The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

Ruth is waving the wand. “You have to go home,” she says.

  “No. Please. Look,” Lily says, sliding in her socks over to the duffel she’s been stowing beneath the hospital cot and digging through until she finds the piece of paper. She returns with it to Ruth, who squints at it, asks Lily to turn on the light, then squints again. This, too, Lily wants to keep forever—her mother’s far-sighted squint.

  “What is this?”

  “A flyer from the management company that runs our building.”

  “I see that. But what are these pictures of?”

  “Laundry! Laundry that sat in the washers for three days. They posted these all over the basement. Adam brought one when he came to see you yesterday.”

  “Okay …”

  “It’s my laundry! I messed up. Yesterday morning, the super’s wife knocked on our door and gave Adam two basketfuls of our clean laundry, all dried and folded—she’d done it herself.”

  “That’s very kind of her.”

  “She wasn’t happy.”

  “Ah well,” Ruth says.

  “Ah well?”

  “This sounds ridiculous.”

  “But now they’ve told our landlord.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous, too.”

  “It doesn’t matter! We could still get kicked out.”

  “Over laundry?”

  “Yes! I don’t know. I just don’t want …”

  “So I’m right.” Ruth hands Lily the flyer. “You want to stay here so you don’t have to go home.”

  “Mom!”

  “Would you turn the light off, honey bun? And this laundry thing. You’re showing it to me at this particular moment—why? You think it will make me happy that you’re sometimes negligent. That you’re not a perfect little housewife. And I’ll let you stay.”

  Lily sees that Ruth is exhausted—and that Lily is the thing exhausting her.

  Ruth brandishes the wand and presses a thumb firmly to the red NURSE button. “So you’ll bring the girls, and you’ll bring books.”

  “Mom.” But Lily knows she has lost. Sorrow washes through her. So what if she can’t tell the difference between fear and avoidance? Does it matter? Both are real. Both would be solved by the same thing—her staying. As it is, she hears the clopping of the nurse.

  “Can you do me a favor, sweetie?”

  Lily nods.

  “Be kind to yourself.”

  Lily nods again, though she wants to weep. If she were any kinder to herself, she wouldn’t do laundry at all. Her children would go to school with their underwear turned inside out. This has happened, but only once.

  “Being kind isn’t the same as letting yourself off the hook,” her mother says. Again with the mind reading. “Remember that column I used to like? The one the sampler came from—A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life? That same columnist—Letty Loveless, she was called—once wrote something like, Take care of yourself. No one else will. And it sounded so harsh, and like it couldn’t possibly be true, like if you believed it were true you would just give up. But I don’t feel that way about it now. Now I think it’s meant to be hopeful. Lily. Are you listening?”

  The nurse knocks and immediately enters, as nurses do. She doesn’t seem to notice that Lily’s face is streaming with tears. Instead she listens without facial expression to Ruth’s instructions. Then she is folding up the cot, handing Lily her duffel, and guiding both cot and Lily out of Ruth’s room, into the glare.

  GLOUCESTER, MA

  VEE

  Early Exile

  Lighter. Bourbon. Virginia Slims. Vee has arranged everything on a tray and set the tray on the rug in Rosemary’s upstairs hallway, where she sits, feet on the first stair, waiting for Rosemary to emerge from the bathroom. This is their ritual, six days into Vee’s “visit,” i.e., banishment: the three children in their bath, the women at the top of the stairs, drinking and smoking. Also part of the ritual, at least for Vee: until the bathroom door opens, she can hardly breathe. Rosemary reassures her endlessly that she likes Vee being here; Vee won’t stay as long as she needs but as long as she can! Still Vee can’t shake a fear that at any moment she’ll be kicked out, that tonight the bathroom door won’t open and tomorrow—when she returns from one of her walks—the front door won’t either. Coming here has saved her. Vee is certain this is true. To Rosemary, to Annisquam, this place where their families spent summers. Where else could she have gone? Not to the mental hospital, as the tabloids claim she has done. Her nerves are tight as wires but she’s not crazy, or sick; she can get through a day. She gets through by smoking and taking long walks: around the point, then off the point, up roads that lead into the woods and down other roads that bring her to water and rocks. She walks past her parents’ old house, owned by another family for nearly a decade but still preserved, as the houses here are, with its white paint and black shutters. It’s been kept as a summer house and is empty now, a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, but when Vee walks past it she imagines the door to the screened porch opening. She can see her mother walking out in her barn coat and duck boots and pearls to check the work of the fall cleanup crew. Vee is glad her mother can’t see her. Of all her mother’s humiliations, and her grandmother’s—the affairs, the talking over, the taking for granted their endless work making her father’s and grandfather’s world—none of that was close to this.

