by Anna Solomon
The king lifts his glass to her and waits. What would he do if she turned and fled? His voice is soft, she thinks, but he banished his queen. He banished his queen, but he is very short. All she can read in his face as he looks up at her is waiting. No clear pleasure or displeasure in his eyes. No ripple in those lines between his brow. Even his mouth appears oddly neutral, neither open nor fully closed. He is not a man primed for a chase. Yet even as she calculates, Esther knows she is fooling herself again. She knows there must be guards on the other side of that door, with sharpened lances taller than their heads.
The end of another idea feels like a death; her shivering grows more pronounced. Gripping the goblet to steady herself, she begins to drink. She drinks as she walked, letting a trickle drop back into the cup with each sip, trying to prolong the activity, to think. But her thoughts are scraps that go nowhere: an awareness that the glass she’s holding is pressing ornate shapes into her palms, a vision of her mother threading a needle, an image of Nadav’s mouth, his brown, unbearded face. Soon Esther is drinking quickly—she drains the rest of the wine in two gulps.
The king, his eyes on the empty goblet, smiles. “I shouldn’t be surprised,” he says. “You were the only one who didn’t try to hide yourself.”
Esther watches as he fills the glass again. Her throat stings. Her trembling limbs are very warm.
“Do you come with a voice?” he asks.
She lifts the glass to cover her mouth. I shouldn’t drink any more, she thinks. Then she drinks, quickly, beckoning courage, and soon her stinging throat begins to hurt less, to open, and the king is still smiling up at her, without cruelty, she thinks, and without falseness, and she thinks, wildly, I will ask for what I want.
“May I go home?” she says, holding out the empty goblet.
The king laughs. But when she doesn’t laugh back, the king blinks, a long, slow-motion blink, so that for an extended moment, she is examining the purple veins on the backs of his eyelids, and praying, not the prayers of her parents, only Please, please. When his eyes open, they fix on the glass. His fingers brush hers as he takes it—they are dry and cool. Please. He raises the goblet. He raises it higher than she expects, his arm stretched toward the ceiling as if he is about to make a speech. Then the goblet drops to the floor, where it cracks with unnerving precision into two equal halves.
As Esther steps away, her blood knocking in her throat, the king releases a quiet chuckle. “You’ve just arrived,” he says mildly. Then he fills another goblet and places it, presses it, back into her hands.
What option does she have? She takes it, and drinks, and knows what she must do, or try to do. She will transform. Until now she has held this possibility at a distance, fearing the risk, knowing what she has in mind is not the kind of transformation she was taught. The lesson she was given in the magicians’ tent the night before Marduk brought her to the palace was focused on turning one object into another, or making something larger or more abundant or of a different quality. It was a beginner’s course, meant to tie her to her mother and her mother’s mother, to give her some sliver of their power to possess. Until this moment, she hasn’t known if she would ever try to use it. But now she knows. As the king refills her glass again and guides her by the elbow to the bed, she is so intent on recalling how to do the magic she barely registers that he has finally stood up. She is only a thumb’s width taller than he, it turns out. “Sit,” he says, and she does, obeying so she can travel in her mind to the tent.
“You are a beauty,” he says.
