The Book of V.: A Novel(44)

“He slept with other women.”

Lily waits for more. But Ruth is quiet.

“You’re saying you blame the tennis balls for his affairs?”

Ruth pulls her blanket up to her chin. She looks small. “That does sound dumb,” she says. “Doesn’t it.”

“Not dumb—wrong. Are you cold?”

Ruth nods.

“I’ll go make more tea.”

“Lily?”

“Yes.”

“You should know that your father didn’t leave. I kicked him out.”

“Okay,” Lily says automatically.

“Okay,” says her mother.

Lily thinks of Adam and Vira, and the fact that they fought not only about whatever they fought about but also about whether she left or he kicked her out. Does it matter? The result is the same. Lily’s father is gone. Vira is gone. She wonders if her mother is trying to assure her in some way, or to warn her. Or maybe it’s not about Lily at all. Maybe she just wants her to know. This was something I did.

Lily speaks softly; Ruth’s eyes are fluttering. “So why has the story always been that he left?”

“It was the only acceptable thing to tell my parents.”

Lily watches her mother for another minute, then opens the door to go make more tea. But June is standing on the other side, looking tired and happy. “I’m done,” she says, heaving herself up onto Ruth’s bed and sliding under the blankets next to her grandmother. She lays an arm across Ruth and looks up at Lily. “I stay here. You get Rosie and come back.”

“She’s not out for another hour,” Lily says. “We’ll go together.”

“I stay here.”

“Enjoy this time. Then grandma has to rest.”

“She can stay,” says Ruth. She pats the bed on the other side of her. “Come on, Lily-pie. Lie down with us.”

“I was going to make your tea.”

“The tea can wait. I’m not cold anymore.”

Lily sets down the mug and stretches out next to her mother.

“Come under the covers.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know. Come under the covers.”

It is warm under her mother’s blankets. Lily’s toes have been cold for hours, she realizes, maybe all winter. On her back, close enough to feel Ruth’s heat, she looks at the stamped-tin ceiling, at two paintings her mother bought from artist friends, at her mother’s bookshelves. On a high shelf is a collection of Ruth’s favorite ashtrays, which she asked Lily to put away after her diagnosis. It strikes Lily that apart from the ashtrays and the loveseat and Ruth’s books, there is almost nothing in this apartment that was also in the old house, and that in the old house, there was almost nothing that was Ruth’s alone. She lived there for years by herself, of course, but you could always feel Lily’s father there, in the rugs and furniture. Her father had traveled, and many of the objects in the house had been chosen by him, and carried long distances by him, and seemed to represent—to Lily, at least—his worldliness. There was an antique Japanese teapot with a built-in strainer, an abstract sculpture, a custom-built turntable and speakers that cost more than his car. Lily’s mother had little: a Childe Hassam etching of the harbor, which she hung above the fireplace, and mementos from her childhood, which she stored in several hatboxes in her closet. Even her books she kept in her bedroom, so that Lily, when she was very young, wondered if books were something private, and maybe a little shameful, like underwear. The ashtrays eventually showed up in so many corners of the house it seemed they’d been sprinkled there by fairies. But mostly she continued ceding the house to Lily’s father.

Why should it surprise her, Lily thinks, that Ruth used to sew? She lived in that house for decades; she’d lived there before Lily was even born. The woman Lily has imagined to be her mother is the one who came after her father: the woman smoking in those short shorts, and then in her long skirts; the woman who pushed her way into the inner circles of the local synagogue until she’d forced a shift toward egalitarian language in the prayers; the woman who for a time brought a book called Let’s Talk! to the breakfast table and tried to engage her children in frank discussion about their bodies; the woman who drove south to beg Lily not to give up her work. Yet even that woman was in the kitchen each day when her kids got home from school. She never worked a paying job. She was a woman who could not tell her parents that she was the one who had chosen divorce.

Lily can hear Ruth breathing next to her now. Both she and June seem to be dozing—June punctuates her grandmother’s labored inhales with short, quick sighs, as if she’s excited even in sleep. Yesterday afternoon, Lily walked into the girls’ room to find that they had rolled out between them a six-foot-long stretch of IKEA paper and were scribbling madly, and not only scribbling but painting—they had taken out the bin of paints that they were not supposed to use without Lily’s help. But before she could scold them, she saw what they were making. Two dresses. June’s of black circles, strung like a garland in the shape of a dress, made with Sharpie—another thing they are not allowed to play with; permanence, fumes, etc.,?…?But look! they cried. Lily looked. It’s coal! June cried, and it took Lily a moment to realize: her daughter got coal from the kohl in the Esther book, the stuff the maidens, all except for Esther, used to darken their eyes. The circles saturated the paper to the point of dampness. They shone. It was a dress for a queen, or a funeral. And Rosie’s. Lily stepped farther into the room. She could feel the girls watching her, afraid she was going to make them start cleaning up. But she was only getting a better view. Rosie’s dress was like a muumuu that had been dipped in a tropical rave, densely patterned with green diamonds, pink spirals, purple lightning bolts, orange tongues. Were they tongues? It didn’t matter. Rosie looked up at her—into her—with tensed brows, as dark and luxuriant as her grandmother’s before the chemo started to thin them. Lily got it, in a way she had not before—their desire for the dresses was not about having something but being it.