Vee lights two cigarettes and hands one to Rosemary, who doesn’t smoke on her own but is game with Vee. She smoked two last night, a personal record, but still nothing close to Vee’s five. Vee has been smoking while she walks, while she reads, while she panics.
“That’s getting infected,” Rosemary says, taking Vee’s left hand in her own and laying it palm up in her lap. They look: the tip of Vee’s ring finger is hot pink and inflamed. A few nights ago Rosemary removed a splinter from this spot, but Vee has not been keeping it covered as Rosemary instructed. When she returns half a minute later with antibiotic ointment and a Band-Aid, Vee feels a pang of embarrassment. She is not a child. And the splinter itself was a humiliation—she got it from the bottom of her dresser drawer as she was pawing for her sew-on-the-go box. She hasn’t told Rosemary this. What would she say? I got this splinter while desperately trying to snip off some buttons my husband told me to button? Who fought that fight? Even worse, who lost it as dramatically and pathetically as Vee has?
Rosemary dresses the wound and returns the Band-Aids and ointment to the hallway medicine closet. Vee finishes her friend’s cigarette for her, then lights two more and holds one out for Rosemary as she plops back down. Vee pulls hard on her own, fighting off the homesickness that hit her when she glimpsed the inside of the medicine closet. Rosemary’s boxes and bins and canisters and sewing baskets, her belongings, where they belong. Vee has so little of what is hers now: a few outfits; her essential toiletries, including the Pill; four pairs of shoes; and—as ever—her sew-on-the-go box. She packed only what she could carry by herself so that she could refuse Hump’s offer to haul her bags out to the car. She knew he would offer, just as she knew he would open the car door for her, and wait until she was situated, and ask if she was comfortable. It was a Town Car. Of course she was comfortable. This car is officially taking you to a place called Fainwright, he said. But you have it take you where you want, so long as it’s out of the way. No one sees you. He winked. This’ll blow over soon enough, Mrs. Kent. We’ll get you back. He slammed the door.
He missed the point, of course. How could she possibly go back? She had been debased in her own home, put to a test she would have to be whorish to willfully pass, then treated like a whore for failing. A psychotic, possibly lesbian, drug-doing whore, no less. It was a level of abuse she had not been raised to endure, no more than she was raised to travel for more than a few days without a trunk.
Rosemary has been generous, of course, telling Vee to use anything, wear her clothes, go into Rosemary’s bedroom and help herself to the books she keeps in a long, low case by the window. Rosemary must have at least a couple hundred, and Vee has been making her way through the shelves—from Jane Eyre to a half dozen Agatha Christies to Lolita to Portnoy’s Complaint—without discrimination or pause. Today she devoured one, called Surfacing, in which the woman—never named—might or might not be going insane and her boyfriend reminds her of “the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction.” Vee laughed and gasped as she turned the pages. Still, it makes a difference that the book is not her own—that her books and Band-Aids sit in a house now locked to her.
Rosemary takes a long drag on her cigarette and stubs it out. “I should get the kids out,” she says, without moving from the floor. She tilts the rest of her bourbon into her mouth. “But I do like when they’re in the bath. It’s like the car. They’re contained.”
Vee nods, though she can only guess. From what she’s seen of Rosemary’s life, mothering looks mostly like a lot of work. Rosemary loves her children, clearly. They are beautiful and funny. But they also never stop moving, and they touch everything they pass, lamps and walls and the artifacts that Rosemary’s husband has collected, and seem to have only three modes of activity, one in which they eat, one in which they bounce around the house and yard, and one in which they cry and whine until they fall asleep. And there’s this other one on the way. Vee hasn’t mentioned to Rosemary her fear that she, too, might be pregnant. For all the time they’ve spent together in the past week, she hasn’t told Rosemary much at all, only the merest outline of what Alex asked her to do in front of the men and what she did in return. And Rosemary hasn’t pressed her. This is part of what has saved Vee. She plans to talk, at some point, and she plans to ask about the cross; she brought Rosemary’s letters with her, too. But for now, ordinary chitchat is preferable. Vee hasn’t forgotten that as she took her bath and did her makeup before the party, she longed to be here, with Rosemary, steeped in what she understood to be domestic bliss. This is where she longed to be, and now this is where she is. She listens to splashing, a yelp, laughter.
“Hello?”
Philip calls out before he has fully entered the house, then his lower half appears at the bottom of the stairs. Decent black oxfords, well-fitted wool trousers, wool overcoat in the process of being removed. The ceilings in the old house are low, so that only if Philip climbs the first couple steps will his upper body and face become visible. So far, six nights in, he has not done that.
“Up here. Down in a few,” Rosemary calls back, and her husband disappears. “I should get them out,” she says again.
“Want help?” Vee asks, but Rosemary shakes her head, as always. “I’ve got it,” she says. But she does not get up. “Just a tiny bit more,” she says, holding out her glass, and Vee obliges and lights herself a fresh cigarette.
“What’s with these clothes?”
Philip’s shoes have appeared again.
Rosemary swivels to look at Vee. “Did you change the laundry?”
“Shit,” Vee says. She put in a load before her afternoon walk today, then forgot it.
“Don’t worry about it.”
But laundry is the only task Rosemary has asked her to help with, and Vee heads down the stairs before her friend can finish her sentence. In the laundry room, she finds Philip, strain on his face, expecting Rosemary.
“Oh,” he says.
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
Philip is not bearded, as Vee remembered him being—or did she make that up, unconsciously casting him as the fiddler? She isn’t sure she would even know he was a Jew if she were to spot him on the street. He looks like something, to be sure—his hair is wiry and dark, his mouth full for a man’s, for the men of a place like Annisquam at least. He is brusque, but also transparent, unable to hide his reactions. Or maybe he is uninterested in hiding them—Vee can’t yet tell. She also can’t tell if, for him, checking on the laundry is a way to boss Rosemary or an effort to be ahead of the times, an early adopter of what the women’s-group women called “home-front equity.” He looks at Vee now with visible mistrust. What does he want her to say? She is sorry about the laundry. Sorry for surprising him here. Sorry for being in his house. Surely he doesn’t expect her to say all this.
She slides past him and begins to load wet clothes into the dryer.
“Did you get any calls today?”
Each night he asks this. He wants to know if any of the papers have tracked her down. As if they would doubt the tabloid story that she is rehabilitating at Fainwright. In an effort to reassure him Vee made a call to the hospital and was promised that they wouldn’t tell anyone whether Vivian Kent is there or not—not because she is who she is, the woman was quick to add, but because of policy. And Vee understood. Half their patients, famously, were famous, most far more so than Vee.