The Book of V.: A Novel(20)

So this is not the shortest version of “How Adam Got Lily for a Wife.” But neither is it the longest. The further Lily gets from it, the more it fascinates her. Like any origin story, maybe.

In the kitchen, the women wait for Lily’s response—plain-Jane paper-bag hero, right?—and Lily wonders what they would say if she told them about the party. If she told how the next two hours passed without Adam making a move, yet how she stayed tuned to him, attentive, would they understand, or think her pathetic? What if she told them how when she was introduced to one of the other single women obviously up for Adam’s perusal, she was too busy comparing their respective attributes to listen to a thing the woman said? If she told them that Adam kept looking around at his options with an overwhelmed and innocent expression on his face, an expression she has since seen on him when he does things like look for shirts online, would the women in Kyla’s kitchen think that made him an asshole? Did Lily think it made him one? If he felt that way, shouldn’t he have picked no one and gone home alone? All the times she and Adam have joked about that night, she has never asked him what took him so long. The party was ending before he made a move. Cold air swept the floor, people threw on their coats, even Fred and his wife were bundling out the door. Finally, Adam walked up to Lily. He chose her because of her hat. He told her this later that night, in bed. He did not delve into the vestigial instinct that must have kicked in, securing him to his stoic, square-chinned, eminently practical New Hampshire forebears. He simply said he’d decided to approach the one woman who had put on a hat to face the coldest night of the year. He assumed it meant things about her, of course—that she was sensible, confident, unselfconscious—things that later would seem less clear, to both of them. But that night he took those things to be true, and so he introduced himself to Lily Rubenstein, in her navy-and-green-striped hat.

“She’s not really plain,” Lily says to Kyla, feeling protective of her premarriage self. “She’s just simple.” Or she means to say these things. She is so afraid of sounding defensive that they come out like questions. Not really plain? Just simple?

“Okay.” Kyla has removed the casserole dish from the microwave and is setting out a large glass bowl of carrot sticks. Not baby carrots, the mushy or dried-out nubs that always remind Lily of dog penises, and then of the fact that her children want a dog, and then that they may never be able to afford enough space in this city to have a dog, but home-peeled, home-cut carrots resting, for some reason, in cold water. Kyla swishes the water with a finger and asks Lily, without a hint of guile, “But their costumes should still be elegant, right?”

Lily thinks of her old hat, with its wide blue and green stripes. Another version of it might have been fashionably ugly, a hat that captured the spirit of a vintage rugby shirt—a rugshat!—but the version Lily had was just what it was. It was old even then. Wearing it could only be interpreted as a kind of self-sabotage.

“Or at least special?” Kyla prompts, and her look is so eager that Lily blurts out, “Yes, of course! Definitely special.” And it’s true, she thinks. The hat was special. Between Adam and Lily it had become a touchstone in their mythology, part of a lapse that included the contest in the bar and which did not reflect upon the basically sane, desirable, kind people that they were. It was a triumph, really, to sail past such a beginning and not only survive but thrive?…?or something. Not until this moment, in Kyla’s kitchen, did Lily connect what happened that night with the pageant in the Purim story, let alone see how neatly she and Adam and Vira fit into their respective roles. Had it been so strange, and so obvious, that they simply couldn’t see it? Lily had never been Eve, not even for a second. She had entered as Esther—in her plain hat, like the plain ribbon—and stayed Esther. The second wife.

“Definitely special,” Lily says again. “But not that special, you know? I mean, I don’t want you to go overboard, after all you’ve done. My mother used to grab scarves from the dress-up bin and that was that, I was Esther, ta-da!” Lily grabs her glass of wine and gulps, anything to stop herself from talking for a second. She hates the word special. She sounds ungrateful, though she’s not. She is not ungrateful, and she does not want to insult Kyla, and she wants—badly!—to do more sewing, with Kyla’s help. She takes another swallow, trying to inhale air along with the wine, and makes her pivot: “All I mean is, I so appreciate everything you’ve done, and I don’t want to put you out, but of course you’re right, we should definitely make something special?…” Lily smiles, but Kyla is at the sink with the bowl of carrots, and Lily gets it now: the water will be poured off and the carrots will taste freshly dug. It’s a trick—simple, yet brilliant. How had Kyla learned to do such a thing? If Lily’s mother hadn’t been so involved in her Jewish new-moon ceremonies, would Lily, too, know how to keep cut carrots fresh? Someone points Lily to the cheese board, and it strikes her, as she tosses an inch-thick piece of brie into her mouth, that the only thing her mother ever sewed, to Lily’s knowledge, was an embroidery sampler which read: A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life. This was something her mother had read in a feminist advice column she liked, though Lily isn’t certain, now that she thinks of it, that her mother actually made the sampler herself, or if she had someone else do it. Which would be funny, really, a joke on the joke, though not on the woman she hired. Whatever its story, it arrived in Lily’s house shortly after her father moved out and hung on the back of the bathroom door, so that you read it each time you sat on the toilet, which for Lily, who was nearing eight at the time and lived at home for another ten years, meant she must have read it thousands of times.