do you know the meaning of the term idée fixe? Because you, right now, are practically illustrating the textbook definition.”
“Stop being so witty,” she said.
“All right. I’ll be direct: Live in the suburbs if it makes you happy. But you’re not happy, Olive. All of us can see that. And might that be due at least in part to the fact that the suburbs put young ladies at a cruel disadvantage where fun with the local boys is concerned? Here’s some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you’ve made before you look askance at somebody else’s.”
I had it on good authority that Cornelius, one of the male copywriters at R.H. Macy’s, had asked Olive to a movie recently, and she had refused. She had used the suburbs as an excuse, when really she was merely waiting on a juicier plum to fall her way. In addition to an excess of parental chaperonage, Olive suffered from the condition of being a snob.
“I like it there!” she said, raising her voice even as I’d been keeping mine level. “Any boy with proper intentions will respect me enough to come see me there.”
Boy? I thought. Olive, you must be every minute of thirty years old.
But I didn’t say it. By that point, of course, everyone else in the kitchen had fallen silent to listen, including Bennie, who was now at my side. I could feel him tensed, ready to join the argument on my behalf—Now see here …—and I didn’t want that. “Let’s just wrap this up, Olive,” I said. “You love your bucolic daffodils and buttercups. I prefer my flowers in proximity to cement. Agree to disagree, yes?”
I offered a hand, but she refused it.
“You can’t even for one instant stop being cute, can you?” she said, slamming her empty glass on the counter, its forlorn lime wedge leaping from the rim to the floor. “It’s disgusting!”
With that, she flounced from the room in a cloud of crumpled periwinkle satin, leaving a wake of mouths agape behind her.
“Oh my stars,” said Helen. The room felt flabbergasted, but sympathetic to my side. “What an outrageous outburst. She’d been bottling that up for quite some time.”
“Are you all right?” asked Dwight.
“Quite,” I said, to him, to the room. “Chalk it up to a free show. Stick around now that it’s over. Don’t feel that you have to go home, especially as it just got a bit more roomy in here.”
“Let’s get you some air,” said Bennie, taking my elbow.
I didn’t feel embarrassed, but I felt a little strange, so I let him guide me to the roof and its relative privacy. He put his arm around my shoulder, and we looked out at the sparkling city.
“So,” he said, changing the subject with delicacy, “when you did that interview for the Times, you may recall that I and my camera came in at the end. Therefore I missed the most interesting parts. Your career achievements. Your biographical particulars.”
“Well,” I said, “you could just read all that in the paper.”
He grinned. “Given the state of journalism I thought it better just to ask you. What kind of advertising do you do, exactly, for Macy’s?”
I didn’t feel too keen on talking about work, as it reminded me of Olive, but I did appreciate his taking an interest, so I explained.
“Institutional advertising,” I said. “That means ads dealing generally with store policy and service and amenities, et cetera. Timely ads arising from hurricanes, Labor Day, spring, July Fourth, et cetera. Promotional ads dealing with assortments of merchandise for various departments, and also all magazine ads, et cetera. I’m the voice of the store. But the store’s voice is not my voice. I help everyone under me to also sound unlike themselves, but rather like R.H. Macy’s, and then to step back and disappear so the store stands alone at center stage.”
Most men were not impressed with my career but rather saw it as a diversion—a novelty that I would cease to find novel once they were done wooing me. They’d seek to give me the gift of not having to work anymore, not realizing I’d abhor few gifts more than that.