Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(58)
Her creased forehead shines brightly with sweat, but she manages a little smile. “It’s silly,” she says. “Luis says it is. But I want Coco to be the first baby born in 1985. You know, the New Year’s baby.”
“That’s a good goal,” I say, and look at my watch. “It’s about 10:30. You’re within sight of it, certainly. If you get this show on the road, Coco just might make it.”
“Ma’am!” says a voice from across the room: the receptionist at the admitting desk. She has, I realize, been saying it for a while. “Do we need to get her to maternity?”
“No!” Maritza says, pivoting her belly away as if to protect its contents.
“We’ll wait for the father, thank you!” I say with a cheery wave.
“Are you an angel?” says Maritza, squeezing my hand so tightly it hurts. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Good grief,” I say. “Don’t go delirious on me.”
She looks past me to the sliding doors and relief floods her face. “Luis!” she shouts.
A thin man with a round face that makes him look even younger than Maritza has just walked in, his dark eyes frantic, scanning the room. He sees us and sprints over.
He wears a leather jacket and a baseball cap. He takes off the latter and clutches it in his hands as he looks at Maritza and then at me, confused. She says something to him in Spanish and he nods to me, and I transfer Maritza’s hand to his.
“I think you’re all set to check in now, Maritza,” I say. “Yes?”
“Yes,” she says, holding on to Luis. “Thank you, Lillian.”
“Muchas gracias, Lillian,” says Luis.
“Of course,” I say. “You’re welcome. And good luck. Just remember, the first thousand diapers are the hardest.”
Maritza laughs, then says, “It hurts to laugh.”
Luis seems to have all but forgotten me. He’s holding both of Maritza’s hands now, his eyes sharp with terror and wonder; his car keys, I notice, still dangle between his fingers. I think about all the ads for engagement rings that I wrote over the years, mostly for R.H. Macy’s but also freelance. How are you fixed for diamonds? they’d ask. Diamonds are better than sulfur and molasses for sweethearts suffering from the megrims. We’ve seen one of our diamond wedding rings revive a young lady’s drooping spirit in half a split second. A time came when these ads stopped seeming funny to me, and I could no longer write them.
“Maritza,” I say, “don’t worry too much about what anybody’s grandmother thinks. Do whatever you want. Anyone who tells you you shouldn’t is trying to sell you something.”
As I walk back to the street, I try to make a mental note to check tomorrow’s papers and see whether Coco, born to Maritza and Luis, succeeds in being 1985’s first sparkling new baby. It’s nice to feel a small sense of investment in the future, even if it only lasts a few hours.
I have so little future left. And so much past.
19
A Horrid Little Ghost
One leaves a sanitarium with a renewed enthusiasm for making oneself up.
At least I did, that early summer of 1955. But one must remain in the sanitarium for quite some time before one achieves such a transformation. Four months in my case: from bleakest February to greenest June.
The last poem I wrote before they sent me in was called “Blackout;” it went like this:
When life seems gray
And short of fizz
It seems that way
Because it is.
It eventually found a home in Ladies’ Home Journal, accompanied by a cute illustration.
I wasn’t kidding when I wrote it. Or so I gather; I don’t remember writing it at all. What I know of that period I’ve had to piece together after the fact—à la that clever Lieutenant Columbo—from journals, letters, medical bills, interviews with eyewitnesses, and the few odd flashes that have come back to me over the years. Filling in, bit by bit, an ugly picture of myself. At once the detective, the victim, and the murderer.
The people around me, Max and Johnny particularly, had come to notice signs of trouble: my drinking, my distraction, my utter lack of pleasure in things—this last, I learned, called anhedonia, which to me sounded like the name of a flower Max never planted in the garden I never wanted. Max tried, in his graceless way, to snap me out of it with a series of increasingly tin-eared and desperate inducements that culminated in our second ocean voyage to Italy, about which the less said the better, but none of it was any use. I had become a stranger—dark and frightening—to the people I most loved.
Or so I gather.
So in I went.
Max checked me into Silver Hill, a residential treatment facility in the tranquil hinterland of bucolic Connecticut.
Severe depression, alcoholism, and menopause on top of it all: that was Dr. R’s tripartite diagnosis, a three-pronged stab to Max’s heart and pride. I, evidently, was so far beyond caring by that point that I took in this assessment without interest, as though they were speaking of someone else—which, in a sense, I suppose they were.
Comprehensive psychiatric and addiction treatment services, those were what Silver Hill provided. I remember, for some reason, holding their brochure, which Max gave me to browse on the ride down from Manhattan that white morning in early February; it apparently declared that they had been restoring mental health since 1931—the same year that I became the highest-paid advertising woman in America. Or so Max told me; I had no appetite for reading and simply took his word for it. I don’t think he cared. I think he mostly wanted to give me something to hold that was not his hand.