The Book of V. Read online

  She crawls on them toward the largest tent, which is known to belong to some Gadols—the most legendary of all the magician families. She lifts the flap and crawls in.

  * * *

  The next morning, she joins hundreds of other girls in the courtyard outside the palace gates. Marduk is next to her but not hovering or blustering—he is shrunken, hands clasped behind his back, hunched like an old man. This morning, when the tent woke, the children—all except for Itz, who knew where she was going—laughed at her hair. Her aunt gasped and began to snip, trying to somehow salvage what was left, while Marduk turned a raging garnet. An hour later, as they walked out of camp in what Esther had assumed would be a quiet departure, for Marduk had not even allowed her to go to Nadav to tell him she was leaving, her uncle turned toward the tents and, as if possessed, began to shout: I am bringing Esther to the king! He will put a stop to our suffering! Esther watched in horror as families poured out of their tents to hear Marduk’s boast. How had saving his fig business turned into saving his people? She banishes him to her peripheral vision now. Most of the other girls have come alone. The sun rises quickly as they wait an hour, then two. A third hour passes without movement from the guards on the other side of the gates. A few girls faint. It is hotter than the day before, hotter than any day in recent memory. Or maybe it only feels that way because of the crowding? No one knows. They are girls. Everyone is afraid to complain too loudly so instead they whisper, and shift, making in sum a thundering hiss. Esther sets down her basket of figs. She stretches her fingers, rubs at the lines the handles have dug into her palm, ignores Marduk beside her. She touches her linen belt and the pocket her aunt has sewn to it, a small purse containing the comb and a pot of pomegranate paste. Esther intends to drop the paste—meant to color her lips—as soon as the gates are opened. She will toss it to the trampling feet, pick up her basket with purposeful clumsiness, letting figs spill in all directions, and begin to walk without so much as a glance at Marduk. She will resist in every way possible.

  Then the gate opens. It’s a shock, though they’ve waited for hours—when it actually happens, there’s a collective gasp. The crowd surges, and Esther, pulled and pushed by the current, finds that she doesn’t have space to reach for her paste and discard it. And she cannot spill the figs—the basket is pinned to her leg by the tightness of the pack. She turns her head, but Marduk is already lost, far behind her now, and as she’s carried forward with the roar of the girls’ feet on the royal stones, she hears, or rather feels, a strange rattle in her throat. She is humming. It’s her aunt’s habit, taking abrupt root in her. There is no melody. It’s the vibration she’s after, the echo of herself that steadies her as she walks.

  BROOKLYN

  LILY

  The Second Wife

  She hums to ward off panic, time running out to pick up one child from school while the other, smaller one throws her boots against the apartment wall. No boots, no boots! They are such nice boots, not hand-me-downs like the rest but a gift from Lily’s middle brother, brand-new fuzz-lined boots in a pine-green suede. Lily would like to have such boots. She almost says this—If I had those boots I wouldn’t throw them against the wall!—but she knows it won’t help, and it’s mean, too, the kind of lording over that Lily’s grandmother did incessantly, according to Lily’s mother, Ruth, which is why, she says, Lily herself was rarely scolded as a child. Reparations, her mother jokes, though her leniency has eroded: now that Lily is grown, Ruth scolds her all the time, albeit passive-aggressively, for Lily has not become the type of woman she was supposed to become.

  “I hope it fulfills you, taking care of the children all the time.”

  “What a variety of sponges you have!”

  “You were so driven when you were younger. But maybe you’re happier now. Are you happier now?”

  Lily hums to ward off her mother’s voice, though it’s Ruth’s favorite lullaby she’s humming, Oh the fox went out on a chilly night … She squats behind her daughter, pins her under the arms, and attempts to work the boots back onto her feet, thinking of Rosie being herded into the cafeteria with the snotty, sorrowful clump of abandoned first-graders.

