Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  “Yes,” he said. “Perfect. Run with it.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. You. The genius who came up with it.”

  Was she blushing? She was, fuck, blushing.

  “Elizabeth, this was always a side project for me, another way into the questions of consolidation, trauma, erasure—but for you? Nail this, and it could be your life’s work. At the very least, we’ll get a paper out of it, and you can be sure I’ll stick my name on there, I’m not a fool. But yours will go first. Take the lead. You can do it.”

  “Of course I can do it.” This was the only possible answer, and if he thought it was true, maybe it was. When had she become someone who needed his permission to believe that?

  “I knew you were special,” he said. He was standing very close to her, but then, the size of the office demanded it. “Every fellow here is special, I make sure of that. But you’ve got… something else.”

  “What?”

  The shadows were doing strange things to his face. She should stop focusing on the lines of his neck, the curve of his ear, she thought. She would have to tell Wendy in the morning that yes, it turned out he was attractive.

  “You don’t just see data points in isolation, or as evidence supporting a theory—you see them as plot points in a story. You want to find some cohesive explanation. A theory of everything, am I right?”

  “You’re right.” Lizzie didn’t believe in a god or a divinely ordained moral order, but she did believe, fervently, in the existence of an answer, the ultimate knowability of universes both inner and outer.

  “You know how I feel about the delicious impossibility of ever knowing everything, but the impulse to try? The ambition? That’s exceptional. That’s what you needed to recognize in yourself. Now that you have? Now that you’re ready to start asking the big questions? Let’s see how much you can know.” He rested a warm hand on her head, as if in benediction, then left.

  Lizzie breathed. The rush of adrenaline receded. She felt limp. She felt bare. She turned out the light, wanted to sit in the dark, silently recite the conversation back to herself—and to sit with the consequence, the thing she had recognized that she couldn’t now un-know. She and Gwen often debated the true definition of love: Gwen wanted to be wholly cared for. Lizzie wanted to be wholly seen. That’s not love, Gwen argued. That’s something else, something probably not even possible, and it was true none of Lizzie’s relationships had ever measured up. People saw what you let them see. They saw what they wanted to. She held on to it, though, her secret fantasy, a man who would see a truth so essential she’d never glimpsed it herself. Gwen always said she asked too much, and Lizzie thought she was probably right. But now, Strauss. Strauss’s gaze, aimed straight at her, narrating her to herself. She tried, halfheartedly, to believe she was simply feeling the aftereffects of intellectual communion, that this effervescence was strictly aboveboard, above neck. But her mind was not what she felt stirring, and not where she felt heat when she thought about his voice saying the word exceptional. He was married. He was old. He was her teacher and her employer. He was the most remarkable man she had ever met, and he thought she, too, was remarkable. She was in trouble.

  WENDY

  How I live now

  A room of my own: one twin bed, one dresser, one stainless steel sink, one small bathroom and shower. No tub. No mirror, at first, but one has been supplied at my request. The face, to me, seems both familiar and strange. Lizzie says everyone feels that way.

  The door has a combination lock, but no one locks me in. Three doors down, a man who remembers everything that once happened to him but nothing of what happens next has been locked inside for years. For his safety, Lizzie told me. I watched Dr. Strauss enter the combination, and now I can visit him as I want, safe or not.

  Everything is new here, shiny and expensive. Everything but the walls, the floors, which are old, and still remember what they used to be. When Dr. Strauss was a child, he says, the Meadowlark was an asylum, and the asylum was a boogeyman used to frighten children into behaving. I make him tell me stories of the women who were here before I was, the voltage and knives that blunted their brains. This building is a body that remembers itself, which I may be the only one to recognize, because mine is a body that does not.

  At night sometimes he knocks on my door.

  He brings me to his office, and we sit side by side in the lamplight. He tells me about the women. He tells me about his wife, whom he is afraid he no longer loves. There are nights he turns out the light and puts on his music, and we let the chords shake us. He lets me see pieces of him no one else sees. It’s only because he thinks being with me is the same as being alone.

