She drags the pack toward herself with a socked foot. “Are you worried?” she asks.
“There’s not much use in worrying. Right? He said bed rest might help. But I’m not doing that.”
“Are you going to tell Philip?”
“What.”
“What the doctor said.”
“No.”
Vee lights a cigarette.
“But I can’t be intimate,” Rosemary says. “And I have to tell him that. According to the doctor.”
“Which part is according to the doctor?”
“Both. I mean, he hasn’t come near me in a month. So it may not be necessary to tell him.”
Vee nods. She waits. Maybe this is when Rosemary begins to talk. Certainly it’s not turning out to be the night for Vee to tell Rosemary about the lumberjack man, as she’d planned to. But Rosemary can tell Vee about her marriage. And maybe tomorrow, or the next day, Vee can tell.
But Rosemary is quiet, sipping her wine. Vee pours herself more bourbon. She is drinking quickly tonight; she can’t help it sometimes, this urge toward oblivion. She is frightened by Rosemary’s spotting. She feels guilty about the robe and the kitchen encounter with Philip, though nothing happened but a bared sternum, a hint of bone. She drinks for a little while, then ventures, “So … it sounds like the doctor’s a little worried. Even if you’re not?”
Rosemary groans. “Have you ever been able to tell what a doctor thinks?” She finishes off her wine, sets the glass on the coffee table, then leans her head back into the couch so that she’s staring at the fireplace across from them. Vee looks at it, too: a classic colonial fireplace lined with black bricks, big enough to cook in and to heat the whole house. The house is chilly. Philip keeps the thermostat at 67.
“Should I build a fire?” Vee asks.
Rosemary says, “Nah. It’s too late.”
“Good. I don’t know if I could even do it anymore.”
They laugh. But Rosemary still seems sad. She seems unlike Rosemary.
“Do you hang stockings?” Vee asks, waving her cigarette at the mantelpiece. “Do you put up a tree?”
Rosemary shakes her head.
Vee grabs a throw off an armchair and spreads it across her friend, and Rosemary sinks further into the cushions. “Thank you,” she says. Then: “I want to lie down.”
“It’s fine. I’ll just finish this cigarette and head up myself.”
“No, I mean on this couch. Right here. I’m too tired to sit up.”
Vee stands up so Rosemary can stretch out, then, when Rosemary pats the space next to her, she lies down, too, with her head on the armrest and her glass on her chest. They look at the ceiling together.
“Will he not allow it?” Vee asks after a while. “The tree?”
“He hasn’t said that.”
“I thought it was the mother. If the mother’s Jewish, then the kids are Jewish, and if she’s not, then …?”
“I’m converting.”
“Are you serious?”
Vee turns to look at Rosemary, but she’s too close to see her clearly. What she notices are Rosemary’s hands cupping her belly.
“Did he ask you to?” she asks.
“No. He’s not religious. He doesn’t care about any of it.”
“So why?”
“We’re a family. So we should be a family.”
Vee, on her third bourbon, is finding the idea preposterous. “What about the cross?” she asks. “Aren’t you scared?”
“The cross is even more reason. A unified front. I’m not going to hide.”
“But you wouldn’t be hiding. You’d just be being. Yourself.”
Rosemary doesn’t say anything for a minute. Vee slides her glass onto the coffee table, then maneuvers until she’s on an elbow, looking at Rosemary’s profile, which appears entirely unperturbed. She starts to wonder if Rosemary is asleep with her eyes open. If everything she’s been saying is not quite what she means to say.
Then Rosemary says, “It’s okay if you don’t get it.”
Vee stands and lights another cigarette. She walks to the mantel, then to the window, where she bumps into a little side table. A strange sculpture—is it made of pewter?—sits atop it, a thing she hasn’t really looked at before, dismissed for its abstractness. She doesn’t look at it now, only labels it in her mind—Philip’s—and walks back to face Rosemary.
“Is it what you want?”
Rosemary sighs, drawing the throw up to her chin. “I find it fascinating, actually. It’s very different. Nothing like Episcopal. Obviously. His mother—I really like her—she invited me to this CR thing in Cambridge. I think I’m going to go.”
“CR?”
“Consciousness raising.”
“Oh. I’ve been to one of those. Or something like it. In DC. I wrote you about it.”
“But this is Jewish, too. I guess they talk about the stories, and how … She says it’s really empowering.”
“Rosemary. How can you go to this group and also convert for your husband? It sounds like a new height of hypocrisy. Is it even allowed?”
Rosemary turns to look at Vee. “Solidarity is always allowed.”
“You can’t be in solidarity with everyone at once,” Vee says, even as she knows exactly what Rosemary means. Rosemary means you stand with your man; she means in the end it’s all anyone cares about. How, Vee thinks, can she not be talking about Vee herself? Irritation flames in her gut, followed by longing. She longs to tell Rosemary everything, right now, not just the outline she offered her first night here—the part about Alex demanding she strip—but what happened in the town house kitchen before the party, and what he may have done to Suitcase Wife, and what Vee thought and felt.
But she is afraid, too. Isn’t Rosemary saying that it makes no difference what Vee thought or felt? What’s to stop Rosemary, when she hears that Alex called, from telling her to go back, as Philip did?
Rosemary sits up. She looks like herself again, friendly, open faced, optimistic, an optimistic pregnant woman heading to bed. “Do you want to come?” she asks. “To the meeting? Everyone is welcome.”
“Maybe,” Vee says. She is thinking of the women’s-group women, and of the wives, and of how Rosemary
