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  To my mother, Ellen Rachel,

  and for my daughter, Sylvia Risa

  I have always regretted that the historian allowed Vashti to drop out of sight so suddenly …

  —Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible

  I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

  —Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”

  Part One

  Exile

  BROOKLYN

  LILY

  Esther for Children and Novices

  Close the book now. Close it. Look. The story’s simple. Persia, once upon a time. King banishes queen. Queen refuses to come to his party and parade in front of his friends—naked, is what most people think he wanted!—and he sends her away, or has her killed. No one knows. She’s gone. Vashti, this is. Her name’s Vashti. You know this! And then the king gets sad and wants another wife so he calls for all the maidens to come and win his affections. A maiden? A maiden is a girl. Or a woman. A woman who isn’t married. Kind of. Right. And the maidens come and put on lots of makeup and smelly oils. But when it’s time for the beauty pageant, the king chooses the maiden who doesn’t try too hard, the one with just a dab of lipstick, or whatever they used. Esther. She also happens to be Jewish, though she doesn’t mention that. She’s very pretty, yes. No, she’s not a princess. She’s an orphan, with an uncle who looks out for her, but then this uncle also winds up getting her into trouble because he refuses to bow down to the king’s minister, and the minister gets mad, really mad, and decides it’s time to kill all the Jews. And then things get kind of messy, but the details aren’t that important and most of them contradict each other anyway, which is why I’m tired of reading you this book and why we are going to put it away for a while. I know you like it, but I need a break.

  Okay, so the new queen winds up being really brave and going to the king without his permission, which is a big no-no—remember what happened to the first queen when she did the opposite? And the new queen asks the king to save her people, and then the king—even though, a few minutes before, he was fine with having all the Jews killed—gets really mad at his minister and has him killed instead. Also, he thinks his minister might like his wife, like Daddy likes Mommy, so that makes him kill him, too.

  But I can see this isn’t making sense. That’s why we’re done with the book. It’s not simple at all, I don’t know why I called it simple, and twice a day for a month is too much—it just is—and we’re done. Really all you need to know, and all anyone ever remembers anyway, is that the second queen, Esther, is the hero.

  Lily tosses the book out of the girls’ bedroom, into the hallway. It’s a children’s book, the biblical story dumbed down, but still it’s convoluted, full of plot holes and inconsistencies. After they’re asleep, she’ll drop it in the recycling bin, then later, admitting to herself that it won’t be recycled, she’ll shove it deep into the kitchen trash. Her husband may or may not be home by then. He is deputy director of programs for Rwanda at a major humanitarian aid organization. She is his second wife.

  So tomorrow, girls—ushering her daughters into their bunk beds—I’m going to learn to sew, so I can make your costumes for the Purim carnival. Remember? We dress up like the characters and then they act out the story and everyone boos at the bad minister and cheers for Esther? I don’t know what happened to Vashti. The book doesn’t say. No one knows. Heads on pillows. If you don’t want to be Esther, tell me in the morning. Otherwise, you’ll be Esther, like all the other girls. Good night! Sweet dreams! No more words tonight! Love you to the moon and back! Eyes closed, mouths closed, stop talking now! Good night!

  WASHINGTON, DC

  VEE

  Royal Preparations

  It happened in the days of Nixon—that Nixon who presided over fifty states, from the Florida Keys to the Aleutian Islands. In those days, in the fifth year of Nixon’s reign, when the scandal that would undo him was erupting in Washington and beyond, a great, unspoken license was given to any official who was not he. A veil of distraction fell over the capital’s swampy fortress and a lustiness took hold, an appetite for drink and women uncommon even among that time and people. It followed that a banquet of minor scandals, insults, and crimes was enjoyed in the town houses of powerful men. There were floor-to-ceiling drapes of heavy velvet, and there were couches of Italian leather on sheepskin rugs. The wineglasses were nearly invisible, the lowballs weighty as a man’s fist. The rule for the drinking was, Drink!

  Among these men was one, Senator Alexander Kent of Rhode Island, who gave no fewer than five parties in one month, displaying his home, his wife, and his good taste in scotch. To the fifth party, which would be his last for a very long time, Senator Kent invited not only those colleagues and donors he counted among his friends but also one man who was obscure in the capital but famous in Rhode Island for the suitcase-manufacturing empire his family had built. Kent invited this man to address a quickly spreading rumor he hoped to learn was untrue: that Suitcase Man was planning to endorse Kent’s opponent in the following year’s election.

  And so to the fifth party the senator added a live band, Rhode Island scallops and littleneck clams on the half shell, as well as a conceptual twist: a second, concurrent party upstairs, for the women only. His reasoning, as he told it to his wife, was that such an arrangement would feel at once traditional yet fresh, old yet new, comfortable yet enticing, and would give him a chance to talk plainly to Suitcase Man. His other reasoning he did not tell his wife: it happened that once upon another time, when Kent had still been called by his father’s name, O’Kearney, of County Offaly across the ocean, he had known Suitcase Man’s wife.

