The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  Lily replied, Sorry, I can’t. She did not say, I’m still too sad, I’m still trying to figure out how to make my daughters’ dresses, I still don’t even understand the story, I’ve got issues with it, etc. Thank you, she wrote, but surely there is someone else more qualified?

  Thirty seconds later, Susan Levinson wrote back. Perhaps you’re RIGHT. But we would LIKE for you to do it and I know your mother would have, too. Your mother was IRREPLACEABLE, we miss her. We MISS her. Also, you should KNOW that the thing is basically written, we’re just recycling it from another temple, so really all you need to do is tweak it in places, a few edits, then help the crew bring it off. They’re very enthusiastic just need a boss.

  Lily felt a little hurt then. They weren’t asking her to create the thing, just fix someone else’s creation. Then she worried. Boss. Was she capable of bossing? Then she reread the email and felt the pride and guilt the woman intended her to feel and said, Okay. Yes. Of course. Thank you.

  And then it had been wonderful! Susan met her at the rabbi’s office to show her the script from the other temple, and every wall was lined with books, floor to ceiling; even the back of the door was covered in books, and Lily felt a calm come over her as she sank into a chair and began to read. Then the rabbi walked in and asked if Lily would like to see the original book of Esther and Lily said of course, because what else could she say, and the rabbi—a tall woman in a ponytail and track pants—pulled down the book and said, “We haven’t met, but I loved your mother.” She walked Lily through the scenes, and the corresponding songs in the spiel, and Lily thought, This isn’t something a rabbi is needed for. She must really have loved my mother. And Susan Levinson kept giggling whenever they went over a funny part of the spiel. Then the rabbi pulled down some other books, full of things people had written about the book of Esther, interpretations and arguments and stories, and here is where Lily got lost for a while—she texted the sitter and asked her to stay a little longer.

  There was one story about how Vashti’s father, who’d been a king, was killed by a candelabrum falling on his head. And rabbis arguing about whether Esther was brought into her uncle’s house as a daughter or wife—the language was not clear, and why else would she be described as shapely and beautiful in the sentence before the one about Mordecai adopting her? Whole scenes of dialogue had been written imagining what might have happened offstage in the story, including one in which the king, Ahasuerus, finally sobered up, asked where Vashti was, and, when told he killed her because she refused to parade naked in front of his friends, responded: I did not act nicely. Then there were people arguing over which woman was really the heroine of the story: Esther saved her people, sure, but wasn’t she a coward first, and before that a concubine? Hadn’t Vashti, not through outright revolt but simply by saying no, been a pioneer, standing out as a sublime representative of self-centered womanhood? But Esther, someone else argued, was the epitome of virtue; when the king made his advances, she was passive, like the ground. No, argued someone else, Esther was not frigid, she had used her feminine wiles to curry favor with the eunuch Baraz and rise to queen and save her people and she had been right to do so. She had done what she had to do, just as Vashti had done what she had to do. Esther simply had better luck because she was a Jew and it was a story meant to make Jews feel good! She was like Judith, except that in Esther’s case she got a lot of help from Mordecai. It was too bad, someone else argued, that Mordecai had to play such a big role. As for Vashti, wasn’t she less a character than an absence? Wasn’t it her absence that made the story possible? Sure, but she was also an anti-Semite, according to someone else—she beat her Hebrew servants. Hunh? Come on, wrote someone else. The whole story was an excuse for a carnival, and carnivals were safety valves that reaffirm institutional control. Wait, said someone else. Look at how God isn’t mentioned, not even once. Wasn’t Esther just another version of Scheherazade? Did you never wonder what happened to the maidens who were not chosen?

  Lily had to tear herself away when her watch beeped. And when she was home and spooning mac and cheese onto the kids’ plates, she was still thinking about all she had read, and what she might do with it.

