by Anna Solomon
“I mean you. Just you.”
“What are y—”
“You’re a slut. Where do you go, Mrs. Alexander Kent? When you leave here for hours at a time. For whole days now, apparently. Do you think I don’t know?”
Vee didn’t know that Philip knew, but now that she does, she thinks, Of course. “Do you think I don’t know about the cross?” she says. It’s the first insult she can think to hurl at him. Then, seeing his confusion: “They burned a cross on your lawn, Philip R. And apparently your wife didn’t even tell you. She protects you, and what do you do apart from some dishes like you’re the goddamned messiah incarnate and not just another jerk who stares at her friends’ tits and—”
“You have a way with words.”
“You think smut is hard to come by?”
“I mean,” says Philip, in a calm, awful voice, “that you shouldn’t have trouble finding somewhere to go. Rosemary told me the women at the group loved you.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Vee snaps. The women at the Jewish consciousness raising group—clearly Philip cannot say consciousness raising—loved Vee because Rosemary, without asking Vee’s permission, told them Vee’s story, the same story the two friends had still not discussed in any detail, and one of the women said, My goodness, you’re Vashti! and all the others oohed and aahed. Apparently Vee was living the story of some queen banished a million years ago in ancient Persia. But Vee did not know or care about any of this and was peeved that Rosemary had offered up her story. She did not love the women back, as Philip clearly hopes she did. She starts to explain this, how she is not going to live with one of the Jewish libbers, when suddenly Philip bolts upright on the couch, looks at her, and hollers: “We were fine before you came! Everything was fine!”
Vee takes in the hatred in Philip’s gaze. Something has slipped in him—he is nothing if not a contained man. “I don’t understand,” she says. “You’re fine now.”
Philip laughs, a whistling, scary laugh. Vee hears the children, somewhere outside. “Where is Rosemary?” she says, suddenly afraid, not for herself now but for her friend.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” Philip covers his face with his hands. He stays like that as he takes a deep breath, then he rubs gruffly at himself and appears again, the skin under his eyes a startling, bruised blue. “You probably think she’ll tell you not to listen to me,” he says. “Tell you to stay. So stay right here. Wait. Hear it for yourself.” His voice has dropped to a monotone. “She’ll be home soon. She called a little while ago.”
“From where?”
“The hospital.”
“Why is she at the hospital?”
“She lost the baby.”
“No.” Vee drops to her knees.
“It started two nights ago.”
“My god.”
Silence. Then Philip says, “You’re so upset. Yet you haven’t even asked how she’s getting home.”
“I can go get her,” offers Vee.
“You’re too late. You weren’t here. A friend is driving her.”
“I could stay with the children, so you can go.”
“I’ll say it again. You weren’t here. You’re too late.”
Vee’s fingertips throb with returning heat. She lets out a wail. Then Philip is standing above her, snatching her up by the shoulders. “What gives you the right to cry,” he says, his face inches from hers, his eyes, on her chest, devastated and dry. “Who do you think you are?” Vee steps backward, out of his reach, but he’s on her again, his hands on her breasts this time, squeezing and pushing her away at once. “Get out,” he says. “Get the hell out.” She feels the shove coming. She understands that she will fly backward into the table behind her and that she and the weird sculpture will fall together into the wall. Then the door opens to Rosemary, and behind her the children, and behind them a white sky. The children have been running and are red-cheeked, gawking, the girl with a look in her eyes that sets Vee’s blood pounding. But it’s Rosemary whose face, pale as the sky, terrifies. “Lionel,” she says, addressing her oldest in a voice like an empty tunnel, “take your brother and sister upstairs. I’ll be right there.” She does not look at Vee as she tells her to pack. Vee does not look at Rosemary’s abdomen. Then Rosemary is walking up the stairs with excruciating care, matching her feet on each step, her hand white from its grip on the banister. And soon she’s gone.
