The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  “When he came by last weekend with Rosie?” Ruth is saying. “The way he looks at her—it took my breath away. Same way I felt when I saw him hold her after she was born. Do you remember?”

  “Of course.” But Lily doesn’t know if she remembers. They have photographs, which serve as memory. Her mother’s sappiness is grating and worrisome—since when does Ruth use phrases like took my breath away? Since when does she reminisce in plaintive tones? Lily is certain now that her mother is dying. “You do realize that’s setting the bar pretty low,” she says. “No one has ever looked at a woman holding her baby in a loving way and said, What a good mother! You never said to me, The way you look at your daughters just takes my breath away.”

  Ruth, who has tilted again, gives Lily a long look. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not asking you to be sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  They are silent for a moment, Lily holding tears in her mouth.

  “I wouldn’t mind some more tea, lovie.”

  “Of course.”

  “And can you take this? On your way? Hang it up for me?”

  Lily didn’t realize her mother was still holding the towel she’d used to dry her hands, but she sees that Ruth’s arm is shaking now, as if the towel she’s proffering were a dumbbell. She sees that Ruth inches her bottom to the very edge of the seat before pushing herself to stand, and that she climbs onto her bed with difficulty. “Oh Lily, I’m tired. I had a little burst there, but I’m zonked.”

  Lily watches out the corner of her eye, making sure her mother is settled before going to hang the towel in the bathroom. Her Post-its are still attached to the wall, warning of the step down from the riser on which the toilet sits. Step down! Be careful! We love you! The ones she put up when her mother first came home Ruth removed immediately, but these—stuck up nearly a week ago—her mother has not touched.

  “I regret it,” her mother says when Lily comes out of the bathroom.

  Lily, not sure what she’s talking about, picks up her mother’s mug. Ruth is working to get underneath her blankets. “With those tennis balls,” she says. “I should never have done that. It was cruel of me. He was right to be angry.”

  “But you said he didn’t try to stop you.”

  “That wasn’t how a man like your father got angry.”

  “How did he get angry?”

  “He slept with other women.”

  Lily waits for more. But Ruth is quiet.

  “You’re saying you blame the tennis balls for his affairs?”

  Ruth pulls her blanket up to her chin. She looks small. “That does sound dumb,” she says. “Doesn’t it.”

  “Not dumb—wrong. Are you cold?”

  Ruth nods.

  “I’ll go make more tea.”

  “Lily?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should know that your father didn’t leave. I kicked him out.”

  “Okay,” Lily says automatically.

  “Okay,” says her mother.

  Lily thinks of Adam and Vira, and the fact that they fought not only about whatever they fought about but also about whether she left or he kicked her out. Does it matter? The result is the same. Lily’s father is gone. Vira is gone. She wonders if her mother is trying to assure her in some way, or to warn her. Or maybe it’s not about Lily at all. Maybe she just wants her to know. This was something I did.

  Lily speaks softly; Ruth’s eyes are fluttering. “So why has the story always been that he left?”

  “It was the only acceptable thing to tell my parents.”

  Lily watches her mother for another minute, then opens the door to go make more tea. But June is standing on the other side, looking tired and happy. “I’m done,” she says, heaving herself up onto Ruth’s bed and sliding under the blankets next to her grandmother. She lays an arm across Ruth and looks up at Lily. “I stay here. You get Rosie and come back.”

  “She’s not out for another hour,” Lily says. “We’ll go together.”

  “I stay here.”

  “Enjoy this time. Then grandma has to rest.”

  “She can stay,” says Ruth. She pats the bed on the other side of her. “Come on, Lily-pie. Lie down with us.”

  “I was going to make your tea.”

  “The tea can wait. I’m not cold anymore.”

  Lily sets down the mug and stretches out next to her mother.

  “Come under the covers.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I know. Come under the covers.”

