The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  As Kyla talks—the machine has many parts, including one called a feed dog—Lily’s fear mounts. Where are the thimbles? Where is the softcore sewing party? But then Kyla is turning to her and looking deep into her eyes, so deeply that Lily notices the remarkable blue of Kyla’s irises and wonders if she wears colored contacts, and saying, “You’re up first, Lil; you’ll do great,” as if they’ve known each other forever, and her voice is quiet now, and tender, as if she senses Lily’s struggle. Lily thinks of the word cerulean, for Kyla’s eyes, and of the freshman-year poetry class in which she fell in love with that word. “Do you mind?” Kyla asks Lily, and before Lily can figure out what she’s talking about Kyla is behind her, taking Lily’s hands into her own. They’ll start with a straight stitch, she says, and suddenly the machine is purring and Lily, guided by Kyla, is sewing. She feels a pleasurable shock, as if she’s jumped into cold water. There is vibration, and fabric, and Kyla’s hands on hers, and the satisfied grumble of the machine, and the cheers of the women gathered around to watch, and, at the small of her back, the gentle press of Kyla’s belly, and Lily realizes not only that Kyla has a belly, like anyone, but also how long it’s been since someone has taken the time to teach her something. Since graduate school, at least, and even then they expected her to teach herself most of what she didn’t know. There is a weightless quality about it, something she remembers from childhood, a sense that as long as she follows she will be okay. And now Kyla asks if she wants to try the foot pedal and Lily looks down and sees that there’s a foot pedal, and Kyla’s foot slides off it to allow Lily’s to hop on and instead of internally mocking the five-hundred-dollar boots Kyla is wearing—though noting the fact of them, she admits, may be a form of judgment—she mostly just feels grateful. She is grateful for this woman who is teaching her to sew, grateful that she cares, grateful for her earnest and unabashed domestic ambitions. So what if Kyla is a little too perfect, her cheekbones a little too good, her blouse a little too drapey-yet-lean? So what if her name is Kyla, as if in her spare time she’s a yoga instructor? She has been nothing but generous and kind. Lily is sorry for her snarkiness. She is embarrassed, as her back relaxes into Kyla’s stomach, at what she suddenly understands to be true: that although her friends, if they could see Lily in this moment, would crack a joke, every one of them would in fact like to be in Lily’s spot. They tell themselves they don’t care about being good homemakers. But they peek around each other’s apartments just the same, commenting on how one person seems never to have any toys on her living-room floor, or how another has managed to put together nonvirtual family photo albums, or how another always manages to buy useful things like that magnetic calendar on her fridge or that cord organizer on her counter. They keep their tone flat, as if they aren’t praising but merely observing, and then they move on to other subjects deemed more worthwhile, husbands or politics or the careers they’ve put on hold. It’s in this way that they are different from Kyla’s women, after all: not in their actual behavior—for they have all chosen to prioritize their children at this point in their lives, to “embrace” (that word, so redolent with resistance!) motherhood—but in their attitude. Never mind that fridge calendars and organizers and doctor’s appointments and school lunches and diarrhea and grocery shopping take up the bulk of their time and energy; never mind that they do feel pulses of pride when they experience success in one of these arenas. They have a phrase that encompasses all of it, “shit and string beans,” which came out of an old feminist novel one of them read once, she forgets what it was called, a name they can throw at almost everything they do. Shit and string beans, and they laugh at themselves, and pour a glass of wine, and put the kids in front of a screen, and settle in to complaining about things large enough that they can’t even pretend to try to solve them that day, like the subway, or the absurd and asinine entertainment of Donald Trump’s run for president, or pollution. A husband’s infidelity. Their own lusts, which they say they can’t imagine actually indulging—how would that even happen? in what space? on whose time?—yet talk about in great detail, for example, the father Lily met recently who looked like he could be a fisherman from her hometown. Granted, half the men in Brooklyn dressed like fishermen these days, but this man, Hal was his memorable name, looked like the real deal and then some: a beautiful, sensitive, sophisticated fisherman with a red beard and strong hands that Lily described to her friends in extravagant detail. She spent a week fantasizing about him, mushy with a kind of lust she hadn’t felt since Rosie was born. She and Adam had sex twice in that time. That, too, the women laughed about, because since when was twice a week getting it on? Since a long time.

