And so on. Lily returns to the line she knows by heart. A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life. This is why she recognized the name Letty Loveless. These were her mother’s favorite columns. But look at what Ruth did, how she twisted what Letty Loveless intended to say, took from it what she wanted.
“Everything all right?” asks Vivian Barr. She has followed Georgie into the hall. She arranges herself in her elegant dress.
“Is all this … yours?” Lily asks.
“Oh, yes.” The older woman nods. “My life’s work.”
“Seriously?”
Vivian Barr gives a small, rueful smile. “Well, seriously in that I wrote them and that it was most of what I did for over a decade. But life’s work, no, I do not mean that seriously. Most of it’s trash. As I’m sure you can see. And yet, clearly not trash enough for me to trash it.”
“My mother loved Letty Loveless.”
Vivian Barr lets out a cross between a gasp and a gravelly chuckle. “Did she,” she says.
“Didn’t you imagine she might read them?”
“I didn’t—”
“This one here? She put it …” Lily points to the passage about the well-kept house, then drops her hand. She feels suddenly protective of Ruth, both of the edit she made and of the fact that the words meant so much to her. “And there was another one she liked,” she says. “About taking care of yourself.”
Vivian Barr squints. “Well. Letty Loveless was not, shall we say, generous.”
“No,” Lily says. “I can see that.” She sounds rude, perhaps, but she is thinking of the cumulative hours she spent looking at the A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life sampler, the way it became one with her mother’s voice, the voice in Lily’s head. That Ruth removed the quotation from its context, thereby altering its meaning, was neither here nor there. That she may eventually have arrived at the thought herself didn’t matter. Here is where she found it: in a column written by her old friend.
Vivian Barr shifts her weight from one orange shoe to the other, clearly tired, wanting to sit back down.
“I wonder if she ever wrote to you,” Lily says. “To Letty Loveless.”
“Rosemary? I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“She was too proud for that.”
Vivian Barr rests a hand on the wall next to her. Her chin is soft in a way Lily didn’t notice before. The lines that gather on her chest are deep. Lily knows she should release her from standing here, in the hallway. But she is thinking of Vira. Where is she standing? How has she aged? Is she married again? And she is thinking, too, that she doesn’t actually want to know, and that there is probably someone else who feels this way about Vivian Barr, someone for whom Vivian Barr remains a kind of legend, occupies a Vivian Barr–sized hole they will never fill. Here she is. A woman with a dog in a dark hallway, wanting to sit down. A woman who loved Lily’s mother once and knows the things in her that did not change. Because she is right, Lily knows. Her mother would never have written to Letty Loveless herself.
“Would you like more tea?”
Lily follows Vivian Barr back to the table, but she is still thinking about her mother’s pride, and she is thinking about her mother being held down in a sailboat as she screamed. Can it be true, as Vivian Barr said, that her mother simply forgot her fear? It is true that she rarely seemed afraid, even when she was dying. If she feared anything, it seemed to be Lily winding up like Rosemary. But maybe that, too, was pride. And maybe the pride that kept her from being someone who would write to an advice columnist—or seek out at some later point her oldest, closest friend—was also fear.
Once Vivian Barr has poured them more tea, and they’ve gone through the rituals with the sugar bowl and cream, and Georgie has accepted sugared cream straight from Vivian Barr’s spoon, Lily says, “Do you still give advice?”
Vivian Barr’s smile is fuller than Lily has seen it. The skin around her eyes whiskers, the green of her irises seems to deepen. “Try me,” she says, and Georgie perks his ears, eager for whatever Lily might say. She didn’t plan on talking about the Esther dress saga. She’s been making some progress at last, despite or maybe between the fern’s reaches. The fabric arrived, then a book of patterns, then a book she realized she needed about how to read patterns. But last night, after cutting out the shapes and laying them on her bed, she realized she had bought nothing to sew them with, no thread, not even a needle, and it became clear to her again: even with a needle, even if she still had the machine she had to return to the rental shop, Lily cannot sew two dresses by herself. She explains all this to Vivian Barr, then tells her about Kyla. “So I’m trying to decide whether to ask for her help,” she says. “I know she would, in a second. But I kept rejecting her offers before. It feels rude now to go back.”
“I wouldn’t bother,” says Vivian Barr without hesitating. “Too complicated. Take the fabric to a dry cleaner, one of the ones that do alterations. If the dresses are as simple as they sound, they’ll have them ready the next day. They’ll charge you what, maybe twenty dollars?”
This is not something Lily has considered. It’s a very practical idea.
“Your mother was quite skilled in the sewing department,” adds Vivian Barr.
“I know. I didn’t know, but then I found out.”
“She didn’t sew after she was Ruth?”
“No.”
Vivian Barr nods. Her smile has disappeared.
“Did you ever think to reach out to her?” Lily asks. “Once enough time had passed?”
“I didn’t think it was my place.”
“You both lived alone.”
“And?”
“And in New York—”
“Do I look like I need company?”
Lily flushes. Something has flared in Vivian Barr; Lily has offended her; it is time to go. She begins to push back her chair. But suddenly Vivian Barr has propped her elbows on the table—a move as surprising coming from her as a fart might be from someone else—and she is looking at Lily, really looking into her eyes, in a way that reminds her, yes, of Ruth. “When I lived at your house,” she says, “you and your brothers were always racing around. Inside, outside, up the stairs, down the stairs. Sometimes it seemed … well. I was very fragile right then, very absorbed. I’ve said that, I realize. My mind is sound. But sometimes it seemed to me … With your brothers, I might have been a tree. But with you, there were these moments when I would see you looking at me, really looking, like you saw something. Something I didn’t yet know about. This sounds ridiculous, I realize, because I was grown and you were a little girl. But I felt, always, a little afraid of you.”
Lily thinks of her kitchen memory—Lily on one side of the glass, Vivian Barr on the other. Does Vivian Barr have the same one? Is she trying to apologize in some way? Lily cannot ask this. She cannot say to this woman, I remember you in a robe, there is something desperate about you, in the robe, you are in a robe in my kitchen, maybe with my father … They have already discussed Lily’s father. That is done. If there is anything else to the story, if Lily is not the only one here who has grappled with another woman’s husband in a kitchen, Vivian Barr is not telling. So Lily says—and it is true, and it was true last night when she said good-night to the girls, her blood still firing from her trespass: “I feel that way with my older daughter sometimes. Rosie. She looks at me, and I think she can see not just something but everything. It’s very unnerving.”