“You’re funny, Lillian,” says Penny, laughing, and her mother laughs, too.
“I used to be,” I say. “You know what else I wonder? I wonder whether anyone will know what a penny was when you get to be my age.”
“Gosh,” says Penny, very serious, very adult. “You’re how old now, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Eighty-four,” I say, lying as always.
“And I’m eleven,” she says, sending her blue-eyed gaze to the ceiling as she mentally calculates. “So that’s seventy-three years from now, right?”
“Correct, Penny,” I say. “You are excellent at math.”
“Her father’s an accountant,” says Kathy, winking at her husband.
“So that will be the year 2057,” says Penny.
“Good grief,” says Kathy. “That sounds so far away!”
“Lillian,” says Penny, “I hope it doesn’t make you too sad, but I have to say that I do not think anyone will be using pennies at that time. It won’t be cost-effective.”
“They just stopped making them out of copper,” Kathy’s brother says. “They’re using cheaper metal now. Zinc, I think.”
“I predict that you are right, Penny,” I say. “Though it does make me a tiny bit sad.”
“Well,” says Penny, “I have a penny collection at home, actually. And I think that if I know anything about myself, I will still have it even then. So it’s not like pennies will be completely gone.”
“That makes me feel better, Penny,” I say, because it does.
I’ve been talking, I realize, and have made little headway on my steak. For a moment I fear I’ve once again let circumstances prevent Delmonico’s from serving me a perfect meal. But it’s still warm and still delicious, and I dispatch it with dispatch. I drink the last of my wine with the last of my meat, and when Kathy’s husband looks at me and reaches for the bottle, I shake my head no and mouth my thanks. Not because I don’t want more, but because I do.
I set down my water glass and feel overcome by something akin to Stendhal syndrome: a dizzy head, a thumping heart. I’m so touched by their kindness. Although a long series of dim and darker days has tempted me to conclude that I inhabit a world on an ever-sewerward skid, here they are. Penny and her mother are just too much. I feel almost faint.
I excuse myself. To powder my nose, I tell them.
But I take my things with me.
I do stop in the lavatory, but when I am done, I do not return to the table. I go to the front, catch our waiter, and settle up. I pay the bill for the entire party on my Carte Blanche, and I leave without saying good-bye, because I’m not sure I can hold myself together, I’m so happy.
Back on William Street, I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to sleep because I want to be awake for this feeling—awake to see what happens next.
This, I am reminded, is why I love walking in the city, taking to the streets in pursuit of some spontaneous and near-arbitrary objective. If one knocks oneself out of one’s routine—and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs—then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is.
It’s about 9:30.
When I first came to the city there were dirigible masts and chromium spires rising in every direction, pointing up toward the vault of heaven, ahead toward the world to come. I pictured them clung with honeysuckle and morning glory, eighty stories up. Everything was so pretty then.
Those spires were dreams before they were spires, and who knows what dreams still shelter behind the distrustful eyes I meet on these streets? That makes me think of my friend Wendy and her enormous Nikon, hunting Madison Square Park for signs of that kind of beauty. Wendy, whose New Year’s Eve party is probably just now getting underway.
I figure Chelsea is a hair under three miles away as the crow flies, but I’ve never been inclined to let crows plot my routes.
15
Nature in the Roar
Even before our new baby was born, I became, for a time, an expert on crying.
I sat trying not to on Friday, January 16, 1942, vastly pregnant on the thirteenth floor of R.H. Macy’s. It was my farewell party.
My office had already been emptied, and I’d be taking the last box of my things home with me that evening. Everyone from institutional advertising had turned out to say good-bye.
“Lilies for our beloved Lily,” said evil Olive, my grinning enemy, presenting me with a bouquet of Orientals and fairly licking her chops at the prospect of my permanent departure.