Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  Three of the Meadowlark’s residential subjects required full-time care: a woman with late-stage Alzheimer’s, a man whose Korsakoff syndrome had advanced far enough to erode all but the most basic functions, and the intriguing Anderson, whose withered hippocampus could form no new memories. Anterograde amnesia: he lived in an eternal present, his life measured out in four-minute intervals, each erasing the one that came before. He played a piano, which Strauss had given him, day and night. Then there was Wendy Doe, as capable of taking care of herself as she was without material means to do so: no money, no social security card, no ID, no chance of legal employment or government subsidy. Not ill enough to be permanently housed by the state, not well enough to house herself—the kind of liminal existence Strauss’s institute was made for. Strauss gave her a bed, an allowance, supervised liberties, in exchange for her willing participation in the research. Our research, he’d suggested Lizzie make a habit of saying, as if a pronoun could fool Wendy into believing she was studying herself.

  The fellows’ bedroom was spare. The bed felt like a board. Lizzie hadn’t yet regained the knack of sleeping alone, even though for nearly thirty years, alone had been her bed and body’s natural state. The body remembered what it wanted to remember. Hers, a traitor, wanted to remember Lucas. Lizzie ventured down the dark hall in pajamas and bare feet. Somewhere, softly, a piano ascended a scale, chased itself back down again. The Meadowlark was an asterisk, wings spoking radially from a central hub. By day, it vibrated with its own self-importance. Rats ran mazes; chimps signed; coders coded; talk therapists talked patients through memory palaces; damaged brains and their owners lay down and held still. A steady stream of outpatient subjects flowed through: the man who remembered every minute of every day since birth. The man who remembered things that had never happened. The woman with continual, overpowering déjà vécu, the conviction that everything she experienced was already a memory. Lizzie empathized. She often felt like she was remembering her life even as it happened.

  Nighttime returned the institute to its former self. The Meadowlark Asylum for Women was founded in 1853 as the city’s proud leap into modern psychiatric care, shuttered in 1982 by state edict after a Pulitzer-winning exposé detailed facilities spattered with blood and feces, patients unwashed, unmedicated, assaulted, strapped down, starved half to death. The acreage had been left to rot for nearly a decade before Strauss secured the funding to make his brainchild manifest. House of horrors turned state-of-the-art factory for knowledge production, shiny and humane. It was only a building; it could not remember. But if it could, Lizzie thought. Epileptics and schizophrenics and late-stage syphilitics, alcoholics and children and prostitutes and women too poor to have anywhere else to go. Dissatisfied housewives dunked in ice baths, frontal lobes ice-picked into obedience. Wives returned to husbands, docile and pliant. Or buried in the backwoods, forgotten.

  Lizzie didn’t believe in ghosts.

  She found a kettle in the staff kitchen and boiled some water. Tea seemed the kind of thing insomniacs were meant to drink. She was still waiting for the tea to cool when Wendy Doe appeared, in a white doily of a nightgown that made her look like a Victorian invalid. Lizzie was wearing Lucas’s boxers and Cal sweatshirt; for their softness, she told herself, not his lingering scent.

  “Sorry,” Wendy said. “I saw the light.”

  “Do you need something?” Lizzie asked.

  “Just couldn’t sleep.”

  Lizzie poured more tea, unsure how to make small talk with a subject, especially a subject with no life, past or present, outside these walls. She wasn’t about to offer up her own life for conversational content.

  “Seen any ghosts yet?” Wendy asked. “I mean, this place has to be haunted, right?”

  Lizzie felt like it was her official duty to pretend she hadn’t just been thinking the same thing. “I think we’re safe.”

  “Have you been to that museum thing yet?” Wendy asked. Lizzie shook her head. Strauss had set aside a corridor for relics from the Meadowlark’s earlier iteration. Most of the staff avoided it. “Let’s just say, if you ever need an emergency lobotomy, you’ll know where to find an ice pick.”

  Lizzie shuddered. She preferred not to think about the women who’d lived here before.

  “I kind of like the thought of it,” Wendy said. “The idea that they’re watching me. The women who used to live here. Like, someone’s got my back, you know?”

  “If you say so.”

  Wendy grinned. “Be careful, they’ve got their eye on you, too.”

  Lizzie stood, excused herself to go back to her room, make a dent in her pile of reading. She had years’ worth of fugue research to catch up on—since starting her doomed dissertation project she’d ignored most new work published on human memory, at least that not published by Benjamin Strauss.

  “You really must love this stuff, huh?” Wendy said.

  “Why?”

  “Doesn’t seem like there could be much money in it, sitting around asking me questions. And you seem like someone who could have been anything. Or at least a lawyer.”

  “Thanks? I think?”

  “So why this?”

  Usually, when asked, Lizzie told people she studied memory because of her grandmother, who’d died of Alzheimer’s. This was a usefully truth-adjacent lie she’d invented in college. The more embarrassing truth: it wasn’t her grandmother’s disease, it was her grandmother’s soap.