  This child, June, whose preschool “day” ended hours ago, at 11:30 a.m., kicks and kicks. June, that warm and pliant month! Lily begins to sweat. Her coat is already on, her hat, her scarf. Oh the fox … June’s boot flies off again and Lily makes the mistake of going for it, which gives her daughter the chance to squirm away and run down the hallway toward the bathroom, where she will, in her newest favorite rite, rip off her shirt and throw it in the toilet. And he prayed to the moon … Lily sheds her coat and runs after her, telling herself to take a breath, get a little perspective, no one will die here—at least not today. This isn’t war, or revolution. Right? If Ro sits in the sorrowful circle, so what? She’ll look at Lily with that look, the one that seems to see into her. But so what? So she waits a few minutes, so the world is not going to end, so lots of kids have it far worse, so she’ll learn resilience, and resilience is the latest … and the moon … As she rounds the corner into the bathroom, Lily reminds herself to smile. She doesn’t want to scare June. If she scares her, they will never make it out. Lily hangs her face in a grin. But June isn’t looking at her, she is deep inside her shirt, wrestling to get it off, and Lily makes the mistake of glancing in the mirror, where she sees that her grin is terrifying. She drops it, yanks off her slouchy wool hat with the hideous pink “ponpon” she let Ro talk her into, and stares at what she understands to be her face but which appears, under the stuttering, chemical fluorescence of their rental apartment’s bathroom light, to be that of an old, gray witch. Because, because, because, because, because! Because of the wonderful things … The tune changes as Lily enters a kind of derailment in which time goes one way and she goes another, into her small makeup box—small so as to deemphasize its importance to the girls, though there is more makeup, much more, hidden in Lily’s underwear drawer. She begins to dab and swipe at herself, thinking of the other mothers, the women who will be at the party this afternoon, a party for Lily, to teach her to sew. Lily doesn’t know any of the women well. She didn’t intend for them to throw a sewing party in her honor. But the hostess, a woman named Kyla, overheard Lily talking to another mother at preschool pickup about how she wished she could make Esther costumes for Rosie and June for Purim this year, if only she knew how to sew. This was true, in a sense. Lily did wish that she could sew. But she wished it as she wished for sleek hair or a triplex apartment: certain it would never happen and not really caring. Sure, she had a vision of herself, by herself, at a table in front of an open window, sewing. But didn’t every woman? It was a fantasy she might once have tried to parse, in a paper, theorizing about its origins in popular and literary culture and arriving at an idea, or a way of articulating an idea, that was semi-original. There would be a lengthy bibliography, the production of which would give Lily a deep, almost rabid kind of pleasure.

  But to actually sew?

  She should never have spoken the wish aloud. It was an empty frill of after-school chatter. Lily knows that she will struggle at sewing, just as she struggles at disconnecting tiny Lego pieces. But before she could take it back, Kyla had invited her and the other mother and some other women, too. Why not make it a party? she’d said. I’ll have wine, and snacks, and she will, Lily knows, because Kyla is always wearing boots with heels, even at the playground, and she sent real, paper invites to the thing: A Sewing Fête!

  What does one wear to a Sewing Fête? Not baggy underwear, certainly. Not sweat.

  Lily, smearing concealer under her eyes, spots a new gray hair in her left eyebrow, tweezes it, and feels instant remorse, not only for the hole she has made but for the pain. It’s enough to make her eyes smart with tears and to make June, whose shirt is off now but still in her hand, think that her mother is crying. She wipes her face with her shirt, as if demonstrating, then offers it to Lily, and Lily, who has again forgotten
to stock the bathroom with tissues, accepts and wipes her eyes, remembering too late the concealer she just applied.

  “Momma?”

