by Anna Solomon
The top drawer of her father’s dresser sticks, as it has for years. She tugs left, jiggles right, then reaches into the back for her sew-on-the-go box. Rosemary’s daughter, she thinks, is also a second wife, but a different kind, of a different era, with a face that shows everything. It showed Vee that the girl is sad, and confused, and possibly having an affair, and that she is unlikely to take the fabric for her daughters’ dresses to a tailor, as Vee suggested. Above all, it showed that she misses her mother. Surely she wanted Vee to offer her something, care for her in some way. And the closest Vee came was rote advice about a dry cleaner, a little tea, and a monologue about how the girl had scared her. Vee snapped at her about not needing company. That was only because it had taken her so long to grow out of needing it—mostly. But how could the girl know that?
Except for the scissors, which rest open and askew atop the other items, the sew-on-the-go box appears as it did when Vee’s grandmother gave it to her, the miniature cardboard spools waiting brightly in their rows as if the plastic container has fossilizing powers. Vee can’t quite grasp Lily’s determination to make the dresses herself—didn’t she understand that Rosemary stopped sewing for a reason? What was happening in Brooklyn these days?—but she will send the box via overnight mail, so that Lily has it tomorrow. It’s meant only for mending, of course, but she can use more than one color of thread; she can do it at her kitchen table where no one will see her struggle. It will be something.
Vee thinks of her own struggle with the buttons on her collar that afternoon, how much they had seemed to mean and how quickly they had come to mean nothing. How badly she had wanted to be a woman with conviction, and how little it seemed to matter in moments what her conviction was. She could have been a senator’s wife if she hadn’t seen through the illusion of their armor, or a women’s-group woman if she hadn’t found them embarrassing. She could have been a mother, like Rosemary, if only she had reached the morning she’d imagined she would someday reach, when she would without hesitation or regret toss her Pill down the toilet. But that morning had not come.
What Vee did not tell Lily—thank goodness!—is that it was Lily and her brothers who made Vee certain that she did not want children. This would sound cruel. But Vee did not feel cruelly toward Rosemary’s children. If anything, she felt grateful, as she eventually did toward Alex, because they had solidified for her what she had not yet been able to believe. They were cute. But their cuteness did not outweigh their chaos. And she never found herself asking them questions; she was not interested in knowing them.
Dr. Monmouth said it was different when they were your own. But Vee was decided. No babies, and no men—not at all with respect to the former, and with respect to the latter not for keeps.
More complicated had been women, and the question of how they would appear in her life. Dr. Monmouth did not once ask about that. Would Vee go on stealing from them, and advising them, and berating them, and being loved by them? (Yes.) Would she really get to know any of the ones in her circle, beyond knowing the music and books they liked, whether they preferred wine or weed, where they were born? (No.) Was she ever attracted to them, as the tabloids inferred? (She would like to kiss some of them. That was all.) Would she find a friend again? (Not like Rosemary.)
In the drawer of her writing table Vee finds a cushioned mailer and tape. She opens her laptop. Lily’s address is disturbingly easy to find—as her own must be, Vee realizes, for Lily to have found her. She makes a note to find out about changing that, then wraps the sew-on-the-go box in the Arts section, slips it into the mailer with a note, and thinks, No. She’ll have a courier deliver it today, so Lily can start tonight.
A half hour later a young man is at Vee’s door, in long shorts and a bright-yellow windbreaker. His neck is tattooed, his face bearded. He smiles, a big smile, his eyes sparkling as if he is glad to see her, and for a moment Vee feels as if they know each other. She smiles back. Then he and the package are gone, swallowed by the city, and Vee’s thumbs are rubbing at her fingers, feeling the creases the thick tape has left in them. Georgie pants behind her, waiting, and she says, “Yes. Let’s go for our nap.”
OUT FROM SUSA
VASHTI
Those Who Cannot Fly or Burrow Walk
By sunrise the city has disappeared. They keep walking. There is water, someone says, far but not too far—they can reach it by dark, if they don’t stop.
They are down to a few dozen, a diminishment that in the camp they could pretend against. They were not slaughtered in a way that could in a different millennium be tried in some kind of tribunal or court. A few boys who stole fruit off market-bound carts were hanged. A few girls were taken. Some men left. Mostly they died gradually, of hunger, thirst, heartache, heat. Exposed now, they see how minor they are. This and the salt whistling up off the sand urges them on.
Vashti watches the strangers who walk alongside her: the men with tents on their backs and the children hauling skins of water and the women slinging babies and pots and one woman, pitched forward as if against a wind, who is draped so heavily in necklaces strung with bones that she looks like a head atop a white mountain. Esther told her about this woman—the mother of Nadav.
The people are mostly silent, preserving their energy, even the small children on their fathers’ shoulders, the babies on their mothers’ breasts. Vashti carries all they will allow her to carry, a small skin and one blanket. She should protest, maybe. But her entombment has left her deficient in vitamins and muscle tone, and Baraz has sewn a small kingdom’s worth of gold into narrow channels in her robes, and she feels with every step on the verge of sinking to her knees.
