The Book of V.: A Novel(34)

“I’m making them dresses this year. And no one wants to be Vashti.”

Her mother smiles, though it’s not quite a smile. “Since when do you sew?”

“A friend is teaching me.”

Her mother nods, then lets out a long sigh. “You’ve made a place for yourself, my Lily.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it means. Nothing more, nothing less. It means I love you.”

Ruth thinks she has insulted Lily; she is trying to smooth it over. But Lily genuinely wants to know. What is the place she has made for herself?

Ruth is waving the wand. “You have to go home,” she says.

“No. Please. Look,” Lily says, sliding in her socks over to the duffel she’s been stowing beneath the hospital cot and digging through until she finds the piece of paper. She returns with it to Ruth, who squints at it, asks Lily to turn on the light, then squints again. This, too, Lily wants to keep forever—her mother’s far-sighted squint.

“What is this?”

“A flyer from the management company that runs our building.”

“I see that. But what are these pictures of?”

“Laundry! Laundry that sat in the washers for three days. They posted these all over the basement. Adam brought one when he came to see you yesterday.”

“Okay?…”

“It’s my laundry! I messed up. Yesterday morning, the super’s wife knocked on our door and gave Adam two basketfuls of our clean laundry, all dried and folded—she’d done it herself.”

“That’s very kind of her.”

“She wasn’t happy.”

“Ah well,” Ruth says.

“Ah well?”

“This sounds ridiculous.”

“But now they’ve told our landlord.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous, too.”

“It doesn’t matter! We could still get kicked out.”

“Over laundry?”

“Yes! I don’t know. I just don’t want?…”

“So I’m right.” Ruth hands Lily the flyer. “You want to stay here so you don’t have to go home.”

“Mom!”

“Would you turn the light off, honey bun? And this laundry thing. You’re showing it to me at this particular moment—why? You think it will make me happy that you’re sometimes negligent. That you’re not a perfect little housewife. And I’ll let you stay.”

Lily sees that Ruth is exhausted—and that Lily is the thing exhausting her.

Ruth brandishes the wand and presses a thumb firmly to the red NURSE button. “So you’ll bring the girls, and you’ll bring books.”

“Mom.” But Lily knows she has lost. Sorrow washes through her. So what if she can’t tell the difference between fear and avoidance? Does it matter? Both are real. Both would be solved by the same thing—her staying. As it is, she hears the clopping of the nurse.

“Can you do me a favor, sweetie?”

Lily nods.

“Be kind to yourself.”

Lily nods again, though she wants to weep. If she were any kinder to herself, she wouldn’t do laundry at all. Her children would go to school with their underwear turned inside out. This has happened, but only once.

“Being kind isn’t the same as letting yourself off the hook,” her mother says. Again with the mind reading. “Remember that column I used to like? The one the sampler came from—A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life? That same columnist—Letty Loveless, she was called—once wrote something like, Take care of yourself. No one else will. And it sounded so harsh, and like it couldn’t possibly be true, like if you believed it were true you would just give up. But I don’t feel that way about it now. Now I think it’s meant to be hopeful. Lily. Are you listening?”

The nurse knocks and immediately enters, as nurses do. She doesn’t seem to notice that Lily’s face is streaming with tears. Instead she listens without facial expression to Ruth’s instructions. Then she is folding up the cot, handing Lily her duffel, and guiding both cot and Lily out of Ruth’s room, into the glare.





GLOUCESTER, MA


VEE


Early Exile



Lighter. Bourbon. Virginia Slims. Vee has arranged everything on a tray and set the tray on the rug in Rosemary’s upstairs hallway, where she sits, feet on the first stair, waiting for Rosemary to emerge from the bathroom. This is their ritual, six days into Vee’s “visit,” i.e., banishment: the three children in their bath, the women at the top of the stairs, drinking and smoking. Also part of the ritual, at least for Vee: until the bathroom door opens, she can hardly breathe. Rosemary reassures her endlessly that she likes Vee being here; Vee won’t stay as long as she needs but as long as she can! Still Vee can’t shake a fear that at any moment she’ll be kicked out, that tonight the bathroom door won’t open and tomorrow—when she returns from one of her walks—the front door won’t either. Coming here has saved her. Vee is certain this is true. To Rosemary, to Annisquam, this place where their families spent summers. Where else could she have gone? Not to the mental hospital, as the tabloids claim she has done. Her nerves are tight as wires but she’s not crazy, or sick; she can get through a day. She gets through by smoking and taking long walks: around the point, then off the point, up roads that lead into the woods and down other roads that bring her to water and rocks. She walks past her parents’ old house, owned by another family for nearly a decade but still preserved, as the houses here are, with its white paint and black shutters. It’s been kept as a summer house and is empty now, a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, but when Vee walks past it she imagines the door to the screened porch opening. She can see her mother walking out in her barn coat and duck boots and pearls to check the work of the fall cleanup crew. Vee is glad her mother can’t see her. Of all her mother’s humiliations, and her grandmother’s—the affairs, the talking over, the taking for granted their endless work making her father’s and grandfather’s world—none of that was close to this.