Lily grabs her hat and follows and finds June standing on the couch, holding The Book of Esther above her head like a trophy. Lily snatches the book away. Her attempt the previous night to throw it out was thwarted by the building’s porter, who, having found it in the trash, knocked on their door this morning, cheerful in his blue jumpsuit: One of your girls make a mistake! Lily wanted to scream. She hates the book, and not only because her mother gave it to the girls in her pushy, be-more-Jewish way—though she wasn’t even born a Jew herself; it was Lily’s father, long dead now, who’d been the Jew—or because the girls quickly grew obsessed with it. She hates the book because after going through three stages with it herself—she was entertained briefly, then bored, then bewildered—she has entered a fourth stage in which she recognizes that the embattled queen Esther, like Lily, is a second wife.
Lily drops the book into the dark crevasse behind the couch cushions. Tomorrow afternoon, but not before then, she will dig it out and leave her mother to read it to the girls. Every Thursday, Ruth comes over so Lily can have a little time to herself, though what Lily does with this time she cannot exactly say. Mostly she walks, sometimes through the park, sometimes through stores, touching things, feeling fizzy and weirdly burdened until the time has passed. Tomorrow, maybe, she will do something more productive: purchase supplies for the girls’ dresses, practice the stitches she will be taught tonight.
Ignoring June’s squeals, Lily throws her into the stroller and, with a knee between her legs, manages to strap her in, buckle the tiny, injurious buckles, and maneuver her out the door. June is shirtless and bootless but they make it, somehow, into the elevator, which causes Lily to remember that she was doing laundry in the basement earlier and that her wet sheets are still waiting in washing machines number one and number three—what will the super do with them this time?—but time is chugging along and look, she managed to grab a fresh shirt for June as well as the boots and also her own coat and hat and by the time the door opens into the lobby they are, a miracle, ready. June smiles sweetly, and Lily pushes them out into the yellowing winter sunlight, and they join the river of other women and strollers and children on Eighth Avenue, heading to this school or that, or home from school, or to laundromats or piano lessons or nitpickers or playdates. There are no men to be seen. It is 2016, four days into a new year. Lily breathes. The cold air wicks her sweat. The sky is blue, the bare trees make it appear bluer, the skin beneath her eyes appears smooth and bright. She will pick up her other child. She will go to the party. She will learn to sew.
WASHINGTON, DC
VEE
Ablutions
For obvious reasons, Vee chooses a bath over a shower. She is not naïve enough to believe that she can save herself with a good scrub, but it’s impossible not to try. And who knows? Her mother believed women could only get pregnant during the full moon, because this was the circumstance in which her own child was conceived and she was a particular kind of lucky person—drinker of gimlets up and down the New England coast, sailor, wearer of pearls—who assumed, despite all evidence to the contrary, the steady bestowal of her luck upon the world. Other people believe other things, about positions or douching or poison. No one seems to understand with any certainty how any of it works.
She runs the water scaldingly hot, pours in enough bubbles to give an elephant a UTI, opens her legs, and flutters her hands, trying to pull the soapy water into her pussy. Vagina, she corrects herself. This is what the women’s-group women insist on calling it. Vagina, she thinks dutifully, though the word disgusts her. She closes her eyes and envisions the water flooding her interior, reaching every crevice and crack, washing out any trace of Alex.
“What are you doing?”
The door makes a solid thwack as it flies open and hits the sink.
“Vee! Look at me.”
She doesn’t move. “I’m bathing,” she says in a delicious monotone. “You’re making the room cold.”
“The party starts in less than an hour.”
“I realize.”
“Well?”
“I’d be further along if you hadn’t attacked me.”
“Oh come on. You loved it. Are you getting out, or what?”
“I don’t know.” Vee sinks lower, up to her ears. Maybe she did love it, in the end. Still, she does not want a baby.
“No! Don’t get your hair wet! It takes you an hour just to do your hair!”
“Then I won’t do it,” Vee says. “Why should I, for a bunch of women?” She widens her eyes for emphasis, thinking of the women’s-group women with their unblown hair. Only a few wear makeup, several go without bras, and the older ones, in their late thirties, are letting themselves go gray. They are meeting tonight, a meeting Vee will miss. But why shouldn’t she bring a little of the women’s-group vibe to her own party? If, as they claim, the beauty standards that enslave women are set by men, why shouldn’t Vee’s party of women, left on their own, wear blue jeans, or housedresses, and allow their hair to do what it will?
“Vee—”
But she is gone, fully sunk. Alex’s voice beyond the water sounds like a distant foghorn, and Vee, holding her breath, thinks of her childhood friend Rosemary, who lives year-round now in an old, comfortable house on the water and who might be feeding her children dinner at this moment, or drawing their bath. Vee, her lungs aching, is startled by the longing she feels for her friend. She pops out of the water and sees Alex’s hands gripping the side of the tub. He is leaning over her now, saying something about how the president of the suitcase-manufacturing company is known for being unfashionably on time to parties, how it’s a Rhode Island thing, and what would she, from distant Massachusetts, know about that?
She giggles, but he doesn’t join her. In another moment, in the time before he was a senator, Alex might have laughed at his own nonsense. Instead, his voice keeps pouring onto her, along with a faint, sour scent, and as she gives in and looks up, she knows what she will find, beyond the freshly shaven jaw and the Roman nose and rich brown eyes: he’s afraid.
He sees her see it and walks out. Then he returns a moment later, flinging the door into the sink again. She would like to mention this, the door-sink situation, because she finds it funny that after a $4,500 renovation the bathroom door slams into the sink, and she would like him to find it funny, too. The money came from her family, after all, just as her family’s money had paid for them to buy a place on Dumbarton, three short but significant blocks east of Wisconsin. But Alex does not like to talk about this, she knows, and he is pacing the length of the tub. “You have to get out now,” he says. “I’m not leaving until you get out,” and Vee thinks, the poor boy, the frightened king, with his nervous, bad breath. Perhaps she has been unfair to him. She rises from the water, and lets him stare, and wonders at how easy it is, to give him what he wants. Why does she make it hard, then? Why resist and demand? Why make him touch her as she did, when he so clearly disliked it? Why keep going to the women’s group? She’d been cajoled the first time, by a fellow Wellesley alum, but no one pressured her to go back. Why not be more like Rosemary, who didn’t hem and haw over whether to have children; who no longer indulges herself with late-afternoon baths, let alone uses them to purge and hide from her husband; who is soft and glad in her warm house? Or like Vee’s mother, who until she died kept clipping her favorite columns from Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal with titles like “Five Ironing Secrets You’ll Wish Your Mother Taught You” and “How to Please Your Husband.” That was the title, on numerous occasions. Vee chose Alex for reasons that are still apparent to her. He was smart, ambitious, a dignified drinker, a great kisser. He could give her what she’d always known, forever. He was like home. She liked home. Why not be like Rosemary, or her mother, and be content?