The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  “See you downstairs in five,” he says. “Buttoned.”

  Vee buttons her collar. The bourbon gnaws at her stomach. She stares at herself. She feels like a piece of ice in a shaker. You look perfect, her mother would say, and Vee can see this, that she is well armored and lovely, but it doesn’t solve her rage, and now she is digging through her stocking drawer, all the way to the back, filled with an absurd and mounting fear: What if it’s been stolen?

  She digs frantically, her nails scraping wood, until she finds it: her sew-on-the-go box. “Every girl needs one,” her grandmother said when she placed it in Vee’s hands sixteen years ago, and Vee has brought the box everywhere, to college and on every trip she’s taken, but she has never opened it, and for a second the profound, undisturbed order visible through the clear plastic top—three white cardboard spools, each neatly wrapped in six colors of thread—makes her hesitate. Then she pries off the top. She tosses the thread aside, pulls up a layer of paperboard, and finds a thimble, a packet of needles, a needle threader—for cheaters, her mother would say—and a miniature pair of scissors. She is looking for something else, a thing one uses to remove thread, a ripper, it might be called, but the box is empty now, so she grabs the scissors and with them returns to the mirror.

  Vee works swiftly, unbuttoning her collar and snipping off each button. She uses her fingers to flick out the remaining thread. Then she flushes the buttons down the toilet and goes to join Alex for the welcoming ceremonies.

  SUSA

  ESTHER

  More Serious Ablutions

  This is where belief may prove difficult—the lengths to which the girls go to prepare themselves for the king. They don’t just soak in oil for a few hours, or exfoliate their heels with razor blades, or spend days practicing the art of hair towers. They spend months doing these things, scraping and scrubbing and oiling and perfuming though it’s never clear, on any given day, if this will be the day that the king at last wants to see them. A heel that’s shaven to the pink needs shaving again two weeks later. One of the Greek girls compares their lot to Sisyphus, and the mood is a little like that; after their initial excitement—they are the final forty, whittled down from hundreds—the corner of the palace where they’re kept has grown heavy. Rumors have trickled in about other night stations, higher stations, where the women are trained in harp and dancing, and higher still, where the women are made wives and given apartments and servants and courtyards where they can walk outdoors. Some stations are moved, in chariots, when the court moves north for summer. Not this one. Half-underground, it is perhaps the lowest; the girls’ only duty is to prepare.

  Esther tracks the days on the wall beside her bed, scratching lines into the stone with her thumbnail. She is up to sixty-three the morning she returns from the hand room—where she’s been chastised for her ragged thumbnail—to find her tally marks rubbed away. Swallowing tears, she turns to face the room. “What do you know about this?” she asks two girls standing nearby. They look at her, then walk away. Esther has gained a reputation in the night station. She scrubs herself apathetically, refuses the oils and perfumes, does nothing to ameliorate her hair situation, though it’s growing out more quickly than she’d like and she can’t get Mona—the night-station mother—or any of the eunuchs to bring her scissors. Early on, when she was still begging them on a daily basis, another girl lay down on her bed without asking and said, Don’t bother, of course they won’t allow scissors, they’re afraid we might hurt ourselves, and Esther, seeing that she was honest, befriended her. She is Esther’s only friend, a Babylonian named Lara whose problem—the extent of which was discovered only after she was chosen for the final forty—has been deemed her excess of hair. Her hair is like a fur, running from her nape to her crack, and from her navel to her cleft. Esther finds these warm paths beautiful, and knows that in the camp they would be objects of envy, but here, Lara is shaven. Her skin burns from shaving and every day she is shaven again. Lara and Esther have in common one language, Farsi, and one goal: neither will become queen and both will go home. They decided this from the start, when the rest of the girls were still high from being among the chosen and still besotted with the comforts of the night station. Every one of them is from the traveling, impoverished tribes. The families of means understood that when a man in power is done with a noble queen he is done with nobility—he wants a woman accustomed to some degree of suffering, a woman who can’t afford to question. They understood that they didn’t want their daughters following Vashti. So it was left to girls from desperate places and peoples, orphans and daughters of whores and daughters of slaves and daughters of failed rebellions and daughters on the verge of being sold into slavery.

  In the early weeks, even Esther and Lara had to admit that life in the station was easier in most ways than the lives they lived outside. They were given as much food and wine as they wanted. They slept on mattresses as thick as four pallets. There was no work required of them, no hauling or washing or planting or cooking. They walked only as far as the dressing room, the hair room, the face room. All they had to do was prepare. All they had to do was keep living.