  He told me the story of the girl in white, the girl who looks like a tormented ghost, photographed and framed over his desk. He says her body is the most famous of bodies, that she was never one of the Meadowlark women but all of the Meadowlark women are, in a way, her daughters. He said she saved herself, ran away. He said her name was Augustine. He asked why I was so curious, and I lied that something about her felt familiar, that it would make me happy to have her close, and it was that easy. He gave her to me. If I’d admitted that I hated to see her there, trapped on his wall, that I wanted to help her run away again, he wouldn’t have; I knew him well enough to know that. I watch her now while I’m trying not to fall asleep, and she watches me when I fail. I dream about her daughters, the Meadowlark women. I imagine them locked inside these same walls, dreaming their way toward me.

  III

  WENDY

  This book

  This is for you. Me. Whoever we are. This is the memory of me, once you remember yourself. This is the tang of lemon gelato, licked off a wooden stick, sweetly splintery against tongue; this is the elephant devouring the moon that the clouds paint across the November sky; these are the morning glories and beardtongues and dayflowers and turtleheads and scarlet beebalm of the woods behind the Meadowlark, and this is Dr. Strauss’s voice enumerating each species, this is his one hand warm on mine as he helps me over a fallen tree and his other hand stroking bark or plucking a berry, this is sweet juice staining lips, breath of sky and pine; this is the taste of smoke, roll of cigarette between fingers, shrill of Lizzie’s worry, tobacco staining borrowed lungs.

  Don’t you want to know who you were, everyone asks me. Who I was. People imagine a different kind of forgetting. A forgetting that’s like a puzzle to be solved. Where are my keys, who’s that girl, whatshisname. Or they imagine a forgetting that’s like a death. I remember I used to love her, but not how, not why; I remember my hands on her body, but not the softness of her flesh. They hear mental block and they think wall. They think footholds or rope ladder or cannonball, they think what’s on the other side. They think a boundary implies a crossing. There are no footholds. There is no other side. Dr. Strauss says this feeling is a symptom of the fugue. I remind him I am a symptom of the fugue. What kind of symptom wants to find its own cure?

  This will be your body again someday. I intend to leave evidence of myself behind. Pictures of me are also pictures of you. So I have found other ways.

  ALICE

  Alice had done her due diligence on the widow and her dead husband. She’d slogged through some of the husband’s academic papers, skimmed articles about his astonishing promise as a young scientist and what seemed to be, reading between the lines, his eventual decline as an aging bureaucrat. She’d found both of them on YouTube, the husband shilling for his institute, the wife chatting awkwardly about her book. She’d studied photos of Elizabeth and Benjamin Strauss posed awkwardly at various gala fund-raisers. She’d found nothing either of them had said or written that had anything to do with fugue states in general or Alice’s mother in particular, but she’d read Augustine, the story of a lost girl held hostage in a house of science. She’d read about the genius men who reduced Augustine to a pathology, their very own psychiatric freak show. She’d read the widow’s deliberations on whether these men had discovered sy
mptoms that conformed to their predictions or generated them, their desire for a well-behaved disease spurring Augustine’s mind to invent one.

  In the press interviews, Elizabeth Strauss was stiff, overly made up, prone to fake laughter and the occasional inopportune giggle. The Elizabeth Strauss of the book was different, not just an intellectual searchlight roving across history and science in search of one girl’s truth—as the flap copy put it—but an author trying to bribe her way into sealed archives, trespassing on private property, writing while tipsy with wine and despair, her own story leaking onto the one she was trying to tell. There was an edge of sadness to it, and Alice had liked this the best. Finding Benjamin Strauss’s obituary had been a blow at first, but toward the end, the article had noted that the great scientist’s wife had once been an academic herself, that she had arrived at the institute in 1999 for a fellowship, and stayed for a happily ever after. This was the year of Alice’s mother’s original disappearance—slim hope, but enough to propel Alice across the country to the widow’s front door, and through it.