  But time! After a five-minute grace period, the school asks for a “donation” of a dollar a minute to cover care. It’s not required—the school is public, after all—but suggested, and the understanding is that you pay if you can, and Lily can in the sense that doing so will not make her homeless, and her daughter has the boots to prove it. So if she’s twenty minutes late? Fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars is a cocktail shaken by a man in a vest, or take-out pad thai plus a couple spring rolls, or overnight diapers for a month, or one-sixth, almost, of a haircut in Park Slope, which is where Lily lives, of course. It is a lot and not very much, though if you fail regularly in this way it becomes, undeniably, a lot. Besides, there is simply no good reason for Lily to be late. She begins to hum again, thinking of Adam in his office, his youthful messenger bag leaning against his aging calf, talking and typing and directing and greenlighting hygiene drops for families that don’t have toilets, let alone lights capable of sputtering, and everything else he does to keep money climbing into their bank account and set himself up to be promoted, not to mention help people. Adam and Lily are trying to save to buy an apartment so they can stop paying through the nose for rent, but they’re paying through the nose for rent so it’s impossible to save—an old story—and then there are things like late pickup, or the occasional parking ticket, also Lily’s fault as she’s in charge of moving the car from place to place to outrun the street cleaners, that eat up their nonexistent “cushion.”

  Lily and Adam have discussed her going back to work. But their conversations always circle back to the same grim reality: adjunct teaching—and adjunct is all she’ll get within a hundred miles of New York City—barely pays enough to cover childcare. They know because Lily did have a gig for a while after Rosie was born, at a college up in Westchester, and there was one day alone, when a snowstorm turned her usual ninety-minute return drive into a five-hour highway crawl, that ate up one-tenth of her semester’s salary in babysitting costs and gave her mastitis. Then, when she was seven months pregnant with June, she finally got a campus interview for the kind of tenure-track job she’d once assumed she wanted, at her alma mater, Grinnell College, a job that paid nearly as much as Adam was making then, but in Iowa, which meant it paid the equivalent of three times as much. But the instant she finished the last of her two days of lectures and talks and interviews and lunches, knowing that she had aced every one, knowing that even in the grotesquerie of her “workplace” maternity outfits—the least offensive ones she could find still involved ruffles and Easter hues—she came across as intelligent, committed, and not insane, Lily knew she was done with academia. When she was offered the job, she took twenty-four hours to make sure, then turned it down before telling Adam, who flushed and said, Really? Wow. Congratulations. Really? He was happy, because he wanted to stay in New York, but he was visibly frightened, because he wanted her to be happy. Are you sure? he asked for days. Are you sure you won’t regret it?

  To her mother Lily lied. She told her the job had gone to someone else. To which Ruth said, It’s because you’re pregnant! You should sue. To which Lily replied, to end things, I just might.

  “Momma, your cock?”

  Lily’s watch—her “clock”—is beeping. It’s her first digital watch since 1984, a gift from the kids, i.e., Adam, who insisted that Ro and June picked it out but also took it upon himself to walk Lily through the device’s many alarm functions.

  How long has it been beeping?

  And if it hasn’t been beeping for a long time now, why not? Shouldn’t it have been beeping half an hour ago? She must have set it wrong, which means she’s lost her ability to perform basic math. Or maybe she didn’t mean to set it at all, and the fact that it’s beeping now, at the moment when she should be arriving at school, is merely a coincidence. Ha.

  “Momma?”

  Lily presses buttons, and the watch stops beeping. She wonders, not for the first time, if there is something wrong with her that she can’t deal with what is in fact a completely manageable situation of her own choosing. She is not captive. Sure, if she had some extra cash or could give up those cocktails she might sign up for a fiction or playwriting workshop, try her hand at actually writing one of the stories that rumble around in her head. But she has two healthy children, an apartment free of leaks and mold, a park nearby, no hunger, no rickets, no physical abuse. An excess of education. She can buy what she needs and vote and get an abortion (for now, in this part of the country) and is married to a man who likes to say it makes him happy to see her happy. Every day, it becomes clearer that most men are pure dick; they’re selling ten-year-old girls and stealing and raping even younger girls and drugging women and reaching their hands up women’s skirts and tugging on choir boys and forcing people to look at their stuff, which makes Adam, in comparison, a very good man. If, for instance, Lily and June wind up thirty minutes late to pick up Ro today, and owe twenty-five dollars, and Lily were to tell Adam, Adam would tell her to get her shit together, but then, because he does not want to be a man who says things like that to his wife, he would kiss her and insist he’s happy, because she’s happy. This was the plan, he likes to say. Enjoy this time. Enjoy the girls. Enjoy me.

