In the kitchen, Kyla asks Lily to give everyone a brief primer on Purim—Poor-eem, she pronounces it, like Adam used to—which causes Lily, who feels at once defensive of and embarrassed by her tribe, and unreasonably irritated by being, apparently, its sole representative at this gathering, to issue forth a brief and conflated account of the holiday and the story that sounds something like “lots of drunkenness and misogyny but also female worship, which you could argue is a form of misogyny, and a so-so king and good queen and evil side guy, celebrated with a play and a big carnival and a pageant and triangle-shaped cookies, and also there’s a thwarted genocide of the Jews …” By the end, Lily is so turned around she adds a final, ambiguous punch line—“It’s kind of a burlesque?”—and then Kyla, undaunted, begins introducing the women to the machine, identifying its various parts and what they do. Lily is hungry. In her nervousness she has drunk too much wine. But the food—cheese and crackers and nuts and something that looks like pickled broccoli—has been laid out at the opposite end of the kitchen, so that to get to it you must walk away from the group and make a thing of wanting it.
As Kyla talks—the machine has many parts, including one called a feed dog—Lily’s fear mounts. Where are the thimbles? Where is the softcore sewing party? But then Kyla is turning to her and looking deep into her eyes, so deeply that Lily notices the remarkable blue of Kyla’s irises and wonders if she wears colored contacts, and saying, “You’re up first, Lil; you’ll do great,” as if they’ve known each other forever, and her voice is quiet now, and tender, as if she senses Lily’s struggle. Lily thinks of the word cerulean, for Kyla’s eyes, and of the freshman-year poetry class in which she fell in love with that word. “Do you mind?” Kyla asks Lily, and before Lily can figure out what she’s talking about Kyla is behind her, taking Lily’s hands into her own. They’ll start with a straight stitch, she says, and suddenly the machine is purring and Lily, guided by Kyla, is sewing. She feels a pleasurable shock, as if she’s jumped into cold water. There is vibration, and fabric, and Kyla’s hands on hers, and the satisfied grumble of the machine, and the cheers of the women gathered around to watch, and, at the small of her back, the gentle press of Kyla’s belly, and Lily realizes not only that Kyla has a belly, like anyone, but also how long it’s been since someone has taken the time to teach her something. Since graduate school, at least, and even then they expected her to teach herself most of what she didn’t know. There is a weightless quality about it, something she remembers from childhood, a sense that as long as she follows she will be okay. And now Kyla asks if she wants to try the foot pedal and Lily looks down and sees that there’s a foot pedal, and Kyla’s foot slides off it to allow Lily’s to hop on and instead of internally mocking the five-hundred-dollar boots Kyla is wearing—though noting the fact of them, she admits, may be a form of judgment—she mostly just feels grateful. She is grateful for this woman who is teaching her to sew, grateful that she cares, grateful for her earnest and unabashed domestic ambitions. So what if Kyla is a little too perfect, her cheekbones a little too good, her blouse a little too drapey-yet-lean? So what if her name is Kyla, as if in her spare time she’s a yoga instructor? She has been nothing but generous and kind. Lily is sorry for her snarkiness. She is embarrassed, as her back relaxes into Kyla’s stomach, at what she suddenly understands to be true: that although her friends, if they could see Lily in this moment, would crack a joke, every one of them would in fact like to be in Lily’s spot. They tell themselves they don’t care about being good homemakers. But they peek around each other’s apartments just the same, commenting on how one person seems never to have any toys on her living-room floor, or how another has managed to put together nonvirtual family photo albums, or how another always manages to buy useful things like that magnetic calendar on her fridge or that cord organizer on her counter. They keep their tone flat, as if they aren’t praising but merely observing, and then they move on to other subjects deemed more worthwhile, husbands or politics or the careers they’ve put on hold. It’s in this way that they are different from Kyla’s women, after all: not in their actual behavior—for they have all chosen to prioritize their children at this point in their lives, to “embrace” (that word, so redolent with resistance!) motherhood—but in their attitude. Never mind that fridge calendars and organizers and doctor’s appointments and school lunches and diarrhea and grocery shopping take up the bulk of their time and energy; never mind that they do feel pulses of pride when they experience success in one of these arenas. They have a phrase that encompasses all of it, “shit and string beans,” which came out of an old feminist novel one of them read once, she forgets what it was called, a name they can throw at almost everything they do. Shit and string beans, and they laugh at themselves, and pour a glass of wine, and put the kids in front of a screen, and settle in to complaining about things large enough that they can’t even pretend to try to solve them that day, like the subway, or the absurd and asinine entertainment of Donald Trump’s run for president, or pollution. A husband’s infidelity. Their own lusts, which they say they can’t imagine actually indulging—how would that even happen? in what space? on whose time?—yet talk about in great detail, for example, the father Lily met recently who looked like he could be a fisherman from her hometown. Granted, half the men in Brooklyn dressed like fishermen these days, but this man, Hal was his memorable name, looked like the real deal and then some: a beautiful, sensitive, sophisticated fisherman with a red beard and strong hands that Lily described to her friends in extravagant detail. She spent a week fantasizing about him, mushy with a kind of lust she hadn’t felt since Rosie was born. She and Adam had sex twice in that time. That, too, the women laughed about, because since when was twice a week getting it on? Since a long time.
Back and forth across the cloth Lily goes. It’s satisfying, even though she isn’t accomplishing anything yet, and totally involving, so that for a time she forgets her hunger and her friends and her laundry and her mother and her daughters and Purim and dresses, until she feels Kyla’s warmth depart at her back and realizes that she is sewing on her own. “You’re doing great!” Kyla says. “I’m just going to get the kids’ dinner together. Keep going!” But Lily’s thread snags; the machine growls; the pedal bucks. She hears herself cry out—a desperate caw, as if she’s been injured. “Oh, don’t worry,” Kyla says, “it’s been through worse. Here, take a break.” She pours wine into Lily’s glass and puts it in her hand. “Tell us about Esther, so we can figure out the dress.”
The other women nod.
“Esther?” Lily asks dumbly.
“As a character.” Kyla opens the door to the refrigerator. “I’m getting the kids’ dinner. But I’m listening. What’s she like?”
“Well, she’s the queen …” Lily is unsure what she did and didn’t say before, but Kyla nods, so Lily continues: “But she likes things simple. I mean, when she goes to become the queen—because first there’s another queen, Vashti, who’s banished, and then there’s Esther and lots of other women who are brought in, like for a kind of contest …”