  Senator Kent’s wife, Vee—born Vivian Barr, daughter of the late Senator Barr of Massachusetts and granddaughter to Governor Fitch of Connecticut, as well as great-granddaughter to a soft-spoken but effective suffragette, all of whom, though dead, would be helping to pay for the party—protested: Weren’t separate events antithetical to the spirit of the Equal Rights Amendment, which Rhode Island ratified one year ago and which Senator Kent claims in his official platform to support?

  A sound enough question. The senator had responded by giving her a foot massage, a rare offering, and Vee had yielded.

  And so in the year 1973, on the second day of November, a day as mild as June, Senator Kent returns from his affairs of state to find the house crawling with caterers and cleaners, bartenders and a flower arranger, and, deeper still, in the kitchen—all the old, noble town houses of Georgetown had their kitchens in the deep, dark backs—his wife, on her hands and knees, working at a spill with a ragged beach towel.

  It is the towel, striped red and blue and white like a barber pole, faded and frayed yet still festive, the towel he had in his dorm room when they first met and which they kept for sen
timental reasons and continue to use for any and all things unclean. The senator loves this towel. He steps on it now, the toe of his shoe grazing his wife’s hand. “Excuse us,” he says to the caterers rushing around, and they jump quick as sand fleas and are gone.

  He locks the swinging door, hook to eye.

  “Why hello,” he says.

  She looks up at him slowly, bangs in her eyes, blouse hanging open to reveal the shadows of her bra.

  And though everything about the moment—the towel, the bra, the reluctant, obscured gaze—seems to him a calculation, her end goal being his seduction, in fact Vee moves slowly because she is tired from a day of list checking and directing and emptying the second floor of personal effects for the women’s party that she doesn’t want to give in the first place; and her bangs are in her eyes because she still needs to shower; and her blouse hangs open because it is not a blouse at all—that is only what he sees—but a stretched-out T-shirt from a Jefferson Airplane concert Vee went to with her girlfriends before she and Kent got serious.

  “Get up,” he says.

  “I’m almost done,” she says.

  “Then I’ll get down.”

  She smiles, understanding. “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “It’s almost five o’clock.”

  “I know what time it is.”

  “Our guests are …”

  “Not for a while yet.”

  He drops behind her and starts to unbutton her jeans.

  “Alex—”

  “Vee …”

  “Alex.” She flips over and wriggles backward. “Stop. I forgot my pill yesterday.”

  He walks on his knees to her, laughing. “What pill?”

  “Sh.” She eye-points toward the door.

  He grins and stage-whispers: “What pill?”

  “The Pill.”

  She expects him to stand, walk out, go cold on her as he does when he’s insulted, as her father used to do to her mother and her grandfather to her grandmother. They will finish the conversation tomorrow, after the party has been a success. But Alex is on a roll. He is the youngest senator in the US Congress, if not elected exactly—instead appointed by the governor after Senator Winthrop died—then popular, and deemed likely to win his seat legitimately next year, assuming no twists like Suitcase Man standing against him. Today he aced his first high-profile press conference, at which Ted Kennedy announced he’ll cosponsor a bill that Alex introduced, then he left the Hill nearly skipping and walked the four miles home, paying homage to Mr. Lincoln on the way. He is on fire, on pace to rise. He pushes Vee back onto the floor, holds her by the wrists, and presses a knee between her legs. In her ear he breathes: “I thought we were going to make babies.”

  Feet shuffle outside the door. Vee nods. A twinge of heat splits beneath his knee—a kind of revving she can’t control. Words spin uselessly in her gut—Of course, just maybe not yet—words she has managed to say only to a doctor, and even then her eyes averted, her face blazing. This was a few months ago, when Alex stopped using condoms. They waited years longer than most of her friends because of his political ambitions, but now, as far as Alex knows, they are no longer waiting. Vee is twenty-eight, thinking of waiting until twenty-nine, maybe thirty, not for any particular reason, nothing she can argue for, even to herself, only a want, to wait, a barking inside: Wait!

  In her ear: “Weren’t we going to make babies? Wipe up their spit with this towel? Maybe you’d sew the ends up a little, make it nice for them, yeah?”