  But even the most enthusiastic of the girls now understands that this particular sort of ease can be unbearable. They understand that they are essentially slaves—and that only one of them will be freed. Their response is to fight, like dozens of crows going after the same bone. They hoard wires and ribbons and animal hair and bird feathers for their hair towers, whatever the eunuchs will smuggle in to them for whatever services they’ll perform for the eunuchs. This, too, they understand: they do work in the night station, albeit a particular kind of work, the oldest kind. They hide, they steal, they sabotage one another. They also braid each other’s hair, and take turns putting on finger-shadow plays about the king and Queen Vashti, and make each other laugh. They have to, or they’ll go crazy. Another old story. They have to despise and depend on each other.

  The night station is not as Marduk thought: a brutal prison or a luxurious bathhouse. Evil or pure. Like nearly everything, it is neither, and both.

  Lara and Esther are different from the other girls in that they believe that the one chosen as queen won’t actually be free. Lara’s tribe is anarchic and violent—anyone who tries to lead, man or woman, is swiftly killed. The palace, she says, is nothing but a facade, with the queen at the center of its hidden misery. Esther’s view, while less extreme, bears similar fruit: as a Jew she was raised to mistrust people who are worshipped, and as the daughter of her particular parents, she was taught to judge those who aspire to wealth and power. Both girls believe themselves superior to other people, subject to different rules, or in Lara’s case no rules at all. Between them they have created a third option, an alternate plot in which they will be released. Each has begun cultivating her own eunuch; she gives him something, but not too much. Esther’s is tall and too thin and has heavy eyelids and a soft mouth that make him look perpetually half-asleep. She lets him watch her. They meet in the room where the sheets and towels are stacked and she touches herself while he watches. One breast. That’s all, for now. Soon, she’ll introduce a second—later, she’ll lift her cloth. The eunuchs are nothing like girls, it turns out. Their voices aren’t high, despite what historians will report. They are not sexless. She has watched them hold a girl down until she licked another eunuch’s asshole, stick fingers into any place a finger can be stuck, make girls lie beneath them on the floor in the defecation room. Her eunuch is not like that. Baraz is his name, and she chose him for his fealty, perceived it in him as palpably as a scent. Though she doesn’t trust him fully yet, she trusts this. He touches her only with his eyes. The idea is that little by little, Esther will agitate and titillate him to such a degree that eventually he will do whatever she asks. The idea is that after the king has finally chosen, and Esther is not queen, she will go to him and say: Get me out. Do anything you want to me. I’ll do anything, if you’ll bring me back to the camp. And by that point his anguish will be
such that he’ll do anything to have her.

  Lara chose her eunuch because he’s very pale skinned, so pale it’s as if he’s not fully formed. She guessed, correctly, that he would like her fur. She lets him lie with her on her bed, his chest against her back or his back against her stomach. That’s all; they lie together. Already she has gotten him to sneak her tea, which Lara is not allowed because Mona says it stimulates hair growth. Like Esther, she has her plan.

  The girls understand that their “plans” may be overly optimistic. They have no experience in these matters—does anyone? No special knowledge has been imparted to them, nothing beyond a belief in their own exceptionalism, and this was granted to them by two people who are dead and two others who live in a cave. Mostly, though, they are able to ignore their doubts, just as they ignore the despair that subsumed them when they first arrived. They have to. But sometimes, like now, as she sits in front of her patch of newly blank wall, her despair hits again—the erasure of her tally marks is like a blow to her ribs. Questions tumble through her mind, questions she has asked and tried to answer every day since she arrived. Why didn’t she run the night her uncle told her what he would do? (Because she did not want to go out into the desert alone.) Why, the day she left Marduk and the palace guards took his figs without a word, why didn’t she do something in that moment, shout or scream as she wanted to, to get herself kicked out? (Because she feared she would be killed.) Why did Marduk think Esther’s problem would be her Jewishness, a laughable notion now that she’s lived among half-breeds and mutts, many of them tribeless? (Because he believes in the exceptionalism of his own oppression.) And why would the king, after a queen like Vashti, of noble birth, known to be educated in archery and hunting, decide to choose from the streets and sands, the lowest of the low, when all they have to offer is their bodies? (Because all they have is their bodies.)

  “What are you looking at?”

  Lara is back, her jaw red from a shave. She lies down on Esther’s bed. Esther lies next to her. “My tally marks,” she says.

  “They’re gone?” Lara is on her side, facing Esther.

