“Over laundry?”
“Yes! I don’t know. I just don’t want …”
“So I’m right.” Ruth hands Lily the flyer. “You want to stay here so you don’t have to go home.”
“Mom!”
“Would you turn the light off, honey bun? And this laundry thing. You’re showing it to me at this particular moment—why? You think it will make me happy that you’re sometimes negligent. That you’re not a perfect little housewife. And I’ll let you stay.”
Lily sees that Ruth is exhausted—and that Lily is the thing exhausting her.
Ruth brandishes the wand and presses a thumb firmly to the red NURSE button. “So you’ll bring the girls, and you’ll bring books.”
“Mom.” But Lily knows she has lost. Sorrow washes through her. So what if she can’t tell the difference between fear and avoidance? Does it matter? Both are real. Both would be solved by the same thing—her staying. As it is, she hears the clopping of the nurse.
“Can you do me a favor, sweetie?”
Lily nods.
“Be kind to yourself.”
Lily nods again, though she wants to weep. If she were any kinder to herself, she wouldn’t do laundry at all. Her children would go to school with their underwear turned inside out. This has happened, but only once.
“Being kind isn’t the same as letting yourself off the hook,” her mother says. Again with the mind reading. “Remember that column I used to like? The one the sampler came from—A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life? That same columnist—Letty Loveless, she was called—once wrote something like, Take care of yourself. No one else will. And it sounded so harsh, and like it couldn’t possibly be true, like if you believed it were true you would just give up. But I don’t feel that way about it now. Now I think it’s meant to be hopeful. Lily. Are you listening?”
The nurse knocks and immediately enters, as nurses do. She doesn’t seem to notice that Lily’s face is streaming with tears. Instead she listens without facial expression to Ruth’s instructions. Then she is folding up the cot, handing Lily her duffel, and guiding both cot and Lily out of Ruth’s room, into the glare.
GLOUCESTER, MA
VEE
Early Exile
Lighter. Bourbon. Virginia Slims. Vee has arranged everything on a tray and set the tray on the rug in Rosemary’s upstairs hallway, where she sits, feet on the first stair, waiting for Rosemary to emerge from the bathroom. This is their ritual, six days into Vee’s “visit,” i.e., banishment: the three children in their bath, the women at the top of the stairs, drinking and smoking. Also part of the ritual, at least for Vee: until the bathroom door opens, she can hardly breathe. Rosemary reassures her endlessly that she likes Vee being here; Vee won’t stay as long as she needs but as long as she can! Still Vee can’t shake a fear that at any moment she’ll be kicked out, that tonight the bathroom door won’t open and tomorrow—when she returns from one of her walks—the front door won’t either. Coming here has saved her. Vee is certain this is true. To Rosemary, to Annisquam, this place where their families spent summers. Where else could she have gone? Not to the mental hospital, as the tabloids claim she has done. Her nerves are tight as wires but she’s not crazy, or sick; she can get through a day. She gets through by smoking and taking long walks: around the point, then off the point, up roads that lead into the woods and down other roads that bring her to water and rocks. She walks past her parents’ old house, owned by another family for nearly a decade but still preserved, as the houses here are, with its white paint and black shutters. It’s been kept as a summer house and is empty now, a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, but when Vee walks past it she imagines the door to the screened porch opening. She can see her mother walking out in her barn coat and duck boots and pearls to check the work of the fall cleanup crew. Vee is glad her mother can’t see her. Of all her mother’s humiliations, and her grandmother’s—the affairs, the talking over, the taking for granted their endless work making her father’s and grandfather’s world—none of that was close to this.
When she isn’t walking, Vee reads. She forgets herself. She is fine.
So it’s not as if she needs Rosemary with her constantly. It’s only when Rosemary is due to return from somewhere—school drop-off, or the hair salon—that Vee’s lungs stop working properly. Her palms sweat, her mind rakes, a frantic speculation as to what is happening and when it will end. She feels wild with helplessness, and this helplessness and the helplessness she felt that night a week ago, after Hump came upstairs and told her a car was coming, get some rest, pack your things—can it possibly be that only one week has passed?—are so similar, as sensations, that each time she waits for Rosemary, she is pulled into the spiraling. She shouldn’t have made him angry. She should have buttoned her collar. She should have let him undress her. She shouldn’t have resisted. She should have known what to expect. She should have made a speech. She should have spit in his face, should have danced naked, shouldn’t have drunk so much, should have buttoned her collar. She keeps thinking back to the Jefferson Airplane concert where she was dancing with her friends when three boys moved on them, threading arms between their legs and up their skirts and trying to push fingers inside them. No one paid attention to the girls’ shouts; they had to flee, run back to their motel, lock the door. They kept laughing, until one of them cried. They should have worn jeans, not skirts. They should have kept their arms down and their legs closed as they danced. She should have buttoned her collar; she should have slapped him. In the upstairs hallway now, she hears the crunch of her zipper breaking. Should have obeyed. Should have known. Should have done better with the Suitcase Wife, to placate and persuade, save Alex’s career before he had to resort to—
“Vivian Kent! What did I ever do without you?”
Rosemary, opening the door, is drenched from the waist down, a waist she insists is already thickening by the day. Her doctor has confirmed that she is pregnant, and though it’s early still, seven weeks, according to Rosemary the swelling happens earlier with each baby. She plops down next to Vee, dries her hands on Vee’s skirt, picks up a glass from the tray, and holds it out.
“No ice tonight?” she asks.
“I forgot the ice.” Vee pours. “Sorry.”
Rosemary shrugs and sips. Her face is flushed from work and steam. The first night, Vee asked if she worried about the kids alone in the bath—there are two boys and a girl, ranging from eight to nearly four—and Rosemary shrugged then, too, and said they were good at looking out for each other. She has always been like this, Vee thinks—steady, calm, difficult to fluster. Her face is broad, her eyebrows notably darker than her sandy hair, her legs and arms strong for a woman, maybe a little thicker than ideal, but in a way that fits the rest of her, so that she never appears large, only grounded, impossible to tip over. Not that she’s masculine or hard. She’s just Rosemary, unfailingly matter-of-fact. Even her nails she now wears unpolished, not unmanicured like the women’s-group women’s but neither lacquered like Vee’s, whose own scarlet preparty polish is starting to chip. Buffed, Rosemary calls what she’s done. She is self-assured enough to go with buffed.