didn’t die,” Lulu says. She doesn’t understand why she has to keep explaining this.
“No, of course not. But it’s—the things men do to women. The ways they think they get to be in charge of you. The way it never seems to stop.”
Those retellings too, which is what Cass was talking about: The way that, even when the physical violence stops, their stories get repeated, and reimagined. Again, and again, and again.
Naomi continues, “I will say, in that class, one of the things we talked about was how people read that story like it’s a warning to women—to trust your intuition and not marry creeps, or, if you do marry a creep, not to be curious about him. To leave things be. Which weirded me out, because he’s the villain. Whatever else happens in the story, he dies at the end.”
“That’s what I said! That’s what I’m saying.”
“It can be about both things, though, is what I thought was interesting. This idea that it’s a story about how women die, but it’s also a story about how women survive.”
Lulu’s dad’s favorite joke is to short-circuit their Passover seders. A seder is supposed to be a long ritual dinner, hours and hours devoted to telling a story everyone already knows. His parents, observant immigrants, used to make him sit through all of it. Lulu’s whole life, he’s sat everyone down at the table and said, “You know how this one goes, right? They tried to kill us; they couldn’t; let’s eat!” and tucked right into his matzoh ball soup.
Bea’s parents left the Philippines decades ago, but their siblings are still there; they don’t work in politics, but her grandparents used to. She doesn’t talk about it much, but she mentions, every now and again, how violent things are over there, under the new president. How glad she is that part of her family is here, and how impossible it is not to worry about the rest of them, who are still there.
If you’re telling the story, it means you’re still alive. If you’re telling the story, it means you’re still haunted by it too.
“Survival is a privilege,” Naomi says. “And it is also kind of a burden.”
“I don’t want it. Either of it. Any of it.”
“What do you want instead?”
Lulu doesn’t have an answer for that.
After a while, Naomi says, “Thank you for telling me.”
“You’re . . . welcome?”
“I know you want to handle it on your own. So I appreciate that you chose to let me help. Or try to.”
Lulu doesn’t know what to say to that. She doesn’t think of herself as being particularly tough, or self-sufficient. She doesn’t think of herself as being someone who doesn’t want help. Only someone who’s trying desperately not to.
“I love you, little sister,” Naomi says.
Lulu’s thought so many times that being hard would break her, that she would crack in half under the pressure. But somehow it’s Naomi’s tenderness that does it, that finally makes her feel like she’s suddenly, totally come undone.
* * *
Lulu goes and sits on one of the stone benches in the grove of fruit trees in the backyard. It’s dark out and it has been basically since she got home from school. The dark here isn’t romantic the way it was at The Hotel; she can see the neighbors’ lights, and the ones from her house up the hill. She can hear city noises and see the buzzy ambient hum of urban fluorescence brightening the world around her, making all of it seem mundane and comprehensible. She closes her eyes and it presses harder against her, demanding her attention, insisting on being let in.
“No,” Lulu whispers. Her eyes were squeezed shut but at the sound of her own voice against the night they fly open. “No,” she says again. “No!” she yells. “No no no no no no no no!” By now she’s howling. “NO!” She screams. “NO! I WON’T! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!”
She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, or even who she thinks she’s yelling at. Definitely not Naomi or Ryan. God, maybe. Whoever, whatever made a universe like this one.
She’s yelling at herself, for not being able to keep Ryan from hurting her, and the women who raised him, who raised him like this. The men who raised him, who raised him like this. His great-great-grandfather and all of his money. His great-great-grandfather and his money and his property and the woman he saw on the screen and then plucked off of it to