MANHATTAN
LILY
For She Had Neither Father Nor Mother
Ruth is gone. It was sepsis, finally, one of the words Lily learned to dread, though sitting now with her brothers, in a bar a few blocks from the hospital, she cannot seem to feel what she imagined she would feel. Lily’s and Lionel’s spouses have taken their children home and to a hotel, respectively. Ian has called his boyfriend in California. He was crying when he hung up but sits silently now, sliding his whiskey through closed lips, while Lionel, clearly in shock, keeps talking. He says words he has already said, things like Four blocks from the hospital, three siblings, four hours dead and And then you called me and I still didn’t get it, I didn’t know how fast it would happen, I wouldn’t have brought the kids, I would have just gotten in the car … Ian was already in the city, visiting, but Lionel, who lives so much closer, missed Ruth’s last cogent hour. Lily called as he was driving, so he knew, but you can’t know such a thing until you know it. He talks. All three of them drink. And soon—Lionel announces—it has been not four but five hours since their mother died.
Lily finds herself thinking not of Ruth, or even of Ruth’s body, but of the hospital room itself, its steady blankness, like a clean sheet, before and as and after Ruth died, and of how strange it is that she and her brothers will likely never return to it.
“What happens now?”
The room had been a different room from the one Ruth had been in during her first hospitalization, but it had also, of course, been the same room, the room Ruth had known Lily had not wanted to leave but had her thrown out of anyway. Go home. As if she was not home, with Ruth.
“Lily?”
Lily feels Lionel’s glass nudging hers and looks up.
“What do we do now?” her brother says. “With her body, and her apartment, and her finances …”
His shock is in his eyes. It’s bigger than Lily realized, and more encompassing; he is shocked, she sees, not only that Ruth is dead but that she has died without leaving him instructions. That his sister is now the one likely to know what he does not. He can’t imagine all she knows—about cancer, yes, but also about cards for doctors and nurses, and cremation versus burial, etc. They have traveled a great distance since the night five weeks ago when he called her with the news, when Lionel was the one Ruth chose to tell first and Lily was naïve enough to think her mother might make it to Purim.
“The funeral home is coming for her,” Lily says gently. “Tomorrow’s the burial, then we’ll sit shiva …”
Lionel groans. “The funeral the day after is ridiculous. It’s not like we can reach all the people she knew in twenty-four hours.”
“We’ll have a memorial service in a couple weeks. She and I talked about—”
“I still don’t get why she had to be so Jewish.”
“I don’t know, Li, but it’s what—”
“Seriously, who does that? Who marries a Jewish guy who isn’t even remotely observant, converts just as he’s leaving you, then keeps going whole hog like you’re actually the Jew?”
“I think you are,” Ian offers. “If you convert. Also, whole hog …”
“But not really.” Lionel scowls. “And why? What was her end game?”
Ian chuckles into his glass. “You’re such an asshole. There was no end game. I think she liked the people.”
“So hang out with them! It was all so embarrassing. My mother is having a bat mitzvah. Good god. And then when we had to do Shabbat on Fridays and she’d put her hand on our heads and say, May you be Lionel, in all that you are? Th
e worst.”
Ian signals for another round, and then they’re quiet for a while, even Lionel. Lily remembers her mother doing that, though hanging from the memory there is no strong feeling. But it would have been different for Lionel, who was already twelve when Ruth converted. Even Ian, who had just turned eleven and had a bar mitzvah two years later, must have gotten used to life without Shabbat and general Jewishness. Whereas Lily had been seven, old enough to vaguely remember before but not old enough to be attached to it. For Lily, the divide has always seemed to be about her father leaving. Not that she was older when that happened; like Lionel, she is pretty sure the conversion and separation were concurrent events. Just that her father has figured in her mind as the bigger deal.
“You know what she told me?” she says. “He didn’t leave. She threw him out.”
“That’s not true,” Lionel says immediately.
“It’s what she told me.”
“I understand. But it’s not true.”
“Why would she say it, then?”
“For the same reason anyone says anything—because she wanted it to be true?”
“Is that why you say things, Lionel?”
Ian swivels on his stool. “Please stop. It could be true.”
Lionel snorts. “Are you kidding me? There’s no way.”