  Once upon a time, the Epstein family was whole: one mother, one father, two daughters. Becca was older by five years, irritatingly golden in hair and touch. Becca had playdates, sports teams, tennis lessons, play rehearsals, friends and talent and ambition. Lizzie, friendless, uncoordinated, left ever further behind, was content to be the one who had their grandmother. They ate microwaved cinnamon buns, drank hot chocolate, watched her grandmother’s stories. Lizzie watched, first, because her grandmother watched, and because here, occasionally, were adults in a feverish sexual disarray that both repulsed and intrigued. Here, eventually, was where Lizzie discovered the monstrousness of love, long before her mother enacted it. Here, ultimately, was where Lizzie found a world more comprehensible than her own, a reality that bent to the exigencies of narrative desire. The soap world was karmically rigid—secrets inevitably revealed, wrongs avenged, innocence redeemed—but physically malleable. Wives became entirely different women, an announcer would inform the audience of the substitution, and life proceeded accordingly. Almost everyone came back from the dead.

  Her grandmother was a widow. Everyone’s grandmother seemed to wind up a widow. Lizzie’s mother told her once, “That’s the thing about men, always leaving, one way or another.” Later Lizzie would wonder whether this had been a warning from mother to daughter that this particular woman intended to leave first. Lizzie’s mother left abruptly. Lizzie’s grandmother left gradually, drifted away from herself in bits and pieces, names and nouns. But even when she could no longer recognize her own granddaughter, she still recognized the women on TV, asked after them as if their comas and kidnappings were real. Once Lizzie’s father got sick, Lizzie had given up trying to brace the wall between fact and fiction. Reality offered little but loss—why not let her grandmother believe as she liked. She didn’t need to know that Lizzie’s mother had come home to care for her dying ex-husband, that Lizzie’s sister had fled to Israel, abandoned them all in favor of God. Instead, Lizzie would sit by her grandmother’s bed, hold her palsied hand, tell her that Yasmine’s affair had come to light and Eleanor was about to figure out she’d married her kidnapper, that Jasper had woken from his coma but couldn’t remember whose bullet had put him there. She never told her grandmother she was majoring in psychology, specializing in memory, subspecializing in figments, false memories indistinguishable from real ones, because she needed to understand why Yasmine and Eleanor and Jasper had been remembered, while Lizzie was forgotten.

  Talking to Wendy Doe was a little like talking to no one, but that was still too muc
h honesty to risk. Nor was Lizzie in the mood for the easy lie. “If you think about life as a war against loss, then memory is the only real weapon we have,” Lizzie finally said. “So how could I study anything else?”

  “If you think about life as a war against loss, you’re kind of setting yourself up for defeat, no?”

  “I didn’t make the rules.”

  “I must scare the shit out of you.” Wendy sounded proud. “Thank you for the lack of bullshit in that answer.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t bullshit?”

  Wendy paused, like this was a good and difficult question. “Maybe it’s easier to see through everyone else’s shit when you don’t have any left of your own.”

  “What you said before, about how it feels not to remember—how it feels like nothing? Tell me more,” Lizzie said. “Please. I want to understand.”

  There was silence. They sipped their tea. Wendy stared hard at the surface of hers, as if trying to memorize its particular color and sheen. Lizzie tried to imagine building a life moment by moment. There might be an impulse, she thought, to binge on the present, shovel memories, no matter how mundane, into the gaping void.

  “Have you ever forgotten anything you desperately want to remember?” Wendy asked.

  Lizzie thought about her father’s smell, the weight of her father’s arms when he hugged her, the sound of his voice when he yelled at her, when he thanked her, when he told her he loved her—all the things she could no longer summon. Her memory of him was like a photo album, finite and fading, the images too flat, the gaps between them impossibly wide. “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t feel like that,” Wendy said. “It doesn’t feel like a puzzle. And it doesn’t feel like a missing leg or something. It doesn’t feel like anything’s missing.”

  “That’s why you don’t want your memory back?”

  “You don’t get it: I don’t not want it back, and I don’t want it back. There is no it. You can’t miss what never happened.”

  “But just because you don’t remember it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The it here is your whole life.”

  Wendy shrugged. “You asked how it feels. That’s how it feels. Look—do you have a kid?”

  “No.”

  “You want one?”

  “I’m not sure how that’s relevant.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “Him who?”

  “Your future baby,” Wendy said. “This helpless, adorable creature who you love more than you’ve ever loved anything. You would die for him.”

  “Are you saying you think you have a child?”

  “No, I’m saying, do you miss him?”

  “Of course not. There is no him yet.”

  “Exactly.”

  * * *

  When she went back to her room, Lizzie made a list: every moment she could remember from the last two weeks. She managed a few lines of conversation, a drugstore trip for toothpaste, the sense that she’d been mildly sad, the invitation from Gwen that had not come. Almost everything that happens is forgotten. Decades swallowed. Maybe, Lizzie thought, the mystery isn’t why we forget some things and not others. Maybe the mystery is why we ever remember.

