The Book of V.

Lily was not young, but they were lucky and within a year Rosie came along, and soon Lily no longer seemed like an antidote to Vira’s mercurial moods. Also, she was even less young than before, she was forty-two, so they tried again and got lucky again and June came, and as the years passed and dwarfed Adam’s three-year marriage to Vira, her name didn’t make them laugh but caused them to feel exposed. They are no longer a beginning. They don’t talk about her anymore. But sometimes, without warning, she swings down and hangs in Lily’s vision, pries at her fears, throws a cruel light. Is Lily too pasty, too frizzy, too compromising, too bougie? Vira’s questions, perhaps, are not so different from Ruth’s. As Lily reaches into the toilet now and squeezes June’s shirt to avoid drippage, and elbows the shower curtain out of the way to avoid contamination, and tosses the shirt into the tub, she sees for the first time that her hands have grown sunspots. She scrubs at them. She is still scrubbing when June runs out and down the hall and Lily hears her call, “Momma, just one time?”

Lily grabs her hat and follows and finds June standing on the couch, holding The Book of Esther above her head like a trophy. Lily snatches the book away. Her attempt the previous night to throw it out was thwarted by the building’s porter, who, having found it in the trash, knocked on their door this morning, cheerful in his blue jumpsuit: One of your girls make a mistake! Lily wanted to scream. She hates the book, and not only because her mother gave it to the girls in her pushy, be-more-Jewish way—though she wasn’t even born a Jew herself; it was Lily’s father, long dead now, who’d been the Jew—or because the girls quickly grew obsessed with it. She hates the book because after going through three stages with it herself—she was entertained briefly, then bored, then bewildered—she has entered a fourth stage in which she recognizes that the embattled queen Esther, like Lily, is a second wife.

Lily drops the book into the dark crevasse behind the couch cushions. Tomorrow afternoon, but not before then, she will dig it out and leave her mother to read it to the girls. Every Thursday, Ruth comes over so Lily can have a little time to herself, though what Lily does with this time she cannot exactly say. Mostly she walks, sometimes through the park, sometimes through stores, touching things, feeling fizzy and weirdly burdened until the time has passed. Tomorrow, maybe, she will do something more productive: purchase supplies for the girls’ dresses, practice the stitches she will be taught tonight.

Ignoring June’s squeals, Lily throws her into the stroller and, with a knee between her legs, manages to strap her in, buckle the tiny, injurious buckles, and maneuver her out the door. June is shirtless and bootless but they make it, somehow, into the elevator, which causes Lily to remember that she was doing laundry in the basement earlier and that her wet sheets are still waiting in washing machines number one and number three—what will the super do with them this time?—but time is chugging along and look, she managed to grab a fresh shirt for June as well as the boots and also her own coat and hat and by the time the door opens into the lobby they are, a miracle, ready. June smiles sweetly, and Lily pushes them out into the yellowing winter sunlight, and they join the river of other women and strollers and children on Eighth Avenue, heading to this school or that, or home from school, or to laundromats or piano lessons or nitpickers or playdates. There are no men to be seen. It is 2016, four days into a new year. Lily breathes. The cold air wicks her sweat. The sky is blue, the bare trees make it appear bluer, the skin beneath her eyes appears smooth and bright. She will pick up her other child. She will go to the party. She will learn to sew.

 WASHINGTON, DCVEE

Ablutions

For obvious reasons, Vee chooses a bath over a shower. She is not naïve enough to believe that she can save herself with a good scrub, but it’s impossible not to try. And who knows? Her mother believed women could only get pregnant during the full moon, because this was the circumstance in which her own child was conceived and she was a particular kind of lucky person—drinker of gimlets up and down the New England coast, sailor, wearer of pearls—who assumed, despite all evidence to the contrary, the steady bestowal of her luck upon the world. Other people believe other things, about positions or douching or poison. No one seems to understand with any certainty how any of it works.

She runs the water scaldingly hot, pours in enough bubbles to give an elephant a UTI, opens her legs, and flutters her hands, trying to pull the soapy water into her pussy. Vagina, she corrects herself. This is what the women’s-group women insist on calling it. Vagina, she thinks dutifully, though the word disgusts her. She closes her eyes and envisions the water flooding her interior, reaching every crevice and crack, washing out any trace of Alex.

“What are you doing?”

The door makes a solid thwack as it flies open and hits the sink.

“Vee! Look at me.”

She doesn’t move. “I’m bathing,” she says in a delicious monotone. “You’re making the room cold.”

“The party starts in less than an hour.”

“I realize.”

“Well?”

“I’d be further along if you hadn’t attacked me.”

“Oh come on. You loved it. Are you getting out, or what?”

“I don’t know.” Vee sinks lower, up to her ears. Maybe she did love it, in the end. Still, she does not want a baby.

“No! Don’t get your hair wet! It takes you an hour just to do your hair!”

“Then I won’t do it,” Vee says. “Why should I, for