Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  She is alone she is alone she is alone.

  September, still no mother. She leaves anyway, ships everything that matters to Chicago. Trades mountains for midland, welcomes flat, alien ground, towers and smog crowding out sky, nothing to remind her of absence. Thinks that here things will be different—but her mother is still gone. Her prospective new friends all want to know: What do your parents do and how did you spend your summer vacation?

  It was a while ago, she learns to say. It’s fine. These strangers need a lot of reassurance.

  She goes to class. Her mother is gone. She learns about economic collapse and environmental catastrophe. Her mother is gone. She learns about Aristotelian metaphysics and studies his prime mover: that which moves without being moved. The first cause responsible for all subsequent effect. The one hard truth from which all else follows. She stops going to class. She subsists on Twix and ramen, loses weight, loses sleep, loses the thread that binds her. She buys a ticket. She gets on the bus.

  ELIZABETH

  The girl appeared on a Tuesday, which was inconvenient, because Tuesday was my day for dissolution. Not that every day wasn’t a dissolution, not that my whole life hadn’t become dissolute, not that fragments of life and self weren’t disintegrating; like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of my life. But on Tuesdays—because, allow the poor widow her maudlin whim, Tuesday was the day he’d died—I let myself stop pretending otherwise. Six days of the week, I did not drink to excess, I did not weep in public. I did not consume unwise quantities of white bread and red meat. I did not leave the house in my pajamas or decline to shower. If I also did not do yoga or take my multivitamin, if I did not clean out his closet or answer the phone when his daughter called, I was still, in the opinion of all politely concerned parties, making an effort. I was forcing said sand through said hourglass, rather than dumping it on the ground and grinding it beneath my bare toes, as I’d fantasized about doing with his ashes. The grit of him, caking my fleshy creases. Sanding self away. These were the dissolute thoughts of dissolution I did not indulge, and every day passed, and every day was another day he’d been dead.

  Nights were long. Sleep elusive. In the beginning, we slept like babies, he liked to say. Turning and turning in a widening gyre, always together: big spoon, little spoon, little spoon, big. Every night its own nursery rhyme. Sleep, without him, when I managed it: solitary and poor, nasty, brutish, short. I woke at dawn. So did the wife across the street, and I liked watching her walk her stroller up and down the dew. Nearly my age, unfathomably. The husband wore a suit. Left for work early, came home late. She missed him, I could tell. The wife had brought a casserole to the shivah, uninvited. Black sweater stretched tight across ninth-month belly, unseemly. There but for the grace of Mirena and perimenopause, I thought, when she waddled to the freezer. Wondered what I would have done if left behind with a piece of him that was not him. If I could have loved it in his place.

  I was forty-eight, and I was a widow. A woman who’d let my husband die on me. Widows were prim or stern, all of them old, or at least older than me, Grimm witches or Woolfian madams. Every room was my own. I wanted none of them.

  Tuesdays I spent in sweats, screening calls, watching soaps, soaking comfort from the cycles of suffering and redemption. No happiness went unpunished, no heart unscathed. Most deaths proved as easily nullified as the marriages that preceded them. That Tuesday, I watched a woman weep bedside, waiting for her lover’s coma to end, not knowing, as I did, that when he woke it would be with a new face and emptied memory. This was the risk of life inside a soap: the possibility you could wake up to find yourself someone else. Lovers’ faces became unrecognizable, children aged a decade overnight; and yet, the circle of life closed in on itself with claustrophobic comfort. Every daughter became a mother, every mistress a wife—every wife a widow.

  The doorbell rang. I ignored it. The bell rang again, and I had apparently become a woman too tired not to do as she was asked. Behind the door stood a bedraggled girl, a copy of Augustine in her hand. She shoved the book in my face. “Is this you?”

  The back cover was dominated by the large black-and-white author photo, face a decade younger than mine, frown carefully calibrated to suggest interrogative empathy, a well-mixed cocktail of softness and rigor, airbrushing and eyeglasses, all to convey the right message, this may be bullshit, but I am not. It was me, but only on the technicality that I had once been someone else, someone younger, someone married, someone eager to take direction, frown with my mouth, smile with my eyes. “It’s somewhat me,” I said.

