Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(9)

“Well, goodness,” I said. “Isn’t that fancy? If living well is the best revenge, I’ve got to start living better more conspicuously. The Silver Room’s a sterling place to begin.”

*

Back in my office, settling into the day’s work, I was trying to console myself with the thought that while I was usually good at getting what I wanted in life, I was not always so good at enjoying it, so maybe it was all right that Chester had denied me. Then Olive knocked her milquetoast knock.

“Are you busy?” she said, even as she walked in.

She seated herself in a manner meant as devil-may-care, but it failed to convince. Olive had an enthusiasm that was studied, forced. She was no giant intellect either, though she was far from stupid.

I thought of the day she’d debuted at the office. I thought of how I’d thought then that she and I could be friends. She started out as I did: assistant copywriter, forty dollars a week. But she did not climb the ladder. Could not. That had been almost four years ago. No one stayed in that job for four years. They either moved up or moved on to a different field.

Chester was a Harvard man, and Olive went to Radcliffe, which is how she got hired. But as skilled as she was at proofreading, she had no wit or sense of the place and could not write a quality, well-voiced ad at all. At all. But being an adwoman remained her fixation; she wouldn’t let it go, and the company wouldn’t let her go. Some murky connection, some muddled sense of Ivy League loyalty between Chester and Olive’s father led her to be indulged, kept on in a way she wouldn’t be otherwise.

I looked at her face, nearing thirty but with something babyish in it. Not fresh, but inchoate: something rudimentary that would never develop. Her sense of humor, I suspected. Olive was pretty, with velvety dark brown hair and huge eyes, but these she spoiled with excessive kohl, and her lipstick was too bright: a sad clown suffering from a lack of confidence. So far in the Macy’s Matrimonial Bureau, Olive had been unlucky—which I would not care about, except that she herself so obviously cared.

We both had the age-old impulse to be attractive, though—or at least fashionable. She referred to my hair as silken, and tawny, and in abundance, and it worried me, this eerie connoisseurship, like she might sneak up behind me and snip it off. Yet because I found myself wanting, against my better angels, to be cruel to her, I forced myself over and over to be nice.

“Olive, is that a new dress?”

“Yes,” she said, actually blushing.

“It suits you beautifully.”

“Thank you, Lily.”

“You’re welcome. You got it here, didn’t you? Women’s wear? Summer clearance, to make way for the new arrivals?”

“I did,” she said, looking at her lap. “No one knows the store quite like you do.”

“Well, we are working on the campaign for fall frocks now, aren’t we?” I said. “So I’ve been keeping an eye on the floor, making sure I know what’s come in.”

“That’s why I’ve stopped by,” said Olive, handing me a typewritten sheet, heavily worked over with strike-through Xes and ink-pen cross outs. “I think I’ve written the ad you asked for. Fun and funny.”

I tried to twist my anticipatory wince into a grin. I had only given Olive that assignment to make her feel better and to keep her busy, and I had to resist the urge to hold her attempt with two fingers at arm’s length, like something disgusting. Stay, gentle Boxfish, I chided myself. Today may be the day she finally figures it out.

I looked at the sheet, intending to read her verse aloud, but got no further than the title before my jaw clamped involuntarily shut.

PARDON US, MADAM, BUT YOUR BRAIN IS SHOWING

It’s tactless to be too darn smart,

And hiding your brains is an art,

But if you’d attract

The boys, it’s a fact

That beauty appeals to the heart.

*

Before I could say a word, Olive had snatched it back from me, saying, “Helen could work up some sketches that would really make it sing, I think.”

“Olive, darling,” I said, “our aim is not to antagonize the bulk of the customers who spend their family’s hard-budgeted money here. If you imply that the frock-purchasing ladies of Manhattan aspire to be empty-headed, then it’s likely they might make the logical leap that shopping at Macy’s is itself not smart.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Olive, folding the sheet into the tiniest square. I was afraid she was going to cry.

“No, of course not,” I said, trying to sound reassuring, “but that’s how it might read.” With anyone else I’d have tried to make it into a joke, but with Olive that was the whole problem. “Tell you what let’s do. I’ll keep thinking about this. In the meantime, I have all these proofs of ads that Chester’s already approved, and they need to be proofread. Nobody’s better at that than you are.”

“I can do that, yes,” she said, taking the stack and rising to leave. “I guess you just have sort of an advantage, Lillian.”

“Excuse me?”

“At being funny, I mean,” said Olive, blinking hard. “Happy people are just bound to be funnier. That’s just how it is.”

I thought about that, mildly awed by its wrongheadedness. I almost tried to explain what a mistake it was to take comedy for happiness, or good cheer for joy. But it was none of Olive’s business how happy I was or wasn’t, so I didn’t.