The Book of V. Read online

  Lily grabs her hat and follows and finds June standing on the couch, holding The Book of Esther above her head like a trophy. Lily snatches the book away. Her attempt the previous night to throw it out was thwarted by the building’s porter, who, having found it in the trash, knocked on their door this morning, cheerful in his blue jumpsuit: One of your girls make a mistake! Lily wanted to scream. She hates the book, and not only because her mother gave it to the girls in her pushy, be-more-Jewish way—though she wasn’t even born a Jew herself; it was Lily’s father, long dead now, who’d been the Jew—or because the girls quickly grew obsessed with it. She hates the book because after going through three stages with it herself—she was entertained briefly, then bored, then bewildered—she has entered a fourth stage in which she recognizes that the embattled queen Esther, like Lily, is a second wife.

  Lily drops the book into the dark crevasse behind the couch cushions. Tomorrow afternoon, but not before then, she will dig it out and leave her mother to read it to the girls. Every Thursday, Ruth comes over so Lily can have a little time to herself, though what Lily does with this time she cannot exactly say. Mostly she walks, sometimes through the park, sometimes through stores, touching things, feeling fizzy and weirdly burdened until the time has passed. Tomorrow, maybe, she will do something more productive: purchase supplies for the girls’ dresses, practice the stitches she will be taught tonight.

  Ignoring June’s squeals, Lily throws her into the stroller and, with a knee between her legs, manages to strap her in, buckle the tiny, injurious buckles, and maneuver her out the door. June is shirtless and bootless but they make it, somehow, into the elevator, which causes Lily to remember that she was doing laundry in the basement earlier and that her wet sheets are still waiting in washing machines number one and number three—what will the super do with them this time?—but time is chugging along and look, she managed to grab a fresh shirt for June as well as the boots and also her own coat and hat and by the time the door opens into the lobby they are, a miracle, ready. June smiles sweetly, and Lily pushes them out into the yellowing winter sunlight, and they join the river of other women and strollers and children on Eighth Avenue, heading to this school or that, or home from school, or to laundromats or piano lessons or nitpickers or playdates. There are no men to be seen. It is 2016, four days into a new year. Lily breathes. The cold air wicks her sweat. The sky is blue, the bare trees make it appear bluer, the skin beneath her eyes appears smooth and bright. She will pick up her other child. She will go to the party. She will learn to sew.

  WASHINGTON, DC

  VEE

  Ablutions

  For obvious reasons, Vee chooses a bath over a shower. She is not naïve enough to believe that she can save herself with a good scrub, but it’s impossible not to try. And who knows? Her mother believed women could only get pregnant during the full moon, because this was the circumstance in which her own child was conceived and she was a particular kind of lucky person—drinker of gimlets up and down the New England coast, sailor, wearer of pearls—who assumed, despite all evidence to the contrary, the steady bestowal of her luck upon the world. Other people believe other things, about positions or douching or poison. No one seems to understand with any certainty how any of it works.

  She runs the water scaldingly hot, pours in enough bubbles to give an elephant a UTI, opens her legs, and flutters her hands, trying to pull the soapy water into her pussy. Vagina, she corrects herself. This is what the women’s-group women insist on calling it. Vagina, she thinks dutifully, though the word disgusts her. She closes her eyes and envisions the water flooding her interior, reaching every crevice and crack, washing out any trace of Alex.

  “What are you doing?”

  The door makes a solid thwack as it flies open and hits the sink.

  “Vee! Look at me.”

  She doesn’t move. “I’m bathing,” she says in a delicious monotone. “You’re making the room cold.”

  “The party starts in less than an hour.”

  “I realize.”

  “Well?”

  “I’d be further along if you hadn’t attacked me.”

  “Oh come on. You loved it. Are you getting out, or what?”

  “I don’t know.” Vee sinks lower, up to her ears. Maybe she did love it, in the end. Still, she does not want a baby.

  “No! Don’t get your hair wet! It takes you an hour just to do your hair!”

