The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  But Baraz, like the king, like Lara, said no. No, I would not defile you in such a way. I’m sorry.

  That had been the worst. After Baraz, no one’s refusal surprised her. Not the cook’s or the chambermaid’s or the gardener’s. Yet she couldn’t stop asking. She wandered the palace, the passages, the kitchens, looking for someone, anyone, who might yield, offering not her body but whatever she thought a given individual might want. When her belly started to grow, the midwives tried pushing her back to bed. What’s your itch? they wanted to know. What’s your complaint?

  She ignores them whenever she can. She continues to find new targets. A stable boy. A wet nurse. It is such a simple message she wants them to convey: Go now. Go far. But no one even hesitates. No, no, no, no. They profess pity. She sees them looking at the lines on her face. From any distance her scars are unnoticeable—if only she kept her distance, like most queens—but up close they look like golden creek beds running through brown sand and provoke a range of reactions. Maybe they are chronic tear stains—the king has caught a miserable for a queen! Or the queen is part divine, sent rays by the sun. Or maybe she is a warrior, from one of the tribes that stripes its young. Only a few, the shrewdest of the ones she presses about the camp, suspect she may be a Hebrew. The king and his minister have told no one this small and large fact.

  No, no. Not a single one even asks what message she wants delivered. Yet Esther tries. Her trying is like a disease. Even now, with her feet going numb under this midwife’s rubbing, she is wondering what she might be able to say to entice the woman. Esther hasn’t noticed before how blue her eyes are, so light a blue they appear almost colorless. One doesn’t often see blue eyes in Susa in 462 BCE. Maybe it means she is weaker than the others, more apt to submit?

  Then two other midwives walk in, slapping their hands together, putting an end to what has not begun. The blue-eyed midwife leaves silently.

  “Time for a rest,” the thin one says, as if Esther has not been resting.

  They are affable, the midwives. They smile and speak kindly and sometimes it seems that they actually like Esther—that they are not simply doing their job. She likes them, despite their pushiness. They move with purpose, their sleeves double-backed onto their shoulders to keep their forearms free, their hands always doing something, or more than one thing, washing while they fold, or stuffing pillows with feathers while they stir a poultice with a foot. Their efficacy is extreme, almost to the point of strangeness, as if—Esther sometimes thinks—they might be sorceresses in disguise. Even their skin color—there are perhaps a half-dozen of them, their skin running from clay-dark to tusk-white—seems designed for her, as if visual harmony will be of help. It is. They are a comfort.

  A hand moves across her stomach, pauses, moves again. “Good,” says the fat midwife.

  “Why?” Often, the creature inside Esther bucks or flutters. But now she feels only her feet, returning from numbness.

  “Three hands,” the midwife says. “You are perfect.”

  Esther returns her smile. It fills her, this praise—she can’t help the flush that crawls up her neck as the midwives lead her back toward her chambers. The midwife is telling her that she will give birth to the king’s child; she is also telling her, in not so many words, that the child will be a boy. The king’s first. Vashti was barren, and his other wives have only borne girls—or at least girls are the only infants born to his wives that the king has claimed as his own. He wants his heir to be born to his queen. And so he will be. To Esther.

  She crosses the threshold and goes cold. The silked walls, the tall bed, the cool silence, the boy in the corner already flush in the face from fanning her air, all of it wakes her from her moment of indulgence. As she climbs the steps to her bed, she feels small, and stupid. How could she forget, even for a moment, the camp? And why did she imagine the blue-eyed midwife might have been the one to obey her? She shouldn’t be surprised anymore by the power she lost when she went from being a night-station girl to being queen. Esther has been low, too. She knows being low can make a person righteous, and if righteousness isn’t power exactly, it’s power’s kin. Now she has only this: cool silence, ease, these bedclothes, this sensation of sinking. It is all, inarguably, exquisite. The boy inside her stirs. The boy in the corner fans. The door will be guarded. They tell her to sleep. But she is never tired.

  BROOKLYN

  LILY

  Another Chamber

  “Tennis balls?”

  “Tennis balls.”

