The Book of V.

presence more than a person, a solidity who never took off his shoes except to bathe, sleep, or swim. She cannot remember him talking to her mother, even to argue. Instead she remembers the sensation of being with him; she remembers feeling when she was with him that authority existed, that whether she liked it or agreed with it it would continue to exert and produce itself. She remembers feeling comforted by this. She can see now that this feeling was a delusion, an internalization of the patriarchy, or perhaps the patriarchy itself, but that doesn’t change the fact that she still thinks of her philandering father, dead for a quarter of a century, as a comfort. Whereas her mother, her mother who is here with her, who has always been here, who she wishes could stay here forever—with her mother it is not as simple.

“So did it work?” she asks.

“No. He just went on sleeping on his back and snoring. It was like he couldn’t feel the balls at all. I was devastated.”

“That sounds a little dramatic.”

“Does it, Lily?” Ruth takes a long sip of tea. Her swallow is audible, and painful sounding, and Lily is sorry. Her mother rarely talks about her own feelings, she mostly pushes other people to reveal theirs, but she just confessed to Lily devastation, and Lily shot her down. “How did you even manage that?” she asks, trying to rewind. “How do you get tennis balls into a shirt?”

“You need two shirts. One larger than the other, and you sew … it’s almost like a duvet? But instead of down, you’re sewing in tennis balls.” Ruth stops, seeing Lily’s confusion, then says: “I was a very good seamstress once.”

How Lily did not until this moment register that her mother has been talking about sewing, she doesn’t know. Ruth’s face is blank, her lips in the thin line she used to make when she was teasing the children, not letting a smile show. But Lily can’t tell if she’s teasing now, or if she’s oblivious, if her sickness is starting to blunt her. She knows that Lily has been struggling to make the girls dresses, or rather struggling with the fact that she’s not making them. Lily has told her how a week after her first lesson, she missed her second date with Kyla. Lily was in the hospital with Ruth, in fact, when she was supposed to be ringing Kyla’s bell. Kyla understood, of course. Kyla was sympathetic and concerned and asked how she could help and then, when Lily, overwhelmed, failed to respond, Kyla simply delivered a meal to Lily’s building. She didn’t buzz the apartment, didn’t even demand that interaction, just left it with the doorman and disappeared. And each week she has checked in. No pressure, just want to remind you I’m here whenever you’re ready …

But Lily is not ready. And Ruth knows this. She knows—Lily believes she must know—that Lily cannot go more than an hour without thinking of Ruth, that to go to Kyla’s would seem a betrayal. Ruth has to know this. She has told Lily the dresses are a torture device she’s invented for herself, that she should give up, use scarves, buy something online. And yet, without a hint of apology, she casually mentions she can sew? Not only that, she called herself a seamstress. Lily is mortified. How could Ruth have let her go on about the dresses—at one point Lily even described the machine parts to her, as if describing a new planet to the earthbound!—and said nothing?

“Lily,” her mother says.

“Yes?”

“Do you want my help?”

“With what?”

“The dresses you want to make. You could buy a used machine, set it up on my desk. Or we could do it by hand … I could teach you some simple stitches—”

“No!” Lily smiles wildly, trying to soften her response, which feels less like a word than a flailing. She cannot imagine accepting help from Ruth, who has seemed all along to disapprove of Lily’s sewing idea, and every other domestic effort she’s made, however poor the result. Besides, her mother isn’t well. “Thank you,” she says. “You don’t have to do that. But thank you.” She takes Ruth’s cold mug of tea. It’s a gag mug her mother got at some Purim celebration, with a knockoff Starbucks logo that says Ohel Coffee, Product de Persia, Certified for the Court of Ahasuerus, 14 Adar 5773 and features a mermaidish queen in the middle of the ubiquitous green circle—Esther, presumably. Why did Lily pour her mother’s tea into this if not to torture herself further? “I’ll go make you some more?”

“All right.” Ruth’s voice is hoarse. “Whatever you like, Lily-pie.”

Ruth is asleep when Lily returns with more tea, so Lily goes back out and sits on the couch next to June. She snuggles up to her daughter, nosing her cheek and trying, as she blocks out SuperWhy!, to remember her mother sewing. Even once. Even if she was making that A Well-Kept House … sampler, which was technically embroidery and which maybe she didn’t even make. But the image that comes to Lily instead is of her mother smoking. She is on the sun porch. She half sits, half leans, her buttocks perched on the bay-window sill while her feet press the floor, her bare legs a sunned hypotenuse. It must be the summer after Lily’s father left, because that was the summer her mother made the leap to shorter shorts but hadn’t yet moved on to the long, gauzy skirts she would wear in summers to come. (Did her mother sew those skirts?) They are shapely legs, with muscular calves and well-defined thighs, and her quadriceps do a little dance as she smokes, climbing up on the inhale and sliding back down on the release, and Lily, transfixed, then and now, watches the knot of muscle as if it might tell her something her mother won’t.

When, after a couple episodes, Lily goes back into Ruth’s bedroom, the blankets have been smoothed