Ms. Milgram had been waiting for close to two hours when I finally spotted her at the far end of the palm-lined entry hall of New York Methodist Hospital. She sat hunched in the corner, shifting her newly acquired pill bottles, tubes of cream, and eye drops from her purse to her Mexican shopping bag and then back again. With each arrangement, she meticulously tied and untied the cheap twine that bound the bags together. Her gray hair was bobbed with bangs. A thin pink ribbon was tied in a bow around her head. Her flowered polyester dress was well worn, though it might have seemed a find in some vintage shop. As I got closer, I noticed it was stained in a few places and appeared to have clumps of food crusted on the placket. “Ms. Milgram?” I said softly, so not to startle her. “Ms. Milgram?” She began nodding her head without looking up. She rose slowly from her spot on the vinyl sectional and pulled out a pair of black oversized Risky Business sunglasses, placing them crookedly across the bridge of her nose. Without a word, she grabbed my hand, gripping it confidently as though she was the escort and led me through the labyrinthine hospital corridors unaware whether my hand belonged to a stranger or to someone she had known forever.

The truth was we had never met, though in the world of social service escorts, the fact was of little practical consequence. I was in possession of all my faculties and had been sitting earlier that afternoon in the office of the social work agency where I was a volunteer, with no particular charge. I was therefore the optimal, not to mention sole, candidate for the job of delivering Ms. Milgram home, a directive that was accompanied by a five-dollar bill from the petty cash envelope, and a personal description, devoid of particulars save the word “sweet.” On my way out the door, I was asked, if at all possible, to try to get inside her apartment. It seemed no one had been up there in quite a while.

When the automatic exit doors of the hospital opened we were bombarded by a rush of scalding July air, which mingled with the disinfected recycled air-conditioning. I felt the brief sensation of sweat and shiver simultaneously. As though having second thoughts as soon as the door opened, Ms. Milgram tugged me back towards the corner of the glass vestibule, removing her sunglasses and revealing her swollen, slightly gooey eyes, which blinked wildly. I asked if she was ok, as I put my hand on her back, to which she just replied with a vacant nod. Slowly putting back on her glasses, as though to tell me she was ready again, she leaned in, whispering in a giddy hush, that ever since her eyes started giving her trouble, she’s been seeing sparkles.

Sparkles, I found out, were not to be confused with the stars that one sees just before fainting, nor did they shoot through your head like the light fractures of a migraine. Sparkles, as Ms. Milgram explained, were all about colors. On a sunny day, along 84th Street, especially when the parked cars were variations of blues and reds, God let her see sparkles so she could enjoy Fourth of July all the time. Sparkles looked like fireworks. Sometimes, at the traffic light of 84th and 1st, they also looked like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Sparkles, in Ms. Milgram’s opinion, were an indisputably good thing, a literal gift from God, which made her feel like everyday was a holiday.

Ms. Milgram’s apartment building was a late nineteenth-century brownstone, the kind with steep Italianate steps that narrow as they go up. She took them one step at a time allowing both feet to rest on each level. When we reached the top of the stoop she turned and said, “Well, you’re just a doll. I tell ya, I don’t know what I’d do without you girls.” She then thanked me twice and smacked her lips conclusively. “Let me help you upstairs,” I said quickly, hoping I hadn’t sounded too eager, suddenly desperate with curiosity. She rapidly shook her head no.

“Its dangerous,” I persisted, “with your eye and everything.” She looked down and tapped her right foot nervously on the doorstop.

“Ok honey but you won’t tell anybody?” she said. I nodded quickly that I wouldn’t, worried she might change her mind.

We entered into a hallway painted cheery off-white, with a dark wood banister and framed impressionist posters on each landing. The building was enviable by Manhattan standards, and combined with the fact that she’d refused to let me pay for the cab, and then tipped two dollars on two-fifty to the driver, the exact nature of her need for volunteer social services began to seem mysterious. But as we reached her floor, a smell began to emerge, of something past due and decaying, and the peeling paint and water-stained ceiling stood in glaring contrast to the renovated floors below.

Trying to hide her quiet panting, Ms. Milgram fumbled with her shaking keys.

“Oh dear. You won’t tell anyone honey?” she repeated breathlessly, “I just can’t seem to keep up. Pat’s been a real gal trying to help me get things in order, she sent over that nice fellow to put in a light, and I been trying real hard. I tell ya, you gals are really somethin’.”

