A hand moves across her stomach, pauses, moves again. “Good,” says the fat midwife.
“Why?” Often, the creature inside Esther bucks or flutters. But now she feels only her feet, returning from numbness.
“Three hands,” the midwife says. “You are perfect.”
Esther returns her smile. It fills her, this praise—she can’t help the flush that crawls up her neck as the midwives lead her back toward her chambers. The midwife is telling her that she will give birth to the king’s child; she is also telling her, in not so many words, that the child will be a boy. The king’s first. Vashti was barren, and his other wives have only borne girls—or at least girls are the only infants born to his wives that the king has claimed as his own. He wants his heir to be born to his queen. And so he will be. To Esther.
She crosses the threshold and goes cold. The silked walls, the tall bed, the cool silence, the boy in the corner already flush in the face from fanning her air, all of it wakes her from her moment of indulgence. As she climbs the steps to her bed, she feels small, and stupid. How could she forget, even for a moment, the camp? And why did she imagine the blue-eyed midwife might have been the one to obey her? She shouldn’t be surprised anymore by the power she lost when she went from being a night-station girl to being queen. Esther has been low, too. She knows being low can make a person righteous, and if righteousness isn’t power exactly, it’s power’s kin. Now she has only this: cool silence, ease, these bedclothes, this sensation of sinking. It is all, inarguably, exquisite. The boy inside her stirs. The boy in the corner fans. The door will be guarded. They tell her to sleep. But she is never tired.
BROOKLYN
LILY
Another Chamber
“Tennis balls?”
“Tennis balls.”
“Okay …” She is listening to Ruth’s story, or trying to listen, but her mind keeps catching on potential dangers in her mother’s bedroom: the four-poster bed that must be climbed into, the rugs her mother has never bothered to stabilize with rug pads, the jagged rock her mother uses as a door stop, the piles of books strewn across the floor. Ruth has grown weaker in the three weeks since her diagnosis, though she won’t admit it. The fact that her doctor has yet to deliver a solid opinion on whether her decline is largely a side effect of the chemo and radiation or a result of the treatments’ failure makes it easier for Ruth to pretend she’s fine. But Lily knows, or believes she knows, that her mother is dying. She sees that Ruth does not lift her feet enough when she walks, so that even if she hasn’t tripped yet, she is perpetually almost tripping. Her mother’s beautiful skin has turned pale. Apart from her appointments, she chooses to stay home. Her friends come in the evenings and Lily during the day, by herself Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and with June on the between days like this one, plopping June in front of Super Why! in the living room before making tea. Each morning she pauses at the bedroom door and exhales before entering. It is unnatural to see a person every day and be able to see them changing. Even her daughters, who are growing at alarming rates, look the same on a given morning as they looked the day before. But Ruth, each time Lily arrives, appears to have passed through years of life since Lily last left.
“So I sewed them into the back of his shirt,” Ruth says.
“Did what?” Lily is noticing how thickly her mother’s ceiling fan is coated in dust.
“The tennis balls. I’d read a column, ‘How to Stop Your Husband from Snoring and Save Your Marriage.’ This was in McCall’s, before I knew there were other magazines. Or I guess I knew, but I didn’t dare. In any case. It said the trick was keeping him off his back, and the trick to keeping him off his back was tennis balls.”
“Ouch.”
“He didn’t try to stop me.”
Lily tries to imagine this encounter. She comes up blank. She knew her father, both before he left, when she was almost eight, and after; until he died of a heart attack when she was nineteen, she and her brothers visited him in California once every year. So it’s not as if she can’t picture his face or hear his voice. Still, he is most real to her as a presence more than a person, a solidity who never took off his shoes except to bathe, sleep, or swim. She cannot remember him talking to her mother, even to argue. Instead she remembers the sensation of being with him; she remembers feeling when she was with him that authority existed, that whether she liked it or agreed with it it would continue to exert and produce itself. She remembers feeling comforted by this. She can see now that this feeling was a delusion, an internalization of the patriarchy, or perhaps the patriarchy itself, but that doesn’t change the fact that she still thinks of her philandering father, dead for a quarter of a century, as a comfort. Whereas her mother, her mother who is here with her, who has always been here, who she wishes could stay here forever—with her mother it is not as simple.
“So did it work?” she asks.
“No. He just went on sleeping on his back and snoring. It was like he couldn’t feel the balls at all. I was devastated.”
“That sounds a little dramatic.”
“Does it, Lily?” Ruth takes a long sip of tea. Her swallow is audible, and painful sounding, and Lily is sorry. Her mother rarely talks about her own feelings, she mostly pushes other people to reveal theirs, but she just confessed to Lily devastation, and Lily shot her down. “How did you even manage that?” she asks, trying to rewind. “How do you get tennis balls into a shirt?”
“You need two shirts. One larger than the other, and you sew … it’s almost like a duvet? But instead of down, you’re sewing in tennis balls.” Ruth stops, seeing Lily’s confusion, then says: “I was a very good seamstress once.”
How Lily did not until this moment register that her mother has been talking about sewing, she doesn’t know. Ruth’s face is blank, her lips in the thin line she used to make when she was teasing the children, not letting a smile show. But Lily can’t tell if she’s teasing now, or if she’s oblivious, if her sickness is starting to blunt her. She knows that Lily has been struggling to make the girls dresses, or rather struggling with the fact that she’s not making them. Lily has told her how a week after her first lesson, she missed her second date with Kyla. Lily was in the hospital with Ruth, in fact, when she was supposed to be ringing Kyla’s bell. Kyla understood, of course. Kyla was sympathetic and concerned and asked how she could help and then, when Lily, overwhelmed, failed to respond, Kyla simply delivered a meal to Lily’s building. She didn’t buzz the apartment, didn’t even demand that interaction, just left it with the doorman and disappeared. And each week she has checked in. No pressure, just want to remind you I’m here whenever you’re ready …
But Lily is not ready. And Ruth knows this. She knows—Lily believes she must know—that Lily cannot go more than an hour without thinking of Ruth, that to go to Kyla’s would seem a betrayal. Ruth has to know this. She has told Lily the dresses are a torture device she’s invented for herself, that she should give up, use scarves, buy something online. And yet, without a hint of apology, she casually mentions she can sew? Not only that, she called herself a seamstress. Lily is mortified. How could Ruth have let her go on about the dresses—at one point Lily even described the machine parts to her, as if describing a new planet to the earthbound!—and said nothing?