She does not sink. As the sun slides across the sky she walks. They all do. They walk as they eat, walk as they drink. The men walk as they urinate. Only the women stop occasionally, squatting behind the pack. Vashti can’t bear the idea and so holds herself tightly until the bones woman walks up to her and says, “I can help,” by which she means she speaks Persian nearly as well as Vashti—her years of dealings with the palace have trained her well. “You’re the mother of Nadav,” Vashti says, and so learns the story: that Nadav married the second-in-line-after-Esther girl, the girl from the good family, and that when the girl gave birth to their first child she and the child died and Nadav left—he was one of the few who simply walked away and never returned. Vashti understands now why the woman leans forward as she does, why she appears to be perpetually scanning the far horizon. She asks the woman for her name so that she can call her something other than mother-of-Nadav, and the woman tells her Amira, and Vashti relieves herself behind the tower of bones that is Amira. They walk together. Later, Amira turns to her and asks what Esther’s child is called. And Vashti hesitates, because she knows the woman is thinking of her own grandchild. “Darius,” she says. And they are silent again, Amira thinking of her grandchild and Vashti of her own shock when Esther told her the boy’s name. Esther did not know, of course, that Darius had been the one who gave Vashti to Ahasuerus, that her son’s name was for the queen who had come before her. “I see,” Vashti said calmly, and Esther began talking of something else, but the boy had turned at his name—the boy looked at Vashti as if he saw through to her thoughts, saw everything.
By the second day, Vashti squats every chance she gets, whether or not she needs to relieve herself. To sweat is a shock. Her calves seize into knots. The skin on her hands and feet burns to the color of cinnabar. She cannot make words, cannot spend the energy to look toward Amira. She sees water where there is no water, clouds where there are no clouds, a cluster of tamarisk where there is only a dune. Her eyes feel singed. She closes them for long stretches, relying on the sand’s palpation to guide her forward. She staggers through passages in which she fears that none of this is real, that she will wake soon, in her hole, and others, when the sun flares especially hot, in which she finds herself longing to be in the ground again. She wants Baraz. Late in the afternoon, in a waking dream, she turns around. She approac
hes the palace gates and uncovers her head. Where is Ahasuerus? Will she be like Esther, going to their king unbidden? No. Esther waited on the floor and shook. Esther got only bones. Vashti is Vashti. She is her father’s daughter still. Isn’t she? Even without her crown? Here I am, she says. This is mine.
No one answers. She is herself and she is someone new. She is going out from Susa. Her sandals are full of sand.
MANHATTAN
VEE
In Only Her Diadem
Vee takes off her stockings and dress and slips into bed. But it takes her a while to fall asleep. She worries. She has seen the bike messengers, how they attach themselves by their shoes to the bike’s pedals and thread through the cars and trucks on the edge of death. Some ride with whistles in their mouths. Does hers have a whistle? At red lights, does he stop or does he shimmy back and forth, balancing in place? She pictures him in that precarious limbo, his neon-yellow sleeves puffing and deflating as he rocks, the muscles in his calves tensing. She wants to warn him against his refusal to obey gravity, the body, time. But soon, his rocking begins to soothe her, and she slips from worry to drowsiness. Georgie buries his nose in the crawl space beneath her knees, and Vee has the sensation that it is she who is riding the bicycle, she who is at the intersection on her pedals, not falling but rocking, shimmying, rising, as the noise and exhaust swell around her in a kind of salute. She returns the salute. Then the light changes, and she bursts forth, flying through the city like a myth.
SOMEWHERE NO LONGER NEAR SUSA
VASHTI
And All She’s Telling You May Be a Lie
Six days out it is decided they will rest. Some kind of water stretches out ahead, a wetly green brush, a scattering of trees. They have stopped before, of course—each time they come to water they drink and fill their skins. On a few occasions they’ve slept, curling for a few hours into a patch of shade or, at night, into the slope of a shallow canyon. But even in sleep they were preparing to walk again. Even on their Sabbath, after a debate, they walked.
Vashti is not the one who decides, of course. She does not rule here. She gets her news from Amira, the bones woman, who points, her necklaces rattling, and says, “See there? We’re making camp.”
And a while later: “Are you all right?”
Vashti nods. But Itz, up at the front, is looking back at her, straight at her, as he has not done since they left Susa, and in response her feet have begun to drag. She knows what he is thinking of—his words to her that first night, as they stood together watching the camp’s disassembly: “I don’t care who you are. When we’re gone from here, you’ll tell us everything.”
She was still dizzy then. But tonight, she knows, once the tents are made and a fire built, it will be time.
“You’ll have to translate for me,” she says, realizing. “Esther’s story.”
“Come,” answers Amira.
But Vashti is thinking. She thought of the story incessantly the first couple days of their march—what she would tell, what she would leave out. But then she stopped, maybe because she stopped believing that they would ever rest. Who was to say when a people was gone from the place they had been? It seemed to her that they might walk forever. So now she must work to recall what she decided. And now, too, she has walked farther with them. She must consider what she has come to know.
