Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  But it was also true that the cafeteria, state of the art or not, was disgusting, and far too reminiscent of cafeterias past. Junior high, summer camp, retirement home, hospital, all fetid with the same stink—stale refrigerator, soggy french fries. Often, the other fellows ate with the postdocs and junior researchers who staffed their project labs, which left Lizzie scanning the room for safe harbor, some empty corner of a table where she could pick at limp salad and sip weak coffee with a modicum of dignity before fleeing. She’d mastered this skill in eighth grade, the speed eating, the gaze performatively intent on absorbing reading material, but had never hoped to hone it into adulthood. The days the other fellows ate together were worse. Mariana spewed thinly veiled commentary on Lizzie’s lack of a solo project; Dmitri dripped jealousy about her proximity to Strauss; Clay simply hit on her, but lazily, as if he couldn’t resist the opportunity for practice but wanted to ensure she knew it was nothing else. Worse than this were the evident ways they peacocked for each other, pretending at modesty regarding their own work and innocent intellectual curiosity about one another’s, all of them probing for weakness, jockeying for superiority, driven by the Darwinian will to eliminate and survive that had earned them their slot to begin with—and it was clear not one of them considered Lizzie a worthy threat. Why would they? Her project was nearly a joke, and it was only nearly hers. She chose not to care. But she’d taken to eating a granola bar and a bag of potato chips alone in her closet-sized cubicle and calling it a day.

  Strauss led Lizzie to the Meadowlark’s “hall of memory,” his shrine to the institute’s earlier incarnation. It was as unsettling as Wendy’s description had led her to believe. Framed photos of asylum inmates marched down both walls—nineteenth-century patients outfitted as farmhands, twentieth-century women in ice baths and induced comas, all interspersed with oil portraits of the Meadowlark’s medical directors. The hall dead-ended in an exhibition of what Strauss presumably saw as his spiritual forebears: long-dead Europeans framed over glass display cases harboring the tools of their trade. Strauss had collected ice picks and straitjackets and electroshock probes, a century and a half of failed miracles. A display in the center paid tribute to the lobotomy technique, which, according to the plaque, had been debuted at the Meadowlark before spreading across the state. Strauss settled onto a long wooden bench near the ice picks. She sat beside him, trying to be casual about leaving an appropriate distance between her thigh and his.

  “So? What do you think of my little tribute to historical memory? I’m told most of the staff finds it unsettling. I hope it doesn’t put you off your lunch.” He’d ordered Chinese food from a dive down the street, cold Szechuan noodles and chicken lo mein for them to share. She preferred pork, but he assured her the chicken was not to be missed.

  “It’s interesting.” She felt like she needed to seize the moment, convince him he was right to treat her like a hypothetical equal. Groping for something anodyne but not moronic to say, she feigned interest in the nearest painting, a medieval orgy of lunatics in a boat.

  “The Ship of Fools,” Strauss said. “Hieronymus Bosch. Doesn’t hold a candle to the original, of course. You’ve been to the Louvre?”

  Lizzie snorted.

  He laughed. “Here’s where you say, ‘If you want me to go to Paris, triple my stipend.’ ”

  “Would that work?”

  “God no.”

  He opened the takeout containers. Steam rose, along with a rich, greasy smell that made her stomach gurgle, she hoped not loud enough for him to hear.

  “You want me to run you through my proposal for the next set of tests?” she asked, flipping through her notes one oily fingerprint at a time.

  “I don’t like to work while I eat. It’s called a lunch break for a reason—let’s break, shall we?”

  “Oh.”

  “If that’s all right with you?”

  There was nothing wrong with a fellow and her adviser having lunch together in a semiprivate locale, and no reason said lunch couldn’t stray from professional to personal. Lizzie knew this. She also knew enough about academic optics to hesitate. It was one thing to be seen as a teacher’s pet; another to be seen as a teacher’s plaything. She knew what happened to those girls, the ones who let themselves notice the body attached to the mind, the unexpectedly muscular forearms, the stubble gracing sharp jawline, the fingers, thick but nimble, long, strong. It wasn’t even necessary to notice such things, it was enough for other people to assume you had. Once, in her first semester of grad school, her adviser had reached across his desk to brush a hypothetical strand of hair from her face and said, “If you act like you’re beautiful, other people will believe it.” Since then he’d been her most tireless supporter. She was never sure whether she was supposed to feel like she owed him something, or the reverse.