  It is warm under her mother’s blankets. Lily’s toes have been cold for hours, she realizes, maybe all winter. On her back, close enough to feel Ruth’s heat, she looks at the stamped-tin ceiling, at two paintings her mother bought from artist friends, at her mother’s bookshelves. On a high shelf is a collection of Ruth’s favorite ashtrays, which she asked Lily to put away after her diagnosis. It strikes Lily that apart from the ashtrays and the loveseat and Ruth’s books, there is almost nothing in this apartment that was also in the old house, and that in the old house, there was almost nothing that was Ruth’s alone. She lived there for years by herself, of course, but you could always feel Lily’s father there, in the rugs and furniture. Her father had traveled, and many of the objects in the house had been chosen by him, and carried long distances by him, and seemed to represent—to Lily, at least—his worldliness. There was an antique Japanese teapot with a built-in strainer, an abstract sculpture, a custom-built turntable and speakers that cost more than his car. Lily’s mother had little: a Childe Hassam etching of the harbor, which she hung above the fireplace, and mementos from her childhood, which she stored in several hatboxes in her closet. Even her books she kept in her bedroom, so that Lily, when she was very young, wondered if books were something private, and maybe a little shameful, like underwear. The ashtrays eventually showed up in so many corners of the house it seemed they’d been sprinkled there by fairies. But mostly she continued ceding the house to Lily’s father.

  Why should it surprise her, Lily thinks, that Ruth used to sew? She lived in that house for decades; she’d lived there before Lily was even born. The woman Lily has imagined to be her mother is the one who came after her father: the woman smoking in those short shorts, and then in her long skirts; the woman who pushed her way into the inner circles of the local synagogue until she’d forced a shift toward egalitarian language in the prayers; the woman who for a time brought a book called Let’s Talk! to the breakfast table and tried to engage her children in frank discussion about their bodies; the woman who drove south to beg Lily not to give up her work. Yet even that woman was in the kitchen each day when her kids got home from school. She never worked a paying job. She was a woman who could not tell her parents that she was the one who had chosen divorce.

  Lily can hear Ruth breathing next to her now. Both she and June seem to be dozing—June punctuates her grandmother’s labored inhales with short, quick sighs, as if she’s excited even in sleep. Yesterday afternoon, Lily walked into the girls’ room to find that they had rolled out between them a six-foot-long stretch of IKEA paper and were scribbling madly, and not only scribbling but painting—they had taken out the bin of paints that they were not supposed to use without Lily’s help. But before she could scold them, she saw what they were making. Two dresses. June’s of black circles, strung like a garland in the shape of a dress, made with Sharpie—another thing they are not allowed to play with; permanence, fumes, etc., … But look! they cried. Lily looked. It’s coal! June cried, and it took Lily a moment to realize: her daughter got coal from the kohl in the Esther book, the stuff the maidens, all except for Esther, used to darken their eyes. The circles saturated the paper to the point of dampness. They shone. It was a dress for a queen, or a funeral. And Rosie’s. Lily stepped farther into the room. She could feel the girls watching her, afraid she was going to make them start cleaning up. But she was only getting a better view. Rosie’s dress was like a muumuu that had be
en dipped in a tropical rave, densely patterned with green diamonds, pink spirals, purple lightning bolts, orange tongues. Were they tongues? It didn’t matter. Rosie looked up at her—into her—with tensed brows, as dark and luxuriant as her grandmother’s before the chemo started to thin them. Lily got it, in a way she had not before—their desire for the dresses was not about having something but being it.

  She turns onto her side. Her mother and her younger daughter look nothing alike, but they nap identically: noses up, mouths open. June smiles at something, goes slack again. Lily’s heart squeezes. It amazes her that the girls believe she is doing it, making those dresses. Where and when they think this is happening, she does not know—perhaps they have in their mind a kind of Rumpelstiltskin cellar where she works through the night—but of course that’s not the point, is it? The point is that they trust her. Even when she doesn’t trust herself.

  “Mom?”

  Nothing. Then a drowsy “Mm …?”

  “I’ll find a machine,” Lily says. “I do want you to teach me. To make the dresses. Okay?”

  Nothing. A clanging comes from Vanderbilt Avenue. They are building wooden crates to protect the trees before laying down new cable, but it sounds as if someone is hitting metal against metal.

  Silence again.

  Then a rustling. Ruth’s hair rubbing her pillow as she nods.