  “Look!” Esther says, nudging Lara’s knee with her own—turn over. But Lara shakes her head. “I’m too tired. I believe you.”

  Esther watches as Lara’s eyes close—she observes the now familiar pattern of veins on her lids, the angry skin at her upper lip and jaw. Once, privately, Esther asked Mona why Lara wasn’t just sent home, a question that required every ounce of selflessness she possessed, for if Lara went, Esther would be alone. Mona answered as if she’d been asked where to find a chamber pot: It would be to admit failure, she said. Also, the king’s minister prefers a round number.

  Esther cups a palm around Lara’s chin and presses as Lara has shown her, rocking from the heel of her hand to the tips of her fingers. Lara is quiet for a while. Her face relaxes. “Thank you,” she says without opening her eyes. Her knee finds Esther’s and nudges it back. “Sorry about your marks. How far had you got to?”

  “Sixty-three.”

  “Counting today?”

  Esther thinks. The days run together. That was the reason for the marks in the first place.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  Other girls walk in, laughing and talking. One asks another why she’s limping and the girl says it’s from a foot treatment and then another says no, it’s because she’s drunk, and they laugh more loudly than before. Lara opens her eyes and rolls them and Esther giggles. They watch each other as the girls continue their banter, which turns soon enough, as Esther and Lara know it will, to Queen Vashti. She is the one subject no one tires of, the story that gets told and told because no one knows how it ends and everyone who tells it gets to arrive at a cliff, look around at her audience, and smile. Then the speculations begin.

  “But do you think she’s actually alive?”

  “No.”

  “Yes! They mated her with a donkey.”

  “No! They decapitated her.”

  “She was impaled.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My brother said—”

  “What’s he, the king’s minister? I thought you come from Farna.”

  “No, no, no. She was buried alive.”

  “Can you imagine?”

  “I think she was stoned.”

  “You think everyone’s stoned.”

  “Haaaaaaaa!” Everyone laughs. By now they’ve all either drunk opium or watched others drink it. Esther and Lara belong to the latter category. But they giggle, too. Lara jounces her chin in Esther’s palm and rolls her eyes back in her head, making Esther giggle harder.

  “I heard something different,” someone says. “From Mother Mona.”

  “Mona? She barely opens her mouth to eat. What did you do for her to make her talk?”

  “Shut up.”

  “What did she say?”

  “It’s not about her punishment. It’s about what she did.”

  “So?”

  Lara’s eyes are closed again. She thinks she’s sick—from the shaving, or the lack of sunlight. She says she feels like an old woman, and sometimes, like now, Esther thinks she looks like one, too. Her lips are so dry they’ve begun to peel—tomorrow, maybe, they will be slathered in yet another paste, made of a different animal’s hoof. Esther looks past her, out the one window, which gives a view of the palace wall and a narrow strip of purpling sky.

  “I thought it was leprosy,” says another girl.

  “That’s a myth, spread by the lepers.”

  “I heard that, too. She slept with the king’s minister! Obviously.”

  “She took a eunuch into the royal bed.”

  “And told him a state secret!”

  “My mother said she tried to poison the king.”

  “She said that, then sent you to be his queen?”

  No one talks for a moment. Esther watches a black bird with yellow wings light on the wall, then fly out of sight into the dusk.

  “Doesn’t anyone want to know what Mona said? She said he threw a weeklong banquet and, days in, asked Vashti to leave the women’s banquet and come appear in front of his men—in her crown.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you get it? In her crown. That means naked.”

  “How does that mean naked?”

  “That’s what Mona said. She said he asked her to come in her crown and she refused and—”

  “That’s stupid. Why wouldn’t she just ask first, like, what do you mean, in my crown? Maybe he didn’t mean naked. Maybe she heard what she wanted to hear.”

  “She’d want to hear that?”

  “Maybe she was jealous.”

  “But maybe he did mean naked.”

  “If I’d been her, I would have just done it.”

  “Me, too. If I knew I’d be killed otherwise?”

  “Who says she knew?”

  “I’d just do it.”

  “But you’re the queen! You can’t just do that, like a whore. You’d be punished.”

  “She was punished anyway.”

  “What do you know of queens?”

  “She had a tail. That’s what I heard.”

  “A tail?”

  “Like an ass.”

  “She couldn’t bear children, is what I heard.”

  “That’s not rumor, it’s true.”

  “Then maybe it’s also true that the king doesn’t have a cupful of royal blood. Vashti was the noble. He worked for her father, a high-up something but still a something.”

