The Book of V.: A Novel(72)



Except for the scissors, which rest open and askew atop the other items, the sew-on-the-go box appears as it did when Vee’s grandmother gave it to her, the miniature cardboard spools waiting brightly in their rows as if the plastic container has fossilizing powers. Vee can’t quite grasp Lily’s determination to make the dresses herself—didn’t she understand that Rosemary stopped sewing for a reason? What was happening in Brooklyn these days?—but she will send the box via overnight mail, so that Lily has it tomorrow. It’s meant only for mending, of course, but she can use more than one color of thread; she can do it at her kitchen table where no one will see her struggle. It will be something.

Vee thinks of her own struggle with the buttons on her collar that afternoon, how much they had seemed to mean and how quickly they had come to mean nothing. How badly she had wanted to be a woman with conviction, and how little it seemed to matter in moments what her conviction was. She could have been a senator’s wife if she hadn’t seen through the illusion of their armor, or a women’s-group woman if she hadn’t found them embarrassing. She could have been a mother, like Rosemary, if only she had reached the morning she’d imagined she would someday reach, when she would without hesitation or regret toss her Pill down the toilet. But that morning had not come.

What Vee did not tell Lily—thank goodness!—is that it was Lily and her brothers who made Vee certain that she did not want children. This would sound cruel. But Vee did not feel cruelly toward Rosemary’s children. If anything, she felt grateful, as she eventually did toward Alex, because they had solidified for her what she had not yet been able to believe. They were cute. But their cuteness did not outweigh their chaos. And she never found herself asking them questions; she was not interested in knowing them.

Dr. Monmouth said it was different when they were your own. But Vee was decided. No babies, and no men—not at all with respect to the former, and with respect to the latter not for keeps.

More complicated had been women, and the question of how they would appear in her life. Dr. Monmouth did not once ask about that. Would Vee go on stealing from them, and advising them, and berating them, and being loved by them? (Yes.) Would she really get to know any of the ones in her circle, beyond knowing the music and books they liked, whether they preferred wine or weed, where they were born? (No.) Was she ever attracted to them, as the tabloids inferred? (She would like to kiss some of them. That was all.) Would she find a friend again? (Not like Rosemary.)

In the drawer of her writing table Vee finds a cushioned mailer and tape. She opens her laptop. Lily’s address is disturbingly easy to find—as her own must be, Vee realizes, for Lily to have found her. She makes a note to find out about changing that, then wraps the sew-on-the-go box in the Arts section, slips it into the mailer with a note, and thinks, No. She’ll have a courier deliver it today, so Lily can start tonight.

A half hour later a young man is at Vee’s door, in long shorts and a bright-yellow windbreaker. His neck is tattooed, his face bearded. He smiles, a big smile, his eyes sparkling as if he is glad to see her, and for a moment Vee feels as if they know each other. She smiles back. Then he and the package are gone, swallowed by the city, and Vee’s thumbs are rubbing at her fingers, feeling the creases the thick tape has left in them. Georgie pants behind her, waiting, and she says, “Yes. Let’s go for our nap.”





OUT FROM SUSA


VASHTI


Those Who Cannot Fly or Burrow Walk



By sunrise the city has disappeared. They keep walking. There is water, someone says, far but not too far—they can reach it by dark, if they don’t stop.

They are down to a few dozen, a diminishment that in the camp they could pretend against. They were not slaughtered in a way that could in a different millennium be tried in some kind of tribunal or court. A few boys who stole fruit off market-bound carts were hanged. A few girls were taken. Some men left. Mostly they died gradually, of hunger, thirst, heartache, heat. Exposed now, they see how minor they are. This and the salt whistling up off the sand urges them on.

Vashti watches the strangers who walk alongside her: the men with tents on their backs and the children hauling skins of water and the women slinging babies and pots and one woman, pitched forward as if against a wind, who is draped so heavily in necklaces strung with bones that she looks like a head atop a white mountain. Esther told her about this woman—the mother of Nadav.

The people are mostly silent, preserving their energy, even the small children on their fathers’ shoulders, the babies on their mothers’ breasts. Vashti carries all they will allow her to carry, a small skin and one blanket. She should protest, maybe. But her entombment has left her deficient in vitamins and muscle tone, and Baraz has sewn a small kingdom’s worth of gold into narrow channels in her robes, and she feels with every step on the verge of sinking to her knees.

She does not sink. As the sun slides across the sky she walks. They all do. They walk as they eat, walk as they drink. The men walk as they urinate. Only the women stop occasionally, squatting behind the pack. Vashti can’t bear the idea and so holds herself tightly until the bones woman walks up to her and says, “I can help,” by which she means she speaks Persian nearly as well as Vashti—her years of dealings with the palace have trained her well. “You’re the mother of Nadav,” Vashti says, and so learns the story: that Nadav married the second-in-line-after-Esther girl, the girl from the good family, and that when the girl gave birth to their first child she and the child died and Nadav left—he was one of the few who simply walked away and never returned. Vashti understands now why the woman leans forward as she does, why she appears to be perpetually scanning the far horizon. She asks the woman for her name so that she can call her something other than mother-of-Nadav, and the woman tells her Amira, and Vashti relieves herself behind the tower of bones that is Amira. They walk together. Later, Amira turns to her and asks what Esther’s child is called. And Vashti hesitates, because she knows the woman is thinking of her own grandchild. “Darius,” she says. And they are silent again, Amira thinking of her grandchild and Vashti of her own shock when Esther told her the boy’s name. Esther did not know, of course, that Darius had been the one who gave Vashti to Ahasuerus, that her son’s name was for the queen who had come before her. “I see,” Vashti said calmly, and Esther began talking of something else, but the boy had turned at his name—the boy looked at Vashti as if he saw through to her thoughts, saw everything.

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