The Girl in Times Square. Paullina Simons

PART I

       IN THE BEGINNING

       You call yourself free? Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! But your eyes should announce to me brightly: free for what?

      FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

1

       Appearing To Be One Thing When it is in Fact Another

      1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49.

      And again:

      1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49.

      Reality: something that has real existence and must be dealt with in real life.

      Illusion: something that deceives the senses of mind by appearing to exist when it does not, or appearing to be one thing when it is in fact another.

      Miracle: an event that appears to be contrary to the laws of nature.

      49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.

      Lily stared at the six numbers in the metro section of The Sunday Daily News. She blinked. She rubbed her eyes. She scratched her head. Something was not right. Amy wasn’t home, there was no one to ask, and Lily’s eyes frequently played tricks on her. Remember last year in the delivery room when she thought her sister gave birth to a boy, and shouted ‘BOY!’ because they all so wanted a boy, and it turned out to be another girl, the fourth? How could her mind have added on a penis? What was wrong with her?

      Leaving her apartment she went down the narrow corridor to knock on old Colleen’s door in 5F. Fortunately Colleen was always home. Unfortunately Colleen, here since she was a young lass during the potato famine, was legally blind, as Lily to her dismay found out, because Colleen read 29 instead of 49, and 89 instead of 39. By the time Colleen finished with the numbers, Lily was even less sure of them. “Don’t worry about it, me dearie,” said Colleen sympathetically. “Everyone thinks they be seeing the winnin’ numbers.”

      Lily wanted to say, not her, not she, not I, as ever just a smudge in the reflected sky. I don’t see the winning numbers. I might see penises, but I don’t imagine portholes of the universe that never open up to me.

      Lily was born a second-generation American and the youngest of four children to a homemaker mother who always wanted to be an economist, and a Washington Post journalist father who always wanted to be a novelist. He loved sports and was not particularly helpful with the children. Some might have called him insensitive and preoccupied. Not Lily.

      Her grandmother was worthy of more than a paragraph in a summary of Lily’s life at this peculiar juncture, but there it was. In Lily’s story, Danzig-born Klavdia Venkewicz ran from Nazi-occupied Poland with her baby, Lily’s mother, across destroyed Germany. After years in three displaced persons camps, she managed to get herself and her child on a boat to New York. She had called the baby Olenka, but changed it to a more American-sounding Allison, just as she changed her own name from Klavdia to Claudia and Venkewicz to Vail.

      Lily lived all her life in and around the city of New York. She lived in Astoria, and Woodside, and Kew Gardens, and when they really moved up in the world, Forest Hills, all in the borough of Queens. Her dream was to live in Manhattan, and now she was living it, but she had been living it broke.

      When George Quinn, who had been the New York City correspondent for the Post, was suddenly transferred down to D.C. because of cost-cutting internal restructuring, Lily refused to go and stayed with her grandmother in Brooklyn, commuting to Forest Hills High School to finish out her senior year. That was some wild year she had without parental supervision. Having calmed down slightly, she went to City College of New York up on 138th Street in Harlem partly because she couldn’t afford to go anywhere else, her parents having spent all their college savings on her brother—who went to Cornell. Her mother, fortunately guilt-ridden over going broke on Andrew, paid Lily’s rent.

      As far as the meager rations of youthful love, Lily, too quiet for New York City, went almost without until she found Joshua—a waiter who wanted to be an actor. His red hair was not what drew her to him. It was his past sufferings and his future dreams—both things Lily was a tiny bit short on.

      Lily liked to sleep late and paint. But she liked to sleep late most of all. She drew unfinished faces and tugboats on paper and doodles on contracts, and lilies all over her walls, and murals of boats and patches of water. She hoped she was never leaving the apartment because she could never duplicate the work. She had been very serious about Joshua until she found out he wasn’t serious about her. She read intensely but sporadically, she liked her Natalie Merchant and Sarah McLachlan loud and in the heart, and she loved sweets: Mounds bars, chocolate-covered jell rings, double-chocolate Oreos, chewy Chips-Ahoy, Entenmann’s chocolate cake with chocolate icing, and pound cake.

      One of her sisters, Amanda, was a model mother of four model girls, and a model suburban wife of a model suburban husband. The other sister, Anne, was a model career woman, a financial journalist for KnightRidder, frequently and imperfectly attached, yet always impeccably dressed. Her brother, Andrew, Cornell having paid off, was a U.S. Congressman.

      The most interesting things in Lily’s life happened to other people, and that’s just how Lily liked it. She loved sitting around into the early morning hours with Amy, Paul, Rachel, Dennis, hearing their stories of violent, experimental love lives, hitchhiking, South Miami Beach Bacchanalian feasts. She liked other people to be young and reckless. For herself, she liked her lows not to be too low and her highs not to be too high. She soaked up Amy’s dreams, and Joshua’s dreams, and Andrew’s dreams, she went to the movies three days a week—oh the vicarious thrill of them! She meandered joyously through the streets of New York, read the paper in St. Mark’s Square, and lived on in today, sleeping, painting, dancing, dreaming on a future she could not fathom. Lily loved her desultory life, until yesterday and today.

      Today, this. Six numbers.

      And yesterday Joshua.

       Ten good things about breaking up with Joshua:

       10. TV is permanently off.

       9. Don’t have to share my bagel and coffee with him.

       8. Don’t have to pretend to like hockey, sushi, golf, quiche, or actors.

       7. Don’t have to listen to him complaining about the short shrift he got in life.

       6. Don’t have to listen about his neglectful father, his nonexistent mother.

       5. Don’t have to get my belly button pierced because he liked it.

       4. Don’t have to stay up till four pretending we have similar interests.

       3. No more wet towels on my bed.

       2. Don’t have to blame him for the empty toilet roll.

       And the number one good thing about breaking up with Joshua:

       1. Don’t have to feel bad about my small breasts.

       Ten bad things about breaking up with Joshua:

       10. There

       9. Are

       8. Things

       7. About

       6. You

       5. I

       4. Could

       3. Never

       2. Love.

       Oh, and the number one bad thing about breaking up with Joshua …