Esther, thinking, I will make it not so, lifts her glass once more to her mouth, and rewinds in her mind to her final night in the camp. Not a sound came from the Gadol family’s tent, but when Esther crawled in, their matriarch was awake, sitting over a brown flame that stank of goat. Above her, hanging from the tent’s smoke hole, dangled a piece of wood in the shape of a hand. A hand was a symbol of peace in the camp, but the stink worried Esther. Why would the woman be reusing cooking oil? The camp required this now—the Persians had begun stealing first oil during their raids—but wouldn’t a magician, if she were a decent magician, simply make her own fire? Esther wasn’t given a chance to ask. The woman’s eyes were bright, her cheeks as dry and red as the riverbank. She smiled as if she’d been expecting Esther and began interrogating her at once. What was she here for? What did she want? What happened to her hair? When Esther glanced with apprehension at the horizontal forms of the Gadol family, the woman sniffed. They’re out! she declared, leaving Esther no choice but to ignore or trust the dozen or so strangers in her midst. She began to explain her situation. Ridiculous! spat the woman at the idea of Esther being put up for queen. Moronic! that Marduk could think his plan might actually work. Could he be so dumb, the woman asked—or this was the gist of what she asked; she spoke in an old accent and with a lisp, from missing front teeth—could he be so stupid that he actually thought a man like the king would notice the difference between those figs and these, let alone call off the Persian brigands on Marduk’s behalf? Cruel! she cried, that he should make Esther go. If Esther had become a burden, he could marry her off; even without a dowry she was pretty enough that some boy would have her. Esther shook her head at this. She knew better than to talk about Nadav, but the woman’s outrage had begun to pass in her mind as a kind of sympathy, softening her, and so she talked about Nadav, and once she was talking it seemed to her she should keep talking, that the more she told, the more sympathetic the woman would become. Esther was wrong about this. Frivolous! cried the woman. Trifling! She knew, as everyone did, of Nadav and his family, knew he was basically betrothed to another girl and that Esther was no one to stop him. Esther should let him marry the other girl and choose her own, more realistic match. At this Esther felt a roil in her glands, the bitter flare that came just before she acted rashly. “I didn’t come for matchmaking,” she said. “And it won’t help me now anyway. Can’t you teach me something?” The woman slitted her eyes and sniffed. For a second, Esther thought she was about to be slapped for her rudeness. But the woman sat calmly, her hands in her lap. She held them in a way that caused Esther to look up and see that the hand shape she’d thought was made of wood—a common enough sight, though usually hanging outside a tent—was in fact a human hand, shriveled to hardness from smoke and decay. She felt a surge of hope; this woman did have power. Esther grew aware that the bodies around her seemed to be not merely asleep but in a deeper state; their forms were not rising and falling with breath.
“How do I know you’re teachable?” the woman crowed. “Most aren’t. Especially trifling, swoony girls.”
“My mother was from magic.” Esther reddened as soon as the words were out. Her mother was a quarter-breed, at most. She would have hated Esther using her in this way. She hated anything that reeked of boasting.
“What was her name?”
“Rut. Daughter of Hanya.”
The woman’s dry face did not move.
“Did you know her?”
The woman rubbed her hands together. Esther, wanting to shake her, said, “What do you know about her?”
“They were at the top once,” was all the woman said.
And then what?
The king is walking toward her. He retreated briefly, to retrieve the bottle, but now he is back. He is down to only his black robe now, and the robe is open—is she imagining this?—to an extent that it wasn’t before. Esther closes her eyes and hunts for the place the Gadol woman showed her. A dark, cold enclosure. It was meant to be a space outside her body, meant to be deposited into an egg, or a seed, whatever object she was working to alter. But Esther brings it inside herself. Then she brings herself inside of it, lowering herself down until a vibration finds her. At first it’s almost like a humming, and then, without warning, it’s nothing like that, it’s a school of fish pulsing at the bottom of the ocean, hundreds of thousands of fish in a resplendent eddy contained within her. But they won’t be contained for long. They resist her boundary
, pressing outward as they flash and pulse, forcing her to enlarge. The dangling hand breaks in, not as spell or tincture but goading, meant to propel. There was power in Esther, the woman said, more than she would have guessed, but it was old and lazy and had to be whipped into action, and it was fragile and had to be handled with care … so Esther lets the hand hang in the room with her, a calm, terrifying stillness in the center of the pulsing eddy. Catastrophe is what she’s going for, a full vortex, but to get there, she cannot self-destruct. She must become the eddy, the fish, the infinite flashing, without inhale or exhale, no longer breathing but existing, not waiting but allowing, not wanting but receiving.
It is exhausting, this work, far harder than digging or chopping or squatting. She is very cold, then very hot. As the pressure builds, she feels as if each of her digits, each limb and nerve, is being squeezed in its own vise.