  The widow’s sadness, in person, was less poetically amorphous than husband-directed, and reminded Alice too much of her father missing his wife. She was about the same age as Alice’s mother, but dressed like a college student, ratty jeans and tangled bun, which made her look older and younger at once. Alice’s mother lived in crisp silk shirts, pleated slacks, skirts with tasteful hemlines, sensible heels—looked distinctly momlike, a woman to be trusted with bake sale proceeds or a Girl Scout troop blazing trail through woods. While her mother was all potential energy and disaster preparedness, the widow seemed spent. This aged her, too.

  Alice hadn’t planned to stay here, uninvited guest in a stranger’s house. She had made a reservation at a hostel, had a date with Taco Bell and a lice-infested bunk bed, had girded herself for another night of guarding bag and body against the incursion of strangers, but she was too tired to resist the temptation of free food and, following, a clean bed with a thick pillow and a door that locked. There was a piece of her mother in this house—the mother she’d never known, the mother who’d vanished from the world before Alice entered it—lodged in Elizabeth’s memories, and Alice was in no hurry to let either of them out of her sight. The widow—call me Elizabeth, she’d said, and though Alice had been drilled from birth in the necessities of honorifics, Mr. and Ms. and Dr. and ma’am, she tried—ordered them greasy Thai food, and Alice told the story she’d gotten too good at telling. Her mother’s disappearance, her father’s confession, the calling off of the search.

  “They think she jumped off a bridge,” Alice told the widow. “But there’s no body.”

  “Then what makes them think she jumped?”

  It was strange to see a reflection of her own grief on a stranger’s face. Alice told her about the shoes left by the bridge, didn’t explain how this was the detail that made suicide seem least viable. It was too obvious. If her mother had wanted to fake her own death, this was exactly how she would have done it.

  “You think she might have come to Philadelphia?”

  Alice shook her head. This was something she had not allowed herself to think. She was too practical to allow that particular fantasy. “I thought if I knew more about what it was like for her here—or, what she was like? Maybe it would help.”

  It was the rest of the sentence Alice had been unable to complete for herself, whether more information would help her explain where her mother had gone, or why, or how she had gone anywhere and left her daughter behind. Whether the story of her mother’s time in Philadelphia would help Alice decide who her mother had been without her memory, and whether that person was more real than the woman Alice had thought she’d known. Whether she was here for help finding answers, or simply, as her father had suggested once he’d given up talking her out of the trip, for closure, whatever that meant. If it helps you accept that she’s not coming back, he’d said. If it helps you grieve.

  She refused to grieve a woman she did not believe was dead. She did not need help with that.

  Elizabeth, like everyone else, said she was so, so sorry. Alice had learned to nod politely and accept the apology, but now there was the temptation to ask: sorry for what?

  “How much do you remember about her?” Alice asked.

  “A lot. We were friends, I guess you could say. Your mother was a remarkable woman.”

  “That’s true, but…”

  “What?”

  “I read about fugue states. People inventing, like, whole different personalities? Acting like they’re someone else? Do you think that happened with her?”

  “I never got the chance to know her as Karen Clark,” the widow said, but maybe Alice could draw her own conclusions. There were files, she said. Not just test results, but extensive notes about Wendy Doe’s personality, her desires and fears. There were audio recordings. Alice wasn’t ready to hear a stranger speaking with her mother’s voice. Or maybe it was the familiar she wasn’t ready for. Not yet.

  “There’s no hurry,” the widow said. “We can do it in the morning.” Instead, they retreated to safe territory, traded trivia about Alice’s college classes, about the widow’s writing process, about—though only glancingly, because this way lay danger—the history of the Meadowlark, about this suburb and the concept of suburbs and the de- and reurbanization of America and at this point, bleary and on the brink, Alice nearly face-planted into her pad Thai, and the widow put her to bed. Another reason to stay that Alice preferred not to acknowledge: the comfort of care. To be back in the hands of a grown-up, to be offered a stack of freshly laundered towels, to be told to speak up if anything else was needed, the implicit promise that need would be met. By 9 p.m., she was tucked into crisp sheets, and after her sleepless night on the bus and her sleepless months in Chicago, something in her, some inner muscle that had been clenched since she left home, responded to the scent of fabric softener and released.