  I diagnosed youth. College, maybe, or—something in the too-firm set of jaw, the fingers tucking themselves into their sleeve then resolutely poking back out again like a compulsion—even younger. Zitted nose, greasy hair, ragged nails, weak chin, but young enough that none of it interfered with beauty. The pink of cheeks. The smoothness of skin. The perkiness of breast. Girls like this never looked tired. When they looked sad, as this one did, it was a fuck-me sadness, a wound that conjured want. I knew about the desirability of damaged young women; I’d made a life of it. Her wrists were thin, her hair limp, the color of discarded Wonder Bread. She looked like she was a runaway, or at least like she wanted to be. A few years younger than Benjamin’s daughter, less practiced in wounded hostility, but giving it her best effort.

  Benjamin’s Nina had run away once, age eight, cruelly sentenced to summer vacation with her estranged father and his newish wife, mind marinated in who knew what vitriol, courtesy of wife number one. She endured two weeks with us, then slung Pikachu pack over shoulder and waltzed out the front door while we slept. She’d only made it as far as the neighbor’s backyard, but it had been enough to curtail the custody visits until a year later they tapered off for good. I’d promised Benjamin that when she crashed into adolescence, her mother would become the enemy and we would provide inevitable refuge, that next time she ran away, she’d run straight to him. There was no next time. Even when Nina came to the city for college, under protest, she wasn’t, in any true sense of the word, his. She was never, in any sense of the word, mine. We filled our lives with other people’s daughters. Benjamin’s students, bright, ambitious echoes of a girl I used to be. My readers, whom Benjamin always found cause to disdain. Your Augustine girls, he called them, the ones who slunk into readings and conferences with bandaged wrists, Auschwitzian bodies swimming in slip dresses, damage blinking like a neon sign, vacancy, someone, anyone, fill me up. I had written the history of a damaged girl, a girl made famous not by her pain but by the story her doctor told about it. I had, the jacket copy boasted, “enabled an object of curiosity to seize subject-hood, reclaimed her narrative from the men who wanted to explain her to herself, triumphantly recentering her as protagonist of her own story.” They had stories, too, my Augustine girls. Pain manifested with infinite variety: an eating disorder. A dead boyfriend. A dead father. A disease, real or imagined. Anxiety, overwhelming. Sorrow, bottomless. Rage against the machine. The girl would set my book before me, whisper her name, then, in a gush, tell me how Augustine and I had taught her to reclaim herself. Until now, until her, she would say, I felt so alone.

  Desperate for attention, Benjamin said. Posers. I reminded him we were all posing. He’d made a life’s work of stories the mind tells itself, I reminded him, and should know that the body could tell stories, too. He would call me too soft, too easy, too young; I would call him an ogre. Somewhere in there, argument would become foreplay, then fingers mouth tongue flesh heart until we were both somehow fucking the Augustine girls—their youth, their damage, their need.

  The book was ten years old, though. Most of the girls had grown up. “I always appreciate hearing from readers, but showing up at my house isn’t—”

  “I’m looking for your husband, actually.”

  “He’s dead.” I resented, on general principle, anyone who made me say it.

  “No, I know. I mean, I found out, when I looked him up. That’s why I came to
you. I’m trying to… I’m looking for my mother, I guess?”

  “Well, she’s not here.”

  “No, I mean, I’m looking for her in the past. Like, trying to figure out who she was, really. I thought if I met you—well, if I met your husband. But then he died.”

  I also resented having to hear anyone else say it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come. You seem busy, and I don’t want to bother you, so…”

  “I am busy, and you are bothering me, so tell me why.” I said it sharply. I waited. Girls her age had obedience baked into their bones. Too many voices saying too many times: behave, submit. You had to work to unlearn it, and maybe I was a traitor to my gender, but her strength of will was not my concern. She did as she was told.

  “My mother was a patient at his institute.” It sounded less like submission than challenge. Good.

  “We didn’t have patients,” I said. Habit. “Only subjects. We were very clear about that.”

  “It was just for a few months, in 1999? They found her on a bus, in a fugue state. They called her Wendy Doe.”