  She hasn’t figured that part out yet. The temple members now side-stepping and singing “Respect”—Vashti’s ballad, of course—will perform basically the same spiel their corollaries performed at a synagogue in California last year, based on the summer of 1967. Ruth had already adapted it a little, and Lily adapted it a little more, writing in a few new lines and one new character, daughter to the wicked minister Haman, who according to one of the rabbi’s books may have accidentally dropped a bucket of feces on her father’s head while he was parading Mordecai around Susa. Lily is proud of the ditty she rearranged for this particular moment: Well, here’s some poop on you / You’re gonna choke on it, too / You’re gonna lose that smile. But mostly she left the script Susan handed her intact and kept what she read in the rabbi’s office for herself. For now.

  * * *

  When Esther enters, after Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love,” the audience whistles and hoots. Vashti has been disposed of, Haman has received his opening boos; now the real show begins. The crowd is boisterous due to the many Tom Collinses that Lily poured from pitchers as people streamed in. As Esther sings her rendition of “Different Drum,” Lily scans the sea of glinting tin groggers and plastic cups. Adam and June and Rosie are in the third row: Rosie on her knees, her dress so bright it could be seen from space, June on Adam’s lap. The girls hold not only groggers but also fairy wands from their personal collections, which they insist Esther would want, and gawk in dazzled adoration up at the “real” Esther, a recent college graduate named Blossom Cohen who bops and swishes and flips her long hair as the congregation—many of whom have known her since she was an infant—shimmies along with her. The congregation imagines she is like her name, cheerful and innocent. But Lily has watched Blossom sneak out of rehearsal to smoke weed, and heard her confide to Haman’s wife that she’s pretty sure she has HPV and may never find anyone to marry her. Never mind that Haman’s wife is being played by a thirtysomething woman whom everyone knows has been twice left by fiancés. The girl, like a girl, does not think of the woman. I’m adulting! Lily heard her say once as the two headed off to smoke, and it took Lily a moment to realize that she wasn’t talking about the vape in her hand but the fact that she was acting in a Purim spiel.

  Now Blossom, aka Esther, parades around the stage with a bunch of other maidens singing their rendition of “Piece of My Heart” as Ahasuerus—hands on his hips, fake eyebrows sternly furrowed—pretends to hem and haw. Which one will he choose? June and Rosie point and shout. Adam’s mouth is open, his absorption in the show so replete that when a rogue stage light cuts across him the old scar on his cheek looks alive. Last week he was promoted to regional director for East Africa, the step up he’s been waiting for, and the depth of his relief, the palpable weight of it in his body, in their apartment, has been a shock; Lily understands now how scared he was before. “Esther!” cry June and Rosie, waving their wands at Blossom. Of course. Lily has indoctrinated them, there is that, but also: if he doesn’t choose Esther, how will they come to be? As if on cue, in the opposite wing across the stage, Lily’s Vashti winks at Lily and Lily winks back, thinking for the space of the wink of Vira, then finding herself once again swept up in the joy of the thing. She helps one of the unchosen maidens change into her raggedy fasting-Hebrew costume, sings along to Haman’s “Purple Haze” (Excuse me while I kill some Jews!), and accepts a glass of wine handed to her by Haman’s wife, who has smuggled a bottle backstage.

  Then something flickers toward the back of the audience. Not a cup or a grogger. Not something anyone else would notice. But Lily notices. It’s Vivian Barr’s red hair. It’s Vivian Barr, sitting at the very end of the very last row.

  Lily draws back into the wing. She is conscious suddenly that she is tipsy, conscious that Haman is repeating a verse and that
the sound system is crackling. What is Vivian Barr doing here? She has no idea that Lily is directing the spiel. The last contact they had came through a courier: a tiny sewing kit Vivian Barr sent after Lily’s visit.

  Lily inches forward to peek again at her mother’s old friend. She sits somewhat stiffly, not rocking or clapping, no drink or grogger in her hand. A stranger here. And perhaps warier than another stranger might be, Lily thinks, remembering how Vivian Barr said your father, you know about Lily’s father being Jewish, and how her voice had changed when Lily asked why she hadn’t reached out to Ruth. Do I look like I need company?

  And yet, Lily thinks. She’s here.

