Lily thinks of her old hat, with its wide blue and green stripes. Another version of it might have been fashionably ugly, a hat that captured the spirit of a vintage rugby shirt—a rugshat!—but the version Lily had was just what it was. It was old even then. Wearing it could only be interpreted as a kind of self-sabotage.
“Or at least special?” Kyla prompts, and her look is so eager that Lily blurts out, “Yes, of course! Definitely special.” And it’s true, she thinks. The hat was special. Between Adam and Lily it had become a touchstone in their mythology, part of a lapse that included the contest in the bar and which did not reflect upon the basically sane, desirable, kind people that they were. It was a triumph, really, to sail past such a beginning and not only survive but thrive … or something. Not until this moment, in Kyla’s kitchen, did Lily connect what happened that night with the pageant in the Purim story, let alone see how neatly she and Adam and Vira fit into their respective roles. Had it been so strange, and so obvious, that they simply couldn’t see it? Lily had never been Eve, not even for a second. She had entered as Esther—in her plain hat, like the plain ribbon—and stayed Esther. The second wife.
“Definitely special,” Lily says again. “But not that special, you know? I mean, I don’t want you to go overboard, after all you’ve done. My mother used to grab scarves from the dress-up bin and that was that, I was Esther, ta-da!” Lily grabs her glass of wine and gulps, anything to stop herself from talking for a second. She hates the word special. She sounds ungrateful, though she’s not. She is not ungrateful, and she does not want to insult Kyla, and she wants—badly!—to do more sewing, with Kyla’s help. She takes another swallow, trying to inhale air along with the wine, and makes her pivot: “All I mean is, I so appreciate everything you’ve done, and I don’t want to put you out, but of course you’re right, we should definitely make something special …” Lily smiles, but Kyla is at the sink with the bowl of carrots, and Lily gets it now: the water will be poured off and the carrots will taste freshly dug. It’s a trick—simple, yet brilliant. How had Kyla learned to do such a thing? If Lily’s mother hadn’t been so involved in her Jewish new-moon ceremonies, would Lily, too, know how to keep cut carrots fresh? Someone points Lily to the cheese board, and it strikes her, as she tosses an inch-thick piece of brie into her mouth, that the only thing her mother ever sewed, to Lily’s knowledge, was an embroidery sampler which read: A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life. This was something her mother had read in a feminist advice column she liked, though Lily isn’t certain, now that she thinks of it, that her mother actually made the sampler herself, or if she had someone else do it. Which would be funny, really, a joke on the joke, though not on the woman she hired. Whatever its story, it arrived in Lily’s house shortly after her father moved out and hung on the back of the bathroom door, so that you read it each time you sat on the toilet, which for Lily, who was nearing eight at the time and lived at home for another ten years, meant she must have read it thousands of times.
Lily tries the pickled-broccoli-like stuff, which is indeed pickled broccoli and is delicious. She tries it on a cracker, then on another cracker with brie, then she finds herself staring at Kyla’s ass as Kyla goes to deliver her genius carrot sticks to the children. It’s not a perfect ass, Lily thinks, not like her cheekbones or hair. It’s not even an especially good one, neither ample nor fit, and Kyla’s jeans, neither snug nor loose, don’t do it any favors. Yet there is something in the way Kyla walks, at once lighthearted and grave, as if her confidence that she’s doing the right thing in the right place at the right time, and her pleasure in doing it, and maybe, too, those unflattering jeans, have imbued her with a kind of holiness. Lily watches until she’s gone, wondering how Kyla got like that, if you had to be born that way or if it was something you could learn, like how to sew, and whether Lily herself could learn it—if not holiness, then maybe a little grace? What if it’s easier than she imagines, if she could simply decide, right now, to be done with the way she is, done with discontent and done with her mother’s voice and maybe done with her friends, too, and their cult of ambivalence? What if she could simply want what she has? Kyla returns, drying her hands on her apron with an ease that makes Lily want to weep. She will get her own apron, she thinks. She will embrace her Estherness. So what if she’s the end of the story, the second wife, the virtuous one? Lily is forty-six. She is too old to still believe that she’s going to somehow wind up being someone she hasn’t already become. She is not a writer or a professor or a singer-songwriter or an adulteress, she is, by choice, a second wife and mother and homemaker. If she is ill equipped to be these things, then she will have to equip herself. If she is not Esther precisely (Esther saves her people; who—whom—is Lily supposed to save???) she will be Esther in spirit. The heroine. The second but lasting queen. A natural, if not terribly sexy, beauty. A virtuous, if not mysterious, wife. A satisfied woman, smiling in her new friend’s kitchen.
* * *
The children eat and the women eat, and then the children are served brownies and led back into the playroom, where the table is pushed out of the way and music is turned on and the children begin, miraculously, to dance. The women are served brownie bites. Lily is eating her fourth when a woman comes up to her, wearing a glow. “I’m Jace,” she says, reaching out a hand.
Lily shakes. She has too many questions—Are you a cowgirl? Where did you get that glow?—so remains silent.
“I think your older daughter goes to theater class with my son,” Jace continues. “Hudson? He says they’re friends?” Then, at Lily’s blank response, she adds: “He’s got red hair?”
“Oh!” Lily cries. “Yes!” She flushes, realizing that Hudson must be the son of none other than Hal the fisherman, of the reddish beard and strong hands, which makes Jace the wife of Hal the fisherman, of course. Lily puts down her brownie bite and says, as casually as she can manage, “I met your husband, I think. At pickup one night? Remind me his name …?”
“Hal! Yeah, he does pickup most of the time. He’s a fisherman, so he’s out and back really early.”
Lily laughs. “For real? He’s a fisherman?”
“Uh-huh.” Jace giggles. “He’s not, like, what you think of. He grew up in Larchmont. But then Wall Street wore off, you know? And he got hooked on tuna. Ha ha.” Jace babbles on, as if she doesn’t know her luck, and Lily, with time to take in how tiny this Jace is, her jean-clad thighs barely bigger than Lily’s arms, starts to picture Jace and Hal screwing. Jace is saying, “Maybe we can all pick them up together next time. If your husband can get off work early? I’m a lawyer, but I have some flexibility, like today … We could go out for pizza? There’s a good place near there …” and Lily nods, thinking, Never. Remember the laundry, she tells herself, to quiet the unvirtuous thoughts in her mind. Remember the laundry, and once the kids are asleep, make a real dinner for Adam. Jace—a lawyer! A pencil-thighed lawyer who still makes time for playdates—is still talking about the pizza place, but Lily buries her mind in her cupboards. Make him a real dinner and put on some nice lingerie and give all of what you’re feeling for Hal to him, she thinks. Screw him! Last Thursday night, when Ruth was over, she told Lily about a friend who’d just been left by her seventy-three-year-old husband because she wouldn’t have sex with him anymore. She said this as nonchalantly as her mother says anything that might shock the person listening, as if to show off her own lack of shock. That seems harsh, Lily had said, but Ruth shot back, Well? Isn’t it part of the deal? Lily didn’t have an answer. After she gave up the Grinnell job, she and Adam had made their own deal, she supposed. He would make the money, she would raise the family, at least until the kids were in school. It had felt honest, mature. Post-everything. They knew they were white, heteronormative, and privileged, and they would do their best to be good people while being that. Sex had not been discussed, then or at any point. Making sex part of the deal would suggest … what? A kind of servitude, at best. Prostitution, at worst. Still, she knows her mother is right. She also knows that although she and Adam have more sex than her friends do—once a week, usually? maybe?—that it is not enough, and not only in a Cosmo sense but in a very personal, Lily sense. She needs more catharsis in her life.