Vee passes her drink to Mrs. Flint. “Well.” She meets Suitcase Wife’s eye, then, emboldened, crosses the room with a swagger. “Here I go!” she calls. “Wish me luck, ladies! If I’m not returned within an hour, promise you’ll come to my rescue!”
BROOKLYNLILY
A Different Kind of Party
Atop a kitchen island gleams the party’s centerpiece: a massive turquoise sewing machine from the 1960s. The hostess, Kyla, repeats the vintage as each guest arrives, explaining that the old machines are superior, if you treat them right. This one was her grandmother’s, she adds, and all the women ooh and ahh at this, Lily included, though the machine fills her with fear. She imagined this would be a needles-and-thimbles kind of sewing party. She thought she might cut out some pieces of cloth, maybe learn to sew the edges to prevent fraying, then wrap them toga-style around the girls and call it a day. But Kyla has laid out patterns, which as far as Lily can tell—who knew sewing patterns were in code?—appear to be for dresses that entail sleeves, and necklines, and in one case a pocket. Lily wants to whisper: Since when did Esther have a pocket on her dress? But she doesn’t know any of the other women well enough to trust they’ll take to her snarkiness, and she’s realizing, as they begin to pepper her with questions, that they know each other very well. It’s palpable, the togetherness of women who’ve stood around like this on countless other occasions, in other kitchens. They are a group. Lily, too, has a group, but she and her friends have never invited a stranger into their midst, their wine isn’t as good, the atmosphere they create isn’t as cheerful, and they don’t have dedicated playrooms like Kyla. On the other hand, Lily’s group includes women of various shapes, colors, and hair textures. And they are skilled at using all these facts, from the mediocre sauvignon blancs that ostensibly allow them to spend money on more important things to the squished apartments to the au naturel hair, to make them feel superior—more authentic, somehow? more real?—to women like these. These women, a couple of whom appear no older than thirty-three, which would make them thirteen years younger than Lily, ask Lily with near jubilance how long she’s been in the neighborhood, and how old her kids are, and whether she works, and what her husband does, and Lily, overwhelmed and self-conscious, answering as best she can, wonders at how easy it would be, if you mixed up these women and Lily’s women and stood them in a line, to tell which ones belong to which group. It’s a depressing thought, because it suggests that they are all basically in permanent uniform and that their superficial differences—these women’s blown-dry hair and diamond rings, etc., as opposed to Lily and her friends with their chunky bracelets and scuffed boot-clogs like something out of Heidi—actually portend deeper ones, like what they do with their pubic hair, and deeper ones still, like what they think and feel. One of the women, upon hearing that Lily used to teach at the city colleges, says, “That’s so cute!” and Lily, feeling mean and small, excuses herself to go check on the children, half hoping one of them will be sick so that she’ll have to take them home, but she finds them cheerfully rolling and cutting homemade Play-Doh with the other children at a low, large table probably made in Finland. Ro looks up first, then June, both girls with almost absurdly happy expressions on their faces, and Lily feels the kind of deep, unadulterated love for them that she experiences when they are asleep, or when she cups the fat arch of June’s foot in her palm, or when Ro lets her hold her as they read. This feeling, in this moment, feels as if it could be felt eternally, if only she lived in this apartment and had this table and this particular bespoke Play-Doh. Lily smiles and waves until, in unison, like happy Finnish cows, her daughters turn back to their work.
In the kitchen, Kyla asks Lily to give everyone a brief primer on Purim—Poor-eem, she pronounces it, like Adam used to—which causes Lily, who feels at once defensive of and embarrassed by her tribe, and unreasonably irritated by being, apparently, its sole representative at this gathering, to issue forth a brief and conflated account of the holiday and the story that sounds something like “lots of drunkenness and misogyny but also female worship, which you could argue is a form of misogyny, and a so-so king and good queen and evil side guy, celebrated with a play and a big carnival and a pageant and triangle-shaped cookies, and also there’s a thwarted genocide of the Jews …” By the end, Lily is so turned around she adds a final, ambiguous punch line—“It’s kind of a burlesque?”—and then Kyla, undaunted, begins introducing the women to the machine, identifying its various parts and what they do. Lily is hungry. In her nervousness she has drunk too much wine. But the food—cheese and crackers and nuts and something that looks like pickled broccoli—has been laid out at the opposite end of the kitchen, so that to get to it you must walk away from the group and make a thing of wanting it.
As Kyla talks—the machine has many parts, including one called a feed dog—Lily’s fear mounts. Where are the thimbles? Where is the softcore sewing party? But then Kyla is turning to her and looking deep into her eyes, so deeply that Lily notices the remarkable blue of Kyla’s irises and wonders if she wears colored contacts, and saying, “You’re up first, Lil; you’ll do great,” as if they’ve known each other forever, and her voice is quiet now, and tender, as if she senses Lily’s struggle. Lily thinks of the word cerulean,