  Back and forth across the cloth Lily goes. It’s satisfying, even though she isn’t accomplishing anything yet, and totally involving, so that for a time she forgets her hunger and her friends and her laundry and her mother and her daughters and Purim and dresses, until she feels Kyla’s warmth depart at her back and realizes that she is sewing on her own. “You’re doing great!” Kyla says. “I’m just going to get the kids’ dinner together. Keep going!” But Lily’s thread snags; the machine growls; the pedal bucks. She hears herself cry out—a desperate caw, as if she’s been injured. “Oh, don’t worry,” Kyla says, “it’s been through worse. Here, take a break.” She pours wine into Lily’s glass and puts it in her hand. “Tell us about Esther, so we can figure out the dress.”

  The other women nod.

  “Esther?” Lily asks dumbly.

  “As a character.” Kyla opens the door to the refrigerator. “I’m getting the kids’ dinner. But I’m listening. What’s she like?”

  “Well, she’s the queen …” Lily is unsure what she did and didn’t say before, but Kyla nods, so Lily continues: “But she likes things simple. I mean, when she goes to become the queen—because first there’s another queen, Vashti, who’s banished, and then there’s Esther and lots of other women who are brought in, like for a kind of contest …”

  “That’s the pageant part, right?” Kyla uncovers a casserole dish. “What the girls will be walking in?”

  “Right.” Lily, no longer sewing, eyes the cheese, but the women surround her, waiting for the lowdown on Esther. “So when she goes to the pageant,” Lily says, “she’s the only one who doesn’t go crazy with her makeup and hair. She dresses very simply and ties her hair back with a ribbon.” Lily has no idea if this detail is true in the original, which she has never read, but in the children’s version Esther ties her hair back with a white ribbon and appears to wear the slightest bit of rouge on her cheeks. The girls love this detail—it’s a central focus of their interrogations. Why not something fancier? Ro wants to know. Maybe something rainbow, or glittery? At which point June parrots Lily: Because she knows what’s on the inside is most important? And Lily nods, dully proud. It’s exhausting, to indoctrinate. And always the truth bleeds through. There would be no need to indoctrinate if there was nothing to cover up. There would be no need for Esther without the whorish girls surrounding her. “Compared to the other maidens,” Lily says to Kyla, “Esther looks like a field hand. She’s the natural beauty.”

  “I love it!” Kyla says. “And god, it sounds so relevant. I mean, such a good lesson for our daughters. Even now, they get so much pressure, right? I love the idea of a kind of plain-Jane hero. It’s like something out of that book … you know … The Paper Bag Princess?”

  Affirmative cries go up from the women. Lily exclaims, too, because she does like that book. Of course she does; she is a woman who keeps the bulk of her makeup hidden in her sock drawer. But plain-Jane paper-bag princess wasn’t what she meant by “natural beauty.” She meant striking without pretense, attractive with minimal effort. A natural beauty, if you wanted to get nuanced about it—and Lily did, apparently—didn’t even have to be beautiful, exactly; it was more that her particular naturalness added up to its own sort of beauty. Lily, for example, knows that she is not objectively beautiful, but according to Adam, she is a n
atural beauty. He says it when they get dressed to go out, and when they spot each other across the apartment in an odd moment of stillness, not wiping a nose or sending a text but standing, for a second, and looking. It’s a gesture of sweetness, to stop and appreciate her. It’s also an insider reference to their somewhat bizarre first encounter, which Lily, in one of the stories she writes in her mind, calls “How Adam Got Lily for a Wife,” the shortest version of which goes something like: Vira left Adam, or Adam threw Vira out, depending on whose story you believed; Adam fell into an abyss; Adam’s friend Fred, struck while planning a surprise party for his wife’s fortieth birthday by how many of her friends were currently single, decided that the party would have a secondary purpose, which was to lure Adam from the abyss.

  Did Adam know? Before the party, as he showered and dressed—choosing dark jeans, a checked shirt that could be interpreted in a variety of ways, and a leather jacket—had he known what Fred was setting up? As he put on his parka, for it was a brutally bitter night, 9 degrees with the wind chill, did he wish for one more stylish, something that said urban woodsman instead of simply L.L.Bean?