  “Then I won’t do it,” Vee says. “Why should I, for a bunch of women?” She widens her eyes for emphasis, thinking of the women’s-group women with their unblown hair. Only a few wear makeup, several go without bras, and the older ones, in their late thirties, are letting themselves go gray. They are meeting tonight, a meeting Vee will miss. But why shouldn’t she bring a little of the women’s-group vibe to her own party? If, as they claim, the beauty standards that enslave women are set by men, why shouldn’t Vee’s party of women, left on their own, wear blue jeans, or housedresses, and allow their hair to do what it will?

  “Vee—”

  But she is gone, fully sunk. Alex’s voice beyond the water sounds like a distant foghorn, and Vee, holding her breath, thinks of her childhood friend Rosemary, who lives year-round now in an old, comfortable house on the water and who might be feeding her children dinner at this moment, or drawing their bath. Vee, her lungs aching, is startled by the longing she feels for her friend. She pops out of the water and sees Alex’s hands gripping the side of the tub. He is leaning over her now, saying something about how the president of the suitcase-manufacturing company is known for being unfashionably on time to parties, how it’s a Rhode Island thing, and what would she, from distant Massachusetts, know about that?

  She giggles, but he doesn’t join her. In another moment, in the time before he was a senator, Alex might have laughed at his own nonsense. Instead, his voice keeps pouring onto her, along with a faint, sour scent, and as she gives in and looks up, she knows what she will find, beyond the freshly shaven jaw and the Roman nose and rich brown eyes: he’s afraid.

  He sees her see it and walks out. Then he returns a moment later, flinging the door into the sink again. She would like to mention this, the door-sink situation, because she finds it funny that after a $4,500 renovation the bathroom door slams into the sink, and she would like him to find it funny, too. The money came from her family, after all, just as her family’s money had paid for them to buy a place on Dumbarton, three short but significant blocks east of Wisconsin. But Alex does not like to talk about this, she knows, and he is pacing the length of the tub. “You have to get out now,” he says. “I’m not leaving until you get out,” and Vee thinks, the poor boy, the frightened king, with his nervous, bad breath. Perhaps she has been unfair to him. She rises from the water, and lets him stare, and wonders at how easy it is, to give him what he wants. Why does she make it hard, then? Why resist and demand? Why make him touch her as she did, when he so clearly disliked it? Why keep going to the women’s group? She’d been cajoled the first time, by a fellow Wellesley alum, but no one pressured her to go back. Why not be more like Rosemary, who didn’t hem and haw over whether to have children; who no longer indulges herself with late-afternoon baths, let alone uses them to purge and hide from her husband; who is soft and glad in her warm house? Or like Vee’s mother, who until she died kept clipping her favorite columns from Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal with titles like “Five Ironing Secrets You’ll Wish Your Mother Taught You” and “How to Please Your Husband.” That was the title, on numerous occasions. Vee chose Alex for reasons that are still apparent to her. He was smart, ambitious, a dignified drinker, a great kisser. He could give her what she’d always known, forever. He was like home. She liked home. Why not be like Rosemary, or her mother, and be content?

  Could it be so easy? As if in answer, Alex salivates audibly. For a moment, just by standing here, she has relieved his fear. It should make her glad, or proud. It does, in part. His hormonal response dominates him, and she domi
nates his hormonal response. But in another part, a drawer deep inside, Vee vibrates with anger, and something harsher: she hates that her power has nothing, really, to do with her; hates that it’s a passive, humiliating power; hates that she uses it anyway.

  Coldly, she says, “Hand me a towel.”

  Alex’s spell is broken. He obeys, then goes to check on the party, leaving Vee staring at herself in the mirror. She drops the towel and looks at her white breasts, her flat stomach, her thick whorls of pubic hair. The hair is dark now but will fluff out a reddish blond when dry, the same as the hair on her head. Her waist is a little thick, her hips a little narrow, the overall shape a little straight, boyish. The longer she looks the plainer she appears—a body, made of the requisite parts, each with its own function. She sees one hip bone, and another; two fleshy knee joints; two feet with their ten toes. From the knuckle of each toe, she sees, grow a few wisps of hair, like grass from a hillock. The wisps of toe hair match her pubic hair, which matches her head hair and her armpit hair, and all of that probably matches her nose and ear hair, though she has never bothered to investigate.