  She jolted awake sometime after midnight, unable to remember her dream. In the dark, a stranger’s furniture casting strange shadows, too jittery to fall back asleep, it suddenly seemed insane she was here, impossible to know what to do next. The decision to leave school had been impulsive, but there was a difference between decision and action. New Alice was capable of impulse, incapable of shedding so much of herself that she didn’t prepare carefully before following it. She had been taught to believe that preparation was the best means of avoiding disaster. This was her mother’s lesson, and while her mother had failed to prepare her for the disaster she’d dumped in Alice’s lap, Alice had learned it too well. She’d applied for an emergency compassionate leave of absence, ensured her scholarship would remain if she returned by January. She’d done her research on the Meadowlark Institute, the Strausses, the unsatisfying theories of how and why a mind could suddenly eject its memories. She had been fine, she had been in control, as long as she kept moving toward her goal, checking things off her to-do list. Now, here, all things done, all motion ceased, she was without a plan.

  She slipped out of the guest bedroom, quietly as she could, poked around the house using her phone as a flashlight, looking for evidence of… she didn’t know what, but found only irritating vacation pictures, rich middle-aged tourists doing rich middle-aged tourist things. She found stacks of record albums, all pretentiously classical. Walls of books on the brain, the past, the great minds of so-called civilization. Dusty mahogany, silk-screened art, a framed letter handwritten by Freud. Everything in Alice’s house was linoleum, wall-to-wall carpeting, and flowered wallpaper, except her room, which was still stenciled to look like a zoo.

  She paused outside the widow’s bedroom, recognizing the voices filtering into the hall. The widow was awake, too—and watching, of all things, her mother’s soap. Alice was tempted to flee. She was tempted to open the door and, as she’d done so many times with her mother, tuck herself cozy beneath the blanket, watch the women on-screen weep and fight and love, watch life go on. Her mother had loved co
mplaining about the show as much as she loved watching it, needled by the way its women were interchangeable, husbands swapping wives, actresses swapping roles. Alice suspected that for her mother, who rationalized every system and abided by every rule, this was the soap’s greatest pleasure, a safe space within which to rage against the machine. And Alice couldn’t disagree, but it had always comforted her, the daily constancy, the implication that all women were in some sense the same woman, behavior differentiated only by their position on a rotating cycle of fundamental drives: lust, duty, vengeance. The women on the show lived in real time, enduring one day and then another and another. Alice grew up; the women grew old. Happy endings ended, tragic ones, too. Days passed, and Alice kept going, and so did they, and even standing in a stranger’s house, ear pressed to door, listening to the women who’d been fighting the same fight and loving the same man since before she was born, Alice felt a little less alone.

  * * *

  Mothers leave. Alice knew this, had seen it on TV and had once caught Madison Chee crying in the skating rink bathroom because, contra Mr. Chee’s desperate hopes, fifteen hundred dollars in facility rental, private group lessons, gourmet cupcakes, and designer skates couldn’t make up for the fact that Mrs. Chee had taken half the communal assets to Albuquerque where she was learning to blow, among other things, glass from a sculptor named Samuel. Alice didn’t think her mother had a Samuel in her, figuratively or literally. But she preferred not to know what anyone else thought, or to watch them wonder what she thought, and so, for the first few days of her mother’s disappearance, she’d refused to leave the house. She didn’t want to talk to her friends, so she did not. They sent her worried texts, funny Snapchats, and Daniel left a Tupperware of his mother’s brownies on the doorstep, which seemed mildly insensitive, considering. Alice ate them anyway.