  I tried to keep my face expressionless. Failed, apparently.

  “You remember!” Relief made her seem even younger.

  “I remember.” My first and last research subject. The year that ended my career, began my life. It wasn’t in the category of things possible to forget. “Did she send you here?” I hoped for; I hoped against.

  “She’s…” The girl wanted to cry, that was obvious. But she refused to, and I liked her for it. “Can we start again?” She stuck out her hand, and I shook it. “I’m Alice. Karen Clark’s—Wendy Doe’s—daughter. A few months ago, my mother went missing. Just walked out, disappeared. And that’s when my father told me…”

  “It happened before.”

  She nodded. “No one’s even looking for her anymore. The police, even my father, they think she’s… you know.”

  I did know. All those years ago, a woman could erase herself with relative ease. It was a different century now, a future of facial recognition and streaming surveillance. To erase yourself from that picture would require something more permanent than a bus ticket and a new name. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “But if you’re thinking she came back here—”

  The girl, Alice, shook her head. “I’m just trying to understand. Who she was. Why she might have…” She paused, and when she continued, her voice was steadier. “I want to know what it was like for her here. What she was like, when she thought she was someone else. I need to know something.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m not some teen runaway,” she said. “I’m eighteen, I can do what I want.”

  “I do remember your mother,” I told her. “It was a lifetime ago, but I remember her very well.”

  A lifetime ago, and here was the girl, her entire life the proof. A lifetime ago, before there was an Elizabeth Strauss, before there was an us, when there was only a Strauss and a Lizzie, when it still hurt to study the lines of his neck, to imagine the impossible, taking his hand. I loved him most, but Lizzie loved him best. How could we be the same person when this girl’s whole life lay between us? A lifetime ago I was somebody else. Wendy Doe was nobody, a fairy tale one neuron told another. But Benjamin was still Benjamin. Benjamin was a constant, axiomatic. I wanted the girl gone, but maybe it would be easier, with her here, to remember, to return to him. I wanted that, too.

  I invited her to stay for dinner, and didn’t consciously plan that after dinner I’d insist she stay the night, but when the cartons were tossed and the dishes done, it seemed only polite. It was less intention than reflex. She was a tether to the past—you can’t throw a drowning woman a rope and not expect her to cling.

  Benjamin’s law: you are the story you tell of your life, and every story has its want. I wanted. In the dark. In the bone and the marrow. It was, that day, nearly one year into the after, and my whole life was a wanting. The story I tell of my life: I was alone, once. Then I was alone again.

  I wanted to go back.

  II

  LIZZIE

  Day one. A windowless room. One table, two chairs. The standard battery of tests: Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Wechsler Memory Scale, California Verbal Learning Test, Test of Everyday Attention, Stroop test (Kaplan variant), Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale, Personality Assessment Inventory, Depression Anxiety Stress Scale, Beck Depression Inventory-2, Dissociation Questionnaire, Thurstone Word Fluency Test, Digit Span Forward and Backward memory tests, Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, Rey-Osterrieth complex figure test.

  Day two, same. Day three, same.

  Strauss believed in knowledge by colonization, understanding a subject by spreading across every inch of its territory until it was wholly possessed. And so Lizzie measured and processed and tallied: average through above average results for all but the obvious subpar performance in episodic memory. Elevated indicators of trauma and depression. Semantic memory intact; areas of specialized knowledge included biology, gardening, medical terminology, food preparation. All what one would expect from a neurologically intact woman of mildly above-average intelligence who either had or was faking a dissociative fugue. The subject had been MRI’d, CAT- and PET-scanned at the intake hospital, but those doctors had been searching only for obvious dysfunction, cause rather than correlation or consequence. The Meadowlark was as concerned with function as with its failure, so Lizzie dutifully ferried the subject to the scanning wing. Wendy lay inside clanking machines, blinked up at a scattershot of images, let associations roam free, while, safe behind glass, Lizzie watched the techs watch the screens, map swaths of gray matter flashing fluorescent as neurons went to work. This part of the Meadowlark was known as the North Pole; brains here lit up like Christmas trees.

