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.
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.