The Book of V.: A Novel(11)

Coldly, she says, “Hand me a towel.”

Alex’s spell is broken. He obeys, then goes to check on the party, leaving Vee staring at herself in the mirror. She drops the towel and looks at her white breasts, her flat stomach, her thick whorls of pubic hair. The hair is dark now but will fluff out a reddish blond when dry, the same as the hair on her head. Her waist is a little thick, her hips a little narrow, the overall shape a little straight, boyish. The longer she looks the plainer she appears—a body, made of the requisite parts, each with its own function. She sees one hip bone, and another; two fleshy knee joints; two feet with their ten toes. From the knuckle of each toe, she sees, grow a few wisps of hair, like grass from a hillock. The wisps of toe hair match her pubic hair, which matches her head hair and her armpit hair, and all of that probably matches her nose and ear hair, though she has never bothered to investigate.

Vee tilts her head back to see if she can see inside her own nostrils. This behavior should repulse her, she knows. But she finds it oddly comforting: herself before the mirror, divided into crude parts, inspecting herself with dispassion—perhaps because none of what she sees in the mirror at this moment correlates with sex, and sexiness, and all the problems they cause.

She’s working to find the right nose-to-mirror angle when a crash returns her to the thing she’s meant to be doing. A tray of silverware, from the sound of it.

She moves quickly now, plotting. Her green dress, her pearl necklace. She glances at the clock. Alex was right, of course—she doesn’t have nearly enough time. She pours herself a thumb of bourbon—apologizing silently to her mother, whose only rule regarding drinking was that you didn’t start alone—swallows it down, and begins. Lotion. Stockings. Her new bra and girdle set, meant to lift and separate. The dress, which zips up the back—she secures it above her hips and leaves the remainder for Alex, in the space of a second noting that this will please him, wondering if that’s what she wants, and worrying that she might be pregnant. She sets her hair, then positions herself at her vanity, picking up her powder and brush only to put them down again a second later, her hand drawn instead to an envelope tucked behind her jewelry box. Vee begins to thumb it open, then puts it back and begins to powder her face. Someone is shouting downstairs.

She watches the letter as she powders. She’s read it three times already, savoring Rosemary’s fat letters—Vee imagines Rosemary’s children look like her handwriting, plump and hearty—and her matter-of-fact narration: she’s bought a new-model washer-dryer set, with an extra rinse option; a new stop sign has caused all kinds of upset among the village elders. This letter is like most of Rosemary’s letters. Or it would be—if it didn’t contain a disturbance, related to Rosemary’s husband. Rosemary is of similar stock as Vee, descended from judges; as girls they went to the same preparatory school in Boston, then graduated together from Wellesley. But the weekend after graduation, Rosemary married a Jewish lawyer, Philip R—Rosenbaum? Rothblum? Vee can never get his last name straight; no matter how many letters she addresses to Rosemary, each time she has to consult her address book. Whatever his name, Philip, for reasons Vee doesn’t understand, agreed to move with Rosemary to the same seaside street on the same exclusively Protestant point where Rosemary and Vee’s Protestant families once summered. The brokers balked. There were rules on the point about which colors you could paint your clapboards—white—and your shutters—black—and about permissible fencing and noise and lawn care, and it’s been understood since the Indians “died off” which people are welcome and which are not. But Rosemary’s mother stepped in with some kind of bribe, and until now things have seemed to be going smoothly enough. Philip has hung his shingle in the small city’s downtown and is building a client base among the ethnics. Rosemary thinks she’s pregnant again, with a fourth. She is hunting for new wallpaper and experimenting with the boys sharing a bedroom because she feels certain that the new one is another girl, and shouldn’t girls have their privacy? She writes about this and then, suddenly, she is writing about a cross. She doesn’t even begin a new paragraph, just describes coming home one afternoon with the boys, and it’s almost dark, and she is thinking about dinner when, pulling into her drive, out the corner of her eye, she perceives a flame. It takes her a few seconds to realize what it is. Then she pushes the boys into the house, fills a bucket with water, runs to put the fire out, and drags the cross into the garage.

Someone burned a cross on Rosemary’s front lawn. Her letter returns to the wallpaper for the baby’s room, then asks after Vee and signs off.

Vee turns her face to one side, then the other, checking that her powder is evenly applied. She’s been writing a response to Rosemary in her head, but apart from the usual—she’ll mention a party or two and a book she’s been reading, and she’ll fail to respond to Rosemary’s questions about whether she is having trouble in the pregnancy department—Vee doesn’t know what to say. If she mentions the cross, should it be to extend her condolences? Is that appropriate in such a situation? It might sound like pity. And Rosemary’s account was so sparse. Maybe she wanted Vee to leave it alone. Then again—Vee leans in toward the mirror and begins to line her eyes—maybe Rosemary was just being shy, not wanting to trouble Vee but secretly hoping Vee would ask all the questions Rosemary had left unanswered. Which was basically everything. How did Rosemary know what to do, in that moment? Did the children watch her as she quenched the flames? What did she tell them when she came inside? What did she tell her husband when he came home? And before that—how long had the cross been burning? Was it charred? Did she think that whoever lit it meant to actually hurt Rosemary and her family, or just scare them? Not that Vee would condone such behavior either way, but it did seem, to her, important. Intent had to be important—didn’t it? But it might be unwise to get into that. Vee puts down her eye pencil and picks up her mascara, refusing to look at the clock—if she looks, her hand will start to shake. She would like a cigarette but settles for a little more bourbon, then paints her lashes from the inside out, as her mother taught her, thinking maybe, if she writes back about the cross, it should simply be to express her outrage. But she worries that could land wrong, too, first because Rosemary herself didn’t sound all that upset—don’t fan a flame that’s not lit, as Vee’s mother used to say, a terrible metaphor given the circumstances, but still, apt—and second because Vee is not in fact outraged. Outrage requires surprise. Vee is not surprised. Nor does she imagine Rosemary can be, not entirely. Rosemary is not a simpleton or a Pollyanna. She knew what she was doing when she married a Jew. Vee has met Philip twice, and though what Rosemary said about him is true—he appears modern, and doesn’t strike a person as religious—he does have an obviously dark, foreign appearance. Vee respects Rosemary for doing what she wanted. Even Vee’s modest acts of defiance—the Pill, the women’s group, her arguments with Alex—fill her with guilt and a kind of dread. She doesn’t have the courage it would take to go against her family’s wishes or the stomach to live as an outsider, never mind to deal with a burning cross. Rosemary is brave, Vee thinks, dabbing at a bit of lipstick that’s bunched on her top lip. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility that her marriage was a mistake.