Her voice trailed off as the stuttering key finally slid into the bolt. She sighed and then resumed her chatting in a voice like some nineteen-thirties Midwestern ingénue, about how her place was a boarding house when she first moved in, and how she’ll “just die” if they ever try to get her out. If a person has some characteristic that at first overwhelms everything else about them, as old age does, it becomes easy to get blinded to the rest of them by that single quality alone. There was something seductive about Ms. Milgram’s age coupled with her sunny attitude towards vision altering eye infections and tipping percentages, but as she painstakingly tried to turn her dead bolt, it was hard not to wonder whether her charm would have been so potent had it not been the attribute of an old lady.

She interrupted the thought herself, as though to answer it, and giggled nervously.

“Ok, dear, you’ll have to squeeze. This door just opens a little.”

We entered into what at one time had been a three-room coldwater flat, though it had ceased to function as anything resembling a home. It was filled from floor to ceiling with the accumulation of every last item, garbage or not, that had passed through her hands during the preceding decades. On the left was a six-foot high wall of boxes, neatly stacked and embellished with tidy rolls of plastic and paper shopping bags stuck in between the places where the box corners met, like pegs in a log cabin. The wall blocked off the sitting room entirely, leaving one narrow pathway of unused space, itself obstructed by a folding chair, which she politely offered to unfold. On the right, in what had been a small foyer, there were Celestial Seasonings tea boxes stacked to the ceiling, a lifetime worth of old prescription bottles and a tower of plastic juice cups, the tin lids pulled halfway back. On top of them was one red plastic rose with fake water drops, still in the plastic box, onto which she had tacked a baseball card-sized metallic sticker of Jesus.

Unsure of whether I should sit, or even stay in the apartment, I watched as Ms. Milgram unpacked her Mexican shopping bag and carefully arranged the contents on a stack of old Yellow Pages. As I watched her, I thought about how we’d stopped at the cafeteria before leaving the hospital. At the time it hadn’t struck me as strange. Ms. Milgram was hungry, and had asked, if it was not too much trouble, if she could eat an early dinner before going home. We sat at a sparse formica table, which was decorated with magenta and blue dixie cups cut imprecisely into the shape of tulips. They had been attached by pipe cleaners to styrofoam take-out containers that were painted green. She wore her black sunglasses throughout the meal, which made no impression on the waitress. After she ordered, Ms. Milgram had pushed the flowers to the side, admiring them first and then noting respectfully that the “Chinaman” who ran the cafeteria was quite artistically inclined. She looked towards a man sitting at the back of the lunch counter, counting out money in a till drawer. He wore a thin black braided ponytail down the middle of his back, though he was clearly not Chinese. He looked up and waved at her warmly, to which she responded, “Good evening, Chinaman.” He smiled, and nodded hello as though tipping a hat. It seemed she was a regular.

She had then proceeded to again remove all of her eye creams, drops, and pills from their containers in her purse. She pushed them towards the center of the table, arranged them to her liking, and picked up the laminated menu, scanning the list of offerings with her index finger, though she had already ordered. When the waitress arrived with the food she asked Ms. Milgram what she had there. Ms. Milgram replied only with a childish shrug, which I took as an indication that she was confused, so as she ate I quietly read and organized the instructions. After I compiled all the information on a piece of notebook paper, it became clear that she would have to administer the medication herself in hourly intervals, from the moment she woke up, keeping track of when she ate and washing her hands before and after each dose. “Whatcha got there?” she’d asked, looking up from her dinner. “A chart,” I said. “You can follow it so you know when to take your medicine. You see here,” I pointed to the time slots and slid it across the table. “Well will ya look at that,” she said, through a mouthful of soggy tuna, a spray of salivated mayonnaise misting the page. I’d taken it as a compliment.

Standing in her apartment, I became focused on the fact that there was no possible way that she was going to take her medication. For some reason it made me angry with her nurse, who we’d passed on our way out and had said in a stern but motherly Jamaican accent, “Don’t forget to take you medicine, mommy.” Her expectation seemed cruelly unreasonable. There was no refrigerator or inch of wall space onto which to tack the chart, and it seemed the fate of the bottles and tubes to lie forgotten at the top of her medicine tower. In the side of Ms. Milgram’s purse was one half of her tuna sandwich wrapped in a cocktail napkin, a handful of sugars, and a few plastic creamers left over from her dinner, which I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to retrieve and throw away. I fantasized about marching back to New York Methodist Hospital and instructing everyone in the cafeteria never to allow her to take anything home again, but thought of the plastic flower decorations, which she had pushed aside to make room for her prescriptions. The things she collected had a place in her order.