  GLOUCESTER, MA

  VEE

  A Sublime Representative of Self-Centered Womanhood

  The road up through the woods is narrow enough that Vee can walk in one of the tracks while smacking, with a long stick, the saplings that grow along the side. She has not walked this road before, though it looks similar enough to others that she loses herself for a time, walking slowly, enjoying the solid thwack as her stick hits the trees. She jumps, in fact leaves the ground, when she hears an engine approaching from below. The road turned to gravel a good half mile back, which she took to mean—as it had for other roads—that no more houses lay ahead, and that the gravel, when it petered out, would turn into a footpath into the rocky moors the locals call Dogtown, at which point Vee would turn around. She is not naïve enough to wander alone into that place—she knows of a violent history, though she has never bothered studying it; she senses, correctly, that there is more to come. The one time she did dare venture in, pushing past the ragged boundary and following a path through briars and blueberry bushes and poison ivy and stunted trees, she came to a massive rock, more than twice her height and the width of two cars, into which was carved, in foot-tall letters: HELP MOTHER. She turned and marched back as quickly as she could without running, her blood pounding, her eyes trying to search the trees on either side of her without appearing afraid. Now, at the sound of the engine, her instinct is the same. She resumes walking so as not to appear rattled, hitting the trees in a steady rhythm even as her cigarette hand quickly adjusts her hat a bit lower over the side of her face. She inhales deeply, trying to calm herself; she blows smoke toward the trees. She is not calm. Puff thwack puff thwack puff, until a man’s voice husks at her: “What’d they do to you?” Then Vee is staring at the back of a red pickup truck and smelling the pipe smoke that’s trailing out from the cab. Quickly, the truck is gone around the bend.

  She should turn around. But she can’t. It’s the pipe smoke, she tells herself, as she continues up the road in the dust the truck has left behind. She loves the smell with an almost scary intensity; she feels, when she smells it, as if she might fall down. Her father and grandfather were pipe smokers of the kind that set their pipes down only for photographs, though there is one black-and-white of senator and governor together—it hangs still in the yacht club’s billiard room—in which both men, son- and father-in-law, blow smoke at the camera. Vee’s father was smoking a pipe when he had the stroke that killed him—his coffin smelled of it, if you leaned close enough.

  Vee did not adore her father or her grandfather. Neither man allowed that. Even in their slippers or swimming trunks they appeared monumental. They could not comfort Vee, like her mother or her grandmother, but neither did they become real to her in the way her mother and grandmother did. The women’s realness came with a cost; it made them impossible not to hate, in a way—their comforting and combing and correcting, their bodies and hands and hair always near. The men never got close enough to ruin the illusion of their omnipotence—they were immortal, somehow, even in death. So what the smell gives her now is a feeling of safety. If she falls down, the smell tells her, she will be picked up. It makes her feel warm, though the day is cold.

  It is mid-December already. She has been at Rosemary’s more than a month, and though she still has no idea what she will do next, her initial panic has for the most part ebbed. She no longer fears at any given moment that Rosemary or Philip will kick her out, and the tabloids rarely mention her now. Also, she got her period. She was about to send off for a kit from a laboratory in North Carolina—she’d asked Rosemary to drop her off at the library, where they had a new book called Our Bodies, Ourselves that provided instructions and an address—but then she bled, and another layer of fear fell away. She almost shouted from the bathroom. She felt like celebrating. But what would Rosemary, at twelve weeks now, her waist thickened even to Vee’s eye, make of that? And Vee hadn’t even shared her fear that she might be pregnant. The lightness the friends established early in Vee’s “visit” has somehow persisted, so that Vee has still not asked Rosemary about the cross that was burned on her lawn, and Rosemary hasn’t pressed Vee for any details beyond the basics of what happened in her town house the night before she tripped up Rosemary’s steps with nothing but a bag and her hat. They talk about memories, and their parents, and what they will drink, and Rosemary’s pregnancy, and whether the laundry—still Vee’s job—needs doing. At Thanksgiving, they debated stuffing recipes, then cooked together, and Philip, though he still asks when Vee plans to leave, allowed Vee to be at the dinner since Vee had no family and Rosemary’s parents, who knew and loved Vee—though they rigorously avoided any discussion of what she was doing there, alone—were the only guests.

  Beyond Rosemary, Vee has found a doctor willing to keep her name to himself and refill her prescription for the Pill, which seems to her now, though she is not currently having sex, as critical as food and water—like her own private armor. The library book agrees. The library book—which she couldn’t check out; it was reference, and besides, she wouldn’t dare be seen reading it; even in the library she had read it tucked inside a large dictionary—quotes a handbook that calls the Pill “the first drug to weaken male society’s control over women.”