  When she isn’t walking, Vee reads. She forgets herself. She is fine.

  So it’s not as if she needs Rosemary with her constantly. It’s only when Rosemary is due to return from somewhere—school drop-off, or the hair salon—that Vee’s lungs stop working properly. Her palms sweat, her mind rakes, a frantic speculation as to what is happening and when it will end. She feels wild with helplessness, and this helplessness and the helplessness she felt that night a week ago, after Hump came upstairs and told her a car was coming, get some rest, pack your things—can it possibly be that only one week has passed?—are so similar, as sensations, that each time she waits for Rosemary, she is pulled into the spiraling. She shouldn’t have made him angry. She should have buttoned her collar. She should have let him undress her. She shouldn’t have resisted. She should have known what to expect. She should have made a speech. She should have spit in his face, should have danced naked, shouldn’t have drunk so much, should have buttoned her collar. She keeps thinking back to the Jefferson Airplane concert where she was dancing with her friends when three boys moved on them, threading arms between their legs and up their skirts and trying to push fingers inside them. No one paid attention to the girls’ shouts; they had to flee, run back to their motel, lock the door. They kept laughing, until one of them cried. They should have worn jeans, not skirts. They should have kept their arms down and their legs closed as they danced. She should have buttoned her collar; she should have slapped him. In the upstairs hallway now, she hears the crunch of her zipper breaking. Should have obeyed. Should have known. Should have done better with the Suitcase Wife, to placate and persuade, save Alex’s career before he had to resort to—

  “Vivian Kent! What did I ever do without you?”

  Rosemary, opening the door, is drenched from the waist down, a waist she insists is already thickening by the day. Her doctor has confirmed that she is pregnant, and though it’s early still, seven weeks, according to Rosemary the swelling happens earlier with each baby. She plops down next to Vee, dries her hands on Vee’s skirt, picks up a glass from the tray, and holds it out.

  “No ice tonight?” she asks.

  “I forgot the ice.” Vee pours. “Sorry.”

  Rosemary shrugs and sips. Her face is flushed from work and steam. The first night, Vee asked if she worried about the kids alone in the bath—there are two boys and a girl, ranging from eight to nearly four—and Rosemary shrugged then, too, and said they were good at looking out for each other. She has always been like this, Vee thinks—steady, calm, difficult to fluster. Her face is broad, her eyebrows notably darker than her sandy hair, her legs and
arms strong for a woman, maybe a little thicker than ideal, but in a way that fits the rest of her, so that she never appears large, only grounded, impossible to tip over. Not that she’s masculine or hard. She’s just Rosemary, unfailingly matter-of-fact. Even her nails she now wears unpolished, not unmanicured like the women’s-group women’s but neither lacquered like Vee’s, whose own scarlet preparty polish is starting to chip. Buffed, Rosemary calls what she’s done. She is self-assured enough to go with buffed.

  Vee lights two cigarettes and hands one to Rosemary, who doesn’t smoke on her own but is game with Vee. She smoked two last night, a personal record, but still nothing close to Vee’s five. Vee has been smoking while she walks, while she reads, while she panics.