  “Okay …” She is listening to Ruth’s story, or trying to listen, but her mind keeps catching on potential dangers in her mother’s bedroom: the four-poster bed that must be climbed into, the rugs her mother has never bothered to stabilize with rug pads, the jagged rock her mother uses as a door stop, the piles of books strewn across the floor. Ruth has grown weaker in the three weeks since her diagnosis, though she won’t admit it. The fact that her doctor has yet to deliver a solid opinion on whether her decline is largely a side effect of the chemo and radiation or a result of the treatments’ failure makes it easier for Ruth to pretend she’s fine. But Lily knows, or believes she knows, that her mother is dying. She sees that Ruth does not lift her feet enough when she walks, so that even if she hasn’t tripped yet, she is perpetually almost tripping. Her mother’s beautiful skin has turned pale. Apart from her appointments, she chooses to stay home. Her friends come in the evenings and Lily during the day, by herself Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and with June on the between days like this one, plopping June in front of Super Why! in the living room before making tea. Each morning she pauses at the bedroom door and exhales before entering. It is unnatural to see a person every day and be able to see them changing. Even her daughters, who are growing at alarming rates, look the same on a given morning as they looked the day before. But Ruth, each time Lily arrives, appears to have passed through years of life since Lily last left.

  “So I sewed them into the back of his shirt,” Ruth says.

  “Did what?” Lily is noticing how thickly her mother’s ceiling fan is coated in dust.

  “The tennis balls. I’d read a column, ‘How to Stop Your Husband from Snoring and Save Your Marriage.’ This was in McCall’s, before I knew there were other magazines. Or I guess I knew, but I didn’t dare. In any case. It said the trick was keeping him off his back, and the trick to keeping him off his back was tennis balls.”

  “Ouch.”

  “He didn’t try to stop me.”

  Lily tries to imagine this encounter. She comes up blank. She knew her father, both before he left, when she was almost eight, and after; until he died of a heart attack when she was nineteen, she and her brothers visited him in California once every year. So it’s not as if she can’t picture his face or hear his voice. Still, he is most real to her as a presence more than a person, a solidity who never took off his shoes except to bathe, sleep, or swim. She cannot remember him talking to her mother, even to argue. Instead she remembers the sensation of being with him; she remembers feeling when she was with him that authority existed, that whether she liked it or agreed with it it would continue to exert and produce itself. She remembers feeling comforted by this. She can see now that this feeling was a delusion, an internalization of the patriarchy, or perhaps the patriarchy itself, but that doesn’t change the fact that she still thinks of her philandering father, dead for a quarter of a century, as a comfort. Whereas her mother, her mother who is here with her, who has always been here, who she wishes could stay here forever—with her mother it is not as simple.

  “So did it work?” she asks.

  “No. He just went on sleeping on his back and snoring. It was like he couldn’t feel the balls at all. I was devastated.”

  “That sounds a little dramatic.”

  “Does it, Lily?” Ruth takes a long sip of tea. Her swallow is audible, and painful sounding, and Lily is sorry. Her mother rarely talks about her own feelings, she mostly pushes other people to reveal theirs, but sh
e just confessed to Lily devastation, and Lily shot her down. “How did you even manage that?” she asks, trying to rewind. “How do you get tennis balls into a shirt?”

  “You need two shirts. One larger than the other, and you sew … it’s almost like a duvet? But instead of down, you’re sewing in tennis balls.” Ruth stops, seeing Lily’s confusion, then says: “I was a very good seamstress once.”

  How Lily did not until this moment register that her mother has been talking about sewing, she doesn’t know. Ruth’s face is blank, her lips in the thin line she used to make when she was teasing the children, not letting a smile show. But Lily can’t tell if she’s teasing now, or if she’s oblivious, if her sickness is starting to blunt her. She knows that Lily has been struggling to make the girls dresses, or rather struggling with the fact that she’s not making them. Lily has told her how a week after her first lesson, she missed her second date with Kyla. Lily was in the hospital with Ruth, in fact, when she was supposed to be ringing Kyla’s bell. Kyla understood, of course. Kyla was sympathetic and concerned and asked how she could help and then, when Lily, overwhelmed, failed to respond, Kyla simply delivered a meal to Lily’s building. She didn’t buzz the apartment, didn’t even demand that interaction, just left it with the doorman and disappeared. And each week she has checked in. No pressure, just want to remind you I’m here whenever you’re ready …