  Vee tilts her head back to see if she can see inside her own nostrils. This behavior should repulse her, she knows. But she finds it oddly comforting: herself before the mirror, divided into crude parts, inspecting herself with dispassion—perhaps because none of what she sees in the mirror at this moment correlates with sex, and sexiness, and all the problems they cause.

  She’s working to find the right nose-to-mirror angle when a crash returns her to the thing she’s meant to be doing. A tray of silverware, from the sound of it.

  She moves quickly now, plotting. Her green dress, her pearl necklace. She glances at the clock. Alex was right, of course—she doesn’t have nearly enough time. She pours herself a thumb of bourbon—apologizing silently to her mother, whose only rule regarding drinking was that you didn’t start alone—swallows it down, and begins. Lotion. Stockings. Her new bra and girdle set, meant to lift and separate. The dress, which zips up the back—she secures it above her hips and leaves the remainder for Alex, in the space of a second noting that this will please him, wondering if that’s what she wants, and worrying that she might be pregnant. She sets her hair, then positions herself at her vanity, picking up her powder and brush only to put them down again a second later, her hand drawn instead to an envelope tucked behind her jewelry box. Vee begins to thumb it open, then puts it back and begins to powder her face. Someone is shouting downstairs.

  She watches the letter as she powders. She’s read it three times already, savoring Rosemary’s fat letters—Vee imagines Rosemary’s children look like her handwriting, plump and hearty—and her matter-of-fact narration: she’s bought a new-model washer-dryer set, with an extra rinse option; a new stop sign has caused all kinds of upset among the village elders. This letter is like most of Rosemary’s letters. Or it would be—if it didn’t contain a disturbance, related to Rosemary’s husband. Rosemary is of similar stock as Vee, descended from judges; as girls they went to the same preparatory school in Boston, then graduated together from Wellesley. But the weekend after graduation, Rosemary married a Jewish lawyer, Philip R—Rosenbaum? Rothblum? Vee can never get his last name straight; no matter how many letters she addresses to Rosemary, each time she has to consult her address book. Whatever his name, Philip, for reasons Vee doesn’t understand, agreed to move with Rosemary to the same seaside street on the same exclusively Protestant point where Rosemary and Vee’s Protestant families once summered. The brokers balked. There were rules on the point about which colors you could paint your clapboards—white—and your shutters—black—and about permissible fencing and noise and lawn care, and it’s been understood since the Indians “died off” which people are welcome and which are not. But Rosemary’s mother stepped in with some kind of bribe, and until now things have seemed to be going smoothly enough. Philip has hung his shingle in the small city’s downtown and is building a client base among the ethnics. Rosemary thinks she’s pregnant again, with a fourth. She is hunting for new wallpaper and experimenting with the boys sharing a bedroom because she feels certain that the new one is another girl, and shouldn’t girls have their privacy? She writes about this and then, suddenly, she is writing about a cross. She doesn’t even begin a new paragraph, just describes coming home one afternoon with the boys, and it’s almost dark, and she is thinking about dinner when, pulling into her drive, out the corner of her eye, she perceives a flame. It takes her a few seconds to realize what it is. Then she pushes the boys into the house, fills a bucket with water, runs to put the fire out, and drags the cross into the garage.

  Someone burned a cross on Rosemary’s front lawn. Her letter returns to the wallpaper for the baby’s room, then asks after Vee and signs off.

