Except for the scissors, which rest open and askew atop the other items, the sew-on-the-go box appears as it did when Vee’s grandmother gave it to her, the miniature cardboard spools waiting brightly in their rows as if the plastic container has fossilizing powers. Vee can’t quite grasp Lily’s determination to make the dresses herself—didn’t she understand that Rosemary stopped sewing for a reason? What was happening in Brooklyn these days?—but she will send the box via overnight mail, so that Lily has it tomorrow. It’s meant only for mending, of course, but she can use more than one color of thread; she can do it at her kitchen table where no one will see her struggle. It will be something.
Vee thinks of her own struggle with the buttons on her collar that afternoon, how much they had seemed to mean and how quickly they had come to mean nothing. How badly she had wanted to be a woman with conviction, and how little it seemed to matter in moments what her conviction was. She could have been a senator’s wife if she hadn’t seen through the illusion of their armor, or a women’s-group woman if she hadn’t found them embarrassing. She could have been a mother, like Rosemary, if only she had reached the morning she’d imagined she would someday reach, when she would without hesitation or regret toss her Pill down the toilet. But that morning had not come.
What Vee did not tell Lily—thank goodness!—is that it was Lily and her brothers who made Vee certain that she did not want children. This would sound cruel. But Vee did not feel cruelly toward Rosemary’s children. If anything, she felt grateful, as she eventually did toward Alex, because they had solidified for her what she had not yet been able to believe. They were cute. But their cuteness did not outweigh their chaos. And she never found herself asking them questions; she was not interested in knowing them.
Dr. Monmouth said it was different when they were your own. But Vee was decided. No babies, and no men—not at all with respect to the former, and with respect to the latter not for keeps.
More complicated had been women, and the question of how they would appear in her life. Dr. Monmouth did not once ask about that. Would Vee go on stealing from them, and advising them, and berating them, and being loved by them? (Yes.) Would she really get to know any of the ones in her circle, beyond knowing the music and books they liked, whether they preferred wine or weed, where they were born? (No.) Was she ever attracted to them, as the tabloids inferred? (She would like to kiss some of them. That was all.) Would she find a friend again? (Not like Rosemary.)
In the drawer of her writing table Vee finds a cushioned mailer and tape. She opens her laptop. Lily’s address is disturbingly easy to find—as her own must be, Vee realizes, for Lily to have found her. She makes a note to find out about changing that, then wraps the sew-on-the-go box in the Arts section, slips it into the mailer with a note, and thinks, No. She’ll have a courier deliver it today, so Lily can start tonight.
A half hour later a young man is at Vee’s door, in long shorts and a bright-yellow windbreaker. His neck is tattooed, his face bearded. He smiles, a big smile, his eyes sparkling as if he is glad to see her, and for a moment Vee feels as if they know each other. She smiles back. Then he and the package are gone, swallowed by the city, and Vee’s thumbs are rubbing at her fingers, feeling the creases the thick tape has left in them. Georgie pants behind her, waiting, and she says, “Yes. Let’s go for our nap.”
OUT FROM SUSAVASHTI
Those Who Cannot Fly or Burrow Walk
By sunrise the city has disappeared. They keep walking. There is water, someone says, far but not too far—they can reach it by dark, if they don’t stop.
They are down to a few dozen, a diminishment that in the camp they could pretend against. They were not slaughtered in a way that could in a different millennium be tried in some kind of tribunal or court. A few boys who stole fruit off market-bound carts were hanged. A few girls were taken. Some men left. Mostly they died gradually, of hunger, thirst, heartache, heat. Exposed now, they see how minor they are. This and the salt whistling up off the sand urges them on.
Vashti watches the strangers who walk alongside her: the men with tents on their backs and the children hauling skins of water and the women slinging babies and pots and one woman, pitched forward as if against a wind, who is draped so heavily in necklaces strung with bones that she looks like a head atop a white mountain. Esther told her about this woman—the mother of Nadav.
The people are mostly silent, preserving their energy, even the small children on their fathers’ shoulders, the babies on their mothers’ breasts. Vashti carries all they will allow her to carry, a small skin and one blanket. She should protest, maybe. But her entombment has left her deficient in vitamins and muscle tone, and Baraz has sewn a small kingdom’s worth of gold into narrow channels in her robes, and she feels