  But Lily is not ready. And Ruth knows this. She knows—Lily believes she must know—that Lily cannot go more than an hour without thinking of Ruth, that to go to Kyla’s would seem a betrayal. Ruth has to know this. She has told Lily the dresses are a torture device she’s invented for herself, that she should give up, use scarves, buy something online. And yet, without a hint of apology, she casually mentions she can sew? Not only that, she called herself a seamstress. Lily is mortified. How could Ruth have let her go on about the dresses—at one point Lily even described the machine parts to her, as if describing a new planet to the earthbound!—and said nothing?

  “Lily,” her mother says.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you want my help?”

  “With what?”

  “The dresses you want to make. You could buy a used machine, set it up on my desk. Or we could do it by hand … I could teach you some simple stitches—”

  “No!” Lily smiles wildly, trying to soften her response, which feels less like a word than a flailing. She cannot imagine accepting help from Ruth, who has seemed all along to disapprove of Lily’s sewing idea, and every other domestic effort she’s made, however poor the result. Besides, her mother isn’t well. “Thank you,” she says. “You don’t have to do that. But thank you.” She takes Ruth’s cold mug of tea. It’s a gag mug her mother got at some Purim celebration, with a knockoff Starbucks logo that says Ohel Coffee, Product de Persia, Certified for the Court of Ahasuerus, 14 Adar 5773 and features a mermaidish queen in the middle of the ubiquitous green circle—Esther, presumably. Why did Lily pour her mother’s tea into this if not to torture herself further? “I’ll go make you some more?”

  “All right.” Ruth’s voice is hoarse. “Whatever you like, Lily-pie.”

  * * *

  Ruth is asleep when Lily returns with more tea, so Lily goes back out and sits on the couch next to June. She snuggles up to her daughter, nosing her cheek and trying, as she blocks out SuperWhy!, to remember her mother sewing. Even once. Even if she was making that A Well-Kept House … sampler, which was technically embroidery and which maybe she didn’t even make. But the image that comes to Lily instead is of her mother smoking. She is on the sun porch. She half sits, half leans, her buttocks perched on the bay-window sill while her feet press the floor, her bare legs a sunned hypotenuse. It must be the summer after Lily’s father left, because that was the summer her mother made the leap to shorter shorts but hadn’t yet moved on to the long, gauzy skirts she would wear in summers to come. (Did her mother sew those skirts?) They are shapely legs, with muscular calves and well-defined thighs, and her quadriceps do a little dance as she smokes, climbing up on the inhale and sliding back down on the release, and Lily, transfixed, then and now, watches the knot of muscle as if it might tell her something her mother won’t.