“What do your kids know of your marriage?”
Lionel slits his eyes.
“Ahhh,” Ian says with a note of triumph, and suddenly Lily is disgusted by them all. “Forget it,” she says, slapping a hand on the bar. “Who cares? No one cares. Do you know what else she said to me? Just yesterday? This one will neither surprise nor offend.”
Her brothers shake their heads.
“I brought the Times. And she saw me slide the book review under the stack. Which I always do. And she said, You have no right to do that. And I was like, What are you talking about? I thought she might be confused, like she didn’t know who I was suddenly, or what was happening. Then she said, You have no right to be jealous, Lily. You haven’t written anything.”
Ian whistles softly. “That’s harsh.”
“But correct!” Lily says.
“Oh come on, Lil.” Lionel’s voice tilts into the one she guesses he must use with frustrated clients. “Couldn’t you still maybe get some kind of—”
“Stop. I didn’t tell you that so we could talk about me. I told you because it was just so Mom.” This is true. Though it is also probably true that on some level Lily does want to talk about herself. She cannot pretend not to be aware that certain problems she has neglected await her once the immediate aftermath of Ruth’s death is attended to. The Purim dresses, for one. The morning after she and Ruth agreed that Ruth would teach her to sew, Lily picked up a rental machine from a shop on Avenue N and set it up according to Ruth’s instructions, but by the next day, Ruth was too tired to get out of bed. Now the machine is still sitting on her desk, unused, and the dresses are still not made. And then there is the problem of Adam. Or if not of Adam, then of Hal, who continues to invite Lily and the kids to the no-name pizza place each Thursday and hang out not quite in the background during her nightly trysts with Adam. Adam thinks it’s nice that she and Hal take the kids out together. And Adam benefits—in bed, on the kitchen island, on the bathmat. So maybe it’s not really a problem? Adam and Hal have their meetings—Hal has even started giving presentations to Adam’s bosses; his charisma, as Adam calls it, is apparently a real asset—and Lily and Adam have theirs. And won’t it all end now anyway, automatically? At this moment perched between her brothers in this bar, Lily can’t imagine her body ever wanting anything like that again, not with Adam or Hal or anyone. She can’t even imagine standing up.
You have no right to be jealous, said her mother.
But then what can she be?
This is the worst problem, of course, the one that hangs over everything else, like a silent, fiery planet on the verge of explosion, or maybe implosion—what Lily is going to do with herself. Beyond mothering. And being mothered. And screwing her husband and fantasizing about his friend/colleague. And trying to save Ruth. She’d been given someone to save after all. She’d been given a mission, albeit a twenty-first-century, American, self-involved mission. But unlike Esther, Lily failed. Now that Ruth is gone, what force will steer her? Beyond semiprofessionally screwing up laundry, which strikes her now as pitiful in the same way that hiding the New York Times Book Review from herself is pitiful: opposite ends of the same spectrum. To care or not to care. Even the spectrum is pitiful. As if all Lily boils down to—if one were to boil her, singe her shell off, pick out her meat—is a poster woman for a think piece on having or not having it all. But Lily’s conundrum goes beyond whether or not to work. She will work again, if not at the work she already knows how to do, if only because they will eventually need and be able to afford—once both girls are in school—a second income. Her question is, Who will she be?
Lily sips her scotch and winces. Why is she drinking scotch? She doesn’t like it. She is drinking it because it’s what her brothers drink. She slides her glass toward Ian and waves for the bartender. “Do you know what Mom liked to drink when we were kids?”
“Bourbon on the rocks,” Ian says.
Lily orders a bourbon. Six hours have passed, then seven. Out the bar’s window they watch the last slash of light disappear from the narrow street. Ian lays his cheek down on the bar, and Lionel says to Lily: “You did good.”
“What do you mean?”
“With Mom. This whole … all of it.”
“Okay.”
“Did you ever feel—did you ever want to just call the doctors and …?”
“I did call the doctors. Often.”
“But I mean just to—”
“Wait a second. Was that a backhanded compliment?” Lily’s head is heavier than she realized. She is maybe drunk. “Are you accusing me of not seeing what was happening?”