  “Of course it’s okay,” she told Strauss. It was just lunch.

  “Good. Now. Question for you. What’s the first thing you remember?”

  “From what?”

  “From life. First memories. A little pet project. I collect them from everyone I meet.”

  He had a rascal’s smile, a crooked canine that made his face less intimidating when revealed. There was a tiny shaving scratch at the curve of his chin, a redness on the bridge of his nose where his glasses had rubbed too tight. She wanted to give him a good answer, a memory that was true.

  “My mother, crying at the kitchen table. I don’t think she knew I was there.”

  “Do you remember why she was crying? Or how it made you feel?”

  “Scared.”

  Strauss scribbled something in a narrow black journal. “Did she cry a lot?”

  Lizzie answered as a scientist. “You mean, because if the episode was an outlier, it would contribute to the likelihood that this memory would imprint?”

  “I mean did she cry a lot. That seems like it would have been hard.” He closed the notebook, slurped down a large mouthful of noodles, mumbled around it. “Promise me you’ll never tell my wife you saw me eat this.”

  “She’s antinoodle?”

  “Antisalt, anti-MSG, antiflavor. I think I’d prefer death to another lean turkey sandwich.”

  “I suspect your wife might feel differently.”

  “I suspect you’d be surprised.”

  He stopped, like he’d said something unexpected, or maybe he was simply aping the expression on her face. “A joke,” he said. “And she’s not making me the sandwiches, incidentally. Simply shaming me into making them myself. If I really loved my daughter, et cetera.” Then, “In case you were wondering, I do. Not so incidentally.”

  It was hard to picture, the great Benjamin Strauss fishing LEGOs out of the carpet, washing sippy cups, and scraping spaghetti sauce off the wall; Strauss applauding as a tutu’d little girl spun a pirouette and curtsied. Or would Strauss be the kind of father who’d forbid his daughter the froth of pink and pirouettes? More likely, Lizzie decided, the kind oblivious to its existence, because he had to work.

  “You were saying,” he said. “Your mother.”

  “I most definitely was not.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You ever consider switching to clinical? You’ve got a great Freudian hmm.”

  He clapped a hand to his chest. “Slings and arrows to the heart!” But he looked delighted. She had delighted him. “You would have made an excellent Dora. Very satisfying evasions.”

  “Okay, so what’s your first memory?”

  “My father, in his armchair, listening to Bach. I would have been maybe four or five? Old enough to have noticed he was a bastard. Young enough not to see why.”

  It was part of the Strauss mythology: father a Holocaust survivor, son dedicating his life to the problem of traumatic memory, in loving tribute to the man who’d never escaped it.

  “In this memory, he was smiling,” Strauss said. He was not. “That was the extremity, if one is required. I remember hiding somewhere, low—under a table, maybe? Thinking if I
moved, if I made a sound, I would ruin it. The last of his happiness gone, and it would be my fault.”

  Lizzie watched his hand, felt an insane impulse to hold it, give comfort, warmth.

  “The thing about memory, of course”—his fingers sanded the edge of the journal—“was I really worrying about that then, or do I only think so now? Or has the retrieval of that sliver, every time I conjure it up over the years, warped the image so much that there’s nothing left of the original? Am I simply remembering something I used to remember, a distorted copy of a distorted copy?” He shrugged off whatever mood had descended. “The only child’s burden, I guess. No one left to ask, no one left to remember with.”

  She liked this version of him, shrunk down to human scale. She liked him small; she liked him vulnerable. She did not like that she liked this.

  “After that day, I never saw him listening to that record without tears. Did I miss them the first time? Did I just later imagine the smile, pick the version of the past I preferred? And that’s the thing, isn’t it. No way of knowing.”

  “I think about that a lot, having no one to check your memories against. Having siblings doesn’t save you from ending up alone. Everyone ends up there eventually, right? Alone with whatever memories matter most?”

