Then the gate opens. It’s a shock, though they’ve waited for hours—when it actually happens, there’s a collective gasp. The crowd surges, and Esther, pulled and pushed by the current, finds that she doesn’t have space to reach for her paste and discard it. And she cannot spill the figs—the basket is pinned to her leg by the tightness of the pack. She turns her head, but Marduk is already lost, far behind her now, and as she’s carried forward with the roar of the girls’ feet on the royal stones, she hears, or rather feels, a strange rattle in her throat. She is humming. It’s her aunt’s habit, taking abrupt root in her. There is no melody. It’s the vibration she’s after, the echo of herself that steadies her as she walks.
BROOKLYN
LILY
The Second Wife
She hums to ward off panic, time running out to pick up one child from school while the other, smaller one throws her boots against the apartment wall. No boots, no boots! They are such nice boots, not hand-me-downs like the rest but a gift from Lily’s middle brother, brand-new fuzz-lined boots in a pine-green suede. Lily would like to have such boots. She almost says this—If I had those boots I wouldn’t throw them against the wall!—but she knows it won’t help, and it’s mean, too, the kind of lording over that Lily’s grandmother did incessantly, according to Lily’s mother, Ruth, which is why, she says, Lily herself was rarely scolded as a child. Reparations, her mother jokes, though her leniency has eroded: now that Lily is grown, Ruth scolds her all the time, albeit passive-aggressively, for Lily has not become the type of woman she was supposed to become.
“I hope it fulfills you, taking care of the children all the time.”
“What a variety of sponges you have!”
“You were so driven when you were younger. But maybe you’re happier now. Are you happier now?”
Lily hums to ward off her mother’s voice, though it’s Ruth’s favorite lullaby she’s humming, Oh the fox went out on a chilly night … She squats behind her daughter, pins her under the arms, and attempts to work the boots back onto her feet, thinking of Rosie being herded into the cafeteria with the snotty, sorrowful clump of abandoned first-graders.
This child, June, whose preschool “day” ended hours ago, at 11:30 a.m., kicks and kicks. June, that warm and pliant month! Lily begins to sweat. Her coat is already on, her hat, her scarf. Oh the fox … June’s boot flies off again and Lily makes the mistake of going for it, which gives her daughter the chance to squirm away and run down the hallway toward the bathroom, where she will, in her newest favorite rite, rip off her shirt and throw it in the toilet. And he prayed to the moon … Lily sheds her coat and runs after her, telling herself to take a breath, get a little perspective, no one will die here—at least not today. This isn’t war, or revolution. Right? If Ro sits in the sorrowful circle, so what? She’ll look at Lily with that look, the one that seems to see into her. But so what? So she waits a few minutes, so the world is not going to end, so lots of kids have it far worse, so she’ll learn resilience, and resilience is the latest … and the moon … As she rounds the corner into the bathroom, Lily reminds herself to smile. She doesn’t want to scare June. If she scares her, they will never make it out. Lily hangs her face in a grin. But June isn’t looking at her, she is deep inside her shirt, wrestling to get it off, and Lily makes the mistake of glancing in the mirror, where she sees that her grin is terrifying. She drops it, yanks off her slouchy wool hat with the hideous pink “ponpon” she let Ro talk her into, and stares at what she understands to be her face but which appears, under the stuttering, chemical fluorescence of their rental apartment’s bathroom light, to be that of an old, gray witch. Because, because, because, because, because! Because of the wonderful things … The tune changes as Lily enters a kind of derailment in which time goes one way and she goes another, into her small makeup box—small so as to deemphasize its importance to the girls, though there is more makeup, much more, hidden in Lily’s underwear drawer. She begins to dab and swipe at herself, thinking of the other mothers, the women who will be at the party this afternoon, a party for Lily, to teach her to sew. Lily doesn’t know any of the women well. She didn’t intend for them to throw a sewing party in her honor. But the hostess, a woman named Kyla, overheard Lily talking to another mother at preschool pickup about how she wished she could make Esther costumes for Rosie and June for Purim this year, if only she knew how to sew. This was true, in a sense. Lily did wish that she could sew. But she wished it as she wished for sleek hair or a triplex apartment: certain it would never happen and not really caring. Sure, she had a vision of herself, by herself, at a table in front of an open window, sewing. But didn’t every woman? It was a fantasy she might once have tried to parse, in a paper, theorizing about its origins in popular and literary culture and arriving at an idea, or a way of articulating an idea, that was semi-original. There would be a lengthy bibliography, the production of which would give Lily a deep, almost rabid kind of pleasure.
But to actually sew?
She should never have spoken the wish aloud. It was an empty frill of after-school chatter. Lily knows that she will struggle at sewing, just as she struggles at disconnecting tiny Lego pieces. But before she could take it back, Kyla had invited her and the other mother and some other women, too. Why not make it a party? she’d said. I’ll have wine, and snacks, and she will, Lily knows, because Kyla is always wearing boots with heels, even at the playground, and she sent real, paper invites to the thing: A Sewing Fête!
What does one wear to a Sewing Fête? Not baggy underwear, certainly. Not sweat.
Lily, smearing concealer under her eyes, spots a new gray hair in her left eyebrow, tweezes it, and feels instant remorse, not only for the hole she has made but for the pain. It’s enough to make her eyes smart with tears and to make June, whose shirt is off now but still in her hand, think that her mother is crying. She wipes her face with her shirt, as if demonstrating, then offers it to Lily, and Lily, who has again forgotten to stock the bathroom with tissues, accepts and wipes her eyes, remembering too late the concealer she just applied.
“Momma?”
But time! After a five-minute grace period, the school asks for a “donation” of a dollar a minute to cover care. It’s not required—the school is public, after all—but suggested, and the understanding is that you pay if you can, and Lily can in the sense that doing so will not make her homeless, and her daughter has the boots to prove it. So if she’s twenty minutes late? Fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars is a cocktail shaken by a man in a vest, or take-out pad thai plus a couple spring rolls, or overnight diapers for a month, or one-sixth, almost, of a haircut in Park Slope, which is where Lily lives, of course. It is a lot and not very much, though if you fail regularly in this way it becomes, undeniably, a lot. Besides, there is simply no good reason for Lily to be late. She begins to hum again, thinking of Adam in his office, his youthful messenger bag leaning against his aging calf, talking and typing and directing and greenlighting hygiene drops for families that don’t have toilets, let alone lights capable of sputtering, and everything else he does to keep money climbing into their bank account and set himself up to be promoted, not to mention help people. Adam and Lily are trying to save to buy an apartment so they can stop paying through the nose for rent, but they’re paying through the nose for rent so it’s impossible to save—an old story—and then there are things like late pickup, or the occasional parking ticket, also Lily’s fault as she’s in charge of moving the car from place to place to outrun the street cleaners, that eat up their nonexistent “cushion.”