“That’s the pageant part, right?” Kyla uncovers a casserole dish. “What the girls will be walking in?”
“Right.” Lily, no longer sewing, eyes the cheese, but the women surround her, waiting for the lowdown on Esther. “So when she goes to the pageant,” Lily says, “she’s the only one who doesn’t go crazy with her makeup and hair. She dresses very simply and ties her hair back with a ribbon.” Lily has no idea if this detail is true in the original, which she has never read, but in the children’s version Esther ties her hair back with a white ribbon and appears to wear the slightest bit of rouge on her cheeks. The girls love this detail—it’s a central focus of their interrogations. Why not something fancier? Ro wants to know. Maybe something rainbow, or glittery? At which point June parrots Lily: Because she knows what’s on the inside is most important? And Lily nods, dully proud. It’s exhausting, to indoctrinate. And always the truth bleeds through. There would be no need to indoctrinate if there was nothing to cover up. There would be no need for Esther without the whorish girls surrounding her. “Compared to the other maidens,” Lily says to Kyla, “Esther looks like a field hand. She’s the natural beauty.”
“I love it!” Kyla says. “And god, it sounds so relevant. I mean, such a good lesson for our daughters. Even now, they get so much pressure, right? I love the idea of a kind of plain-Jane hero. It’s like something out of that book … you know … The Paper Bag Princess?”
Affirmative cries go up from the women. Lily exclaims, too, because she does like that book. Of course she does; she is a woman who keeps the bulk of her makeup hidden in her sock drawer. But plain-Jane paper-bag princess wasn’t what she meant by “natural beauty.” She meant striking without pretense, attractive with minimal effort. A natural beauty, if you wanted to get nuanced about it—and Lily did, apparently—didn’t even have to be beautiful, exactly; it was more that her particular naturalness added up to its own sort of beauty. Lily, for example, knows that she is not objectively beautiful, but according to Adam, she is a natural beauty. He says it when they get dressed to go out, and when they spot each other across the apartment in an odd moment of stillness, not wiping a nose or sending a text but standing, for a second, and looking. It’s a gesture of sweetness, to stop and appreciate her. It’s also an insider reference to their somewhat bizarre first encounter, which Lily, in one of the stories she writes in her mind, calls “How Adam Got Lily for a Wife,” the shortest version of which goes something like: Vira left Adam, or Adam threw Vira out, depending on whose story you believed; Adam fell into an abyss; Adam’s friend Fred, struck while planning a surprise party for his wife’s fortieth birthday by how many of her friends were currently single, decided that the party would have a secondary purpose, which was to lure Adam from the abyss.
Did Adam know? Before the party, as he showered and dressed—choosing dark jeans, a checked shirt that could be interpreted in a variety of ways, and a leather jacket—had he known what Fred was setting up? As he put on his parka, for it was a brutally bitter night, 9 degrees with the wind chill, did he wish for one more stylish, something that said urban woodsman instead of simply L.L.Bean?
By the time the party was in full swing, certainly, he had to have known, because after the surprise for the wife had been pulled off, Fred turned his full attention to whispering in Adam’s ear while unsubtly eye-pointing at the various women he wanted Adam to check out. Lily saw all this, of course. She was, at this point, in a corner of the tiny bar Fred had rented out, talking with Fred’s wife. They had met over a decade ago in an intense and not great yearlong MAT program, so they were close, in a sense, but only saw each other once or twice a year; Lily did not know Fred’s friends. Her first thought, when Adam’s eyes landed on her, was that if she’d seen his picture on Match or Jdate, she would have been drawn to him for about ten seconds, then she would have moved on. There was something generic in his handsomeness. She would not have trusted that in real life he would offer more than he did in the picture. But he was good-looking. And she was not looking at him online, she was looking at him in a bar, which meant she could see him move, and she liked the way he moved. Still, she might have dismissed him. She might even have decided to be offended by the overt meat-market situation, though this would have been disingenuous, as she had been on Match and Jdate for a long time. But as Adam’s gaze moved on, Lily saw his drink-free hand toggle the zipper on his leather jacket, and in the gesture she saw self-consciousness, a dawning realization, she believed, that he was dressed like every other man in the place, that even their zippers looked like his, oversized and burnished. She saw him shrink a little, and decided that he had not known, before the party, that he was being offered a kind of flock. Or that if he knew, he’d managed to convince himself he did not know. If, after considering his options, he chose her, she thought, she would not be opposed to talking, at least.
So this is not the shortest version of “How Adam Got Lily for a Wife.” But neither is it the longest. The further Lily gets from it, the more it fascinates her. Like any origin story, maybe.
In the kitchen, the women wait for Lily’s response—plain-Jane paper-bag hero, right?—and Lily wonders what they would say if she told them about the party. If she told how the next two hours passed without Adam making a move, yet how she stayed tuned to him, attentive, would they understand, or think her pathetic? What if she told them how when she was introduced to one of the other single women obviously up for Adam’s perusal, she was too busy comparing their respective attributes to listen to a thing the woman said? If she told them that Adam kept looking around at his options with an overwhelmed and innocent expression on his face, an expression she has since seen on him when he does things like look for shirts online, would the women in Kyla’s kitchen think that made him an asshole? Did Lily think it made him one? If he felt that way, shouldn’t he have picked no one and gone home alone? All the times she and Adam have joked about that night, she has never asked him what took him so long. The party was ending before he made a move. Cold air swept the floor, people threw on their coats, even Fred and his wife were bundling out the door. Finally, Adam walked up to Lily. He chose her because of her hat. He told her this later that night, in bed. He did not delve into the vestigial instinct that must have kicked in, securing him to his stoic, square-chinned, eminently practical New Hampshire forebears. He simply said he’d decided to approach the one woman who had put on a hat to face the coldest night of the year. He assumed it meant things about her, of course—that she was sensible, confident, unselfconscious—things that later would seem less clear, to both of them. But that night he took those things to be true, and so he introduced himself to Lily Rubenstein, in her navy-and-green-striped hat.
“She’s not really plain,” Lily says to Kyla, feeling protective of her premarriage self. “She’s just simple.” Or she means to say these things. She is so afraid of sounding defensive that they come out like questions. Not really plain? Just simple?
“Okay.” Kyla has removed the casserole dish from the microwave and is setting out a large glass bowl of carrot sticks. Not baby carrots, the mushy or dried-out nubs that always remind Lily of dog penises, and then of the fact that her children want a dog, and then that they may never be able to afford enough space in this city to have a dog, but home-peeled, home-cut carrots resting, for some reason, in cold water. Kyla swishes the water with a finger and asks Lily, without a hint of guile, “But their costumes should still be elegant, right?”