The Book of V.: A Novel(9)

This last bit he never speaks aloud, but the sentiment oozes from him, his longing for Lily to be not only present but satisfied. His first wife, Vira, was neither. She worked for a different, scrappier aid group and was always running off to war-torn places. She wanted to keep doing this, it turned out. She didn’t want children. She didn’t want, he says in summary, or used to say, when he spoke openly of Vira: She didn’t want to be a wife.

When June grabs her shirt back and drops it in the toilet, one part of Lily’s brain ponders appropriate reactions. Time out? But they are late! A slap in the face? But that’s not allowed?…?Yet the rest of her is motionless, staring at her reflection. Her makeup effort has halted, her hum has fallen off. Her thoughts have wandered from the party and the other mothers to Vira, whom she has never met, Vira with her flawless brown skin and flat stomach and lustrous black hair. No matter that somewhere, Vira is aging, or that she may have changed her mind and had three children by now. For Lily and Adam, Vira will always be as she was when she left (Adam’s version) or he threw her out (hers): thirty-one and childless. Her skin will forever bounce back when poked; her female parts will be fresh and tucked in. Lily hates the jealousy she feels, thinking of Vira—she is jealous of her eternal youth but also of what looks from here like freedom, and clarity. Why is she still hanging around? When Lily and Adam fell in love, they talked about Vira all the time, and it seemed a bold, smart tactic, a way of declaring that they weren’t afraid. Or Adam talked, and Lily believed, about how over time Vira grew angry about almost everything Adam did: the new job he took, which she considered to be “establishment”; the J. Crew catalog he dug out of the recycling bin to which she’d exiled it in protest of its knock-kneed, starving models; the praise he heaped on her very occasional bouts of cooking, traditional Gujarati recipes she’d learned from her mother that he just actually, genuinely loved! She accused him of passive aggression and said he was trying to get her to cook more. In the end, Adam told Lily, when fighting was their main activity, Vira said she’d probably married him to piss off her parents, who’d had an idea about her marrying a fourth cousin from Ahmedabad. Which was when Adam told her to go, though he had not meant go as in forever but go, get some fresh air. But that was that. She was gone. Adam and Lily used to joke about how Vira was like Lilith, that other angry first wife, which was funny, both because Lily’s name was so close to Lilith and because Adam’s name was Adam, and fun because it made Lily into Eve, which they both found sexy. Then they got married and immediately started trying to conceive, because Lily was not young, but they were lucky and within a year Rosie came along, and soon Lily no longer seemed like an antidote to Vira’s mercurial moods. Also, she was even less young than before, she was forty-two, so they tried again and got lucky again and June came, and as the years passed and dwarfed Adam’s three-year marriage to Vira, her name didn’t make them laugh but caused them to feel exposed. They are no longer a beginning. They don’t talk about her anymore. But sometimes, without warning, she swings down and hangs in Lily’s vision, pries at her fears, throws a cruel light. Is Lily too pasty, too frizzy, too compromising, too bougie? Vira’s questions, perhaps, are not so different from Ruth’s. As Lily reaches into the toilet now and squeezes June’s shirt to avoid drippage, and elbows the shower curtain out of the way to avoid contamination, and tosses the shirt into the tub, she sees for the first time that her hands have grown sunspots. She scrubs at them. She is still scrubbing when June runs out and down the hall and Lily hears her call, “Momma, just one time?”

Lily grabs her hat and follows and finds June standing on the couch, holding The Book of Esther above her head like a trophy. Lily snatches the book away. Her attempt the previous night to throw it out was thwarted by the building’s porter, who, having found it in the trash, knocked on their door this morning, cheerful in his blue jumpsuit: One of your girls make a mistake! Lily wanted to scream. She hates the book, and not only because her mother gave it to the girls in her pushy, be-more-Jewish way—though she wasn’t even born a Jew herself; it was Lily’s father, long dead now, who’d been the Jew—or because the girls quickly grew obsessed with it. She hates the book because after going through three stages with it herself—she was entertained briefly, then bored, then bewildered—she has entered a fourth stage in which she recognizes that the embattled queen Esther, like Lily, is a second wife.

Lily drops the book into the dark crevasse behind the couch cushions. Tomorrow afternoon, but not before then, she will dig it out and leave her mother to read it to the girls. Every Thursday, Ruth comes over so Lily can have a little time to herself, though what Lily does with this time she cannot exactly say. Mostly she walks, sometimes through the park, sometimes through stores, touching things, feeling fizzy and weirdly burdened until the time has passed. Tomorrow, maybe, she will do something more productive: purchase supplies for the girls’ dresses, practice the stitches she will be taught tonight.

Ignoring June’s squeals, Lily throws her into the stroller and, with a knee between her legs, manages to strap her in, buckle the tiny, injurious buckles, and maneuver her out the door. June is shirtless and bootless but they make it, somehow, into the elevator, which causes Lily to remember that she was doing laundry in the basement earlier and that her wet sheets are still waiting in washing machines number one and number three—what will the super do with them this time?—but time is chugging along and look, she managed to grab a fresh shirt for June as well as the boots and also her own coat and hat and by the time the door opens into the lobby they are, a miracle, ready. June smiles sweetly, and Lily pushes them out into the yellowing winter sunlight, and they join the river of other women and strollers and children on Eighth Avenue, heading to this school or that, or home from school, or to laundromats or piano lessons or nitpickers or playdates. There are no men to be seen. It is 2016, four days into a new year. Lily breathes. The cold air wicks her sweat. The sky is blue, the bare trees make it appear bluer, the skin beneath her eyes appears smooth and bright. She will pick up her other child. She will go to the party. She will learn to sew.