On a stack of boxes next to the foyer, Ms. Milgram had built what was essentially a shelf, by pushing the top two rows of boxes flush with the wall and leaving the bottom ones sticking out about six inches. On it were a King James Bible and The Pill Book, alongside a light green rotary phone, which I later learned only dialed out. It was resting on a neatly folded stack of bags. Above the ledge was a bare light bulb, hanging from an electrical cord, which served as the only source of light in the three-room apartment. The two books rested together, illuminated against the dim shadows that formed from the shards of light that broke through the cardboard. The spines were unbroken, though the placement was prominent, as though she was facilitating a silent face-off between science and religion.

Once Ms. Milgram had me inside her apartment her self-consciousness about “her mess” receded and she seemed to enjoy the company. Like an art docent on a gallery tour, she proudly described all of her most important relics. She pointed out the metallic sticker of Jesus, explaining that it had been a gift from a neighbor. She explained that she always prayed to it just before leaving the house, asking that he protect her in the world. She gave no specific forces from which she wanted to be protected. Revealing, from under a table, a stack of old New York Posts, she rattled off the star signs of all the people who worked at the agency where I volunteered. She opened the paper to the horoscope page, which had Gemini and Libra neatly clipped out, explaining that she often cuts out forecasts when they seem particularly prescient and mails them off to whomever they make her think of. She then explained that Jesus was a Capricorn and smiled knowingly.

As she spoke I found myself straining to peer beyond the tea boxes into the kitchen. In the sink a fetid pool of water served as a way station for a handful of extra juice cups. Ms. Milgram followed my attention, which she took as an indicator to continue on with her tour.

“I sure have been telling Pat that that kitchen is just fine, but I tell ya, she’s set on getting that super here to fix things up. But he never liked us much, the neighbors complained about the racket.”

There were flattened egg cartons stuck between the rotting window screen and the security bars, which allowed a milky light to settle around the sink. Above the grease stained window molding was a bundle of dangling wires, as though some electrician had gone out for a smoke break decades before and decided to call it quits. The Styrofoam edges of her make shift blinds were inching dangerously close to the top of the window, almost skimming the wiring in some pyrotechnic flirtation.

“Maybe we could even just get him to fix those wires.” I was unsure what “we” I was referring to. “When was the last time he was up here?”

“Oh, gee, the gal I boarded with, she, well she passed. But those two were always in a row, and he didn’t much like it up here because, well, then it went to pieces and ya know…”

As she spoke I realized it was almost six-thirty. I had, for some time, needed to go to the bathroom, though I had suppressed the nagging, which under the circumstances had seemed beside the point. I was overcome with an immediate urge to leave, which gave way to full-scale panic as I realized that the prospect of going anywhere near her bathroom, from which the most pronounced smell was originating, was beyond the limits of my compassion.

“Uh, Ms. Milgram, I’m sorry to interrupt but I should be getting back to the office.”

Her animated chatter was collapsing in on itself, grinding to a slow halt. I thought I detected a look of familiar acquiescence in her blinking eyes and I felt selfish.

“Sure. Of course. You’ve been real kind. I know they keep you gals busy. Pat’s just busy as busy gets.”

Backing out of the corridor of boxes, which suddenly felt too narrow to turn around in, I optimistically reassured her that if she was able to just throw away one stack of boxes she could again reach her bed. Much to my surprise, I found myself telling her that Jesus would support the endeavor. She indulged me by smiling absently and thanked me over and over, assuring me that I was quite a kind young girl.

Just short of opening the door to its full 45-degree capacity Ms. Milgram stopped and gave me a substantial hug, kissing my cheek and whispering God bless you in my ear. I shivered and backed out the door. My heart began pounding, and forgetting that the stairs began behind me to the left, I continued to back out. I forced myself to look her right in the eye just before I realized I was falling. Her face went white as I stumbled forward, catching myself just barely on the second step down. Hoping she wouldn’t notice my shaking palms, I looked up, as though to tell her I was fine, worried that somehow I had hurt her. She gasped a soft “Oh dear” and a terror, more biblical than personal, swept over her face. I stood, nervously laughing, and promised that I was all right. She warned me to be careful, as though the fall had affirmed the staircase was not just scary for her but objectively dangerous.



