The Book of V.: A Novel(76)

Then something flickers toward the back of the audience. Not a cup or a grogger. Not something anyone else would notice. But Lily notices. It’s Vivian Barr’s red hair. It’s Vivian Barr, sitting at the very end of the very last row.

Lily draws back into the wing. She is conscious suddenly that she is tipsy, conscious that Haman is repeating a verse and that the sound system is crackling. What is Vivian Barr doing here? She has no idea that Lily is directing the spiel. The last contact they had came through a courier: a tiny sewing kit Vivian Barr sent after Lily’s visit.

Lily inches forward to peek again at her mother’s old friend. She sits somewhat stiffly, not rocking or clapping, no drink or grogger in her hand. A stranger here. And perhaps warier than another stranger might be, Lily thinks, remembering how Vivian Barr said your father, you know about Lily’s father being Jewish, and how her voice had changed when Lily asked why she hadn’t reached out to Ruth. Do I look like I need company?

And yet, Lily thinks. She’s here.

And here is Esther again, too, entering the king’s chambers without his permission, winging her hippie skirt like a flamenco dancer. And here comes Haman, leering, and dopey Ahasuerus, looking confused, and then, in another Lily addition, Mordecai leaping out for a moment to remind the audience to keep drinking, for it’s been commanded that they be so drunk by the end of the spiel that they can’t tell the difference between him and Haman. “Good or bad!” he cries. “Cunning or true! Who knows? Not you!”

Lily wonders if Vivian Barr can feel Lily watching her.

Clearly she knew that Lily would not take her advice to go to a tailor; hence the sewing kit. Did she also know that Lily would ignore her advice about not going back to the friend who had first helped her, to make the dresses?

Hello I am sorry to have been out of touch for so long I hope you can forgive me went Lily’s text to Kyla, because she feared any pause for punctuation would cause her to lose her courage. I wonder if you would still be willing to help me with my daughters’ dresses I have the fabric and the patterns I’ve chosen very simple ones what do you think?

Too complicated, Vivian Barr had said, of returning to Kyla. Thinking of Rosemary, maybe, or other failed friendships, or women in general.

But she had been wrong. Within a few minutes came Kyla’s reply: Of course, and please don’t worry. I’ll be home tonight. Come after 8:30, just text when you’re nearby instead of ringing, kids will be asleep. It was 8:00 already and Adam had just gotten home but he said, Of course, go, just as he had said, Of course, direct the spiel, understanding already what she was only beginning to understand herself. And Lily thought, that’s all right. That happens sometimes. It does not mean I’m a child. It means only that he has imagined what it might be like to be me. He sees that as the emptiness starts to lift, other tides have begun filling in. She took his encouragement, Of course, not as fear, but love.

With this softness in her heart she walked to Kyla’s. And when she got there, to Kyla’s clean kitchen, all that ran through her was gratitude. Kyla’s husband was out, again, Kyla said blackly, and Lily, unsure what Kyla wanted—Kyla of the perfect life—did not become paralyzed but said what her instincts told her to say, which was, Good thing I’m here, and Kyla laughed. And Lily unpacked her bag, laying out the fabrics, and the patterns, and the box Vivian Barr sent her. Maybe it’s weird, she said, but I’d like to include some of this thread in the dresses. Can that work? Lily was doing this not for Vivian Barr but for her mother, who once upon a time had loved Vivian Barr and, later, loved Letty Loveless. She had used Letty Loveless, Lily had come to see, as a source of courage, so that she could make the choices she wanted to make and not clean the things she did not want to clean—in that sense, Vivian Barr aka Letty Loveless had not ruined but saved her mother. Kyla said yes. They could use that thread in the collars, sew those by hand. She waited until they were sewing—Kyla at Lily’s back for a while and then, by the second dress, Lily mostly on her own—to ask if the thread had been Lily’s mother’s. And Lily told her the story.

Now, a couple rows away from Vivian Barr, Kyla and her kids brandish their groggers like lassos. It’s their first spiel. Closer to the front, her mother’s friend Susan Levinson laughs, while in the aisle the rabbi dances in a Wonder Woman costume, while not far from her, in the third row, Lily’s daughters’ dresses glow. When Lily presented them at last with their costumes, they smiled and thanked her. They were oddly serene. It was clear they had expected the dresses, that they never doubted Lily’s story that she was making them. They bounce in their seats now, unthinking, aglow. It doesn’t matter to them that Lily still doesn’t really know how to sew, or that the love she feels for them, so blinding and pure in moments, is obscured from her in others, or that she kissed a man who is not their father, that though she will not kiss him again, will not blow up her life—she does not want to blow it up, this thing she’s made with Adam, begun in that bar, this thing with holes they will never patch; she wants it—she may think of him, and desire him.

To a child, maybe, like the child Lily once was, looking at Vivian Barr, there can be only one story at a time.

She will tell her daughters the truth, Lily thinks. Not yet, but sooner than her mother told her. Not the details, but the gist. She will tell them: The type of woman you imagine yourself becoming does not exist.