A pressure from without. Esther opens one eye. The king, seemingly oblivious to her efforts, is tilting the wine bottle into her goblet, and for a moment, relieved of the pressure and the flashing, she lets herself rest. She waits for the wine to flow; when it flows, she will force herself in again. Here, you may be thinking, she will lose her courage. She’ll drink more wine, she’ll start enjoying it, this will go back to the story it is supposed to be, where the maiden wants her beauty, wants to be queen. But Esther is very stubborn. And her stubbornness is aided by the fact that nothing flows. The bottle is empty. The king calls out, “Another!” and Esther, wanting to stay ahead of whoever will be sent in with the wine, dives back in again. Down, she tells herself, and the heat flips back to cold. She is distracted briefly, pulled from the vibration by a recognition, obvious yet fresh: the king has people; she has none. Don’t be distracted, she tells herself. Don’t be afraid, go in again. She urges herself lower but the pain is shocking now, the dark hole grips, the lights begin to flash fitfully and with menace, no longer the pulsing school of fish but a storm. She gasps but keeps her eyes closed, refuses even to peek. She is aware of the king on the other side but wills herself further in, downward, and noise recedes. The vortex holds her. She has never felt cold like this.
Years pass, or twenty seconds. When she is loosed from the place, dropped from the swirling, the king is still alone and staring at her. He drops the empty wine bottle, but without force, and the bottle doesn’t break as the goblet did—instead it rolls in Esther’s direction, arcing and wobbling until it reaches her foot. She looks down. Her sandals are in tatters; her toes have grown talons. “Your wine,” a voice calls, and the king rushes to slam a door, blocking a passage Esther didn’t see before. He throws his back against it and calls back, in a singsong to hide his quavering, “Wait! Not now!” Sweat rolls down his face. Esther turns to the mirror. She is larger in every direction, taller, wider, longer. Her face is made of her features but they have taken on new proportions and aligned themselves at new distances from one another. Her eyes are weirdly far apart and her nose and mouth unnervingly close. Her stomach has swelled, forcing open her robe, revealing breasts as small as kumquats. She pulls the robe closed, but not before she’s sure he’s seen. Her thorny feet are obscenely long, her skin mottled and rashy, her hands so fat they look like paddles. She holds them up for closer inspection and flexes them, then rises on her toes and finds that she can do this, too, and at these assurances that she is still in basic command, the blood hammering in her ears calms a bit. Still, she is shivering as she turns to face the king, who is flat against the door, his eyes huge and desperate. “What is this?” he shout-whispers.
Esther arranges her throat. “This is me,” she answers. Her voice is her own. A minor comfort. “Here I am.”
WASHINGTON, DC
VEE
Banished
The instant she spun away, Vee knew what she had done could not be undone. She fled, taking the back stairs to avoid the women’s party, running until she reached the guest room on the top floor, locking herself in. She shivered uncontrollably. She could not make thoughts. She heard the sound of the house emptying, heard shouting, Alex and Hump, then silence, and time.
A knock, later. Late. She may have slept. Hump’s voice on the other side. “Mrs. Kent?” She opens the door, but he is not the same man. His white-blond hair is damp and pulled into a point between his eyes. His eyes are eerily bright, the blue a marble’s blue. He strides past her into the room, plants his feet, folds his arms, and says, “What will we do with you?”
Vee doesn’t answer. It’s clear from his crooked smile he already knows the answer to his own question, clear that the smile is not flirtatious or even pitying but cruel. Vee holds the doorknob and looks at the floor. She is no longer drunk; her head hurts. She is very thirsty.
“You had to understand it was necessary,” says Hump. “You’ve always been a fun girl, Mrs. Kent. We didn’t imagine you making a fuss. Then boom. Frigid as an iceberg. Shipwreck …”
Hump’s voice is the kind of wave that smashes you to the sand. It recedes, leaves a ringing in her ears, smashes again.
