Lily and Adam have discussed her going back to work. But their conversations always circle back to the same grim reality: adjunct teaching—and adjunct is all she’ll get within a hundred miles of New York City—barely pays enough to cover childcare. They know because Lily did have a gig for a while after Rosie was born, at a college up in Westchester, and there was one day alone, when a snowstorm turned her usual ninety-minute return drive into a five-hour highway crawl, that ate up one-tenth of her semester’s salary in babysitting costs and gave her mastitis. Then, when she was seven months pregnant with June, she finally got a campus interview for the kind of tenure-track job she’d once assumed she wanted, at her alma mater, Grinnell College, a job that paid nearly as much as Adam was making then, but in Iowa, which meant it paid the equivalent of three times as much. But the instant she finished the last of her two days of lectures and talks and interviews and lunches, knowing that she had aced every one, knowing that even in the grotesquerie of her “workplace” maternity outfits—the least offensive ones she could find still involved ruffles and Easter hues—she came across as intelligent, committed, and not insane, Lily knew she was done with academia. When she was offered the job, she took twenty-four hours to make sure, then turned it down before telling Adam, who flushed and said, Really? Wow. Congratulations. Really? He was happy, because he wanted to stay in New York, but he was visibly frightened, because he wanted her to be happy. Are you sure? he asked for days. Are you sure you won’t regret it?
To her mother Lily lied. She told her the job had gone to someone else. To which Ruth said, It’s because you’re pregnant! You should sue. To which Lily replied, to end things, I just might.
“Momma, your cock?”
Lily’s watch—her “clock”—is beeping. It’s her first digital watch since 1984, a gift from the kids, i.e., Adam, who insisted that Ro and June picked it out but also took it upon himself to walk Lily through the device’s many alarm functions.
How long has it been beeping?
And if it hasn’t been beeping for a long time now, why not? Shouldn’t it have been beeping half an hour ago? She must have set it wrong, which means she’s lost her ability to perform basic math. Or maybe she didn’t mean to set it at all, and the fact that it’s beeping now, at the moment when she should be arriving at school, is merely a coincidence. Ha.
“Momma?”
Lily presses buttons, and the watch stops beeping. She wonders, not for the first time, if there is something wrong with her that she can’t deal with what is in fact a completely manageable situation of her own choosing. She is not captive. Sure, if she had some extra cash or could give up those cocktails she might sign up for a fiction or playwriting workshop, try her hand at actually writing one of the stories that rumble around in her head. But she has two healthy children, an apartment free of leaks and mold, a park nearby, no hunger, no rickets, no physical abuse. An excess of education. She can buy what she needs and vote and get an abortion (for now, in this part of the country) and is married to a man who likes to say it makes him happy to see her happy. Every day, it becomes clearer that most men are pure dick; they’re selling ten-year-old girls and stealing and raping even younger girls and drugging women and reaching their hands up women’s skirts and tugging on choir boys and forcing people to look at their stuff, which makes Adam, in comparison, a very good man. If, for instance, Lily and June wind up thirty minutes late to pick up Ro today, and owe twenty-five dollars, and Lily were to tell Adam, Adam would tell her to get her shit together, but then, because he does not want to be a man who says things like that to his wife, he would kiss her and insist he’s happy, because she’s happy. This was the plan, he likes to say. Enjoy this time. Enjoy the girls. Enjoy me.
This last bit he never speaks aloud, but the sentiment oozes from him, his longing for Lily to be not only present but satisfied. His first wife, Vira, was neither. She worked for a different, scrappier aid group and was always running off to war-torn places. She wanted to keep doing this, it turned out. She didn’t want children. She didn’t want, he says in summary, or used to say, when he spoke openly of Vira: She didn’t want to be a wife.
When June grabs her shirt back and drops it in the toilet, one part of Lily’s brain ponders appropriate reactions. Time out? But they are late! A slap in the face? But that’s not allowed … Yet the rest of her is motionless, staring at her reflection. Her makeup effort has halted, her hum has fallen off. Her thoughts have wandered from the party and the other mothers to Vira, whom she has never met, Vira with her flawless brown skin and flat stomach and lustrous black hair. No matter that somewhere, Vira is aging, or that she may have changed her mind and had three children by now. For Lily and Adam, Vira will always be as she was when she left (Adam’s version) or he threw her out (hers): thirty-one and childless. Her skin will forever bounce back when poked; her female parts will be fresh and tucked in. Lily hates the jealousy she feels, thinking of Vira—she is jealous of her eternal youth but also of what looks from here like freedom, and clarity. Why is she still hanging around? When Lily and Adam fell in love, they talked about Vira all the time, and it seemed a bold, smart tactic, a way of declaring that they weren’t afraid. Or Adam talked, and Lily believed, about how over time Vira grew angry about almost everything Adam did: the new job he took, which she considered to be “establishment”; the J. Crew catalog he dug out of the recycling bin to which she’d exiled it in protest of its knock-kneed, starving models; the praise he heaped on her very occasional bouts of cooking, traditional Gujarati recipes she’d learned from her mother that he just actually, genuinely loved! She accused him of passive aggression and said he was trying to get her to cook more. In the end, Adam told Lily, when fighting was their main activity, Vira said she’d probably married him to piss off her parents, who’d had an idea about her marrying a fourth cousin from Ahmedabad. Which was when Adam told her to go, though he had not meant go as in forever but go, get some fresh air. But that was that. She was gone. Adam and Lily used to joke about how Vira was like Lilith, that other angry first wife, which was funny, both because Lily’s name was so close to Lilith and because Adam’s name was Adam, and fun because it made Lily into Eve, which they both found sexy. Then they got married and immediately started trying to conceive, because Lily was not young, but they were lucky and within a year Rosie came along, and soon Lily no longer seemed like an antidote to Vira’s mercurial moods. Also, she was even less young than before, she was forty-two, so they tried again and got lucky again and June came, and as the years passed and dwarfed Adam’s three-year marriage to Vira, her name didn’t make them laugh but caused them to feel exposed. They are no longer a beginning. They don’t talk about her anymore. But sometimes, without warning, she swings down and hangs in Lily’s vision, pries at her fears, throws a cruel light. Is Lily too pasty, too frizzy, too compromising, too bougie? Vira’s questions, perhaps, are not so different from Ruth’s. As Lily reaches into the toilet now and squeezes June’s shirt to avoid drippage, and elbows the shower curtain out of the way to avoid contamination, and tosses the shirt into the tub, she sees for the first time that her hands have grown sunspots. She scrubs at them. She is still scrubbing when June runs out and down the hall and Lily hears her call, “Momma, just one time?”