Dorothy Simic was born in 1919 to a Hartford, Connecticut, family of some financial means. She described herself as a dreamy child. At twenty-two, she broke off an engagement to a family friend who her father had considered an appropriate match in order to join the “war effort,” which she passed working in a steel factory. After the war she married a veteran, Walt Milgram, who’d been stationed in the South Pacific and whose name she still uses. She had known him as a child and thought him “kind,” though once married she found him “changed.” Regularly, during what would now be classified as post-traumatic stress flashbacks, he’d screamed long convoluted stories at her about the Japs, calling her the enemy and threatening to kill her. The reenactments typically ended in beatings, episodes in which she euphemistically deemed him the “Bad Man.”

After her first year with Mr. Milgram, in which she had twice tried to run away, she attempted to commit suicide, an act he responded to by putting her in a sanatorium and divorcing her. With a considerable trust from her family and an ample allowance from her divorce she moved to New York, a choice she explained not by the circumstances of her life but by the fact that she had always been attracted to sophistication. She moved into the building where she now lives when it was a boarding house, and shared her three rooms with another single woman. They were said to have had an “emotionally entangled,” “psychologically abusive” relationship, though they lived together for nearly forty years. She worked, less for money than for something to do, at the Woolworth’s “Five and Dime” on Second Avenue in the Seventies. She said it was the happiest time in her life. Her boarding house was converted into apartments sometime in the housing boom of the mid-fifties by which time the communal nature of the post-war boarding houses had become unfashionable. The building was again renovated in the mid-eighties. As with the first renovation, no work was done to her apartment, as though the force of her presence rendered it locked in time. Hoarding, while the term admittedly does her apartment no justice, is the clinical name for “her mess,” and her trouble with it began when her roommate died in the early eighties.

For some days after I met Ms. Milgram, it was impossible to get the image of falling down her stairs out of my mind. The feeling of it played back through my body at inappropriate times, the way you are woken from a falling dream by the feeling of crashing onto your bed. At moments I would suddenly cringe in shame at the memory of racing four blocks from Ms. Milgram’s to Café Guy Pascal, to go to the bathroom. I had squatted in the gold-mirrored ladies room, furiously washing my hands and peeing simultaneously because I could not decide which thing I needed to do more urgently, nor did I want to do either before having done the other first. I had never been in Café Guy Pascal before. The windows advertised afternoon specials of scones, crepes, or apple cake with tea for nine dollars, and when I passed the yellow and blue Côte d'Azur exterior on the bus I had imagined that old ladies passed their afternoons at the marble tables. It was not that halfway through my summer as a social work intern I was still under any illusions about what it was to be old in New York, nor was it that I held onto any romantic notions about tea specials at quaint French cafés. I held onto Café Guy Pascal, and perhaps ended up there that Tuesday after being in Ms. Milgram’s apartment, because I understood that I would not see any clients there, that the café had been my fantasy of what it was to be old, not theirs.

A week or two after my visit to Ms. Milgram’s I had stayed late at the agency one rainy evening and read her case file as though somewhere in those pages I could find out the end of the story. As I read I could hear her, as she sat wedged between her boxes, illuminated beneath the light bulb on her folding chair. As I read, an image of the “Chinaman” sitting at the end of the lunch counter crept back into my mind. She had said the name in a particularly distant way. I imagined her with a young woman’s face, in the same pink ribbon and flowered dress, arranging the display casings at Woolworth’s, where beyond the glass windows, the parked cars caught glints of the gritty morning light. I imagined her frozen in a photograph, caught momentarily so that you could feel for a second the mixture of liberation and strain in her dulling eyes. And then the image faded the way a snapshot that you meant to take, if you could have only stopped looking, blurs in your mind as time recedes. In its place was her corridor, where she sat under the light, her eyes swollen and red. She sat there silently, clipping horoscopes and rolling shopping bags, attempting to approximate a fortress where nothing expires and nothing fades, where it is possible to believe that time can wait.