  Vee turns her face to one side, then the other, checking that her powder is evenly applied. She’s been writing a response to Rosemary in her head, but apart from the usual—she’ll mention a party or two and a book she’s been reading, and she’ll fail to respond to Rosemary’s questions about whether she is having trouble in the pregnancy department—Vee doesn’t know what to say. If she mentions the cross, should it be to extend her condolences? Is that appropriate in such a situation? It might sound like pity. And Rosemary’s account was so sparse. Maybe she wanted Vee to leave it alone. Then again—Vee leans in toward the mirror and begins to line her eyes—maybe Rosemary was just being shy, not wanting to trouble Vee but secretly hoping Vee would ask all the questions Rosemary had left unanswered. Which was basically everything. How did Rosemary know what to do, in that moment? Did the children watch her as she quenched the flames? What did she tell them when she came inside? What did she tell her husband when he came home? And before that—how long had the cross been burning? Was it charred? Did she think that whoever lit it meant to actually hurt Rosemary and her family, or just scare them? Not that Vee would condone such behavior either way, but it did seem, to her, important. Intent had to be important—didn’t it? But it might be unwise to get into that. Vee puts down her eye pencil and picks up her mascara, refusing to look at the clock—if she looks, her hand will start to shake. She would like a cigarette but settles for a little more bourbon, then paints her lashes from the inside out, as her mother taught her, thinking maybe, if she writes back about the cross, it should simply be to express her outrage. But she worries that could land wrong, too, first because Rosemary herself didn’t sound all that upset—don’t fan a flame that’s not lit, as Vee’s mother used to say, a terrible metaphor given the circumstances, but still, apt—and second because Vee is not in fact outraged. Outrage requires surprise. Vee is not surprised. Nor does she imagine Rosemary can be, not entirely. Rosemary is not a simpleton or a Pollyanna. She knew what she was doing when she married a Jew. Vee has met Philip twice, and though what Rosemary said about him is true—he appears modern, and doesn’t strike a person as religious—he does have an obviously dark, foreign appearance. Vee respects Rosemary for doing what she wanted. Even Vee’s modest acts of defiance—the Pill, the women’s group, her arguments with Alex—fill her with guilt and a kind of dread. She doesn’t have the courage it would take to go against her family’s wishes or the stomach to live as an outsider, never mind to deal with a burning cross. Rosemary is brave, Vee thinks, dabbing at a bit of lipstick that’s bunched on her top lip. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility that her marriage was a mistake.

  Vee’s face is done. She lifts her eyebrows to see how she will appear in conversation, checks her teeth, her nails, the angle of her necklace, and so on, a series of minute actions as natural to her as swallowing. In this sense, Vee is ancient—she belongs to the millennia. She blows her hair, unpins it, sprays it, pinches it to relieve the slight helmet effect. She has her finger on her perfume mister when Alex walks in.

  “Ready?”

  His brow is filmed in sweat, his jaw already showing signs of stubble. He is afraid again, she thinks. And he is handsome. He is an objecti
vely handsome man who knows how to wear a suit, his thighs big enough to fill out the trousers, his hands strong, well veined. She kisses him, hard, then turns away, and Alex zips her, and their wordlessness makes her happy, because this, after all, is the point. Isn’t it? They will throw their parties. They’ll have sex again, drunk and a little wild, but this time with a condom. Maybe he’ll tie her to the bed—he has done this a couple times—and Vee will come without his needing to touch her. She’ll go crazy, and in the morning the house will be put back together and they’ll sit in the dining alcove and read the papers over coffee and marmalade toast.

  Alex spins her around. He nods. He toggles a finger at the buttons on her collar, which she has left open.

  “Button up,” he says.

  “I like it this way.”

  “Me, too,” he says. He cups his hands around her breasts and squeezes. “Button up.”

  Vee turns back to the mirror. “Get out.”

  Behind her, Alex picks up her empty glass and smiles. He assumes Vee is joking, even flirting, and for a moment she doesn’t know herself. Maybe she is joking. She wants it to be so, wants to lift again into their moment of grace. She didn’t think hard about the buttons. She could say this, and point out that her necklace, a gift from Alex, is more visible this way, but his eyes meet hers and Vee sees that his position is firm: He wants her to look like a virgin. He wants to defile her and he wants her to be new, again and again and again.