“All it was was a little bit of payback. I got a slice of your wife, you—”
“I understand,” Vee says, wanting it to stop.
“You understand. Oh. Because the senator, he wasn’t sure you did. But look, you’re a smart girl. You figured it out on your own. So what’s your problem?”
The doorknob is wet against Vee’s palm. “Where is Alex?” she asks.
“Crying his eyes out.”
Vee looks up. Hump flashes her a grin that’s gone the next second, a snake behind a rock. “Mrs. Kent. Would you like to tell me about your little ladies’ lib group?”
She stares at him.
“Your husband is not exactly a man of principle, Mrs. Kent. He’s full of information. And you know, that Fiorelli woman was not unhelpful, either. I caught her on her way out. It sounds like there was some tantalizing behavior going on at your party, too.”
“Get out,” Vee said.
“We’ve had a nice thing, you and I.”
She works not to breathe.
“This won’t be permanent,” he says.
“Where is Alex?”
“But it won’t be fun. You were such a fun girl.”
“Where is he?”
“A car will be here at six.”
There are questions she should ask. Where am I going, what is this. Instead she envisions herself disappearing. Not going anywhere, not running away—Hump wouldn’t let that happen—but simply fading. Ceasing to be.
“Hey.” Hump, on his way out, sets a finger under her chin. He makes her look at him. He has never touched her before. “Get some sleep,” he says, and flips the finger and slides it down to the hollow in her throat, then out the ridge of her collarbone. He presses the finger into her shoulder, hard, and Vee realizes, an agony falling through her, that her shoulder is bare, her dress still half-unzipped.
AND SO
It Was Recorded:
THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER
NOVEMBER 4, 1973
EXCLUSIVE: The wife of Senator Alexander Kent has been admitted to Fainwright Hospital, the renowned psychiatric institution outside Boston, Massachusetts, the ENQUIRER has learned.
According to the senator’s chief of staff, Humphrey Sumner III, the senator’s wife, Vivian, 28, a petite, attractive redhead who hails from a long line of New England statesmen, suffered “a psychotic break following a party [last Friday night] that grew quite out of hand. We’re still trying to determine whether she may have been under the influence of a narcotic. She has a delicate constitution, and the senator is comforted that she is now receiving the best care possible.”
Although Senator Kent was not available for comment, Barbara Haskell, the wife of Congressman Haskell of Illinois, told the ENQUIRER that the Kents’ party was “a terrific time, with women and men on separate floors; I’ve never seen anything like it. There was wonderful music and lots of dancing. Vivian is wonderfully pretty, a fun-loving hostess. I guess you could say it g
ot a little wild.”
Asked what “wild” looked like at a ladies-only event, another guest, Diane Fiorelli, who traveled all the way from Rhode Island to attend the Kents’ party, reported that she was “concerned from the beginning about how things might develop, and my concerns were shown to be legitimate.”
When asked to elaborate, Mrs. Fiorelli declined. But Mr. Sumner shared context that might help fill in the gaps, saying that Mrs. Kent had recently attended meetings of a Women’s Liberation group in Washington, DC.
Susan Silver, a former classmate of Mrs. Kent’s who joined her at these meetings, encapsulated their feisty libber spirit, saying: “This group is only radical if you believe that equal rights for women is radical. It’s only radical if you think women should stay at home serving their husbands and looking pretty. It’s only radical if you fear women using their full intellectual capacity.”
According to Dr. Matthew Pickles, consultant psychiatrist at Horizon Psychiatric Hospital in Los Angeles, who has not treated Senator Kent’s wife, the anger often on display at such gatherings should not be confused with Angry Woman Syndrome, a condition he has studied for over 35 years, though he acknowledges there may be overlap. Moreover, he said, “These Consciousness Raising groups are known to be havens for ladies seeking an alternative lifestyle.”
Mrs. Kent and Miss Silver were classmates at Wellesley College, an all-girls school in Massachusetts. Both graduated magna cum laude; only Mrs. Kent is married, and both women are childless.