  Vee is confused about sex. She wakes sometimes from dreams pinned by an arousal so intense it’s more like pain, a certainty that a body has been on hers, a desperation to call it back. But it’s not sex, per se, that she misses—she doesn’t think so. She has enjoyed not putting on a girdle, not shaving her armpits every day. It’s not sex—she tells herself—but it is something. Rosemary hugs her. Rosemary is a generous hugger. But that’s not it, quite, either. Rosemary’s friendship, as much as Vee loves her, cannot be enough. A man is required—she knows this even as it shames her. She has not been unattached from a man since she and Rosemary, at thirteen, went on a double date with two boys named John and John.

  The smoke is still in her nostrils when she reaches a driveway, at the end of which stands a small house of unfinished wood, newly built—she can smell that, too. Enough trees have been cleared around the house that she can see it, but not so many that she feels exposed as she stands looking at it. She wonders if anyone else knows that the house is here, if the man who drove by is a kind of hermit, or outlaw. She hears the clicking of his cooling truck. She sees a row of tools leaned against the house, shovels and hoes and axes and a machete. She wonders if he is planning to build a shed—if his wife, if there is a wife, will insist on a shed. She would, she thinks. But why? Her walk has left her confused. Would she want the shed to protect the tools, or to hide them for app
earance’s sake, or to make him build it? Vee knows she often can’t tell the difference between what she wants and what she thinks she should want, but knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to tell the difference.

  “You here to beat down my trees?”

  Vee hadn’t noticed the man walking toward her, carrying a leash. She backs away.

  The man stops. He surveys her. He wears blue jeans, a hunting jacket, and—the only incongruity—a clean shave. “My dog jumped out of the truck,” he says. “Want a ride down the hill?”

  Vee shakes her head.

  “Okee doke.” The man heads for his truck, then shouts before closing the door: “If you’ll be so kind as to get out of my way?”

  Vee moves to the edge of the driveway. She would like a ride. But a dog, she thinks, doesn’t just jump out of a truck. Does it? Not if its owner is kind?

  The truck reverses to where Vee stands. The man rolls down his window, a wary look on his face. “Sure you don’t want a ride?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  Is this fear? Vee wonders. Or is it shame? Her body feels heavy, her thigh muscles on the verge of collapse. The truck’s running board is oddly clean, as if he leaps into his seat instead of climbing, and she rests her gaze there, listening to the blood in her ears.

  “You mute?”

  “You alright?”

  When she doesn’t answer, the man climbs down from the truck. “Oh god,” he says. “Don’t cry.” And Vee, who didn’t know she was crying, starts to cry harder. She feels insane suddenly, standing in a strange man’s driveway, letting him take her by the shoulders, falling into him. She has fallen into him. “Oh god,” he says again—she hears it, muffled, through her hair. “Oh no,” as his arms wrap around her. Then: “Goodness, you didn’t look this small.”

  Vee has never slept with a man whose family she didn’t know. She has only slept with Alex and two boyfriends before him. He could be diseased; he could be a murderer. She leads him toward his house. She doesn’t smell pipe smoke on him, doesn’t smell it inside. She wonders if she dreamed it, if she is dreaming this, too, hallucinating the lumberjack in the woods and her hands on his neck—could it possibly be real? But if she were hallucinating, she would hallucinate a mattress on the floor and there is a bed—a simple one, built of the same wood as the house, but still a bed. If she were hallucinating, it would be a collision so hasty they would simply unbuckle and pull aside, but beneath him she is naked. The man’s eyes are open and looking into her eyes, though she can’t tell if he sees her. She barely sees him. She sees Alex pushing her to the floor, sees Suitcase Wife up in the ceiling, sees Alex pushing his hand up Suitcase Wife’s skirt, working his whole hand up inside her, then Vee feels it inside herself and Suitcase Wife has disappeared into Vee, their backs hitting the floor with a terrible sound, though that might be the thwack of Vee’s stick hitting the trees. Smack. She slams her hands against the man’s chest. She feels a rush of power. Then she sees the dog leash hanging on the bedroom doorknob, within his reach, and hears herself say in a squirrelish voice, “What about your dog?” and as the man laughs, and comes, fear grips her again, and now this is all she feels, bright, blinding fear, until he is off her. He says something but she can’t hear; she is underwater in the tub again while Alex talks at her. She finds her clothes. Her hat. Where is her stick? When did she let go of her stick? She hears his footsteps behind her and decides she’ll turn down the ride again—even if he insists, she’ll say no. She needs a cigarette. She needs to walk.