  This last bit he never speaks aloud, but the sentiment oozes from him, his longing for Lily to be not only present but satisfied. His first wife, Vira, was neither. She worked for a different, scrappier aid group and was always running off to war-torn places. She wanted to keep doing this, it turned out. She didn’t want children. She didn’t want, he says in summary, or used to say, when he spoke openly of Vira: She didn’t want to be a wife.

  When June grabs her shirt back and drops it in the toilet, one part of Lily’s brain ponders appropriate reactions. Time out? But they are late! A slap in the face? But that’s not allowed … Yet the rest of her is motionless, staring at her reflection. Her makeup effort has halted, her hum has fallen off. Her thoughts have wandered from the party and the other mothers to Vira, whom she has never met, Vira with her flawless brown skin and flat stomach and lustrous black hair. No matter that somewhere, Vira is aging, or that she may have changed her mind and had three children by now. For Lily and Adam, Vira will always be as she was when she left (Adam’s version) or he threw her out (hers): thirty-one and childless. Her skin will forever bounce back when poked; her female parts will be fresh and tucked in. Lily hates the jealousy she feels, thinking of Vira—she is jealous of her eternal youth but also of what looks from here like freedom, and clarity. Why is she still hanging around? When Lily and Adam fell in love, they talked about Vira all the time, and it seemed a bold, smart tactic, a way of declaring that they weren’t afraid. Or Adam talked, and Lily believed, about how over time Vira grew angry about almost everything Adam did: the new job he took, which she considered to be “establishment”; the J. Crew catalog he dug out of the recycling bin to which she’d exiled it in protest of its knock-kneed, starving models; the praise he heaped on her very occasional bouts of cooking, traditional Gujarati recipes she’d learned from her mother that he just actually, genuinely loved! She accused him of passive aggression and said he was trying to get her to cook more. In the end, Adam told Lily, when fighting was their main activity, Vira said she’d probably married him to piss off her parents, who’d had an idea about her marrying a fourth cousin from Ahmedabad. Which was when Adam told her to go, though he had not meant go as in forever but go, get some fresh air. But that was that. She was gone. Adam and Lily used to joke about how Vira was like Lilith, that other angry first wife, which was funny, both because Lily’s name was so close to Lilith and because Adam’s name was Adam, and fun because it made Lily into Eve, which they both found sexy. Then they got married and immediately started trying to conceive, because Lily was not young, but they were lucky and within a year Rosie came along, and soon Lily no longer seemed like an antidote to Vira’s
mercurial moods. Also, she was even less young than before, she was forty-two, so they tried again and got lucky again and June came, and as the years passed and dwarfed Adam’s three-year marriage to Vira, her name didn’t make them laugh but caused them to feel exposed. They are no longer a beginning. They don’t talk about her anymore. But sometimes, without warning, she swings down and hangs in Lily’s vision, pries at her fears, throws a cruel light. Is Lily too pasty, too frizzy, too compromising, too bougie? Vira’s questions, perhaps, are not so different from Ruth’s. As Lily reaches into the toilet now and squeezes June’s shirt to avoid drippage, and elbows the shower curtain out of the way to avoid contamination, and tosses the shirt into the tub, she sees for the first time that her hands have grown sunspots. She scrubs at them. She is still scrubbing when June runs out and down the hall and Lily hears her call, “Momma, just one time?”