“No!”
“What happened was entirely common in non–small cell lung cancer patients. The chemo weakens the immune system, and once infection sets in, sepsis—”
“Lily! That’s not it. I promise. I was just saying, I don’t know how … if I were in your place, I don’t know if I could have …”
Ian slides his glass into Lionel’s, shutting him up, then lifts his face off the bar and slides his glass into Lily’s. Clink. Clink. “He’s saying thank you,” he says, and slides Lionel’s glass into Lily’s.
The clinks repeat themselves in her ears. Her brothers are quiet, watching her. For years she has thought of them as enlarged versions of their boy selves: Lionel the natural boss, interested in money, attentive to details; Ian the jock and peacemaker who tried his best to go along. She has sensed that they think in the same way about her: the smart but hapless baby, overly sensitive, thinks too much. But Lionel is anxious, even fearful, and Ian, if she bothers to think for even a minute about the basic facts of his life, has not been able to just go along.
Lily picks up her glass, empties it, then clinks it against her brothers’ glasses. I’m the one doing it now, she thinks. May you be Lily, in all that you are. One of the glasses will topple off the bar in a minute, and then they will leave, and get in cabs, and go their separate ways, but until then she toasts with her brothers, clink, clink, and they nod together to the beat.
SUSA
ESTHER
Descent
The bird is perfect. She has taught it the scent of sumac, and cardamom and sesame, too. When she frees it in the courtyard, the bird flies without hesitation over the wall and away. She trusts it as she trusts herself. It is her, in a sense. When it reaches Nadav’s mother, and speaks, it will speak Esther’s words. The guards eye her but no more than usual. They do not ask questions. The triumph she feels with the bird safely over the wall is so replete she could lie down on the stones and sing; she feels as if the bird has been released from her own chest.
But that night, on her pillow, s
he finds the bird’s bones, picked clean. She knows the bones as she knew her own hands; she knows they are not another bird’s bones masquerading as her bird’s. Next to them is a miniature scepter: an invitation to a banquet in the king’s rooms.
She is not surprised, the following evening, to find herself seated next to the minister. He wastes no time. “Spices have been prohibited in the camp for months now,” he says in greeting, swirling his finger in his wine. “Your poor bird didn’t have a chance.”
Esther stares at her plate, avoiding the minister’s glinting ornaments and his toothless, fearsome smile.
“And your eunuch? He’s a coward. Soft. Always has been. But you knew that, didn’t you.” The minister slows his words, as if talking to a child. “He didn’t go close enough to the camp to have any idea.”
Esther imagines strangling the minister with the gilded collar he wears. It might be doable, she thinks—if she could bring back the beast, she could do it. But she doubts she will ever again have enough power to become the beast. And even if she could, wouldn’t Darius be harmed, seeing his mother like that? And the new child inside her—what would happen to it? Still, she can feel her giant paddle hands on the minister’s neck. She sees vividly the color his skin would turn, a red as fierce as the sumac he’s banned. She faces him. “How did you capture it?”
“Your Majesty. Did you really think they would listen to you? Are you so arrogant as that? Even now?” Spittle shines in the corners of his lips. “You must know they are cowards, too. Like you, trying to escape fate. Yours, theirs. Your poor bird was the only brave one. You should have seen it when it found me, my palm outstretched, full of spices. Oh, the fragrance of my skin!”
A hand arrives on her thigh. It rests for a moment, then the fingers begin to walk her robes aside. The king rises to say something and the minister’s head follows but his fingers stay behind and keep walking. Esther clamps her legs together and watches the king’s mouth move. When he is seated again, the minister grows bolder. He looks at her as he speaks; he speaks to her as he forces his fingers between her thighs; he forces his fingers between her thighs as he brings meat to his mouth with his other hand. “I twisted its neck,” he says. “It was easy. Not so different, really, from ordering the killing of the queen.” He leans closer. “The king regrets that, you know. You must—you are not stupid. You must know that Vashti is the one he wants.”