  “If that’s true, why would anything be up to him?”

  “Where did Mother Mona hear this about the crown, anyway?”

  As the girls veer into another story, Esther nudges Lara’s knee again. “You awake?”

  “Mm.”

  “Is it better?”

  “Mm.”

  Esther removes her hand from Lara’s face. “I think she knew everything,” she whispers. “She knew he wanted her naked and she knew what would happen if she
refused. She refused anyway. She got away. We’re going to get away, too.”

  Lara shrugs. “If us getting away looks like her getting away …”

  “No, silly! I didn’t mean that. I meant—”

  But Lara is rolling over. She nestles her backside into Esther’s front and lets out an emphatic, silencing sigh.

  WASHINGTON, DC

  VEE

  He with Gourds and His Wife with Cucumbers

  Dusk here, too. The senator and his wife preside at the top of their front steps in the weirdly warm November air, kissing and shaking, directing: men downstairs, women up. No one appears irritated by this arrangement, or even surprised, though in a crowd of professional expression-hiders it would be hard to tell. The light on the northern side of Dumbarton Street is fading. Vee watches the women’s powdered faces absorb the purple hue and her heart falls a little further. It’s already fallen from her earlier, button-snipping high because at the last second she faltered and knotted a white kerchief around her neck, and now it tumbles to a new low as she hears herself call Hello, good evening, hello! The women’s-group women will be gathering soon with their hard embraces. There will be none of this restrained smiling, no lacquered hair or painful shoes or chit-chat, just a headlong launch into self-realization. If Vee were there, they would applaud her button flushing and cringe as she described the women at her party.

  But soon, Vee forgets. The greetings complete, Alex goes inside, unsubtly chasing the suitcase man—did he even notice her missing buttons?—and Vee goes up and the rule, after all, is, Drink! and Vee’s upstairs parlor has been transformed with drapery and flowers and a jazz trio playing in one corner and golden-haired boys serving gin and tonics and punch on golden trays, and within half an hour Vee is floating around feeling just fine. The party is more charged than she imagined, the women smoking and circling each other like boxers, their dresses shorter, she thinks, than at the last party, and one woman, the wife of a congressman from Dallas, is wearing a white pantsuit and clearly a new kind of underwear, if she wears underwear at all, and four-inch heels when she’s already as tall as many men, and it’s scintillating, this pantsuit—it knocks something loose in Vee. She unknots her kerchief and drapes it over the curved elbow of a sconce and just like that, the familiar fixture is made exotic and Vee feels powerful again, like a queen. She accepts a lit cigarette and explores her altered realm, enjoying the prerogative of the hostess not to settle anywhere for long. Excuse me, she says, when she is bored by a conversation, excuse me, and moves on. A golden-haired boy takes her empty glass and hands her a fresh one, and she drinks deeply and laughs out loud, then finds that she is listening to a debate about the ERA, not about whether it will ever make it into the Constitution—that is the men’s subject, the tally; someone’s husband has heard that Maine may be next to ratify—but what difference it will in fact make. One woman contends that Roe v. Wade was far more consequential and the ERA merely symbolic, another that symbolic change comes first, a third that the opposite is true, that symbolic change placates the oppressed and precludes any real progress. Vee, drifting on, is lifted on a current of joy. It’s not only the gin, she thinks—though she must pause for a second to touch a nearby chair. It’s the fact that the women are arguing. It’s the way they jab and paw at each other as their cigarette smoke swirls through her parlor. This is where she belongs, she thinks, not among the women’s-group women with their circle talk and their red wine and unmade faces. They seem impossibly distant to her in this moment, as gauzy to her as their skirts, as ineffectual as their marijuana. Ugly, too. Vee floats past two more women in heated debate and thinks of the first time she met them, at a welcoming luncheon hosted by the Senate Wives Club. Vee was twenty-five, the other two older but as meek as she was; together they sat through the afternoon as quietly as dolls. Look at them now, wiggling at odd moments to the music and yelling to be heard. They are dazzling, these wives of politicians and company presidents, these tigresses who openly disagree with each other. They don’t protect each other’s feelings or pretend they don’t love their power, their direct means of manipulating the leaders of the free world. Vee’s grandmother was a governor’s wife and her mother was a senator’s wife and Vee is a senator’s wife. Why should she think she might be anything else? She drifts from one argument to another, stirred to a smoke-swirled paroxysm of pride and satisfaction, thinking, perhaps aloud, Look at these women! They are not cross-legged on couches talking about liberation. They are already liberated, and she is one of them.