The Book of V.: A Novel(8)
But to actually sew?
She should never have spoken the wish aloud. It was an empty frill of after-school chatter. Lily knows that she will struggle at sewing, just as she struggles at disconnecting tiny Lego pieces. But before she could take it back, Kyla had invited her and the other mother and some other women, too. Why not make it a party? she’d said. I’ll have wine, and snacks, and she will, Lily knows, because Kyla is always wearing boots with heels, even at the playground, and she sent real, paper invites to the thing: A Sewing Fête!
What does one wear to a Sewing Fête? Not baggy underwear, certainly. Not sweat.
Lily, smearing concealer under her eyes, spots a new gray hair in her left eyebrow, tweezes it, and feels instant remorse, not only for the hole she has made but for the pain. It’s enough to make her eyes smart with tears and to make June, whose shirt is off now but still in her hand, think that her mother is crying. She wipes her face with her shirt, as if demonstrating, then offers it to Lily, and Lily, who has again forgotten to stock the bathroom with tissues, accepts and wipes her eyes, remembering too late the concealer she just applied.
“Momma?”
But time! After a five-minute grace period, the school asks for a “donation” of a dollar a minute to cover care. It’s not required—the school is public, after all—but suggested, and the understanding is that you pay if you can, and Lily can in the sense that doing so will not make her homeless, and her daughter has the boots to prove it. So if she’s twenty minutes late? Fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars is a cocktail shaken by a man in a vest, or take-out pad thai plus a couple spring rolls, or overnight diapers for a month, or one-sixth, almost, of a haircut in Park Slope, which is where Lily lives, of course. It is a lot and not very much, though if you fail regularly in this way it becomes, undeniably, a lot. Besides, there is simply no good reason for Lily to be late. She begins to hum again, thinking of Adam in his office, his youthful messenger bag leaning against his aging calf, talking and typing and directing and greenlighting hygiene drops for families that don’t have toilets, let alone lights capable of sputtering, and everything else he does to keep money climbing into their bank account and set himself up to be promoted, not to mention help people. Adam and Lily are trying to save to buy an apartment so they can stop paying through the nose for rent, but they’re paying through the nose for rent so it’s impossible to save—an old story—and then there are things like late pickup, or the occasional parking ticket, also Lily’s fault as she’s in charge of moving the car from place to place to outrun the street cleaners, that eat up their nonexistent “cushion.”
Lily and Adam have discussed her going back to work. But their conversations always circle back to the same grim reality: adjunct teaching—and adjunct is all she’ll get within a hundred miles of New York City—barely pays enough to cover childcare. They know because Lily did have a gig for a while after Rosie was born, at a college up in Westchester, and there was one day alone, when a snowstorm turned her usual ninety-minute return drive into a five-hour highway crawl, that ate up one-tenth of her semester’s salary in babysitting costs and gave her mastitis. Then, when she was seven months pregnant with June, she finally got a campus interview for the kind of tenure-track job she’d once assumed she wanted, at her alma mater, Grinnell College, a job that paid nearly as much as Adam was making then, but in Iowa, which meant it paid the equivalent of three times as much. But the instant she finished the last of her two days of lectures and talks and interviews and lunches, knowing that she had aced every one, knowing that even in the grotesquerie of her “workplace” maternity outfits—the least offensive ones she could find still involved ruffles and Easter hues—she came across as intelligent, committed, and not insane, Lily knew she was done with academia. When she was offered the job, she took twenty-four hours to make sure, then turned it down before telling Adam, who flushed and said, Really? Wow. Congratulations. Really? He was happy, because he wanted to stay in New York, but he was visibly frightened, because he wanted her to be happy. Are you sure? he asked for days. Are you sure you won’t regret it?
To her mother Lily lied. She told her the job had gone to someone else. To which Ruth said, It’s because you’re pregnant! You should sue. To which Lily replied, to end things, I just might.
“Momma, your cock?”
Lily’s watch—her “clock”—is beeping. It’s her first digital watch since 1984, a gift from the kids, i.e., Adam, who insisted that Ro and June picked it out but also took it upon himself to walk Lily through the device’s many alarm functions.
How long has it been beeping?
And if it hasn’t been beeping for a long time now, why not? Shouldn’t it have been beeping half an hour ago? She must have set it wrong, which means she’s lost her ability to perform basic math. Or maybe she didn’t mean to set it at all, and the fact that it’s beeping now, at the moment when she should be arriving at school, is merely a coincidence. Ha.
“Momma?”
Lily presses buttons, and the watch stops beeping. She wonders, not for the first time, if there is something wrong with her that she can’t deal with what is in fact a completely manageable situation of her own choosing. She is not captive. Sure, if she had some extra cash or could give up those cocktails she might sign up for a fiction or playwriting workshop, try her hand at actually writing one of the stories that rumble around in her head. But she has two healthy children, an apartment free of leaks and mold, a park nearby, no hunger, no rickets, no physical abuse. An excess of education. She can buy what she needs and vote and get an abortion (for now, in this part of the country) and is married to a man who likes to say it makes him happy to see her happy. Every day, it becomes clearer that most men are pure dick; they’re selling ten-year-old girls and stealing and raping even younger girls and drugging women and reaching their hands up women’s skirts and tugging on choir boys and forcing people to look at their stuff, which makes Adam, in comparison, a very good man. If, for instance, Lily and June wind up thirty minutes late to pick up Ro today, and owe twenty-five dollars, and Lily were to tell Adam, Adam would tell her to get her shit together, but then, because he does not want to be a man who says things like that to his wife, he would kiss her and insist he’s happy, because she’s happy. This was the plan, he likes to say. Enjoy this time. Enjoy the girls. Enjoy me.