This time, she did not scratch or slam the walls. She thought. If Ahasuerus learned she was alive, he would break. Any equilibrium he’d found—which the new queen was testing, evidently—would be spun into chaos.
And so the fox. Vashti did not know that Esther was above somewhere, in the bones room, working out the same problems, devising parallel solutions. Though she must have known. Esther, too. They must have moved, in moments, as one. Or, it was simply obvious, universal: anyone would think first to fly, above the earth, and, when that didn’t work, to go through.
She turns now, baring the fox that crawls across her stomach. One front claw wraps around her waist; the other cups her left breast. Baraz’s lines are simple but bold, so that the fox’s tail, skirting her ribs, appears to quiver. Itz’s mouth is open. Agony sings in Vashti’s ears. Who is this whore, she thinks. This whore has swallowed the woman who was called a whore for her virtue. It does not follow. But of course it does. Of course Ahasuerus hadn’t wanted her to be virtuous at that particular moment, because it made her look frigid, and if she was frigid, it was about him, whereas a whore—or a leper, or whatever other conclusions they came to—well, that was about her. She was a woman like that. By the time his drink wore off, she knew, it was too late. She was gone, dead—and he could not change his mind. He could not be seen as weak.
So now, again, whore. Her robes open. Itz is aroused—it would be false to pretend that she can’t see his arousal. He does not know that ink is not reserved for the queen. None of them know this. They have never seen anyone’s body adorned in such a way, and it is easy to believe, in their stunned state, that only a queen is given these markings. (This is one way people come to think they know things, which they then tell to other people, who tell them to other people, who write them down, and so the thing stands as truth in a book and later on a pixelated screen: “A queen in ancient Persia was marked by animal tattoos.”)
They don’t approve of what has been done to the queen’s body, but they are moved by it. Even Itz. Itz is moved as a rebel and he is moved as an adolescent boy. He confers with his father.
It is easy, after that, to spread word among the other tents. It is easy—they are experts—to pack. They are gone within an hour, leaving only footprints, and these too, are gone by sunrise, when the breeze turns into a wind that sweeps low and fast across the sand.
MANHATTANVEE
Summoned Forth, She Kept Her State
The windows need cleaning, Vee thinks, as she follows Georgie back into the apartment—the sun’s angle highlights the soot. Can it be three o’clock already? She did not plan for the girl to stay so long. She makes a note about the windows, then sits at the table to take off her shoes. Her arches are tired. Her whole body is tired. She rises to clear off the table, then sits back down, attempts a halfhearted stacking of dishes and cups, and looks elsewhere. Her plants need watering. Windows. Plants. The tea has made her hands shaky. She sits, looking out through her sooty windows at the building next door. She should go sit on the couch so she can look at the park. But just as she knew she should say something to somehow cheer Rosemary’s daughter, and then failed to actually do it, she stays seated in the chair.
It had been a bit of a shock, at the memorial service, to find that the girl looked nothing like Rosemary. Her brothers shared her friend’s fair hair and good tanning skin, but Lily looked like her father, and this disappointed Vee more than she could explain. Today, though, as they talked, Vee began to see pieces of Rosemary in the girl, not in her features themselves but in the way she used them. A slight tilt to her head when she listened. The completeness with which her mouth pulled back when she smiled. The way she moved her eyebrows. Rosemary’s had been thick, and Lily’s were less so, but they emoted as Rosemary’s had, furrowing and lifting and falling as if not quite in her control.
When Rosemary told Vee she needed to leave, it was her eyebrows that betrayed her regret.
What was it Lily said exactly? Did you ever think to reach out to her? As if Vee hadn’t thought it all the time. Even in recent years, every so often a longing would swell up in her, for Rosemary. But it was not her place, as she said. Alex had asked her to come back; Rosemary had not. And it was apparent from the way Lily’s brothers regarded her at the reception that she had not been spoken of with any fondness in their house, if she’d been spoken of at all. To those boys, clearly, Vee had been ruinous.
Vee waters her plants: her jade, her just-emerging amaryllis, her Christmas cactus on its iron stand. She puts away the watering can and crosses out Plants. Then she stands in her stockinged feet, picking at a little scale that has grown back on the jade’s lower leaves. She steps back. It’s a beautiful plant, Vee’s for more than twenty years. She has trimmed its branches to encourage breadth over depth, so that it fills the window without claiming too much space. When an individual branch goes rogue, she clips it and gives it to one of the doormen in a mug of soil. The oldest, Mikel, has shown her pictures of his, now two feet tall on a windowsill crammed with figurines of children dressed
