Ruth opens her eyes.
“Are you having an affair, sweetheart?”
“What?” Lily’s voice cracks. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m thinking maybe you’re sitting here because you’re having an affair and you’re waiting for the right moment to talk to me about it.” Ruth looks into her eyes as she learned to do decades ago, at a HinJewBu retreat center set into the folds of a valley in the Berkshires, so that—to Lily, at least—it seems she is silently shouting: I am looking into your eyes!
“I’m not having an affair,” Lily says.
“Okay.”
“I’m not going to have an affair.” Though it’s impossible to say this without thinking of Hal. Last night, at theater class pickup, which Lily’s sitter couldn’t do, Jace was nowhere to be seen. But Hal was there, apologizing for her. She wanted to do the pizza plan, he said, but a work thing … and Lily nodded, forcing herself not to look at his hands, or even at his wrists, which she had also noticed, because they were covered in ginger hairs and very appealing. Let’s do it anyway? Hal said, in the kind of helplessly flirtatious way that helplessly flirtatious people have, people who may mean nothing by anything, who simply exude sex by standing there. Flustered, Lily declined, telling him about her mother’s diagnosis by way of explanation, though nothing about the diagnosis explained why she and the girls couldn’t join him for pizza and though as soon as she told him she was flooded with guilt at the intimacy she had shared, for there were people she knew far better whom she had not yet told. Like that, she had crossed a line. And now, as Ruth spears her with that dogged gaze, Lily feels as though her mother can see the thoughts she has provoked, Lily’s fantasy: those hands, on her hips; a gruff altercation nowhere near a bed.
“Okee doke,” Ruth says, doubtfully.
“Aren’t you going to ask me if maybe Adam is having an affair?”
“I know Adam’s not having an affair.”
“Why?”
“I know. Your father had affairs.”
“Yet you’re asking me.”
“You’re not entirely unlike your father.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hard to satisfy. There’s a kind of engine built into your brain, always churning. Your nature is to be angry.”
“It sounds like you’ve thought about this. But I’m not angry.”
Ruth smiles. Her teeth are small and straight and pearly—another thing Lily did not inherit. “You’re not staying tonight,” she says. “I’ll call the nurses and tell them to put the cot away.”
“Mom!”
“Go home. Bring the kids tomorrow. I want to see the kids.”
“They’ll be too loud.”
“That’s life.”
Her mother flings an arm in the air, a flamboyant gesture that takes Lily’s breath away for a second. She places her hands atop the blanketed mound of her mother’s feet and squeezes.
“Are you hiding from them?”
“What?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. I don’t.” Lily removes her hands from her mother’s feet.
“I don’t mind it here, is the truth,” her mother says. “At home there’s so much—so many things I need to do, and want to do, and so many, just, things. It’s peaceful—this clean, blank room.”
Lily nods before she can stop herself. Of course she knew what her mother meant. It’s impossible not to recognize that the hospital has its appeal, despite the noises and the lights and the reason they are here. Here, you can be nowhere. A kind of free. But she does not want to admit this to her mother, let alone hear her mother essentially speak her own thoughts. Her mother has always done this, and always it makes Lily feel as if she’s been pickpocketed. She knows this is unfair, that they are both allowed to have the same common human thoughts. Still, she feels an urge to slap her mother away. She felt this when her mother asked for her hair stylist’s number, too; she wanted to say, No! Not yours! Instead she said nothing, because she is middle-aged and semireasonable and should be able to share a hair stylist with her mother. Still, she was peeved.
In the hospital, stricken with fear, it’s a bit of a consolation, to feel peeved.
Her mother reaches for the wand that calls the nurse. “I’m going to push this button now, and you’re going to come back tomorrow with the girls.”
“Please don’t! They have school.”
“If you can skip three days of home, they can skip a day of school.”
“Mom.”
“Bring books. I’ll read to them.”
Any further argument Lily might have made is deflated now, because the book the girls would most want to bring is the very same one her mother would most want to read to them: Esther. Besides, what kind of person wanted to keep her mother from her children? “I’m staying over,” she says, “but I’ll go home early and get them. Maybe you can talk June out of being Vashti, because that’s her current plan.”
Ruth’s right eyebrow rises. “There’s no shame in Vashti, Lily. Didn’t I teach you that? It’s all the same costume anyway, some old scarves, a little thrift-store jewelry.”
“I’m making them dresses this year. And no one wants to be Vashti.”
Her mother smiles, though it’s not quite a smile. “Since when do you sew?”
“A friend is teaching me.”
Her mother nods, then lets out a long sigh. “You’ve made a place for yourself, my Lily.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it means. Nothing more, nothing less. It means I love you.”
Ruth thinks she has insulted Lily; she is trying to smooth it over. But Lily genuinely wants to know. What is the place she has made for herself?
Ruth is waving the wand. “You have to go home,” she says.
“No. Please. Look,” Lily says, sliding in her socks over to the duffel she’s been stowing beneath the hospital cot and digging through until she finds the piece of paper. She returns with it to Ruth, who squints at it, asks Lily to turn on the light, then squints again. This, too, Lily wants to keep forever—her mother’s far-sighted squint.
“What is this?”
“A flyer from the management company that runs our building.”
“I see that. But what are these pictures of?”
“Laundry! Laundry that sat in the washers for three days. They posted these all over the basement. Adam brought one when he came to see you yesterday.”
“Okay …”
“It’s my laundry! I messed up. Yesterday morning, the super’s wife knocked on our door and gave Adam two basketfuls of our clean laundry, all dried and folded—she’d done it herself.”
“That’s very kind of her.”
“She wasn’t happy.”
“Ah well,” Ruth says.
“Ah well?”
“This sounds ridiculous.”
“But now they’ve told our landlord.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous, too.”
“It doesn’t matter! We could still get kicked out.”