Paullina Simons: The Girl in Times Square

But Lily wasn’t married and had no kids. There was nowhere else for her to go. She lived close to Lower East Side where her mother and grandmother first lived when they came to America, and every time she wanted to walk off a part of her life, she walked the streets of New York until she walked herself out of it.

But Lily couldn’t walk far enough to rid herself of the persistent nagging caused by Amy’s persistent, unending absence.

“It’s because you’re depressed and broke,” said her sister Anne. “The depression is depleting you from the inside out. Being broke sucks. But I gotta go, Lil.”

“It’s because you can’t walk off something like your roommate missing,” said her other sister Amanda. “Go dancing. That will cheer you up. Go ahead, like you used to. Everything will be okay. You’re young. But I gotta go, Lil.”

But Lily didn’t have the energy to go dancing.

Once I had been clarified by Joshua, by Amy. He’s not coming back, and until she returns I’m in limbo. Amy, come back and tell me what I’m supposed to do at twenty-four in the middle of my life. Define my life for me, Amy.

How long was she going spend all her earnings on Union Square Café’s exquisite calamari and yellow cabs? Until Amy came back.

How long was she not going to cash in her lottery ticket?

Until she found out who she was.

Until Amy came back.

As if not cashing it were insurance against the unthinkable.

Lily’s exhaustion got worse. Got so bad that she had to cut her hours from fifty to forty, to thirty-five, to twenty-five. She would sit down on her break and fall asleep, and once they couldn’t wake her. They got so scared, they had almost called 911. Turned out she had walking pneumonia. She took antibiotics and ate calves’ liver for dinner every day until she lost her appetite for everything, not just calves’ liver. She was afraid to get on the scale. Even Yodels didn’t tempt her. Though they tempted her in the Associated supermarket down the street. She had big plans for Yodels, for Chips Ahoy, for Mallomars, for Double Chocolate Milanos, for German Chocolate cake, for strudel, for Krispy Kreme donuts. Then she would come home and put her goods on top of her microwave. She would balance them delicately atop the microwave and once she sneezed and six boxes of Entenmann’s and Pepperidge Farm ended up on the floor. She didn’t pick them up for …

Well, they were still on the floor, and unopened.

It was warm, but she felt cold, bundling herself in a thick cardigan that belonged to Amy, and going to the movies to sleep.

Her mother sent money for August, threatening that it was going to be the last time. When Lily cut her hours down she asked for a little extra, but Allison refused to send it. She yelled into the phone for ten minutes, while Lily, phone cradled to her ear, sketched with her soft charcoal a large black mouth perpetually open in a screaming O.

“Your father is telling you venomous lies about me, I know. While I sleep, so sick, my body old, shaking, bruised, full of medicines that keep me alive, I know he calls you up and complains about me, tells you I’m drinking, but what about him, does he tell you about himself, how he refuses to be a man to his wife—”

“Got—To—Go—Mom. Got—to—go.”

She burned her forearm at work, and over days it became so infected it required emergency medical treatment and more antibiotics. She was a walking mold spore. She tried to eat yogurt to counteract the Ph imbalance in her body, but found that she had gone off yogurt. Lily kept bandaged the burn that wouldn’t heal. Not so much kept bandaged as kept hidden.

On Thursday, August 5, Claudia sat Lily down and said, “I’m not going to beat around the bush. The family is worried about you.”

Lily squeezed her hands together, realizing they were numb, released them and said, “Don’t worry, Grandma, I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“That’s not it,” said Claudia. “You’re not too tired to find a job, are you?”

“Oh, that.” Yes, too tired for that, too.

“Yes, that. The family wants to know if you’re looking for work. For meaningful work.”

“Tell them all, from me—no.”

“Stop wringing your hands. You’re not helpless. You’re a college graduate.”

“Not quite.”

“Well, that’s deliberate, you know it is. What, you didn’t know you needed one more class to graduate? One more! Three hours a week, three credits. You didn’t know that?”

I didn’t know that. Did she have enough energy to say it? “I didn’t know that.” Good, Lil.

“Puhlease.”

“Grandma, I was already taking eighteen credits last semester, the maximum you can take.”

“You could’ve gotten permission.”

“In case you don’t know, I work to pay my rent.”

“Your mother sends you half your rent. Your boyfriend, and Amy—they pay the rest.”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me speaking to you these last three months, but Joshua’s been gone since April. And believe it or not but Amy has not paid her rent since she went missing in May.”

Claudia continued as if Lily hadn’t spoken. “I think you kept three credits, consciously or subconsciously, so that you could hang on to something, hang on and not move forward. I think you want to feel that you’re still unfinished.”

She wanted to tell her grandmother that she was still unfinished. Unfinished, unanswered, unformed. “I can’t have this conversation again. Here are the magazines.” She stood up from the couch and swayed.

“You’re not getting any younger, you know. Only you think your time is infinite. But you’re twenty-five next month. And soon your youth is gone. Ask your mother how she feels about her youth being gone.”

“I know how she feels. She’s told me enough times. And you know what, my mother has bigger problems than her youth being gone.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Never mind.”

“By the time I was twenty-four, do you know what I’d done?”

“Yes, I know, Grandma. You’ve told me—”

“I’d been in one concentration camp, Ravensbruck, and one death camp, Sobibor. I walked two hundred kilometers carrying your mother on my back. I lived in DP camps near Hamburg, sleeping on the ground for three months, and then in typhoid barracks. All this by the time I was twenty-four.”

“—A thousand times,” Lily finished quietly.

Claudia remained sitting. “What are you waiting for? You want to turn out like that young woman in Iowa?” She said nothing more, as if Lily should have intuited, or perhaps known the rest.

“What woman in Iowa?” Lily finally said in a flat drone.

“The woman, thirty-four years old, was riding in the passenger seat of her car and a landscaping block fell from an overpass and crashed through the windshield. It hit her in the face. A two-foot-square concrete block struck this woman in the face. What does this tell you?”

“She shouldn’t have been riding shotgun?” offered Lily.

“Exactly. Lily, don’t be caught in a passenger seat with a concrete block in your face.”

Lily wanted to tell her grandmother to stop, to desist for a moment, to remember Lily, to remember Lily’s life, that Amy was missing, that her mother was missing, that Joshua, yet another supposed constant, was missing. That even she, Lily, was missing. But no way to talk about that when her hands, her thighs were going numb, numb ! No way to talk about anything. She left.

Friday night, August 6, Paul asked her to come watch him perform his music at Fez on Lafayette. Lily was happy to be asked, so she went but found it nearly impossible to remain upright. The noise, the smoking was debilitating to her in ways she could not explain. She left as soon as Paul’s set was over. At home the machine was chockfull. Rachel asked her to go to the movies. Amanda called to invite her for Sunday dinner. Anne called just to find out how she was doing. Her mother called, spoke in some sort of code. “Your father will be the death of me,” was all Lily could decipher. The coke-addled cutie-patootie called asking her for a drink but in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I don’t do Manhattan, baby,” he said, “but boy do I do Bed-Stuy. Come out, I’ll show you a good time … like before.” She smiled. He had been such a good kisser.