  “Jesus, that’s depressing.” He laughed. “I knew I liked you.” He liked her; this had not occurred to her.

  Strauss checked his watch. She checked it, too, more stealthily: expensive.

  “I have a meeting. Well, more of a schmoozing. Walk with me?”

  They strolled, lingering along the earliest of the historical displays.

  “Most people talk about the science of the past as if it was barbaric, but these were wonders, in their day.” Strauss gestured to the faces of the dead scientists, framed smugly beside the evidence of their landmark achievements. Pinel and Tuke, fathers of the modern mental asylum. James and Freud, ur-fathers of modern psychology. Charcot, father of hysteria, and beside his portrait, the spiritual daughter, Augustine, teenage hysteric draped in ethereal white, face contorted in what looked like orgiastic joy. Egas Moniz, father of the lobotomy, for which he’d received a Nobel Prize. Walter Freeman, surgeon and salesman, who’d peddled the technique across America, framed beside his winning slogan, Lobotomy Brings Them Home. “In their time, these men were all miracle workers,” Strauss said.

  “Well. They were all men, at least.”

  He laughed at this, as if she was trying to be adorable, and made it so.

  “Everything we do is wrong,” he said. “That’s why all this is here: to remind us. The goal is to be a little less wrong, every year, every day. That’s the miracle.” Then he said he had to go, to the schmoozing for which he was now late. Then he was gone.

  The next day he appeared in her office doorway, two foil-wrapped steak sandwiches in hand, eyebrows raised. “Hungry?” And yes, she was.

  * * *

  Lizzie was sincerely trying not to notice Gwen’s nipple, but Gwen’s nipple was making this impossible. And it wasn’t just the nipple, swollen, red, crusty. It was the ballooning flesh it festooned. It was the feral lips fish-mouthing its moist tip, rooting, hungry. Lizzie was trying to tell Gwen about work, about what it was like being back in Philadelphia, about Wendy Doe, whom Lizzie was doing her best not to like, partly because it seemed detrimental to her scientific objectivity, but mostly because it seemed ill-advised to get attached to someone with the existential version of a terminal condition. Gwen bitched about her mother-in-law. Lizzie politely inquired after Andy, whom she was still doing her best to like. She politely did not inquire after Gwen’s novel, which was presumably still unfinished. The baby sucked, swallowed. Everything felt like small talk. Lizzie told Gwen about the strange quality of her conversations with Benjamin Strauss, the sense of say-anything freedom that usually required late nights, alcohol, absolute dark. Gwen maneuvered baby on boob, pretending to listen.

  When the baby was born, and Lizzie was still living three thousand miles away, Gwen had dutifully detailed every shitlike feeling: contractions, of course, but also the panicked boredom, the vaginal tearing, the literal shitting on the delivery table. (“I was married two years before I even let myself shit while Andy was in the next room!” Gwen had said. “Huh,” Lizzie said.) It hurt to pee, Gwen had complained, too bad because she now peed all the time. It hurt to shit, which was similarly easier than ever. (“Suffice to say I’m never going for a run again,” Gwen said, “but if I do, I’m wearing a diaper.”) Gwen wasn’t Lizzie’s first friend to have a baby, but she was Lizzie’s first best friend to have a baby, the first both willing and determined to tell her everything. (“When it’s your turn, you’re going to know so much more than I did,” Gwen had said, and Lizzie didn’t say that the more Gwen told her, the less Lizzie wanted her turn, which in retrospect had marked the beginning of this new phase of their friendship, the phase of Lizzie not saying things.)

  Lizzie loved her best friend too much to want her unhappy. Lizzie was glad for her best friend that she’d stopped calling at 3 a.m., crying softly as her baby suckled, wondering in a whisper if she’d made a mistake. She was glad that Gwen was happy, that Gwen loved baby Charlotte, loved motherhood, loved that she could squirt milk from her nipples and suck mucus from her baby’s nostrils. Gwen loved the pattern of freckles on Charlotte’s little baby ass and the spastic fisting of Charlotte’s little baby hands, and of course Gwen loved her baby smell and the way she looked when she slept in her baby bassinet, and the way her baby face lit up when she smiled, now that she smiled, and Lizzie, babied out, was doing her best. She was happy for her best friend. She very much wanted to be happy.

