Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(85)

And then one fall day in 1966—with my long-traitorous brain at last reconciled with my body, with Max dead, with Gian living on his own—I rediscovered that coat, shrouded in plastic at the back of a closet. I put it on. I stepped outside, and the world seemed to accept me as a person who ought to be wearing it.

And then I took a walk.

I walked with no objective in mind beyond a vague interest in finding an old-fashioned cream soda, and six hours later I was seeing the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty from the upper deck of the Staten Island Ferry, watching as the faces of the strangers gathered at the rails were warmed and softened by the orange light, hearing them whisper and shout in four or five languages and a dozen different accents. It was the most clichéd scene imaginable—like the hackwork of Rockwell’s most gauche imitator—and my practiced mind filled with needle-sharp couplets to skewer it.

I didn’t write any of them down, though. I just stood still and watched, hoping that the tears on my cheeks could be plausibly blamed on the biting wind off the Upper Bay. We’ve been here all along, the world seemed to say, waiting for you. What took you so long to find us?

I put Phoebe’s food in her ceramic dish, pour myself a glass of water, and take a seat at the table in the dim kitchen, listening to the dainty smacks of her cat mouth.

The message light flashes on, a red pulse on the wall behind it. Somewhere in the building a party is breaking up; from the stairwell I hear the drunken talk and stumbling steps of those who’ve given up on the ancient elevator. We drift—all of us—farther from the fraught spasm of midnight, settling into the fog of another year.

No one survives the future, of course. Over the years I have rushed it, run from it, tried to shunt myself from its track. That these efforts did not succeed does not mean that I regret them.

Now? The future and I are just about even, our quarrel all but resolved. I welcome its coming, and I resolve to be attentive to the details of its arrival. I plan to meet it at the station in my best white dress, violet corsage in hand. Waving as it comes into view, borne toward the present on its road of anthracite.





Author’s Note and Sources

The story of Lillian Boxfish is inspired, in part, by the life and work of the poet and ad woman Margaret Fishback, herself the real highest-paid female advertising copywriter in the world during the 1930s, thanks to her brilliant work for R.H. Macy’s.

Back in 2007, my best friend from high school, Angela McClendon Ossar, was earning her master’s degree in library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and doing an internship in the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University. As part of this job, she got to be the receiving and processing archivist for a recent acquisition: the papers of Margaret Fishback.

Angela, as the first person ever to work professionally with the papers (after Fishback’s son, Anthony Antolini, donated the material), quickly realized that Fishback was a figure—a poet, a protofeminist, a successful career woman, and a mother—who would appeal to me as a poet, a feminist, and a professional myself. She called me up and told me all about Fishback, and I was so fascinated that I applied for a travel-to-collections grant from Duke, which enabled me, in May of 2007, to be the first nonarchivist or librarian to work with Fishback’s archive.

I instantly felt a deep connection to Fishback—an affinity for her writing both of ads and of poems, and her overall sensibility—though she’d been dead since the mid-1980s. I knew that I wanted to do something to bring her story and those of others like her (this whole forgotten generation of pre–Mad Men advertising women) into the light. I gave a lecture at Duke about my findings, focusing particularly on Fishback’s innovative use of humor in her ad copy for Macy’s, but it took me a few years to realize what shape my project should take. At last, stuck inside during a blizzard in Chicago in 2013, I got the idea to combine my love of Fishback with my love of cities and flanerie; I resolved to write a novel that would bring these two affinities together. Now, almost exactly a decade to the day that I first set eyes upon the Fishback archive, the book has arrived.

To be clear, this is a work of fiction and not a biography of Margaret Fishback. The circumstances of the novel are my invention, and the attitudes and opinions expressed by Lillian Boxfish are entirely imagined. That said, I encourage everyone to read Margaret Fishback’s collections of light verse, which are utterly charming and are as follows: I Feel Better Now, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1932 (poems originally appearing in the New York World, The New Yorker, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York American, Judge, and Vanity Fair) I Take It Back, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1935 (poems originally appearing in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, The New York American, The New York Sun, The World, Judge, Vanity Fair, Redbook, Buffalo Town Tidings, The Stage, and The Forum Magazine) One to a Customer, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1937 (an omnibus comprising I Feel Better Now and Poems Made Up to Take Out, supra, together with two other volumes: Out of My Head and I Take It Back) Poems Made Up to Take Out, New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1963 (poems originally appearing in Better Living, Collier’s, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, the New York Herald Tribune, Pictorial Review, Reader’s Digest, American Girl, American Home, The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, The Wall Street Journal, This Week, Woman’s Day, and Women’s Wear Daily) I also recommend taking a look at her how-to books, including the one on etiquette, Safe Conduct: When to Behave—And Why (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1938), as well as a humorous guide to parenthood called Look Who’s a Mother! A Book About Babies for Parents, Expectant and Otherwise (Simon & Schuster, 1945).