She begins to walk again but slowly; soon the people around her slow, too, adjusting to match her pace. They do so without looking at her, as they’ve done the whole way, ever attentive to her without admitting their attentiveness, shifting as she shifts, making sure she is never left on the flanks or behind. Whether they think they’re protecting her or protecting themselves, she can’t decide, or rather she comes to different conclusions on different days. They don’t trust her fully, that’s clear. And why should they? But now that they’re close to a destination she senses in them a new impatience with her, something that borders perhaps on contempt and makes her feel more acutely the demands of her task ahead. They left for her. Or this is what they tell themselves—as little fealty or fear as they should seem to owe her, this is what they need to believe. What will she give them in return?
It’s not her story they want, of course. She is only the queen who was banished so their part could begin. She warrants a mention, maybe two. Make way for Esther! They will think they want to know everything. So Vashti will have to make them think she is telling them everything. Esther the maiden in the night station. It will have to be a bowdlerized night station, bawdy but not dark, not depraved. Only as they imagine. Esther the one girl (Lara will be excised; Lara is too complicated) who will not paint her face or tower her hair, whose natural beauty is such that the king is instantly besotted. The king means well but does not have his own thoughts; the king wants above all to be king, to possess and declare; the king is a dupe. They will like this. He is not one of them. But Esther. She will have to do something very brave. Esther had in fact done something very brave, but it was not the thing they would want her to have done—never mind that she became the beast for them as much as for her. In the story, she has to do something that is entirely and explicitly for them, something that emphasizes her virtue (excise Baraz in the linen room, excise the minister’s advances, excise anything she may have wanted for herself) and above all proves her loyalty and her good luck. It will be the kind of outrageously good luck that can masquerade as wisdom, the kind of luck that results in triumphs a people can then believe they deserve.
Her trial will involve going to the king unbidden, Vashti thinks. Esther did that, and she will do it in the story. He is harmless, of course. But they don’t know that.
She slows further, to think. The story is like tendrils of twine she’s trying to braid into rope. Around her the people’s frustration at her pace is a palpable heat, and Vashti finds the uncle—Marduk—squinting back at her. Why he hates her she can only guess. Maybe he hates all Persians, or anyone who is higher than him, anyone who makes him feel as his brother did. Maybe he is simply exhausted. He has lost his wife, it seems, and maybe one child—it is hard to tell which children belong to which adults. Or maybe it’s simpler than all that. Maybe he does not like Vashti because she is not Esther. Vashti saw how his mouth gaped as she talked about his niece, how when she exaggerated the girl’s newfound plumpness, he flinched.
The story, she thinks, lengthening her stride again, will have to prominently and positively feature the uncle. It will begin with him. It did begin with him! The uncle with the idea of sending his niece to the king. The uncle will have to return, more than once.
As Marduk turns away and begins to walk, next to his tall son, the story grows and coalesces in Vashti’s mind, not the story Itz asked for but the one he actually needs. Itz will not be in the story. Itz needs a new story, one that has nothing to do with him. But the uncle wants the old story—not as it is but as it might have been. He wants to go back, and do better, and for everything to turn out well. He wants to slay the villain. The villain will be the minister, of course. (The villain is, in fact, the minister.) So Marduk will be a hero, too, along with Esther, Esther who will want what she has. (And she does now, in certain respects, doesn’t she?) Marduk and Esther standing atop Persia, grinding the minister’s head into the earth. Or maybe not that, exactly, but something like it. A gallows. A hanging meant for one of their own but delivered to another. Reversal, revenge. Yes. Vashti picks up her pace. And other things, she thinks, that would never happen but must happen. Things they don’t have the shamelessness for in life. The story doesn’t have to be believable, she realizes. It has to be the opposite—so unbelievable that they can believe in it. So far from what they know to be true that they can lose sight of the truth. Rivers of wine. Harlots. A pageant. A parade! Spies and riots and then a party. So much blood shed by their enemies they won’t know what to do but howl and dance. Yes. The story is cohering, the story that will become the book is coming into view. Forget the wandering, she thinks. Forget the hole. Burn the re
cords. Hurt with nothing but laughter.
BROOKLYN
LILY
The Spiel
From the wings the empty stage looks vast and dignified, its scuffed floors brought to sleekness by the precurtain light. In the beat before her actors enter, Lily feels almost absurdly stirred. No matter that it’s an amateur and melodramatic musical comedy they’re putting on, open to anyone willing to make a fool of themselves. Her heart thuds beneath her ribs. And when the curtain rises and Mordecai leaps out crying, “All hail!” Lily finds herself cheering as wildly as the audience, her hands raised high as she claps.
In the program she is listed as the spiel’s writer and director, and though in fact what she has contributed on the writing front has been quite minor, she did not correct the proofs. Beneath her name, in italics, is written: In honor of her mother, Ruth Burnham Rubenstein, the original. Before she got sick, unbeknownst to Lily—how much had been unbeknownst to Lily!—Ruth had volunteered to write and direct the spiel, and no one was able to bear replacing her before she died. So they waited, then waited a little longer. Then, the day after Lily’s visit to Vivian Barr, she received an email from Ruth’s friend Susan Levinson—the woman who spearheaded the beautiful platters at the memorial service—asking if Lily would fill the role.