  By the time the party was in full swing, certainly, he had to have known, because after the surprise for the wife had been pulled off, Fred turned his full attention to whispering in Adam’s ear while unsubtly eye-pointing at the various women he wanted Adam to check out. Lily saw all this, of course. She was, at this point, in a corner of the tiny bar Fred had rented out, talking with Fred’s wife. They had met over a decade ago in an intense and not great yearlong MAT program, so they were close, in a sense, but only saw each other once or twice a year; Lily did not know Fred’s friends. Her first thought, when Adam’s eyes landed on her, was that if she’d seen his picture on Match or Jdate, she would have been drawn to him for about ten seconds, then she would have moved on. There was something generic in his handsomeness. She would not have trusted that in real life he would offer more than he did in the picture. But he was good-looking. And she was not looking at him online, she was looking at him in a bar, which meant she could see him move, and she liked the way he moved. Still, she might have dismissed him. She might even have decided to be offended by the overt meat-market situation, though this would have been disingenuous, as she had been on Match and Jdate for a long time. But as Adam’s gaze moved on, Lily saw his drink-free hand toggle the zipper on his leather jacket, and in the gesture she saw self-consciousness, a dawning realization, she believed, that he was dressed like every other man in the place, that even their zippers looked like his, oversized and burnished. She saw him shrink a little, and decided that he had not known, before the party, that he was being offered a kind of flock. Or that if he knew, he’d managed to convince himself he did not know. If, after considering his options, he chose her, she thought, she would not be opposed to talking, at least.

  So this is not the shortest version of “How Adam Got Lily for a Wife.” But neither is it the longest. The further Lily gets from it, the more it fascinates her. Like any origin story, maybe.

  In the kitchen, the women wait for Lily’s response—plain-Jane paper-bag hero, right?—and Lily wonders what they would say if she told them about the party. If she told how the next two hours passed without Adam making a move, yet how she stayed tuned to him, attentive, would they understand, or think her pathetic? What if she told them how when she was introduced to one of the other single women obviously up for Adam’s perusal, she was too busy comparing their respective attributes to listen to a thing the woman said? If she told them that Adam kept looking around at his options with an overwhelmed and innocent expression on his face, an expression she has since seen on him when he does things like look for shirts online, would the women in Kyla’s kitchen think that made him an asshole? Did Lily think it made him one? If he felt that way, shouldn’t he have picked no one and gone home alone? All the times she and Adam have joked about that night, she has never asked him what took him so long. The party was ending before he made a move. Cold air swept the floor, people threw on their coats, even Fred and his wife were bundling out the door. Finally, Adam walked up to Lily. He chose her because of her hat. He told her this later that night, in bed. He did not delve into the vestigial instinct that must have kicked in, securing him to his stoic, square-chinned, eminently practical New Hampshire forebears. He simply said he’d decided to approach the one woman who had put on a hat to face the coldest night of the year. He assumed it meant things about her, of course—that she was sensible, confident, unselfconscious—things that later would seem less clear, to both of them. But that night he took those things to be true, and so he introduced himself to Lily Rubenstein, in her navy-and-green-striped hat.

  “She’s not really plain,” Lily says to Kyla, feeling protective of her premarriage self. “She’s just simple.” Or she means to say these things. She is so afraid of sounding defensive that they come out like questions. Not really plain? Just simple?

  “Okay.” Kyla has removed the casserole dish from the microwave and is setting out a large glass bowl of carrot sticks. Not baby carrots, the mushy or dried-out nubs that always remind Lily of dog penises, and then of the fact that her children want a dog, and then that they may never be able to afford enough space in this city to have a dog, but home-peeled, home-cut carrots resting, for some reason, in cold water. Kyla swishes the water with a finger and asks Lily, without a hint of guile, “But their costumes should still be elegant, right?”

  Lily thinks of her old hat, with its wide blue and green stripes. Another version of it might have been fashionably ugly, a hat that captured the spirit of a vintage rugby shirt—a rugshat!—but the version Lily had was just what it was. It was old even then. Wearing it could only be interpreted as a kind of self-sabotage.