  When, after a couple episodes, Lily goes back into Ruth’s bedroom, the blankets have been smoothed and the blinds raised, the room swept in light. Ruth emerges from the bathroom, wiping her hands on a towel with an officious, energetic air, and Lily lets herself feel a spasm of hope. Her hope surges when Ruth looks her in the eye and says, “How is Adam?” because of course How is Adam? means How is your marriage? and Are you having an affair now? and all this is Ruth’s way of being her truest self. Never mind that Lily’s blood pounds at the question because if she were to answer honestly, she would have to say, I’m having one in my mind. Which is true. The Thursday after she virtuously declined Hal’s pizza-date invitation, he asked again, and she accepted, and since then he has occupied an unreasonably large and torrid portion of her thoughts. Nothing happened, to be clear. The place was a hole in the wall Lily had never even noticed before, called only PIZZA, it seemed, which of course made Jace, who had discovered and recommended it, a kind of urban pioneer. That this was in addition to her being a lawyer with nonexistent thighs only made the “date” feel more acceptable—what interest could Hal possibly have in Lily? They ate at a Formica table with the kids, and drank wine out of paper cups, and Hal asked the obligatory question about how Lily’s mother was doing, though not in an obligatory way—he had a way of crinkling his lovely crow’s-feet wrinkles in a way that reminded you of sun and also of storms he might have weathered and suggested that he was ready to empathize with your storms, too. All that was cheesy, and platonic enough. But then he looked at Lily’s plate and said, “I see you really like hot pepper,” and that was all it took—she was wet. It was mortifying, she would tell Ruth, if she were to tell her any of this, which she will not. And then, well, what happened next was maybe kind of mortifying, too, in its predictability. That night she seduced Adam, and the next night, too, and the night after that, and what has happened since is one of the stranger things that has happened in the past month but also, inarguably, the best: almost every night, after the girls are asleep, Lily leads Adam to the bedroom, or the bathroom, or once the kitchen, and they take off their clothes and do it. It’s not something they talk about. There’s no foreplay, no planning or premeditation. Even for Lily, who started it, it feels less like something she does than something she is led to, like a fucker’s version of sleepwalking. She just keeps finding herself in the middle of it. Almost everything else that brings her pleasure she has put on hold since Ruth’s diagnosis, things like dessert, or the Sudoku puzzles she likes, or Kyla’s lessons. But sex? The more it happens, the more Lily makes it happen. She does not dwell on its relationship to Hal nor on the pitifully easy Psych 101 analysis of her behavior: compulsive sex as an attempt to defy death. Instead she orders new underthings, a French negligee, a pair of crotchless underwear, a garter belt—they both love the garter belt. So maybe there is some premeditation now. At a minimum, there is commitment.

  Which makes it true when Lily answers her mother: “He’s fine.”

  Ruth settles herself onto a loveseat that once belonged to her own mother. “Any progress toward a promotion?”

  “Do you want more tea?”

  “Sit.”

  Lily sits on Ruth’s bed.

  “Tell me,” Ruth says. “I’m stuck here. Tell me something.”

  So Lily tells her mother about Adam’s fish-farm endeavor, which is finally looking like it might happen. She sets the scene: a refugee camp west of Kigali. She describes the challenges, the skeptics. Then she explains the role she played in the turnaround, how after the pizza date it struck her that Hal—“this dad of a kid in Rosie’s theater class?”—might be able to help Adam. Adam needed a fish expert who wasn’t already opposed to his project, and Hal was a fisherman. He’d even worked with aquaculture pools, Lily h
appened to know, because he’d mentioned this, at the pizza place, because he was the kind of man who did not need to be prompted to talk about himself. Other things he’d mentioned: he was involved in some kind of artisanal kelp locavore start-up on Long Island Sound, and he knew just about everyone. Which could not hurt, Lily thought. She set up a date for Adam and Hal, and that was that: since then Adam has brought Hal on as a consultant and they meet for regular drinking/planning sessions in the neighborhood. Are you sure it’s okay? Adam keeps asking, because his meeting Hal means Lily putting the girls to sleep on her own, and while at some point Lily might have said no, this particular scenario she supports entirely, for it relieves her of guilt and furthers Adam’s cause. He still hasn’t gotten a full go-ahead, she tells Ruth, but last week, thanks to a funder Hal brought in, they received a sizable grant, the kind of money they’ve been waiting for, which will help to draw other money and quiet the doubters.

  “What’s this Hal like?” her mother asks, as if that is the point.

  “He’s fine.” It is good to have given Hal to Adam. He served his purpose, she has decided. Which sounds mercenary, she realizes, but isn’t mercenary better than gaga? The women she knows whose husbands have cheated insist that it’s impossible for the cheating to have nothing to do with their marriage, but Lily is starting to think they’re wrong—you can want something and still fully want another thing. That they conflict does not mean you are conflicted.

  “It’s important for men to have friends,” Ruth says. “Your father never had friends.”

  “Mm,” Lily answers.

  “Adam is a good father.”

  “Yes.” Lily is noticing how Ruth keeps tilting on the loveseat, righting herself, then tilting again. She is clearly uncomfortable, maybe in pain. She looks embarrassed. Lily has not often known her mother to be embarrassed, and it is hard not to feel embarrassed for her. Lily looks away, to give her privacy.