“What was she like?” she says instead. “When you first met her.”
“We were four, dear. I can’t remember.”
“What’s your first memory of her?”
Vivian Barr looks at the scone still lying on the serving dish. “Well—I remember the first time we ever took a sailing lesson. We were seven, maybe eight. And your mother—her mother had to drag her, literally drag her, onto the dock. She was screaming. She was so terrified that her mother had to hand her to the teacher, and the teacher had to hold her down, and then when we left the dock she grabbed one of the cleats and held on so tight she started to slip out of the boat. The teacher got her, of course. I remember him working her fingers loose; he was trying to be gentle but he was also shaken—you can imagine. He must have been a child himself, maybe sixteen.”
“How terrible,” Lily says.
“I don’t know.” Vivian Barr, who has not taken her eyes off the scone, grabs it now without the tongs, breaks off a chunk, and dangles it beside her chair until Georgie comes and snags it. “I think she forgot it, mostly. And you know what? By the next year she was the only one of us racing Beetle Cats. She wound up being the best sailor in our class, boys included. The most fearless of us all.” She feeds Georgie another chunk of scone. “That’s how your mother was.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she didn’t dwell. Later, for instance, when she was married? She was always writing me these glowing letters, even when someone else might have had a few complaints. Even when something scary happened—like once there was this cross burnt on your lawn because your father, you know—and she told me about it, but she didn’t dwell. She didn’t fret or want my pity.”
“I never heard about that.”
“No. Why would you have?”
“But then why—”
“Her conversion? I don’t know. I think the cross strengthened her resolve. She took me to this consciousness raising group—”
“I thought you took her.” Lily is thinking of her brothers, who told her this. Did they remember the cross burning? It seems like something both impossible and necessary to forget, something she cannot ask them.
“No. She took me. Your father’s mother invited her, and she invited me. It was still new, then, to talk like that about things like sex and chauvinistic husbands and awful goings-on from your childhood. Your mother was in heaven—you could see that those women would become a kind of second home for her. She didn’t say much, but she loved listening to everyone else talk.” Vivian Barr pauses. “She was a private person, your mother. She was the kind of private person who wears a face that makes her seem like a public person.”
Salt pools in Lily’s throat. “That’s true.”
Vivian Barr watches Georgie lap up crumbs from the rug. When he is finished, she hands him another chunk of scone.
“So you really didn’t take her?” says Lily.
“I didn’t take her.”
“Or have an affair with my father?”
“I didn’t do that either.”
“Did you teach her how to smoke?”
“I don’t know if teach is the right word, but I encouraged her, yes. I got her drinking bourbon, too. Before that, she drank Tom Collinses.” She looks pointedly at Lily, who has never heard of a Tom Collins and does not know what to say. “Girly drinks,” continues Vivian Barr, and shakes her head. “But she did love cigarettes. I stopped soon after I got to New York. Anything that reminded me of that time, I stopped. But Rosemary was never a quitter.”
Lily bristles at this attempt at praise. Is it fair that Ruth kept smoking while Vivian Barr quit? It is not fair.
“But I do want to add, about the affairs—I’m not saying he didn’t have them.”
Lily nods. She thinks of her mother telling her she is like her father, hard to satisfy, and wonders if last night’s make-out session with Hal was somehow fated. Maybe there is something in her beyond her control. Maybe she will blow up her life.
“Try the scone, dear.”
What can Lily do? She takes a bite of her scone as Vivian Barr and Georgie watch, then she watches Vivian Barr feed the rest of her own scone to Georgie and, when he’s finished, bring her hand to his head. Her fingers are long and nimble. They work through the fur, untangling, caressing.
“Excuse me,” Lily says. “Which way to the bathroom?”
“Just down the hall.”
As soon as the door is closed, the tears Lily has been holding back spill out. From her mouth, from her eyes. She watches herself in the mirror, sitting on a tiny toilet, weeping, missing Ruth as she has not yet missed her.
* * *
Lily isn’t sure how much time she spends in the bathroom. Ten minutes, maybe twenty. She rinses her face, pats at it with a hand towel, then abandons the effort and drifts back down the hallway, composing herself as best she can, checking her watch. It’s nearly two. Their sitter will be unlocking her bike soon, jumping on in her sprightly twentysomething way and pedaling toward the girls’ schools. Doing Lily’s only job.
Lily slows. The art in the hall is not art after all but printed matter of some kind, news articles, or—she looks more closely. Clippings from a magazine, dated from the mid-1970s and ’80s. They all share the same title: Ask Letty Loveless. Lily knows this name. Dear Letty Loveless, she reads. Why is the Miss America Pageant still popular even after the protests? To which Letty Loveless has written a response titled: “Why Do Birds Sing?” Next to that is, Dear Letty Loveless, How should I groom between my legs? and next to that, Dear Letty Loveless, I believe Diane Fiorelli’s story because I was attacked, too, but my husband won’t believe me and I don’t know what to do. Lily skims enough to get the drift—Letty Loveless lacks love for all kinds of women in equal measure—then she falls into a kind of trance, unable to stop reading. There are stifled housewives who write in, and members of the Women’s Liberation Party who confide in Letty Loveless their vision for an armed uprising. Women who’ve had abortions and regret it, women who haven’t and regret it. Women whose faces are falling, women who lust after other women, women who believe makeup is a moral failing, women who’ve never touched their own genitalia, women who love their children but hate their husbands, women who love their husbands but hate marriage, women who hate all of it and want to run away. Spinsters and widows and the cheated upon and the cheaters. First and second and third wives. They all write to Letty Loveless, and they are all abused by her. Here is the flaw in your argument, she writes. Or, If you’re asking me to determine whether or not you are fundamentally, irresolvably lazy, I offer this: Lie down for a day. Do nothing. See what happens. Or, You think you can be a wife without being a Wife. But it’s not possible. You will have to give something up.
Lily inches her way down the hall, oblivious to the dry tears stiffening her cheeks and the dog nosing around her knees, fully lost, until, deep in one of the letters responding to a woman called Poor Housekeeper in Walla Walla, she reads: Perhaps you would like me to tell you that a well-kept house is a sign of an ill-spent life. Then you could go on and feel righteous in your mediocrity. This has fast become a stance adopted by Women’s-Group Women toward Wives …