Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(5)

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.”