The Book of V.: A Novel(64)

Lily bristles at this attempt at praise. Is it fair that Ruth kept smoking while Vivian Barr quit? It is not fair.

“But I do want to add, about the affairs—I’m not saying he didn’t have them.”

Lily nods. She thinks of her mother telling her she is like her father, hard to satisfy, and wonders if last night’s make-out session with Hal was somehow fated. Maybe there is something in her beyond her control. Maybe she will blow up her life.

“Try the scone, dear.”

What can Lily do? She takes a bite of her scone as Vivian Barr and Georgie watch, then she watches Vivian Barr feed the rest of her own scone to Georgie and, when he’s finished, bring her hand to his head. Her fingers are long and nimble. They work through the fur, untangling, caressing.

“Excuse me,” Lily says. “Which way to the bathroom?”

“Just down the hall.”

As soon as the door is closed, the tears Lily has been holding back spill out. From her mouth, from her eyes. She watches herself in the mirror, sitting on a tiny toilet, weeping, missing Ruth as she has not yet missed her.



* * *



Lily isn’t sure how much time she spends in the bathroom. Ten minutes, maybe twenty. She rinses her face, pats at it with a hand towel, then abandons the effort and drifts back down the hallway, composing herself as best she can, checking her watch. It’s nearly two. Their sitter will be unlocking her bike soon, jumping on in her sprightly twentysomething way and pedaling toward the girls’ schools. Doing Lily’s only job.

Lily slows. The art in the hall is not art after all but printed matter of some kind, news articles, or—she looks more closely. Clippings from a magazine, dated from the mid-1970s and ’80s. They all share the same title: Ask Letty Loveless. Lily knows this name. Dear Letty Loveless, she reads. Why is the Miss America Pageant still popular even after the protests? To which Letty Loveless has written a response titled: “Why Do Birds Sing?” Next to that is, Dear Letty Loveless, How should I groom between my legs? and next to that, Dear Letty Loveless, I believe Diane Fiorelli’s story because I was attacked, too, but my husband won’t believe me and I don’t know what to do. Lily skims enough to get the drift—Letty Loveless lacks love for all kinds of women in equal measure—then she falls into a kind of trance, unable to stop reading. There are stifled housewives who write in, and members of the Women’s Liberation Party who confide in Letty Loveless their vision for an armed uprising. Women who’ve had abortions and regret it, women who haven’t and regret it. Women whose faces are falling, women who lust after other women, women who believe makeup is a moral failing, women who’ve never touched their own genitalia, women who love their children but hate their husbands, women who love their husbands but hate marriage, women who hate all of it and want to run away. Spinsters and widows and the cheated upon and the cheaters. First and second and third wives. They all write to Letty Loveless, and they are all abused by her. Here is the flaw in your argument, she writes. Or, If you’re asking me to determine whether or not you are fundamentally, irresolvably lazy, I offer this: Lie down for a day. Do nothing. See what happens. Or, You think you can be a wife without being a Wife. But it’s not possible. You will have to give something up.

Lily inches her way down the hall, oblivious to the dry tears stiffening her cheeks and the dog nosing around her knees, fully lost, until, deep in one of the letters responding to a woman called Poor Housekeeper in Walla Walla, she reads: Perhaps you would like me to tell you that a well-kept house is a sign of an ill-spent life. Then you could go on and feel righteous in your mediocrity. This has fast become a stance adopted by Women’s-Group Women toward Wives?…

And so on. Lily returns to the line she knows by heart. A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life. This is why she recognized the name Letty Loveless. These were her mother’s favorite columns. But look at what Ruth did, how she twisted what Letty Loveless intended to say, took from it what she wanted.

“Everything all right?” asks Vivian Barr. She has followed Georgie into the hall. She arranges herself in her elegant dress.

“Is all this?…?yours?” Lily asks.

“Oh, yes.” The older woman nods. “My life’s work.”

“Seriously?”

Vivian Barr gives a small, rueful smile. “Well, seriously in that I wrote them and that it was most of what I did for over a decade. But life’s work, no, I do not mean that seriously. Most of it’s trash. As I’m sure you can see. And yet, clearly not trash enough for me to trash it.”

“My mother loved Letty Loveless.”

Vivian Barr lets out a cross between a gasp and a gravelly chuckle. “Did she,” she says.

“Didn’t you imagine she might read them?”

“I didn’t—”

“This one here? She put it?…” Lily points to the passage about the well-kept house, then drops her hand. She feels suddenly protective of Ruth, both of the edit she made and of the fact that the words meant so much to her. “And there was another one she liked,” she says. “About taking care of yourself.”

Vivian Barr squints. “Well. Letty Loveless was not, shall we say, generous.”

“No,” Lily says. “I can see that.” She sounds rude, perhaps, but she is thinking of the cumulative hours she spent looking at the A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life sampler, the way it became one with her mother’s voice, the voice in Lily’s head. That Ruth removed the quotation from its context, thereby altering its meaning, was neither here nor there. That she may eventually have arrived at the thought herself didn’t matter. Here is where she found it: in a column written by her old friend.