  “That’s getting infected,” Rosemary says, taking Vee’s left hand in her own and laying it palm up in her lap. They look: the tip of Vee’s ring finger is hot pink and inflamed. A few nights ago Rosemary removed a splinter from this spot, but Vee has not been keeping it covered as Rosemary instructed. When she returns half a minute later with antibiotic ointment and a Band-Aid, Vee feels a pang of embarrassment. She is not a child. And the splinter itself was a humiliation—she got it from the bottom of her dresser drawer as she was pawing for her sew-on-the-go box. She hasn’t told Rosemary this. What would she say? I got this splinter while desperately trying to snip off some buttons my husband told me to button? Who fought that fight? Even worse, who lost it as dramatically and pathetically as Vee has?

  Rosemary dresses the wound and returns the Band-Aids and ointment to the hallway medicine closet. Vee finishes her friend’s cigarette for her, then lights two more and holds one out for Rosemary as she plops back down. Vee pulls hard on her own, fighting off the homesickness that hit her when she glimpsed the inside of the medicine closet. Rosemary’s boxes and bins and canisters and sewing baskets, her belongings, where they belong. Vee has so little of what is hers now: a few outfits; her essential toiletries, including the Pill; four pairs of shoes; and—as ever—her sew-on-the-go box. She packed only what she could carry by herself so that she could refuse Hump’s offer to haul her bags out to the car. She knew he would offer, just as she knew he would open the car door for her, and wait until she was situated, and ask if she was comfortable. It was a Town Car. Of course she was comfortable. This car is officially taking you to a place called Fainwright, he said. But you have it take you where you want, so long as it’s out of the way. No one sees you. He winked. This’ll blow over soon enough, Mrs. Kent. We’ll get you back. He slammed the door.

  He missed the point, of course. How could she possibly go back? She had been debased in her own home, put to a test she would have to be whorish to willfully pass, then treated like a whore for failing. A psychotic, possibly lesbian, drug-doing whore, no less. It was a level of abuse she had not been raised to endure, no more than she was raised to travel for more than a few days without a trunk.

  Rosemary has been generous, of course, telling Vee to use anything, wear her clothes, go into Rosemary’s bedroom and help herself to the books she keeps in a long, low case by the window. Rosemary must have at least a couple hundred, and Vee has been making her way through the shelves—from Jane Eyre to a half dozen Agatha Christies to Lolita to Portnoy’s Complaint—without discrimination or pause. Today she devoured one, called Surfacing, in which the woman—never named—might or might not be going insane and her boyfriend reminds her of “the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction.” Vee laughed and gasped as she turned the pages. Still, it makes a difference that the book is not her own—that her books and Band-Aids sit in a house now locked to her.

  Rosemary takes a long drag on her cigarette and stubs it out. “I should get the kids out,” she says, without moving from the floor. She tilts the rest of her bourbon into her mouth. “But I do like when they’re in the bath. It’s like the car. They’re contained.”

  Vee nods, though she can only guess. From what she’s seen of Rosemary’s life, mothering looks mostly like a lot of work. Rosemary loves her children, clearly. They are beautiful and funny. But they also never stop moving, and they touch everything they pass, lamps and walls and the artifacts that Rosemary’s husband has collected, and seem to have only three modes of activity, one in which they eat, one in which they bounce around the house and yard, and one in which they cry and whine until they fall asleep. And there’s this other one on the way. Vee hasn’t mentioned to Rosemary her fear that she, too, might be pregnant. For all the time they’ve spent together in the past week, she hasn’t told Rosemary much at all, only the merest outline of what Alex asked her to do in front of the men and what she did in return. And Rosemary hasn’t pressed her. This is part of what has saved Vee. She plans to talk, at some point, and she plans to ask about the cross; she brought Rosemary’s letters with her, too. But for now, ordinary chitchat is preferable. Vee hasn’t forgotten that as she took her bath and did her makeup before the party, she longed to be here, with Rosemary, steeped in what she understood to be domestic bliss. This is where she longed to be, and now this is where she is. She listens to splashing, a yelp, laughter.

  “Hello?”

  Philip calls out before he has fully entered the house, then his lower half appears at the bottom of the stairs. Decent black oxfords, well-fitted wool trousers, wool overcoat in the process of being removed. The ceilings in the old house are low, so that only if Philip climbs the first couple steps will his upper body and face become visible. So far, six nights in, he has not done that.