  Lizzie and Gwen had bought a joint ad in their high school yearbook, advertising their superior brand of friendship: a large black-and-white photo of their younger selves dressed for Halloween as Bo and Luke Duke, with a caption reading In This Together. This was their identical wrist casts after the Roller Skating Incident of 1979. Their three-day suspension after Jennifer Weinberg had pulled her eyes to slits, told Gwen she smelled like wonton soup, and that her mother said Gwen’s mother probably wanted to kill herself when she had a daughter, and Lizzie smacked her in the face with a floor hockey stick. This was the bat mitzvah circuit, the SATs, Lizzie’s mother leaving and Lizzie’s father dying, Gwen’s mother losing her job and Gwen’s sister losing an eye, college applications, loves requited and un-, virginities disposed of, Gwen’s dreams of a Pulitzer and Lizzie’s plans for a Nobel, the abortion, the date rape, the togetherness of their this unabated by time or distance, indivisible, except that now, whatever Gwen was in, Lizzie was not. All through the whirlwind romance, the fairy-tale wedding, the purchase of the swanky Old City co-op, the pregnancy, the birth, Lizzie had prepared for an envy that never materialized; she hadn’t thought to steel herself against this, the feeling that she’d been replaced—not by Andy, per se, and not by Charlotte, per se, but by GwenAndyCharlotte, an unbreachable unit. The feeling that Gwen, who’d befriended her on the first day of kindergarten, who had shoplifted Lizzie’s first tampons, whose zucchini-based demonstration had coached Lizzie through her first blow job, was leaving her behind.

  “So you want to fuck your boss,” Gwen said as she switched the baby to the other breast. Maybe she’d been listening after all.

  “I’m in it for his brain,” Lizzie said. “No other part of his anatomy.”

  Gwen made a noise suggestive of disbelief.

  “It’s like with Mr. Vickner,” Lizzie said, invoking the eighth-grade history teacher with whom they’d both been mildly obsessed. “It’s not like either of us wanted to fuck him.”

  Gwen’s smile suggested she was remembering the day she’d gotten overheated, passed out, woke to find herself on the tiled floor, Mr. Vickner peering down at her with concern. He’d rested his palm on her forehead, she’d bragged to Lizzie later. The most, or at least most thrilling, physical contact either of them had yet managed with the opposite sex. “Speak for you
rself.”

  Lizzie felt herself relaxing, for what might have been the first time since she’d touched down in Philadelphia. There was no need to perform herself for Gwen, no point in trying to choose words carefully when Gwen understood what lay beneath them. All those miles that had separated them, the motherhood that did now—neither could erase their shared history, Lizzie reminded herself. They were family, and the baby didn’t have to change that, any more than the husband did.

  “Seriously, though,” she said. “You know I would never.”

  “Obviously I know. You would never.”

  Lizzie would never. Not just for professional reasons and not just for ethical ones, but because her life was the result of her mother fucking someone else’s husband, because she had witnessed her father deal, daily, with the fact of some other man fucking his wife.

  “But there’s nothing wrong with wanting to,” Gwen said. “Or entertaining a poor, undersexed mother with details of your hot-for-teacher fantasy come to life.”

  “You and Andy still aren’t…?”

  “It’s not like I don’t want to. In theory. But when the moment is upon us, I just…” She shrugged. “It’s hard to explain.”

  Lizzie took her free hand, the one not holding the baby in place, and squeezed.

  “I missed you,” Gwen said. “Never leave me again.”

  “Just to be clear, I’m taking that as an invitation to move in.”

  “Done.”

  “I’m sure Andy will be thrilled,” Lizzie said.

  “Fuck Andy.”

  Lizzie grinned. “He wishes.”

  “Fuck you, too,” Gwen said, and then they were laughing, like they used to, like there was no one on the planet but the two of them, and Lizzie thought maybe this could be enough.