  The caterers’ shuffling grows louder. In the sweetest, sexiest voice Vee can conjure she says, “Let’s reconvene tonight,” but already Alex is loosening his belt, then Vee’s back hits the floor and he is inside her, and she doesn’t fight him, not because within her in some squishy feminine core she is all right with having a baby (she isn’t) and not because she knows her fighting him wouldn’t matter (spousal rape—if that’s even what this is—being legal in those days) but because his not listening to her, his force, turns her on. She will hate herself for this fact as soon as it’s over. She will think how ashamed she would be to admit such a thing to the women’s group she has been attending once a month. But for now, her pleasure grows, she a caught thing, and now, because at the last meeting of the group a radical thing took place, a lesson in female orgasm, now, once Alex is done, she makes him do what she learned to do herself: she grabs his hand and guides him into place. He looks quizzical. She repositions his fingers. Like this, she thinks at him. Like that. She watches his confusion turn into annoyance but refuses to stop—instead she moves his hand faster and turns her face to the side so she won’t have to look at him. In his place, though, filling her vision, is the towel, with its faded stripes and tangle of threads. Goddamnit, I’ll sew it! she thinks and closes her eyes. She must concentrate. But girls’ voices trill in her head, a thing they used to say at Wellesley, Vee included, feigning courage and pep: You can’t be forced if you don’t resist! Other voices hiss back, the women’s-group women: Tsssk. Vee shakes her head and returns to Alex’s hand, and to the point between her legs, but as her pulse starts to quicken and her thoughts relax, the point is also a sewing needle, its eye glinting in the sew-on-the-go box her grandmother gave her when she turned ten, its point shoved deep inside a pink foam cushion in the box, the box shoved deep inside Vee’s stocking drawer, unopened for years. Vee has softened on Alex’s hand—she has lost her channel. If she loses, he wins. Again, she shuts her eyes. Alex is giving off an impatient heat but she steals it and drives his hand until at last the heat flares and she is satisfied. Then she pushes him out of the kitchen, wipes up his mess with the towel, and lets the help back in.

  SUSA

  ESTHER

  The Shapely and Beautiful Maiden

  The camp is as you imagine—which is not to say that it is as it was. Heat and sand and rock. Bare feet. Brown tents. Sand. What grass grew in the low swells has been ripped up and woven into pallets. A damp, dark track shows the way to and from the river, trampled to a sheen by heels and hooves. They are hundreds, but not a thousand. They drain the red river mud to clay, bake the clay into brick, use the bricks to mark their fire pits. They attempted a wall once but gave up within a day, understanding that if it could save them, it could also be their trap. So their only wall is the one they threw the camp up against when they first arrived: the outermost palace wall, a tree-high, tongue-pink slab of boundary that curves away infinitely—like any circle—in both directions.

  In summer, when the sun is so hot a pebble can burst into flame and the far sands send up smoke, they wake and begin to walk. They walk slowly, following the palace wall and its shade. They carry their water and wares and infants, working as they walk, returning, by sundown, to where they began. Each time a crude place is left and returned to it appears a little less crude. In this way the camp begins to settle in their bones, not as home—they are not that naïve—but as a place they will stay for however long they can.

  Some hunt, while others grow fruit in groves a day’s distance away. A few dozen keep sheep, at a farther distance. Most stay in the camp, making things out of the clay, which they sell at the city market; a select few, like one woman who makes necklaces out of bird and fox and mole bones, sell to the palace. A small group makes magic, but it is crude magic—each time they are banished from a place, their strength is diluted, so that the granddaughter of a woman who could grow a shade tree in a month now takes six times as long. And so on. This generation can make two yolks grow in one egg, they can spin twine out of sand and water, they can summon a goblin from his hole in the river.

  The goblin is not a sure bet. Sometimes he spits up true Persian coins and sometimes he spits up counterfeit, and it takes a sharp eye to know which is which. But he answers their summons and allows them to play master and what choice do they have? He is their goblin. They bury the counterfeit in the sand.

  They have been here for decades, some say a century. Sometimes they send two boys to
climb up the wall and tie a tarp to the jagged fort. The boys throw the tarp down and the people, arms raised, walk backward until the tarp’s limit. The tarp is many tarps sewn together. They stake it into the sand with daggers and twine and luxuriate in their pitch of darkness until a palace guard severs the boys’ knots and throws down the tarp. Often this occurs within minutes, but occasionally they get a few hours of reprieve. Years ago, when a new king and queen were named and the guards fell over, sick with wine, the people remained in the tarp’s shadow a full week.

  They are tolerated here. Which is more than they can say about most places.

  * * *

  Then a kid, barely nine, digging a hole to bury one of his baby teeth, finds a few of the goblin’s counterfeit coins and, not knowing the difference, sneaks off to the market to surprise his mother with a new spoon. He lost her old one in the river last week. His sister had cleaned it and laid it on the bank. He only wanted to see if it could float. But the river took the spoon faster than he thought possible, faster than the river itself moved, and by the time the boy, waist-deep, scrambled to the bank, the spoon had disappeared around the far bend.

  At the market, the boy chooses the wrong stall, owned by a Persian whose family has fallen. The man’s bitterness is clear to the boy, it shines in his eyes, but once the boy has spotted the spoon—cypress and the length of his arm from elbow to middle finger, just like his mother’s original—he cannot be put off. He is a soft boy, according to his father, and might even choose the bitter stallkeeper with an unthinking urge to make him less bitter. The man takes his coins and hands over the spoon and the boy departs for the camp, triumphant. But within seconds, the man looks down and sees. His muscles twitch to action. He moves to run after the boy, but his wife grabs his arm. She knows he is capable of more. No one—not even her husband—knows the wife’s story, but her bitterness is deep enough to make her husband’s taste sweet. That boy is from the camp, she says. Swindler of the first degree. You’ll let him get away with a beating around the ears?