  Lizzie had signed on to the fugue project because the reward of working side by side with a world-renowned genius had seemed to outweigh any risk and—though she would have preferred this were not a factor—because Wendy Doe had rooted herself in Lizzie’s brain. Not just the intellectual puzzle of her, which would have been acceptable, but the human fact of her, the woman untethered from life and self, a tragic figure that some part of Lizzie couldn’t help imagining herself swooping in to save. She didn’t know why Wendy had signed on, but given her disinterest in her own condition and any possible resolution of it, Lizzie suspected that upon discharge from the state hospital, there’d been nowhere better to go. The Meadowlark was Wendy’s last resort, and she was treating it—and Lizzie—accordingly.

  Lizzie asked Wendy exhaustive questions about the past, but the woman never slipped from her story of no story. Lizzie showed Wendy pictures, played her music, offered her smells, recorded her responses. These figures would establish a cognitive baseline; subsequent tests at regular intervals would track its evolution over time. The tests were dull, the data crucial, though so far the only data point that compelled Lizzie was Wendy’s resolute lack of interest in her own past. Lizzie kept prodding her to speculate about who she might have been, what she might have been fleeing from or to, imagining that free association might guide her toward something true, but Wendy resolutely did not want to guess, did not want to imagine, did not want to know.

  They had just finished a third variant of IQ test when Strauss peeked in. “Don’t want to interrupt, I just thought I’d see how it’s going.”

  Lizzie’s posture straightened, and she could feel a false smile stretch across her face. “Great!” Wendy’s smile looked more genuine, and her echoed “Great!” almost sounded sincere.

  “That’s my girl,” Strauss said to Lizzie, which should have galled her. She wanted to impress him—for practical reasons, but she could also feel it pulsing in her, the congenital need for approval. Her mother used to call her a born teacher’s pet—bewildered tone implying some kind of switched-at-birth scenario. Her father always countered that there was nothing wrong with currying favor from the people you respected—and it was true that those teach
ers who lost Lizzie’s respect never had cause to doubt her disdain—but Lizzie knew he simply loved her too much to see the flaw. Her mother had nailed it. Her mother’s disappearing act, which left Lizzie in ever more dire need of loco parentis approval, had turned impulse into pathology. It was not her favorite trait, but it had gotten her into Harvard, into her PhD program, most likely into the Meadowlark, and if it could get her out with Benjamin Strauss’s full-throated approval, then she would swallow the toadying shame of it, and when he stepped out again, leaving Wendy in “Elizabeth’s capable hands,” she would not berate herself for blushing.

  When the door closed, Wendy collapsed forward theatrically, head in hands. “What a fucking joke.”

  “I know these tests seem dull, but the answers could be illuminating—”

  “Not when you’re asking all the wrong questions.”

  It was the first indication Wendy had given of her own curiosity.

  “What would be the right question?”

  “Can we just take a break for a while?” Wendy stood, looking like a kid asking for a bathroom pass, equal parts impatient and pleading.

  “Of course. But—just tell me, what should we be asking?”

  “For one thing, you could ask me what it feels like not to remember.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  Wendy was already at the door. “It feels like nothing. And don’t ask me how you study that.”

  * * *

  Three hours into a miserable, waking night, Lizzie gave up on sleep. Navigated the small room by feel, cursed as a shadow’s sharp edge attacked her thigh, but cursed quietly, as if someone were there to hear. The institute in the dark: too quiet. Probably haunted. Tonight, Lizzie would be its ghost. Each fellow was required to spend one night per week babysitting the ward. Not that it was a ward, exactly, because these were neither patients nor inmates, but voluntary subjects. Twenty miles away, in a swank high-rise apartment, Lizzie’s best friend since kindergarten was staring glassy-eyed at a Russian novel and nursing her no longer quite newborn, which Lizzie knew because this was what Gwen did every night. She was too tired to entertain company, she told Lizzie, who hadn’t realized she counted as company when it came to Gwen. Thus was Lizzie’s only prospect of a social life foreclosed, and after a week of chasing Gwen and avoiding her mother, she found herself pathetically grateful for the excuse to spend a night at work. Not that there was work to do: the Meadowlark employed security to enforce order, nurses to monitor health. Lizzie need only observe.