  “Up here. Down in a few,” Rosemary calls back, and her husband disappears. “I should get them out,” she says again.

  “Want help?” Vee asks, but Rosemary shakes her head, as always. “I’ve got it,” she says. But she does not get up. “Just a tiny bit more,” she says, holding out her glass, and Vee obliges and lights herself a fresh cigarette.

  “What’s with these clothes?”

  Philip’s shoes have appeared again.

  Rosemary swivels to look at Vee. “Did you change the laundry?”

  “Shit,” Vee says. She put in a load before her afternoon walk today, then forgot it.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  But laundry is the only task Rosemary has asked her to help with, and Vee heads down the stairs before her friend can finish her sentence. In the laundry room, she finds Philip, strain on his face, expecting Rosemary.

  “Oh,” he says.

  “Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  Philip is not bearded, as Vee remembered him being—or did she make that up, unconsciously casting him as the fiddler? She isn’t sure she would even know he was a Jew if she were to spot him on the street. He looks like something, to be sure—his hair is wiry and dark, his mouth full for a man’s, for the men of a place like Annisquam at least. He is brusque, but also transparent, unable to hide his reactions. Or maybe he is uninterested in hiding them—Vee can’t yet tell. She also can’t tell if, for him, checking on the laundry is a way to boss Rosemary or an effort to be ahead of the times, an early adopter of what the women’s-group women called “home-front equity.” He looks at Vee now with visible mistrust. What does he want her to say? She is sorry about the laundry. Sorry for surprising him here. Sorry for being in his house. Surely he doesn’t expect her to say all this.

  She slides past him and begins to load wet clothes into the dryer.

  “Did you get any calls today?”

  Each night he asks this. He wants to know if any of the papers have tracked her down. As if they would doubt the tabloid story that she is rehabilitating at Fainwright. In an effort to reassure him Vee made a call to the hospital and was promised that they wouldn’t tell anyone whether Vivian Kent is there or not—not because she is who she is, the woman was quick to add, but because of policy. And Vee understood. Half their patients, famously, were famous, most far more so than Vee.

>   She told Philip about the woman’s promise. She reminded him that she has no family for people to badger, no aunts or uncles, no parents, no siblings, and that the only people who know where she is are Alex and Hump, who have no interest in sharing that information. She explained that no one recognizes her, that even on her trip northward, the driver, an Albanian man who was silent for 99 percent of the ten-hour drive, did not insist on any kind of costume when she got out at rest stops.

  But Philip is not assuaged by any of this. He insists she wear a hat on her walks. When she tells him now, “No calls,” he stays in the doorway, silent, until she twists around to face him. Philip is shorter than Alex but broader in the shoulders and meatier in the arms, like he might have been a wrestler once upon a time and has the potential to grow a little fat as he ages. He stands tilted against the jamb, arms folded, frowning, and for the first time it strikes Vee that he may be afraid not only of attention but of her.

  “I’ll leave as soon as I can,” she says.

  “Good,” says Philip.

  Vee nods.

  “This is a quiet house,” he adds. “Rosemary and I would like to keep it that way.”

  A flush of anger moves through her and as she turns away, and sinks her hands into the cool, wet clothes, she begins to hum, pretending great concern about locating care labels, until, finally, she hears Philip’s footsteps in retreat.

  SUSA

  ESTHER

  The Queen, Nine Months Pregnant

  You had to understand it couldn’t be prevented. She is eighteen, ripe as a rabbit. Her stomach sits in her lap. Her feet are being rubbed. The midwife doing the rubbing discreetly avoids the bulging knuckles on Esther’s big toes, remnants of her beastly transformation, but that does not mean she—or any of the midwives—trusts her. They have been too close to her for too long. They know the other changes, as well: the slight deformation of her ears, pointed where they used to be round; the permanent rash that runs along the tops of her thighs; the way her nipples have turned from pink to purple. Granted, this last problem could also be linked to her condition. Either way, they will never go back to pink, just as her ears and skin and toes will never return to their original forms.