  And here is Esther again, too, entering the king’s chambers without his permission, winging her hippie skirt like a flamenco dancer. And here comes Haman, leering, and dopey Ahasuerus, looking confused, and then, in another Lily addition, Mordecai leaping out for a moment to remind the audience to keep drinking, for it’s been commanded that they be so drunk by the end of the spiel that they can’t tell the difference between him and Haman. “Good or bad!” he cries. “Cunning or true! Who knows? Not you!”

  Lily wonders if Vivian Barr can feel Lily watching her.

  Clearly she knew that Lily would not take her advice to go to a tailor; hence the sewing kit. Did she also know that Lily would ignore her advice about not going back to the friend who had first helped her, to make the dresses?

  Hello I am sorry to have been out of touch for so long I hope you can forgive me went Lily’s text to Kyla, because she feared any pause for punctuation would cause her to lose her courage. I wonder if you would still be willing to help me with my daughters’ dresses I have the fabric and the patterns I’ve chosen very simple ones what do you think?

  Too complicated, Vivian Barr had said, of returning to Kyla. Thinking of Rosemary, maybe, or other failed friendships, or women in general.

  But she had been wrong. Within a few minutes came Kyla’s reply: Of course, and please don’t worry. I’ll be home tonight. Come after 8:30, just text when you’re nearby instead of ringing, kids will be asleep. It was 8:00 already and Adam had just gotten home but he said, Of course, go, just as he had said, Of course, direct the spiel, understanding already what she was only beginning to understand herself. And Lily thought, that’s all right. That happens sometimes. It does not mean I’m a child. It means only that he has imagined what it might be like to be me. He sees that as the emptiness starts to lift, other tides have begun filling in. She took his encouragement, Of course, not as fear, but love.

  With this softness in her heart she walked to Kyla’s. And when she got there, to Kyla’s clean kitchen, all that ran through her was gratitude. Kyla’s husband was out, again, Kyla said blackly, and Lily, unsure what Kyla wanted—Kyla of the perfect life—did not become paralyzed but said what her instincts told her to say, which was, Good thing I’m here, and Kyla laughed. And Lily unpacked her bag, laying out the fabrics, and the patterns, and the box Vivian Barr sent her. Maybe it’s weird, she said, but I’d like to include some of this thread in the dresses. Can that work? Lily was doing this not for Vivian Barr but for her mother, who once upon a time had loved Vivian Barr and, later, loved Letty Loveless. She had used Letty Loveless, Lily had come to see, as a source of courage, so that she could make the choices she wanted to make and not clean the things she did not want to clean—in that sense, Vivian Barr aka Letty Loveless had not ruined but saved her mother. Kyla said yes. They could use that thread in the collars, sew those by hand. She waited until they were sewing—Kyla at Lily’s back for a while and then, by the second dress, Lily mostly on her own—to ask if the thread had been Lily’s mother’s. And Lily told her the story.

  Now, a couple rows away from Vivian Barr, Kyla and her kids brandish their groggers like lassos. It’s their first spiel. Closer to the front, her mother’s friend Susan Levinson laughs, while in the aisle the rabbi dances in a Wonder Woman costume, while not far from her, in the third row, Lily’s daughters’ dresses glow. When Lily presented them at last with their costumes, they smiled and thanked her. They were oddly serene. It was clear they had expected the dresses, that they never doubted Lily’s story that she was making them. They bounce in their seats now, unthinking, aglow. It doesn’t matter to them that Lily still doesn’t really know how to sew, or that the love she feels for them, so blinding and pure in moments, is obscured from her in others, or that she kissed a man who is not their father, that though she will not kiss him again, will not blow up her life—she does not want to blow it up, this thing she’s made with Adam, begun in that bar, this thing with holes they will never patch; she wants it—she may think of him, and desire him.

  To a child, maybe, like the child Lily once was, looking at Vivian Barr, there can be only one story at a time.

  She will tell her daughters the truth, Lily thinks. Not yet, but sooner than her mother told her. Not the details, but the gist. She will tell them: The type of woman you imagine yourself becoming does not exist.

