Vee’s face is done. She lifts her eyebrows to see how she will appear in conversation, checks her teeth, her nails, the angle of her necklace, and so on, a series of minute actions as natural to her as swallowing. In this sense, Vee is ancient—she belongs to the millennia. She blows her hair, unpins it, sprays it, pinches it to relieve the slight helmet effect. She has her finger on her perfume mister when Alex walks in.
“Ready?”
His brow is filmed in sweat, his jaw already showing signs of stubble. He is afraid again, she thinks. And he is handsome. He is an objectively handsome man who knows how to wear a suit, his thighs big enough to fill out the trousers, his hands strong, well veined. She kisses him, hard, then turns away, and Alex zips her, and their wordlessness makes her happy, because this, after all, is the point. Isn’t it? They will throw their parties. They’ll have sex again, drunk and a little wild, but this time with a condom. Maybe he’ll tie her to the bed—he has done this a couple times—and Vee will come without his needing to touch her. She’ll go crazy, and in the morning the house will be put back together and they’ll sit in the dining alcove and read the papers over coffee and marmalade toast.
Alex spins her around. He nods. He toggles a finger at the buttons on her collar, which she has left open.
“Button up,” he says.
“I like it this way.”
“Me, too,” he says. He cups his hands around her breasts and squeezes. “Button up.”
Vee turns back to the mirror. “Get out.”
Behind her, Alex picks up her empty glass and smiles. He assumes Vee is joking, even flirting, and for a moment she doesn’t know herself. Maybe she is joking. She wants it to be so, wants to lift again into their moment of grace. She didn’t think hard about the buttons. She could say this, and point out that her necklace, a gift from Alex, is more visible this way, but his eyes meet hers and Vee sees that his position is firm: He wants her to look like a virgin. He wants to defile her and he wants her to be new, again and again and again.
“See you downstairs in five,” he says. “Buttoned.”
Vee buttons her collar. The bourbon gnaws at her stomach. She stares at herself. She feels like a piece of ice in a shaker. You look perfect, her mother would say, and Vee can see this, that she is well armored and lovely, but it doesn’t solve her rage, and now she is digging through her stocking drawer, all the way to the back, filled with an absurd and mounting fear: What if it’s been stolen?
She digs frantically, her nails scraping wood, until she finds it: her sew-on-the-go box. “Every girl needs one,” her grandmother said when she placed it in Vee’s hands sixteen years ago, and Vee has brought the box everywhere, to college and on every trip she’s taken, but she has never opened it, and for a second the profound, undisturbed order visible through the clear plastic top—three white cardboard spools, each neatly wrapped in six colors of thread—makes her hesitate. Then she pries off the top. She tosses the thread aside, pulls up a layer of paperboard, and finds a thimble, a packet of needles, a needle threader—for cheaters, her mother would say—and a miniature pair of scissors. She is looking for something else, a thing one uses to remove thread, a ripper, it might be called, but the box is empty now, so she grabs the scissors and with them returns to the mirror.
Vee works swiftly, unbuttoning her collar and snipping off each button. She uses her fingers to flick out the remaining thread. Then she flushes the buttons down the toilet and goes to join Alex for the welcoming ceremonies.
SUSAESTHER
More Serious Ablutions
This is where belief may prove difficult—the lengths to which the girls go to prepare themselves for the king. They don’t just soak in oil for a few hours, or exfoliate their heels with razor blades, or spend days practicing the art of hair towers. They spend months doing these things, scraping and scrubbing and oiling and perfuming though it’s never clear, on any given day, if this will be the day that the king at last wants to see them. A heel that’s shaven to the pink needs shaving again two weeks later. One of the Greek girls compares their lot to Sisyphus, and the mood is a little like that; after their initial excitement—they are the final forty, whittled down from hundreds—the corner of the palace where they’re kept has grown heavy. Rumors have trickled in about other night stations, higher stations, where the women are trained in harp and dancing, and higher still, where the women are made wives and given apartments and servants and courtyards where they can walk outdoors. Some stations are moved, in chariots, when the court moves north for summer. Not this one. Half-underground, it is perhaps the lowest; the girls’ only duty is to prepare.
Esther tracks the days on the wall beside her bed, scratching lines into the stone with her thumbnail. She is up to sixty-three the morning she returns from the hand room—where she’s been chastised for her ragged thumbnail—to find her tally marks rubbed away. Swallowing tears, she turns to face the room. “What do you know
