Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(4)
“It’s not just R.H. Macy’s, Johnny,” I say, though I’d miss the department store like I’d miss a parent; the company gave me a life that I would not have lived otherwise. “In Murray Hill I don’t have to drive. I don’t have to rely on anybody. If I came to Brunswick, my brain would waste into a raisin and I’d break both my hips.”
He goes on, and I listen, but he won’t persuade me. I’m not leaving this city no matter how far it falls in its hellward slide. Over the years I have entertained the idea of moving. I adore my son, the kids, adore the idea of usurping the fake mother. And yet.
“Gianino, darling,” I say. “I thought this call was about Julia, not your old ma. What will you do with the evening? I imagine this heart attack has quashed your plans?”
“We’re going to let the kids stay up until midnight this year. They’re all old enough. Even though I’ll be at the hospital—just being awake will be enough of a treat for them. What are your plans?”
“Same as always. Dinner at Grimaldi at five, and then early to bed with a book.”
“Veal rollatini with green noodles?” he asks.
“As ever,” I say. “Alberto’s specialty.”
The Grimaldis were family friends of Max’s family. Max, whose full name was Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo. The restaurant is just around the corner on Madison Avenue, and I’ve been going there since they opened in 1956. Max and I had divorced—why say it that way? Max had divorced me—before then, but because I got to keep the apartment, got to keep the city, I also got to keep the restaurant and that set of friends. It’s been my New Year’s Eve standard since the late seventies, back before pasta became the rage of the age.
“Tell Alberto that Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo, Jr., sends his regards,” says Gian. “Tell Al junior that I say ciao.”
“I will to Alberto,” I say, “but I can’t to Al. He absconded to Palm Beach to serve tortellini to the snowbirds.”
I think of my rollatini, and I don’t feel hungry.
“I bet his new place won’t require jackets in that Florida heat,” says Gian.
I’d bet he’s right, and though I’ll never set foot in Florida, I resent that, just as I resent our summertime tourists who underdress, who take no pride in looking any better than bovine, in their shorts and their neon hues and their fanny packs. Even were Alberto no longer to require it, I would dress for dinner.
“If I’m out when you have news, I’m at Grimaldi,” I say. “So don’t worry and just leave a message.”
I used to use a service, but Gian and the kids set up an answering machine last week, one of their Christmas presents. The leave-a-message message speaks in the voice of Lily, my youngest granddaughter—my favorite voice, and not just because they named her after me, but because she’s musical, a singer like her father. She’s called me every day since they left, to record a reply to her own recording before I pick up and we talk a bit. Our new game: Lily ringing Lily, then speaking to Grandma Lillian.
“All right,” says Gian. “Be careful out there. Love you, Ma.”
I replace the Bakelite receiver in its cradle and look down at the kitchen table, where I’ve been sitting.
Dark, glimmering crumbs, like potting soil, are strewn across the tabletop beneath my elbows, my face. I have just devoured half a package of Oreo brand cookies manufactured by Nabisco while on the phone with Gian without even realizing it.
I never do that: Buy manufactured cookies. Eat that way, like an animal. I don’t even especially like Oreos. My mouth, which moments ago was obliviously munching, now teems with their industrial-strength sweetness. My fingertips are greasy with creme filling—creme so-called, as opposed to cream, because it must be just powdered sugar and lard, unless I miss my guess. I suppose I must have been twisting them apart, eating them disassembled, or how else would I have made such a mess?
“Phoebe!” I say to the cat, creeping along the back of the sofa, staring at me green-eyed. “Why didn’t you say something?”
Phoebe rotates her pert ears away and plops to the floor, pretending she hasn’t heard me, in much the same manner a cultured person responds to audible flatulence.
I am, for the life of me, unable to fathom why I even had the vile black sandwiches. Did I buy them while the grandchildren were here? I’m sure I did not. My week prior to their visit was a Tartarus of sheet pans, spent in the creation of a Christmas-cookie fantasia; had the little goblins at any point asked me for packaged cookies, I’m quite certain I would have shipped them back to Maine with stockings full of coal. Wherefore, then, this evil visitation? The episode is enough to make me fear the onset of a condition that until now I’ve mocked: this Alzheimer’s disease that’s evidently plaguing the aged. Or so I’m told; I don’t often mix with the aged.
No time for such fretting now: Worst of all, I have only a little more than an hour before I’m to be at Grimaldi. I doubt I’ll be famished again by the time they seat me, but I have to show up, or Alberto really will send a cop to look in on me. I couldn’t abide that. Plus, I have my dinner attire picked out, and I don’t want to stay in; I’ve been in all day. The weather, unwholesomely clement, dissuaded me from taking my usual stroll. The mercury hit sixty-five yesterday—December 30 in New York City—and the forsythia in Central Park thought it meant that they should bud. Tonight the low is supposed to be a more reasonable thirty degrees, so I can dress as befits midwinter.