The Book of V.: A Novel(75)

There was one story about how Vashti’s father, who’d been a king, was killed by a candelabrum falling on his head. And rabbis arguing about whether Esther was brought into her uncle’s house as a daughter or wife—the language was not clear, and why else would she be described as shapely and beautiful in the sentence before the one about Mordecai adopting her? Whole scenes of dialogue had been written imagining what might have happened offstage in the story, including one in which the king, Ahasuerus, finally sobered up, asked where Vashti was, and, when told he killed her because she refused to parade naked in front of his friends, responded: I did not act nicely. Then there were people arguing over which woman was really the heroine of the story: Esther saved her people, sure, but wasn’t she a coward first, and before that a concubine? Hadn’t Vashti, not through outright revolt but simply by saying no, been a pioneer, standing out as a sublime representative of self-centered womanhood? But Esther, someone else argued, was the epitome of virtue; when the king made his advances, she was passive, like the ground. No, argued someone else, Esther was not frigid, she had used her feminine wiles to curry favor with the eunuch Baraz and rise to queen and save her people and she had been right to do so. She had done what she had to do, just as Vashti had done what she had to do. Esther simply had better luck because she was a Jew and it was a story meant to make Jews feel good! She was like Judith, except that in Esther’s case she got a lot of help from Mordecai. It was too bad, someone else argued, that Mordecai had to play such a big role. As for Vashti, wasn’t she less a character than an absence? Wasn’t it her absence that made the story possible? Sure, but she was also an anti-Semite, according to someone else—she beat her Hebrew servants. Hunh? Come on, wrote someone else. The whole story was an excuse for a carnival, and carnivals were safety valves that reaffirm institutional control. Wait, said someone else. Look at how God isn’t mentioned, not even once. Wasn’t Esther just another version of Scheherazade? Did you never wonder what happened to the maidens who were not chosen?

Lily had to tear herself away when her watch beeped. And when she was home and spooning mac and cheese onto the kids’ plates, she was still thinking about all she had read, and what she might do with it.

She hasn’t figured that part out yet. The temple members now side-stepping and singing “Respect”—Vashti’s ballad, of course—will perform basically the same spiel their corollaries performed at a synagogue in California last year, based on the summer of 1967. Ruth had already adapted it a little, and Lily adapted it a little more, writing in a few new lines and one new character, daughter to the wicked minister Haman, who according to one of the rabbi’s books may have accidentally dropped a bucket of feces on her father’s head while he was parading Mordecai around Susa. Lily is proud of the ditty she rearranged for this particular moment: Well, here’s some poop on you You’re gonna choke on it, too You’re gonna lose that smile. But mostly she left the script Susan handed her intact and kept what she read in the rabbi’s office for herself. For now.



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When Esther enters, after Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love,” the audience whistles and hoots. Vashti has been disposed of, Haman has received his opening boos; now the real show begins. The crowd is boisterous due to the many Tom Collinses that Lily poured from pitchers as people streamed in. As Esther sings her rendition of “Different Drum,” Lily scans the sea of glinting tin groggers and plastic cups. Adam and June and Rosie are in the third row: Rosie on her knees, her dress so bright it could be seen from space, June on Adam’s lap. The girls hold not only groggers but also fairy wands from their personal collections, which they insist Esther would want, and gawk in dazzled adoration up at the “real” Esther, a recent college graduate named Blossom Cohen who bops and swishes and flips her long hair as the congregation—many of whom have known her since she was an infant—shimmies along with her. The congregation imagines she is like her name, cheerful and innocent. But Lily has watched Blossom sneak out of rehearsal to smoke weed, and heard her confide to Haman’s wife that she’s pretty sure she has HPV and may never find anyone to marry her. Never mind that Haman’s wife is being played by a thirtysomething woman whom everyone knows has been twice left by fiancés. The girl, like a girl, does not think of the woman. I’m adulting! Lily heard her say once as the two headed off to smoke, and it took Lily a moment to realize that she wasn’t talking about the vape in her hand but the fact that she was acting in a Purim spiel.

Now Blossom, aka Esther, parades around the stage with a bunch of other maidens singing their rendition of “Piece of My Heart” as Ahasuerus—hands on his hips, fake eyebrows sternly furrowed—pretends to hem and haw. Which one will he choose? June and Rosie point and shout. Adam’s mouth is open, his absorption in the show so replete that when a rogue stage light cuts across him the old scar on his cheek looks alive. Last week he was promoted to regional director for East Africa, the step up he’s been waiting for, and the depth of his relief, the palpable weight of it in his body, in their apartment, has been a shock; Lily understands now how scared he was before. “Esther!” cry June and Rosie, waving their wands at Blossom. Of course. Lily has indoctrinated them, there is that, but also: if he doesn’t choose Esther, how will they come to be? As if on cue, in the opposite wing across the stage, Lily’s Vashti winks at Lily and Lily winks back, thinking for the space of the wink of Vira, then finding herself once again swept up in the joy of the thing. She helps one of the unchosen maidens change into her raggedy fasting-Hebrew costume, sings along to Haman’s “Purple Haze” (Excuse me while I kill some Jews!), and accepts a glass of wine handed to her by Haman’s wife, who has smuggled a bottle backstage.