BROOKLYNLILY
The Spiel
From the wings the empty stage looks vast and dignified, its scuffed floors brought to sleekness by the precurtain light. In the beat before her actors enter, Lily feels almost absurdly stirred. No matter that it’s an amateur and melodramatic musical comedy they’re putting on, open to anyone willing to make a fool of themselves. Her heart thuds beneath her ribs. And when the curtain rises and Mordecai leaps out crying, “All hail!” Lily finds herself cheering as wildly as the audience, her hands raised high as she claps.
In the program she is listed as the spiel’s writer and director, and though in fact what she has contributed on the writing front has been quite minor, she did not correct the proofs. Beneath her name, in italics, is written: In honor of her mother, Ruth Burnham Rubenstein, the original. Before she got sick, unbeknownst to Lily—how much had been unbeknownst to Lily!—Ruth had volunteered to write and direct the spiel, and no one was able to bear replacing her before she died. So they waited, then waited a little longer. Then, the day after Lily’s visit to Vivian Barr, she received an email from Ruth’s friend Susan Levinson—the woman who spearheaded the beautiful platters at the memorial service—asking if Lily would fill the role.
Lily replied, Sorry, I can’t. She did not say, I’m still too sad, I’m still trying to figure out how to make my daughters’ dresses, I still don’t even understand the story, I’ve got issues with it, etc. Thank you, she wrote, but surely there is someone else more qualified?
Thirty seconds later, Susan Levinson wrote back. Perhaps you’re RIGHT. But we would LIKE for you to do it and I know your mother would have, too. Your mother was IRREPLACEABLE, we miss her. We MISS her. Also, you should KNOW that the thing is basically written, we’re just recycling it from another temple, so really all you need to do is tweak it in places, a few edits, then help the crew bring it off. They’re very enthusiastic just need a boss.
Lily felt a little hurt then. They weren’t asking her to create the thing, just fix someone else’s creation. Then she worried. Boss. Was she capable of bossing? Then she reread the email and felt the pride and guilt the woman intended her to feel and said, Okay. Yes. Of course. Thank you.
And then it had been wonderful! Susan met her at the rabbi’s office to show her the script from the other temple, and every wall was lined with books, floor to ceiling; even the back of the door was covered in books, and Lily felt a calm come over her as she sank into a chair and began to read. Then the rabbi walked in and asked if Lily would like to see the original book of Esther and Lily said of course, because what else could she say, and the rabbi—a tall woman in a ponytail and track pants—pulled down the book and said, “We haven’t met, but I loved your mother.” She walked Lily through the scenes, and the corresponding songs in the spiel, and Lily thought, This isn’t something a rabbi is needed for. She must really have loved my mother. And Susan Levinson kept giggling whenever they went over a funny part of the spiel. Then the rabbi pulled down some other books, full of things people had written about the book of Esther, interpretations and arguments and stories, and here is where Lily got lost for a while—she texted the sitter and asked her to stay a little longer.
There was one story about how Vashti’s father, who’d been a king, was killed by a candelabrum falling on his head. And rabbis arguing about whether Esther was brought into her uncle’s house as a daughter or wife—the language was not clear, and why else would she be described as shapely and beautiful in the sentence before the one about Mordecai adopting her? Whole scenes of dialogue had been written imagining what might have happened offstage in the story, including one in which the king, Ahasuerus, finally sobered up, asked where Vashti was, and, when told he killed her because she refused to parade naked in front of his friends, responded: I did not act nicely. Then there were people arguing over which woman was really the heroine of the story: Esther saved her people, sure, but wasn’t she a coward first, and before that a concubine? Hadn’t Vashti, not through outright revolt but simply by saying no, been a pioneer, standing out as a sublime representative of self-centered womanhood? But Esther, someone else argued, was the epitome of virtue; when the king made his advances, she was passive, like the ground. No, argued someone else, Esther was not frigid, she had used her feminine wiles to curry favor with the eunuch Baraz and rise to queen and save her people and she had been right to do so. She had done what she had to do, just as Vashti had done what she had to do. Esther simply had better luck because she was a Jew and it was a story meant to make Jews feel good! She was like Judith, except that in Esther’s case she got a lot of help from Mordecai. It was too bad, someone else argued, that Mordecai had to play such a big role. As for Vashti, wasn’t she less a character than an absence? Wasn’t it her absence that made the story possible? Sure, but she was also an anti-Semite, according to someone else—she beat her Hebrew servants. Hunh? Come on, wrote someone else. The whole story was an excuse for a carnival, and carnivals were safety valves that reaffirm institutional control. Wait, said
