This was not sustainable, according to Dr. Monmouth. Vee would eventually want to have children. She would want a partner, “a lifelong relationship of depth and substance.”
After a year, when Vee still did not want these things, Dr. Monmouth continued to insist that she wanted them, until one day Vee said, “I really don’t think I do. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I did not really want the men so much as I wanted to be the men.”
Dr. Monmouth stared at her.
“I want to live alone.”
Dr. Monmouth leaned forward, elbows to her wool-slacked knees. “This is so sad,” she said. “It’s just heartbreaking to me.”
Vee leaned forward, too, elbows to her stockinged knees. “Why?”
“You’ve given up. You met your moment of disillusionment too early. We all have them, but for most of us it’s a gradual process, an easing in. Yours, your trauma, and your isolation now, the walls you’ve built up around yourself … Vivian. Just because you’ll never be able to worship a man again doesn’t mean you can’t love one.”
Vee sat for a long moment, staring up at Dr. Monmouth’s high, white ceiling. Her heart was thudding loudly, because she knew it was time to be done with therapy, and because what Dr. Monmouth had said reached beneath her ribs and squeezed. She said, “I don’t think that’s true for me.” Then she thanked Dr. Monmouth and asked her—She’s the age my mother would be, she thought, which made it both easier to dismiss her and harder to leave—to put a final bill in the mail.
Even now, more than forty years later, she can summon the queasiness she felt walking out of Dr. Monmouth’s office that day. Quickly, it had turned into giddiness. Another spring had come. The leaves in Washington Square Park had unfolded and were sifting a puzzle of light onto the paths and trash and benches, bathing the students and homeless people in a kind of glow. The arch looked brighter than usual, adding to her sense that she had been transported.
In the hallway, Vee summons a deep breath. It fills her. She is fine. She calls to Georgie, and together they go into the bedroom. The room soothes her, as always. There is her bed, and her writing desk, and the art she has chosen, and the drapes—her love of bare windows was short-lived, it turns out—and the old dresser of her father’s, one of numerous pieces she got back from Alex once she was finally settled and knew she would not be moving again. She was nearly middle-aged by then, and had come to be grateful that he’d done what he’d done. She would never have found out what she wanted otherwise. She would have had children. Alex would have become more violent. She is certain of this though she has no proof, though Suitcase Wife’s charges against him—filed some months after that party—were dismissed. Vee had dismissed her, too, had called her Suitcase Wife instead of Diane Fiorelli, though Diane was her name, though clearly Alex did something to Diane that Diane did not want. Now, Vee suspects, young women would not put up with such behavior from men. Look at them, carrying mattresses around and going into combat—soon Hillary would be president and men would be chastened. But Alex won his reelection, then won again, and again, and now he’s the senior senator from Rhode Island. Vee sees pictures from time to time. In a few, Alex, still handsome, is standing with his family, three kids and his wife, the same one he married a couple years after Vee left, or after he banished her and then she refused to come back. The wife wears sweater sets in aqua and peach, but she is beautiful in an understated way, tall and olive-hued. Vee studies the woman’s face, but it gives nothing away.
The top drawer of her father’s dresser sticks, as it has for years. She tugs left, jiggles right, then reaches into the back for her sew-on-the-go box. Rosemary’s daughter, she thinks, is also a second wife, but a different kind, of a different era, with a face that shows everything. It showed Vee that the girl is sad, and confused, and possibly having an affair, and that she is unlikely to take the fabric for her daughters’ dresses to a tailor, as Vee suggested. Above all, it showed that she misses her mother. Surely she wanted Vee to offer her something, care for her in some way. And the closest Vee came was rote advice about a dry cleaner, a little tea, and a monologue about how the girl had scared her. Vee snapped at her about not needing company. That was only because it had taken her so long to grow out of needing it—mostly. But how could the girl know that?
Except for the scissors, which rest open and askew atop the other items, the sew-on-the-go box appears as it did when Vee’s grandmother gave it to her, the miniature cardboard spools waiting brightly in their rows as if the plastic container has fossilizing powers. Vee can’t quite grasp Lily’s determination to make the dresses herself—didn’t she understand that Rosemary stopped sewing for a reason? What was happening in Brooklyn these days?—but she will send the box via overnight mail, so that Lily has it tomorrow. It’s meant only for mending, of course, but she can use more than one color of thread; she can do it at her kitchen table where no one will see her struggle. It will be something.
Vee thinks of her own struggle with the buttons on her collar that afternoon, how much they had seemed to mean and how quickly they had come to mean nothing. How badly she had wanted to be a woman with conviction, and how little it seemed to matter in moments what her conviction was. She could have been a senator’s wife if she hadn’t seen through the illusion of their armor, or a women’s-group woman if she hadn’t found them embarrassing. She could have been a mother, like Rosemary, if only she had reached the morning she’d imagined she would someday reach, when she would without hesitation or regret toss her Pill down the toilet. But that morning had not come.
What Vee did not tell Lily—thank goodness!—is that it was Lily and her brothers who made Vee certain that she did not want children. This would sound cruel. But Vee did not feel cruelly toward Rosemary’s children. If anything, she felt grateful, as she eventually did toward Alex, because they had solidified for her what she had not yet been able to believe. They were cute. But their cuteness did not outweigh their chaos. And she never found herself asking them questions; she was not interested in knowing them.
Dr. Monmouth said it was different when they were your own. But Vee was decided. No babies, and no men—not at all with respect to the former, and with respect to the latter not for keeps.
More complicated had been women, and the question of how they would appear in her life. Dr. Monmouth did not once ask about that. Would Vee go on stealing from them, and advising them, and berating them, and being loved by them? (Yes.) Would she really get to know any of the ones in her circle, beyond knowing the music and books they liked, whether they preferred wine or weed, where they were born? (No.) Was she ever attracted to them, as the tabloids inferred? (She would like to kiss some of them. That was all.) Would she find a friend again? (Not like Rosemary.)
In the drawer of her writing table Vee finds a cushioned mailer and tape. She opens her laptop. Lily’s address is disturbingly easy to find—as her own must be, Vee realizes, for Lily to have found her. She makes a note to find out about changing that, then wraps the sew-on-the-go box in the Arts section, slips it into the mailer with a note, and thinks, No. She’ll have a courier deliver it today, so Lily can start tonight.