“Lily,” her mother says.
“Yes?”
“Do you want my help?”
“With what?”
“The dresses you want to make. You could buy a used machine, set it up on my desk. Or we could do it by hand … I could teach you some simple stitches—”
“No!” Lily smiles wildly, trying to soften her response, which feels less like a word than a flailing. She cannot imagine accepting help from Ruth, who has seemed all along to disapprove of Lily’s sewing idea, and every other domestic effort she’s made, however poor the result. Besides, her mother isn’t well. “Thank you,” she says. “You don’t have to do that. But thank you.” She takes Ruth’s cold mug of tea. It’s a gag mug her mother got at some Purim celebration, with a knockoff Starbucks logo that says Ohel Coffee, Product de Persia, Certified for the Court of Ahasuerus, 14 Adar 5773 and features a mermaidish queen in the middle of the ubiquitous green circle—Esther, presumably. Why did Lily pour her mother’s tea into this if not to torture herself further? “I’ll go make you some more?”
“All right.” Ruth’s voice is hoarse. “Whatever you like, Lily-pie.”
* * *
Ruth is asleep when Lily returns with more tea, so Lily goes back out and sits on the couch next to June. She snuggles up to her daughter, nosing her cheek and trying, as she blocks out SuperWhy!, to remember her mother sewing. Even once. Even if she was making that A Well-Kept House … sampler, which was technically embroidery and which maybe she didn’t even make. But the image that comes to Lily instead is of her mother smoking. She is on the sun porch. She half sits, half leans, her buttocks perched on the bay-window sill while her feet press the floor, her bare legs a sunned hypotenuse. It must be the summer after Lily’s father left, because that was the summer her mother made the leap to shorter shorts but hadn’t yet moved on to the long, gauzy skirts she would wear in summers to come. (Did her mother sew those skirts?) They are shapely legs, with muscular calves and well-defined thighs, and her quadriceps do a little dance as she smokes, climbing up on the inhale and sliding back down on the release, and Lily, transfixed, then and now, watches the knot of muscle as if it might tell her something her mother won’t.
When, after a couple episodes, Lily goes back into Ruth’s bedroom, the blankets have been smoothed and the blinds raised, the room swept in light. Ruth emerges from the bathroom, wiping her hands on a towel with an officious, energetic air, and Lily lets herself feel a spasm of hope. Her hope surges when Ruth looks her in the eye and says, “How is Adam?” because of course How is Adam? means How is your marriage? and Are you having an affair now? and all this is Ruth’s way of being her truest self. Never mind that Lily’s blood pounds at the question because if she were to answer honestly, she would have to say, I’m having one in my mind. Which is true. The Thursday after she virtuously declined Hal’s pizza-date invitation, he asked again, and she accepted, and since then he has occupied an unreasonably large and torrid portion of her thoughts. Nothing happened, to be clear. The place was a hole in the wall Lily had never even noticed before, called only PIZZA, it seemed, which of course made Jace, who had discovered and recommended it, a kind of urban pioneer. That this was in addition to her being a lawyer with nonexistent thighs only made the “date” feel more acceptable—what interest could Hal possibly have in Lily? They ate at a Formica table with the kids, and drank wine out of paper cups, and Hal asked the obligatory question about how Lily’s mother was doing, though not in an obligatory way—he had a way of crinkling his lovely crow’s-feet wrinkles in a way that reminded you of sun and also of storms he might have weathered and suggested that he was ready to empathize with your storms, too. All that was cheesy, and platonic enough. But then he looked at Lily’s plate and said, “I see you really like hot pepper,” and that was all it took—she was wet. It was mortifying, she would tell Ruth, if she were to tell her any of this, which she will not. And then, well, what happened next was maybe kind of mortifying, too, in its predictability. That night she seduced Adam, and the next night, too, and the night after that, and what has happened since is one of the stranger things that has happened in the past month but also, inarguably, the best: almost every night, after the girls are asleep, Lily leads Adam to the bedroom, or the bathroom, or once the kitchen, and they take off their clothes and do it. It’s not something they talk about. There’s no foreplay, no planning or premeditation. Even for Lily, who started it, it feels less like something she does than something she is led to, like a fucker’s version of sleepwalking. She just keeps finding herself in the middle of it. Almost everything else that brings her pleasure she has put on hold since Ruth’s diagnosis, things like dessert, or the Sudoku puzzles she likes, or Kyla’s lessons. But sex? The more it happens, the more Lily makes it happen. She does not dwell on its relationship to Hal nor on the pitifully easy Psych 101 analysis of her behavior: compulsive sex as an attempt to defy death. Instead she orders new underthings, a French negligee, a pair of crotchless underwear, a garter belt—they both love the garter belt. So maybe there is some premeditation now. At a minimum, there is commitment.
Which makes it true when Lily answers her mother: “He’s fine.”
Ruth settles herself onto a loveseat that once belonged to her own mother. “Any progress toward a promotion?”
“Do you want more tea?”
“Sit.”
Lily sits on Ruth’s bed.
“Tell me,” Ruth says. “I’m stuck here. Tell me something.”
So Lily tells her mother about Adam’s fish-farm endeavor, which is finally looking like it might happen. She sets the scene: a refugee camp west of Kigali. She describes the challenges, the skeptics. Then she explains the role she played in the turnaround, how after the pizza date it struck her that Hal—“this dad of a kid in Rosie’s theater class?”—might be able to help Adam. Adam needed a fish expert who wasn’t already opposed to his project, and Hal was a fisherman. He’d even worked with aquaculture pools, Lily happened to know, because he’d mentioned this, at the pizza place, because he was the kind of man who did not need to be prompted to talk about himself. Other things he’d mentioned: he was involved in some kind of artisanal kelp locavore start-up on Long Island Sound, and he knew just about everyone. Which could not hurt, Lily thought. She set up a date for Adam and Hal, and that was that: since then Adam has brought Hal on as a consultant and they meet for regular drinking/planning sessions in the neighborhood. Are you sure it’s okay? Adam keeps asking, because his meeting Hal means Lily putting the girls to sleep on her own, and while at some point Lily might have said no, this particular scenario she supports entirely, for it relieves her of guilt and furthers Adam’s cause. He still hasn’t gotten a full go-ahead, she tells Ruth, but last week, thanks to a funder Hal brought in, they received a sizable grant, the kind of money they’ve been waiting for, which will help to draw other money and quiet the doubters.
“What’s this Hal like?” her mother asks, as if that is the point.
“He’s fine.” It is good to have given Hal to Adam. He served his purpose, she has decided. Which sounds mercenary, she realizes, but isn’t mercenary better than gaga? The women she knows whose husbands have cheated insist that it’s impossible for the cheating to have nothing to do with their marriage, but Lily is starting to think they’re wrong—you can want something and still fully want another thing. That they conflict does not mean you are conflicted.