The Book of V.: A Novel(7)
She crawls on them toward the largest tent, which is known to belong to some Gadols—the most legendary of all the magician families. She lifts the flap and crawls in.
* * *
The next morning, she joins hundreds of other girls in the courtyard outside the palace gates. Marduk is next to her but not hovering or blustering—he is shrunken, hands clasped behind his back, hunched like an old man. This morning, when the tent woke, the children—all except for Itz, who knew where she was going—laughed at her hair. Her aunt gasped and began to snip, trying to somehow salvage what was left, while Marduk turned a raging garnet. An hour later, as they walked out of camp in what Esther had assumed would be a quiet departure, for Marduk had not even allowed her to go to Nadav to tell him she was leaving, her uncle turned toward the tents and, as if possessed, began to shout: I am bringing Esther to the king! He will put a stop to our suffering! Esther watched in horror as families poured out of their tents to hear Marduk’s boast. How had saving his fig business turned into saving his people? She banishes him to her peripheral vision now. Most of the other girls have come alone. The sun rises quickly as they wait an hour, then two. A third hour passes without movement from the guards on the other side of the gates. A few girls faint. It is hotter than the day before, hotter than any day in recent memory. Or maybe it only feels that way because of the crowding? No one knows. They are girls. Everyone is afraid to complain too loudly so instead they whisper, and shift, making in sum a thundering hiss. Esther sets down her basket of figs. She stretches her fingers, rubs at the lines the handles have dug into her palm, ignores Marduk beside her. She touches her linen belt and the pocket her aunt has sewn to it, a small purse containing the comb and a pot of pomegranate paste. Esther intends to drop the paste—meant to color her lips—as soon as the gates are opened. She will toss it to the trampling feet, pick up her basket with purposeful clumsiness, letting figs spill in all directions, and begin to walk without so much as a glance at Marduk. She will resist in every way possible.
Then the gate opens. It’s a shock, though they’ve waited for hours—when it actually happens, there’s a collective gasp. The crowd surges, and Esther, pulled and pushed by the current, finds that she doesn’t have space to reach for her paste and discard it. And she cannot spill the figs—the basket is pinned to her leg by the tightness of the pack. She turns her head, but Marduk is already lost, far behind her now, and as she’s carried forward with the roar of the girls’ feet on the royal stones, she hears, or rather feels, a strange rattle in her throat. She is humming. It’s her aunt’s habit, taking abrupt root in her. There is no melody. It’s the vibration she’s after, the echo of herself that steadies her as she walks.
BROOKLYN
LILY
The Second Wife
She hums to ward off panic, time running out to pick up one child from school while the other, smaller one throws her boots against the apartment wall. No boots, no boots! They are such nice boots, not hand-me-downs like the rest but a gift from Lily’s middle brother, brand-new fuzz-lined boots in a pine-green suede. Lily would like to have such boots. She almost says this—If I had those boots I wouldn’t throw them against the wall!—but she knows it won’t help, and it’s mean, too, the kind of lording over that Lily’s grandmother did incessantly, according to Lily’s mother, Ruth, which is why, she says, Lily herself was rarely scolded as a child. Reparations, her mother jokes, though her leniency has eroded: now that Lily is grown, Ruth scolds her all the time, albeit passive-aggressively, for Lily has not become the type of woman she was supposed to become.
“I hope it fulfills you, taking care of the children all the time.”
“What a variety of sponges you have!”
“You were so driven when you were younger. But maybe you’re happier now. Are you happier now?”
Lily hums to ward off her mother’s voice, though it’s Ruth’s favorite lullaby she’s humming, Oh the fox went out on a chilly night?…?She squats behind her daughter, pins her under the arms, and attempts to work the boots back onto her feet, thinking of Rosie being herded into the cafeteria with the snotty, sorrowful clump of abandoned first-graders.
This child, June, whose preschool “day” ended hours ago, at 11:30 a.m., kicks and kicks. June, that warm and pliant month! Lily begins to sweat. Her coat is already on, her hat, her scarf. Oh the fox?…?June’s boot flies off again and Lily makes the mistake of going for it, which gives her daughter the chance to squirm away and run down the hallway toward the bathroom, where she will, in her newest favorite rite, rip off her shirt and throw it in the toilet. And he prayed to the moon?… Lily sheds her coat and runs after her, telling herself to take a breath, get a little perspective, no one will die here—at least not today. This isn’t war, or revolution. Right? If Ro sits in the sorrowful circle, so what? She’ll look at Lily with that look, the one that seems to see into her. But so what? So she waits a few minutes, so the world is not going to end, so lots of kids have it far worse, so she’ll learn resilience, and resilience is the latest?…?and the moon?…?As she rounds the corner into the bathroom, Lily reminds herself to smile. She doesn’t want to scare June. If she scares her, they will never make it out. Lily hangs her face in a grin. But June isn’t looking at her, she is deep inside her shirt, wrestling to get it off, and Lily makes the mistake of glancing in the mirror, where she sees that her grin is terrifying. She drops it, yanks off her slouchy wool hat with the hideous pink “ponpon” she let Ro talk her into, and stares at what she understands to be her face but which appears, under the stuttering, chemical fluorescence of their rental apartment’s bathroom light, to be that of an old, gray witch. Because, because, because, because, because! Because of the wonderful things?… The tune changes as Lily enters a kind of derailment in which time goes one way and she goes another, into her small makeup box—small so as to deemphasize its importance to the girls, though there is more makeup, much more, hidden in Lily’s underwear drawer. She begins to dab and swipe at herself, thinking of the other mothers, the women who will be at the party this afternoon, a party for Lily, to teach her to sew. Lily doesn’t know any of the women well. She didn’t intend for them to throw a sewing party in her honor. But the hostess, a woman named Kyla, overheard Lily talking to another mother at preschool pickup about how she wished she could make Esther costumes for Rosie and June for Purim this year, if only she knew how to sew. This was true, in a sense. Lily did wish that she could sew. But she wished it as she wished for sleek hair or a triplex apartment: certain it would never happen and not really caring. Sure, she had a vision of herself, by herself, at a table in front of an open window, sewing. But didn’t every woman? It was a fantasy she might once have tried to parse, in a paper, theorizing about its origins in popular and literary culture and arriving at an idea, or a way of articulating an idea, that was semi-original. There would be a lengthy bibliography, the production of which would give Lily a deep, almost rabid kind of pleasure.