  Lizzie’s favorite soap convention was the retcon. This was fan lingo for retroactive continuity, an Orwellian revision of past events. The narrative gods recklessly reshaped the past to suit their present needs: We have always had a third child. We have always had these mysterious scars and the violent backstory that produced them. We have always been at war with Eastasia. She did not miss the child she hadn’t yet had, or any other nonexistent presence from her imagined future. But the logic doesn’t hold, she might have told Wendy, were she a person inclined toward personal confession. It was possible to miss a thing you’d never had, a remnant from some alternate and preferable version of the past. Sometimes Lizzie felt like she was missing an entire life. All the people she should not have lost. All the things she was meant to possess: Love. Success. A home. A purpose. A sister who was not absent, a father who was not dead. She would have happily remembered a different life, and almost could. Other Lizzie, better Lizzie, felt like a name dancing on the tip of her tongue, a life she could take back, if she could only remember living it.

  WENDY

  How to be a test subject

  For a CT scan, drink contrast solution and wait sixty to ninety minutes for it to circulate through the bloodstream, make the brain glow. Feel the fluid warm your veins, make you want to pee. Do not pee. Step behind curtain, strip. Gown. The room is too cold. The gown is too thin. Enter a bright white room. Lie down on the padded table. Let technician arrange your body, brace your head in place. Let him fasten a thick strap across your chest. Try to breathe. Watch him disappear from view. Watch the ceiling slide one way as the table slides another, through a large, flashing tube. Try to breathe. Unless the voice in the intercom tells you not to breathe. Do as it says. In this room, it is the voice of your god.

  For an EEG test, let the cap be fitted snugly over your head. The cap is covered with small metal probes, each attached to a wire. Try to believe they will not electrocute you. Sit very still as a green gel is injected into each probe. Smile politely when you are told this machine will channel the music of your brain waves, the amplitudes and frequencies. The EEG technician fancies himself a poet. He says, now let’s listen to the song of yourself. But first, maintain a resting state for eight minutes. To rest, in this context, means sit up straight. Stare fixedly at the image of a small purple cross. Wait for the voice to give you permission to stop, for the real test to begin.

  Before an fMRI, remove all jewelry. Any metal in an fMRI could superheat and burn your skin. If you have a metal implant in your body, the machine’s magnetic field could yank it out of place, tear a swath of destruction through muscle and tendon and flesh. You don’t know if you have any metal inside you. Trust the doctors who claim you do not. Remove all clothing. Gown up. Lie down. Let the technician place a plastic shell over your head and face, a joystick in your hand. This is how you will communicate, while keeping perfectly still. Whatever you do, keep perfectly still. Let padded headphones be fitted over your ears. Lie still as the table slides you into a coffinlike tube. Try to listen to the commands playing through your headphones. Focus on the mirror, suspended over your eyes, angled toward a screen. See what they want you to see. Faces you don’t know, with expressions you try to recognize. Press one button for happy, one button for sad. Don’t move. Don’t scratch. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t panic. Don’t imagine what will happen if they leave you here.

  Before a PET scan, fast for six hours. Raise arm, allow cannula to be inserted. Watch radioactive dye flow from syringe to cannula, from cannula to your veins. Wait for your organs and tissue to absorb radioactive material. Take off your clothes, again. Your gown is still too thin. Lie down. Behind glass, your scientists watch your brain at work. Wonder what they see, and if they can see what you think of them.

  LIZZIE

  Their first one-on-one update meeting had barely begun and Strauss was already bored. No one who knew Lizzie would have called her a good observer of social cues, but this diagnosis didn’t demand much acuity. Strauss was making a dumb show of distraction, his pencil playing a jazz riff against the rim of his glasses, his eyes volleying between Lizzie’s face and a sunlit view of the Meadowlark woods. As Lizzie relayed the results of Wendy’s latest brain scans, she caught him checking his watch three times.

  “I can come back,” she said on the third, wishing she’d sounded less apologetic and more aggrieved. “Or just leave you with the notes?”

  “I’m hungry.” Strauss stood. “You hungry?”

  “Uh, sure?”

  “Should I take that interrogatory tone as the lack of conviction characteristic to your generation, or a more idiosyncratic inability to gauge your own physical desires?”

  “You can take it as my uncertainty that my hunger is relevant, given the foodlike stuff they serve in the cafeteria?”
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  “Who said anything about the cafeteria?”

  * * *

  Yes, she was riffing. Yes, her central uncertainty had stemmed from the suspicion she was being dismissed. Yes, everything she said to him came with a terminal question mark, because everything she said was, at base, a variant of the same question. Am I, Lizzie Epstein, dutiful novitiate in this cathedral to pure science, judged meritorious by you, its god? Am I boring you? Am I impressing you? Am I revealing the deep truth of self and its unworthiness, am I destroying my future with this sentence, or this next one, am I proving that I am special? Am I special? Am I sufficient? Am I pleasing you? How can I please you more? And yes, she knew that as a student, a scientist, a woman, she was not supposed to care, and to whatever degree she did care, it was supposed to be for pragmatic purposes, the necessity to impress power. It was not supposed to be because she had fallen prey to the myth of the Great Man of Science, or because seeing Strauss close up had only inflated the myth it should have punctured, or because—his respect seeming an improbable goal—she longed for his approval. Supposed to aside: there it was. Lizzie was an inept observer of others but prided herself on a supreme ability to gauge her own desires, and she admitted, if only to herself, she desired this.