The Book of V.: A Novel(25)
Lily looks at him, thinking this is a joke. But what would the joke be? “Since when do you not like olives?”
“These kinds of olives. These wrinkly ones.”
“They’re cured.”
“They’re wrinkly.”
“Okay.”
“I thought you knew. I’ve said so.”
“You mean you’ve looked at me and said, I don’t like these wrinkly olives? I don’t think I’ve cooked with them in over a year.”
“At restaurants. Wherever. I never order cured olives.”
“And I should have noticed that?”
Adam’s expression, as he looks at her, is not that of an asshole. He is not patronizing or even bemused. He is hurt, she realizes. And somehow this, the profound need in his eyes for her attention, for her to attend him, like a mother, enrages her far more than if he were simply acting like a jerk. And her anger is big and quickly blossoming; it extends beyond him to his mother, and to all the mothers of sons.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I did leave out the anchovies, Adam. It’s not as if I don’t think of you. But I’ll add olives to my list. I’ll develop a new system. I’ll make a note in my phone whenever you express a preference for one thing or another—or when I observe a pattern of distaste, as with the olives. Maybe I can set up a reminder, so that if my phone ever senses me going for a jar of olives, Siri will stop me with her sultry robot voice: Wait. Adam does not like olives. Put those olives back! I like olives, Adam, and I thought you did, too. I’m sorry. I will never cook with them again.”
Adam shakes his head. “It’s okay. I can pick them out.” And he does. Then he wipes his fingers on the cloth napkin, as Lily, thinking, That’s more laundry, thinking, Quell your anger, woman; calm this shit down, asks about his day, and Adam tells her about a contentious meeting he ran about a new aquaculture initiative he’s trying to spearhead in a Rwandan refugee camp. Camps in Zambia have built fish ponds, he says; he sees no reason refugees in Rwanda shouldn’t benefit, too. They’re from Congo and, more recently, Burundi. They eat fish. And the camp has been consistently short on food, underfunded since the media stopped paying attention. Fish ponds, Adam explains, not only produce food; they produce fertilizer for fields, which then produce more food, and he thinks the novelty of it could draw attention from new funders. But his colleagues are pushing back. Aquaculture in camps isn’t common enough yet, they worry. There are too many technical challenges; health concerns; questions of ownership, training, oversight, etc. He’s been hearing it from his own organization and from partner groups, too, from NGOs and usually supportive UN staff alike. They still won’t accept that the camp situation has become protracted, he says, that the refugees there will not be repatriated in the next twenty-four months or even in the next decade. Adam tells Lily that he’s managed to push a demonstration pond through, for training and breeding, but they’ve run into logistical problems—boys from outside the camp stealing fish out of the pools before they can reach full size. A fight broke out between the local boys and refugee boys, and one kid had to be driven to Kigali to have his eye socket reset.
Lily’s brain hurts when she hears this, it’s so terrible. And yet it’s so far away, too, and she realizes, as she’s listening, that she forgot the laundry again, when she and the girls got home. She wails inside but waits for Adam to finish talking, because she doesn’t need to tell him about her failure and because how can she be thinking of laundry as he talks about kids who might die of hunger, or malaria? Why doesn’t it make her heart clang and break? Why doesn’t she ever do more than donate money? Vira did more than donate money. My heart isn’t hard, Lily thinks. It’s only stretched, and a little faded—often there is only enough space for her own kids’ shit and string beans.
By the time Adam is done talking it’s 10:04 and the laundry room has been locked—the super will have tossed their wet clothes into a wire basket. He’ll have recognized the girls’ Wonder Woman briefs, purchased by Lily’s mother in an attempt to bring “some representation of female strength, and even then?…” into their underwear collection, which until her intervention consisted of princesses from Target because, face it, princesses from Target were convenient. He will have ticked off another tick on his mental checklist of all Lily has gotten wrong. Lily fears that one day, if Adam and she can finally afford to buy in their building, it will be the super who stops them. She keeps meaning to Google whether this is possible—superintendent influence co-op board—but then, as with the laundry, she forgets.
She says none of this to Adam. She restrains herself from nagging him about his not asking about her day; she does not insist on telling him the storyless story of the sewing party; she turns off that self and brings up another. This is what men hate about women, she thinks, that we are actors, that between our urges and our actions there are these layers, this angling and scrim. Yet aren’t they, almost always, the beneficiaries? She guides him to the bedroom and strips to the red lace underwear-and-bra set she managed to put on while cooking dinner and not doing laundry. She zips on high-heeled boots, knowing, as she does so, that her order is off—she should have gone to the bedroom first and stripped and zipped before letting him in. But it works out. Adam smiles, not in a nervous way but in a sexy way, and says, “Oh,” and takes off his own clothes. The sex is good. Lily comes without a great deal of effort. No one told her in her twenties that although she was having sex in fair quantity, her orgasms were like sad nubs compared to what she experiences now. No one told her that the homestretch could be unvaried, even mechanical, and totally transporting. She is transported. She is wrung. Adam has had something to do with it. Lily didn’t think once of the fisherman. Does she really need anything more than this?