  “Or at least special?” Kyla prompts, and her look is so eager that Lily blurts out, “Yes, of course! Definitely special.” And it’s true, she thinks. The hat was special. Between Adam and Lily it had become a touchstone in their mythology, part of a lapse that included the contest in the bar and which did not reflect upon the basically sane, desirable, kind people that they were. It was a triumph, really, to sail past such a beginning and not only survive but thrive … or something. Not until this moment, in Kyla’s kitchen, did Lily connect what happened that night with the pageant in the Purim story, let alone see how neatly she and Adam and Vira fit into their respective roles. Had it been so strange, and so obvious, that they simply couldn’t see it? Lily had never been Eve, not even for a second. She had entered as Esther—in her plain hat, like the plain ribbon—and stayed Esther. The second wife.

  “Definitely special,” Lily says again. “But not that special, you know? I mean, I don’t want you to go overboard, after all you’ve done. My mother used to grab scarves from the dress-up bin and that was that, I was Esther, ta-da!” Lily grabs her glass of wine and gulps, anything to stop herself from talking for a second. She hates the word special. She sounds ungrateful, though she’s not. She is not ungrateful, and she does not want to insult Kyla, and she wants—badly!—to do more sewing, with Kyla’s help. She takes another swallow, trying to inhale air along with the wine, and makes her pivot: “All I mean is, I so appreciate everything you’ve done, and I don’t want to put you out, but of course you’re right, we should definitely make something special …” Lily smiles, but Kyla is at the sink with the bowl of carrots, and Lily gets it now: the water will be poured off and the carrots will taste freshly dug. It’s a trick—simple, yet brilliant. How had Kyla learned to do such a thing? If Lily’s mother hadn’t been so involved in her Jewish new-moon ceremonies, would Lily, too, know how to keep cut carrots fresh? Someone points Lily to the cheese board, and it strikes her, as she tosses an inch-thick piece of brie into her mouth, that the only thing her mother ever sewed, to Lily’s knowledge, was an embroidery sampler which read: A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life. This was something her mother had read in a feminist advice column she liked, though Lily isn’t ce
rtain, now that she thinks of it, that her mother actually made the sampler herself, or if she had someone else do it. Which would be funny, really, a joke on the joke, though not on the woman she hired. Whatever its story, it arrived in Lily’s house shortly after her father moved out and hung on the back of the bathroom door, so that you read it each time you sat on the toilet, which for Lily, who was nearing eight at the time and lived at home for another ten years, meant she must have read it thousands of times.

  Lily tries the pickled-broccoli-like stuff, which is indeed pickled broccoli and is delicious. She tries it on a cracker, then on another cracker with brie, then she finds herself staring at Kyla’s ass as Kyla goes to deliver her genius carrot sticks to the children. It’s not a perfect ass, Lily thinks, not like her cheekbones or hair. It’s not even an especially good one, neither ample nor fit, and Kyla’s jeans, neither snug nor loose, don’t do it any favors. Yet there is something in the way Kyla walks, at once lighthearted and grave, as if her confidence that she’s doing the right thing in the right place at the right time, and her pleasure in doing it, and maybe, too, those unflattering jeans, have imbued her with a kind of holiness. Lily watches until she’s gone, wondering how Kyla got like that, if you had to be born that way or if it was something you could learn, like how to sew, and whether Lily herself could learn it—if not holiness, then maybe a little grace? What if it’s easier than she imagines, if she could simply decide, right now, to be done with the way she is, done with discontent and done with her mother’s voice and maybe done with her friends, too, and their cult of ambivalence? What if she could simply want what she has? Kyla returns, drying her hands on her apron with an ease that makes Lily want to weep. She will get her own apron, she thinks. She will embrace her Estherness. So what if she’s the end of the story, the second wife, the virtuous one? Lily is forty-six. She is too old to still believe that she’s going to somehow wind up being someone she hasn’t already become. She is not a writer or a professor or a singer-songwriter or an adulteress, she is, by choice, a second wife and mother and homemaker. If she is ill equipped to be these things, then she will have to equip herself. If she is not Esther precisely (Esther saves her people; who—whom—is Lily supposed to save???) she will be Esther in spirit. The heroine. The second but lasting queen. A natural, if not terribly sexy, beauty. A virtuous, if not mysterious, wife. A satisfied woman, smiling in her new friend’s kitchen.