  As the spiel reaches its finale, the audience gets to its feet. Even Vivian Barr rises, clapping. After the pageant, Lily will introduce her to the girls. Rosemary’s granddaughters. She will make Vivian Barr a stranger no more, and show her the collars, made with the thread she sent. Perhaps you’ll make better use of this than I? she wrote in her note. Here it is, Lily will say, holding their collars together, turquoise and fuchsia for Rosie, black and white for June. No strand was long enough on its own but together they added up. Thank you.

  She means this. And not only for the sewing kit, but for Vivian Barr’s postscript, too: I did imagine she might read my letters. Of course I did. And for the thing that has stayed with Lily since she left Vivian Barr’s apartment, not yet coherent but cohering: an understanding of Ruth as something not solid but assembled, built of everything she could grab hold of. A Letty Loveless column here, a gathering of women there, a burning cross, a whiff of perfume on her husband’s collar, a stray want she could not name, a time of grief. Like a nest, maybe, without a bird—Ruth had to be and build herself at the same time. So of course there could be no talk of sewing, or of Rosemary. A thing put together could always come apart. But Lily, because she did not know any of this, and because Ruth could not tell her, because to tell her would have been to expose her own construction—Lily, who was formed in that nest, believed it had always been. And for so long her own sense that she is still in a state of assembly has made her ashamed.

  Soon all Lily can see are the children rushing the stage for the pageant. They surround the cast in a swarm, Vashti in her short skirt and Ahasuerus with his Burger King crown and Haman’s daughter with her bucket and Haman with his wickedness and Esther, too, who merely looks like Blossom, the twenty-two-year-old who does not know what will happen next in her life. But who does know? If Lily has been waiting for some kind of transformation, she understands now that none is coming. No new Lily, only herself, moving forward, a little less ashamed. The actors run offstage, leaving the children in their costumes, Esthers and Mordecais and Elsas and Batmen, prancing and yowling beneath the lights, waiting for direction.

  It’s Lily, hiding in the wings still, who is meant to direct them. And she will, in a moment. She is watching her daughters dancing in the dresses they envisioned, leaping and pouncing with their wands outstretched, making sparks fly. They have forgotten Esther. They are simply themselves, ecstatic. Soon, she will step out, so they can see her.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not exist without two books that came first: the original Book of Esther, in all its bawdy splendor, and The Hours, whose structure helped inspire my own. Thank you to whoever dreamed up the former, and to Michael Cunningham for writing the latter.

  I’m deeply grateful to the friends and sister who read drafts of this book, in part or whole, and provided invaluable feedback. Thank you to Clare Burson, Eleanor Henderson, Marisa Silver, Jessie Solomon-Greenbaum, Rachel Wolff, Gina Zucker, and most especially to Lisa Srisuro,
who arrived early and returned as the closer in the final stretch.

  To the people who know far more than I do about all manner of things—from the cost of bathroom renovations in 1973 to international humanitarian relief operations today—and who generously shared their expertise and perspective, I offer my humblest thanks. You are Graham Brawley, David Clatworthy, Anne Deneen, Lika Dioguardi, Sarah Ellison, Dr. Ronnie-Gail Emden, Daniel Holt, Kathy Jones, Sheryl Kaskowitz, Aaron Kuriloff, Danielle Lazarin, Iraj Isaac Rahmim, Geoffrey Richon, Dr. Keren Rosenblum, Dr. Dave Shultz, Ellen Solomon, and Michelle Zassenhaus. A special thanks to Amy Gottlieb and my fellow writers in Amy’s wonderful Jewish Sources, Literary Narrative class at Drisha Institute. And to Rabbi Rachel Timoner, who opened her office and books to me when I knew almost nothing. Now I know a little more than nothing. Thank you for showing me possible paths.

  Numerous texts provided inspiration and information. Those I found myself returning to include Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief by Paula Vogel; The JPS Bible Commentary: Esther by Adele Berlin; Surfacing by Margaret Atwood; Spinster by Kate Bolick; Lilith & Her Demons by Enid Dame; Ancient Jewish Novels, edited and translated by Lawrence M. Wills; The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan; The Book of Esther by Emily Barton; Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister; and last but perhaps the most influential and the source of “shit and string beans,” The Women’s Room by Marilyn French.