The Book of V.

rental apartment’s bathroom light, to be that of an old, gray witch. Because, because, because, because, because! Because of the wonderful things … The tune changes as Lily enters a kind of derailment in which time goes one way and she goes another, into her small makeup box—small so as to deemphasize its importance to the girls, though there is more makeup, much more, hidden in Lily’s underwear drawer. She begins to dab and swipe at herself, thinking of the other mothers, the women who will be at the party this afternoon, a party for Lily, to teach her to sew. Lily doesn’t know any of the women well. She didn’t intend for them to throw a sewing party in her honor. But the hostess, a woman named Kyla, overheard Lily talking to another mother at preschool pickup about how she wished she could make Esther costumes for Rosie and June for Purim this year, if only she knew how to sew. This was true, in a sense. Lily did wish that she could sew. But she wished it as she wished for sleek hair or a triplex apartment: certain it would never happen and not really caring. Sure, she had a vision of herself, by herself, at a table in front of an open window, sewing. But didn’t every woman? It was a fantasy she might once have tried to parse, in a paper, theorizing about its origins in popular and literary culture and arriving at an idea, or a way of articulating an idea, that was semi-original. There would be a lengthy bibliography, the production of which would give Lily a deep, almost rabid kind of pleasure.
But to actually sew?
She should never have spoken the wish aloud. It was an empty frill of after-school chatter. Lily knows that she will struggle at sewing, just as she struggles at disconnecting tiny Lego pieces. But before she could take it back, Kyla had invited her and the other mother and some other women, too. Why not make it a party? she’d said. I’ll have wine, and snacks, and she will, Lily knows, because Kyla is always wearing boots with heels, even at the playground, and she sent real, paper invites to the thing: A Sewing Fête!
What does one wear to a Sewing Fête? Not baggy underwear, certainly. Not sweat.
Lily, smearing concealer under her eyes, spots a new gray hair in her left eyebrow, tweezes it, and feels instant remorse, not only for the hole she has made but for the pain. It’s enough to make her eyes smart with tears and to make June, whose shirt is off now but still in her hand, think that her mother is crying. She wipes her face with her shirt, as if demonstrating, then offers it to Lily, and Lily, who has again forgotten to stock the bathroom with tissues, accepts and wipes her eyes, remembering too late the concealer she just applied.
“Momma?”
But time! After a five-minute grace period, the school asks for a “donation” of a dollar a minute to cover care. It’s not required—the school is public, after all—but suggested, and the understanding is that you pay if you can, and Lily can in the sense that doing so will not make her homeless, and her daughter has the boots to prove it. So if she’s twenty minutes late? Fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars is a cocktail shaken by a man in a vest, or take-out pad thai plus a couple spring rolls, or overnight diapers for a month, or one-sixth, almost, of a haircut in Park Slope, which is where Lily lives, of course. It is a lot and not very much, though if you fail regularly in this way it becomes, undeniably, a lot. Besides, there is simply no good reason for Lily to be late. She begins to hum again, thinking of Adam in his office, his youthful messenger bag leaning against his aging calf, talking and typing and directing and greenlighting hygiene drops for families that don’t have toilets, let alone lights capable of sputtering, and everything else he does to keep money climbing into their bank account and set himself up to be promoted, not to mention help people. Adam and Lily are trying to save to buy an apartment so they can stop paying through the nose for rent, but they’re paying through the nose for rent so it’s impossible to save—an old story—and then there are things like late pickup, or the occasional parking ticket, also Lily’s fault as she’s in charge of moving the car from place to place to outrun the street cleaners, that eat up their nonexistent “cushion.”
Lily and Adam have discussed her going back to work. But their conversations always circle back to the same grim reality: adjunct teaching—and adjunct is all she’ll get within a hundred miles of New York City—barely pays enough to cover childcare. They know because Lily did have a gig for a while after Rosie was born, at a college up in Westchester, and there was one day alone, when a snowstorm turned her usual ninety-minute return drive into a five-hour highway crawl, that ate up one-tenth of her semester’s salary in babysitting costs and gave her mastitis. Then, when she was seven months pregnant with June, she finally got a campus interview for the kind of tenure-track job she’d once assumed she wanted, at her alma mater, Grinnell College, a job that paid nearly as much as Adam was making then, but in Iowa, which meant it paid the equivalent of three times as much. But the instant she finished the last of her two days of lectures and talks and interviews and lunches, knowing that she had aced every one, knowing that even in the grotesquerie of her “workplace” maternity outfits—the least offensive ones she could find still involved ruffles and Easter hues—she came across as intelligent, committed, and not insane, Lily knew she was done with academia. When she was offered the job, she